on not involved in the welter of conflict on
land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the
Stars and Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and
merchantmen, from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased to
carry cargoes beneath their own ensigns. Spain was afraid to send her
galleons to Mexico and Peru. All the Continental ports were begging for
American ships to transport their merchandise. It was a maritime harvest
unique and unexpected.

Yankee skippers were dominating the sugar trade of Cuba and were rolling
across the Atlantic with the coffee, hides, and indigo of Venezuela and
Brazil. Their fleets crowded the roadsteads of Manila and Batavia
and packed the warehouses of Antwerp, Lisbon, and Hamburg. It was a
situation which England could not tolerate without attempting to thwart
an immense traffic which she construed as giving aid and comfort to her
enemies. Under cover of the so-called Rule of 1756 British admiralty
courts began to condemn American vessels carrying products from enemies'
colonies to Europe, even when the voyage was broken by first entering an
American port. It was on record in September, 1805, that fifty American
ships had been condemned in England and as many more in the British West
Indies.

This was a trifling disaster, however, compared with the huge calamity
which befell when Napoleon entered Berlin as a conqueror and proclaimed
his paper blockade of the British Isles. There was no French navy to
enforce it, but American vessels dared not sail for England lest they
be snapped up by French privateers. The British Government savagely
retaliated with further prohibitions, and Napoleon countered in like
manner until no sea was safe for a neutral ship and the United States
was powerless to assert its rights. Thomas Jefferson as President used
as a weapon the Embargo of 1807, which was, at first, a popular measure,
and which he justified in these pregnant sentences: "The whole world
is thus laid under interdict by these two nations, and our own vessels,
their cargoes, and crews, are to be taken by the one or the other for
whatever place they may be destined out of our limits. If, therefore, on
leaving our harbors we are certainly to lose them, is it not better as
to vessels, cargoes, and seamen, to keep them at home?"

A people proud, independent, and pugnacious, could not long submit to a
measure of defense which was, in the final sense, an abject surre