"Here it is not felt; and in England, amid the more recent and
interesting events of the day, it is forgotten." When, however, the
effect was evident at home of a law forbidding any American vessels from
going to sea, even to catch fish, and prohibiting the export of any of
the products of the United States, either in their own ships or those of
any other country, then there arose a popular clamor for the abandonment
of a policy so ruinous. Within four months of its enactment, Josiah
Quincy of Massachusetts declared, in a debate in Congress, that "an
experiment such as is now making was never before--I will not say
tried--it never before entered into the human imagination. There is
nothing like it in the narrations of history or in the tales of fiction.
All the habits of a mighty nation are at once counteracted. All their
property depreciated. All their external connections violated. Five
millions of people are engaged. They cannot go beyond the limits of
that once free country; now they are not even permitted to thrust their
own property through the grates." While American ships at home were kept
there, those which had remained abroad to escape the embargo were met by
a new peril. Some of them were in French ports awaiting a turn in
affairs; others ventured to load with English goods in English ports, to
be landed in France under the pretense, supported by fraudulent papers,
that they were direct from the United States or other neutral country.
The fraud was too transparent to escape detection long, and Napoleon
thereupon issued, in the spring of 1808, the Bayonne decree authorizing
the seizure and confiscation of all American vessels. They were either
English or American, he said; if the former, they were enemy's ships and
liable to capture; but if the latter, they should be at home, and he was
only enforcing the embargo law of the United States, which she ought to
thank him for.

The prosperity and tranquillity which marked the earlier years of
Jefferson's administration disappeared in its last year. Congress, both
in its spring and winter sessions, could talk of little else but the
disastrous embargo; proposing, on the one hand, to make it the more
stringent by an enforcement act, and, on the other, to substitute for it
non-intercourse with England and France, restoring trade with the rest
of the world, and leaving the question of decrees and orders in council
open for future consideration. The President no longer h