; but the President's influence was
so great that Congress adopted it almost without discussion.

Jefferson's design, to use his own words, was "to introduce between
nations another umpire than arms;" and he expected that England would be
starved into submission. The annual British exports to the United States
amounted to $50,000,000. Cutting off this trade meant the throwing out of
work of thousands of British sailors and tens of thousands of British
factory hands, who had no other means of livelihood. Mr. Jefferson felt
confident that the starvation of this class would bring such pressure to
bear upon the English government, then engaged in a death struggle with
Bonaparte, that it would be forced to repeal the laws which obstructed
American commerce. It is possible that this would have been the result had
the embargo been observed faithfully by all citizens of the United States.
Jefferson maintained till the day of his death that such would have been
the case; and Madison, no enthusiast, long afterward asserted that the
American state department had proofs that the English government was on
the point of yielding. The embargo pressed hardest of all upon Virginia,
for it stopped the exportation of her staples,--wheat and tobacco. It
brought about, by the way, the financial ruin of Jefferson himself and of
his son-in-law, Colonel Randolph. But the Virginians bore it without a
murmur. "They drained the poison which their own President held
obstinately to their lips."

It was otherwise in New England. There the disastrous effect of the
embargo was not only indirect but direct. The New England farmers, it is
true, could at least exist upon the produce of their farms; but the
mariners, the sea-captains, and the merchants of the coast towns, saw a
total suspension of the industry by which they lived. New England evaded
the embargo by smuggling, and resisted it tooth and nail. Some of the
Federal leaders in that section believing, or pretending to believe, that
it was a pro-French measure, were in secret correspondence with the
British government, and meditated a secession of the eastern States from
the rest of the country. They went so far, in private conversation at
least, as to maintain the British right of impressment; and even the
Orders in Council were defended by Gardenier, a leading Federalist, and a
member of Congress.

The present generation has witnessed a similar exhibition of anglomania,
when, upon the assertion