nder to
brute force. New England, which bore the brunt of the embargo, was first
to rebel against it. Sailors marched through the streets clamoring for
bread or loaded their vessels and fought their way to sea. In New
York the streets of the waterside were deserted, ships dismantled,
countinghouses unoccupied, and warehouses empty. In one year foreign
commerce decreased in value from $108,000,000 to $22,000,000.

After fifteen months Congress repealed the law, substituting a
Non-Intercourse Act which suspended trade with Great Britain and France
until their offending orders were repealed. All such measures were
doomed to be futile. Words and documents, threats and arguments could
not intimidate adversaries who paid heed to nothing else than broadsides
from line-of-battle ships or the charge of battalions. With other
countries trade could now be opened. Hopefully the hundreds of American
ships long pent-up in harbor winged it deep-laden for the Baltic, the
North Sea, and the Mediterranean. But few of them ever returned. Like
a brigand, Napoleon lured them into a trap and closed it, advising the
Prussian Government, which was under his heel: "Let the American ships
enter your ports. Seize them afterward. You shall deliver the cargoes to
me and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt."

Similar orders were executed wherever his mailed fist reached, the
pretext being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act. More than two
hundred American vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar
robbery for which France paid an indemnity of five millions after
twenty years. It was the grand climax of the exploitation which American
commerce had been compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult
and bloodshed afloat. There lingers today in many a coastwise town an
inherited dislike for France. It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe
which beggared many a household and filled the streets with haggard,
broken shipmasters.

It was said of this virile merchant marine that it throve under pillage
and challenged confiscation. Statistics confirm this brave paradox. In
1810, while Napoleon was doing his worst, the deep-sea tonnage amounted
to 981,019; and it is a singular fact that in proportion to population
this was to stand as the high tide of American foreign shipping until
thirty-seven years later. It ebbed during the War of 1812 but rose again
with peace and a real and lasting freedom of the seas.

Thi