legal the act committed by any British officer the more sure he was
of reward, till it seemed that the impressment of American citizens
was an even surer road to promotion than valor in an engagement with
the enemy. Such were the substantial wrongs inflicted by Great
Britain; nor were any pains taken to cloak their character; on the
contrary, they were done with more than British insolence and
offensiveness, and were accompanied with insults which alone (p. 045)
constituted sufficient provocation to war. To all this, for a long
time, nothing but empty and utterly futile protests were opposed by
this country. The affair of the Chesapeake, indeed, threatened for a
brief moment to bring things to a crisis. That vessel, an American
frigate, commanded by Commodore Barron, sailed on June 22, 1807, from
Hampton Roads. The Leopard, a British fifty-gun ship, followed her,
and before she was out of sight of land, hailed her and demanded the
delivery of four men, of whom three at least were surely native
Americans. Barron refused the demand, though his ship was wholly
unprepared for action. Thereupon the Englishman opened his broadsides,
killed three men and wounded sixteen, boarded the Chesapeake and took
off the four sailors. They were carried to Halifax and tried by
court-martial for desertion: one of them was hanged; one died in
confinement, and five years elapsed before the other two were returned
to the Chesapeake in Boston harbor. This wound was sufficiently deep
to arouse a real spirit of resentment and revenge, and England went so
far as to dispatch Mr. Rose to this country upon a pretended mission
of peace, though the fraudulent character of his errand was sufficiently
indicated by the fact that within a few hours after his departure the
first of the above named Orders in Council was issued but had not (p. 046)
been communicated to him. As Mr. Adams indignantly said, "the same
penful of ink which signed his instructions might have been used also
to sign these illegal orders." Admiral Berkeley, the commander of the
Leopard, received the punishment which he might justly have expected
if precedent was to count for anything in the naval service of Great
Britain,--he was promoted.

It is hardly worth while to endeavor to measure the comparative
wrongfulness of the conduct of England and of France. The behavior of
each was utterly unjustifiable; though England by committing the first
extreme breach of international law