, and strong on the side of Canada. The seaboard might,
indeed, in the preceding ten years, have been given a development of
force, by the creation of an adequate navy, which would have
prevented war, by the obvious danger to British interests involved in
hostilities. But this had not been done; and Jefferson, by his gunboat
policy, building some two hundred of those vessels, worthless unless
under cover of the land, proclaimed by act as by voice his adherence
to a bare defensive. The sea frontier, therefore, became mainly a line
of defence, the utility of which primarily was, or should have been,
to maintain communication with the outside world; to support commerce,
which in turn should sustain the financial potency that determines the
issues of war.

The truth of this observation is shown by one single fact, which will
receive recurrent mention from time to time in the narrative. Owing
partly to the necessities of the British Government, and partly as a
matter of favor extended to the New England States, on account of
their antagonism to the war, the commercial blockade of the coast was
for a long time--until April 25, 1814--limited to the part between
Narragansett Bay and the boundary of Florida, then a Spanish colony.
During this period, which Madison angrily called one of "invidious
discrimination between different parts of the United States," New
England was left open to neutral commerce, which the British, to
supply their own wants, further encouraged by a system of licenses,
exempting from capture the vessels engaged, even though American.
Owing largely to this, though partly to the local development of
manufactures caused by the previous policy of restriction upon foreign
trade, which had diverted New England from maritime commerce to
manufactures, that section became the distributing centre of the
Union. In consequence, the remainder of the country was practically
drained of specie, which set to the northward and eastward, the
surplusage above strictly local needs finding its way to Canada, to
ease the very severe necessities of the British military authorities
there; for Great Britain, maintaining her own armies in the Spanish
peninsula, and supporting in part the alliance against Napoleon on the
Continent, could spare no coin to Canada. It could not go far south,
because the coasting trade was destroyed by the enemy's fleets, and
the South could not send forward its produce by land to obtain money
in return