re exempted as a matter of course from the operation of this
act; so also were all vessels in ballast or already loaded with goods at
the time when the act was passed. Coasting vessels were to give bonds
double the value of vessel and cargo to re-land their goods, wares, or
merchandise in some port of the United States.

American shippers were so little appreciative of the protection offered
by a benevolent Government that they evaded the embargo from the very
first. Foreign trade was lucrative in just the proportion that it was
hazardous. If some skippers obeyed, the profits were so much the greater
for the less conscientious. Under guise of engaging in the coasting
trade, many a ship's captain with the connivance of the owner landed his
cargo in a foreign port. A brisk traffic also sprang up by land across
the Canadian border.

[Map: House Vote on the Embargo December 21, 1807]

All pretense that the embargo was designed to protect American commerce
had now to be abandoned. Jefferson did not attempt to disguise his
purpose to use the embargo as a great coercive weapon against France and
Great Britain. Congress passed supplementary acts and suffered the
President to exercise a vast discretionary power which was strangely at
variance with Republican traditions. "When you are doubtful," wrote the
President with reference to coasting vessels, "consider me as voting for
detention." "We find it necessary," he informed the governors of the
States, "to consider every vessel as suspicious which has on board any
article of domestic produce in demand at foreign markets." Governors of
those States which consumed more wheat than they produced were to issue
certificates to collectors of ports stating the amount desired. The
collectors in turn were to authorize merchants in whom they had
confidence to import the needed supplies. Nor did the President hesitate
to put whole communities under the ban when individual shipowners were
suspected of engaging in illicit trade. He so far forgot his horror of a
standing army that he asked Congress for an addition to the regular army
of six thousand men. Congress had already made an appropriation of
$850,000 to build gunboats. It now appropriated a million and a quarter
for fortifications and for the equipment of the militia.

Through the long summer of 1808, President Jefferson waited anxiously
for the effects of coercion to appear. The reports from abroad were not
encouraging. The effects