The Chesapeake Affair and the Embargo: Orders and Council
Congress had adjourned in April [1808], leaving the President at full leisure to apply his experiment during a long recess. At first embargo had been well received, but after the spring elections appeared decisive symptoms that sentiment was changing. The stoppage of commerce bore with crushing severity upon New England, whose ships and seamen were thrown suddenly out of employment. Her old merchants tottered to ruin, without a general bankrupt law to relieve them. Breadstuffs and fresh provisions accumulated at the wharves, which, if not exported, would perish and be a dead loss. The high price of such supplies abroad, in comparison with the statute penalties, encouraged shippers to practise every artifice to get them out of the country, though at the risk of capture. The law was evaded by fraud or force; vessels slipped out from Machias, Portland, Nantucket, and Newport harbors; and so high-handed was the resistance to embargo on the Canada border at Lake Champlain, where an illicit traffic went on, that the national government had to equip vessels and send troops thither to maintain its authority.
Flour was the chief commodity in these smuggling ventures. Much was got over the lines into Canada; barrels upon barrels were stored, too, at Eastport and in the southern ports of Georgia, ready to be conveyed, as opportunity might serve, into New Brunswick over the one boundary and Florida over the other. On this account, chiefly, Congress had passed the third Embargo Act just before adjournment, under which the President was empowered to grant special permits for vessels to clear from ports adjacent to foreign territories and make seizure and search of suspected vessels. Collectors were accordingly directed not to grant clearances at all to vessels laden with flour. But, some States finding it needful to import flour for home consumption, the President authorized the respective governors to grant merchandise permits for domestic convenience to those in whom they had confidence. This plan worked badly, for some of the State executives, in fulfilling their functions as "ministers of starvation," yielded too readily to the clamors of the merchants who pestered them, as did especially the easy-tempered Sullivan, whose official permits soon began circulating in cities as far south as Washington, where they were openly bought and sold. By a later circular the President advised the collectors not to detain coastwise vessels with unsuspicious cargoes; and this rule operated much better.
New York city felt embargo like the creep of death. In November that port was full of shipping. On the wharves were strewn bales of cotton, wool, and merchandise; barrels of potash, rice, flour, and salted provisions; hogsheads of sugar, tea, rum, and wine. Carters, sailors, and stevedores were busy. The Tontine Coffee-House was filled with underwriters, brokers, and merchants, all driving a brisk business, while the auctioneer on the front steps knocked off the goods which were heaped about the sidewalk. Carts, drays, and wheelbarrows jammed up the Wall and Pearl Street corner. But the next April all was quiet and stagnation; crowds and merchandise had vanished from Coffee-House Slip, and many commercial houses in the vicinity were closed up.
By midsummer the President and Secretary Gallatin were burdened with cases which required special instructions. They were tormented by personal applications for leave to transport. Against every loop-hole appeared the pressure of a besieging host. It was the most embarrassing law Jefferson had ever to execute; he had not expected such a sudden growth of fraud and open opposition. But he was resolved, nevertheless, that the convenience of the citizen should yield far enough to give the experiment a fair trial.
History must admit that so far as embargo was used as a weapon for coercing Europe it utterly disappointed expectation. The sacrifice required at home, in order to produce an impression abroad, proved of itself fatal in practice to the long endurance of any such experiment. If England bled, or France, under the operation, the United States bled faster. Jefferson miscalculated in supposing that the European struggle had nearly culminated, or that the nerveless Continental powers could organize an armed neutrality to protect their own interests. Instead of a sinking, vacillating, debt-ridden England, he found a stubborn England making capital of what it owed, its prodigious resources slowly uncoiling. He found a new ministry, hard as flint, with Parliament to brace it, bending with redoubled energies to the war, heedless of Liverpool remonstrances, marching the red-coats to break up meetings and suppress riots in Manchester and those other manufacturing towns where embargo and the Continental exclusion were most heavily felt. Next to making American commerce tributary to the British exchequer, the aim of those who framed the Orders in Council had been to drive it from the ocean, so that British merchants might absorb the maritime trade once more to themselves. This latter alternative embargo directly favored. Our non-importation act, which had now gone into effect against Great Britain, made it still less an object for that country to court a repeal of the embargo. By way, too, of partial offset to the loss of our market, a new one was opened to England by the outbreak in Spain. As if to exasperate us to the utmost, the Orders in Council were repealed as to that nation, but not the United States.
Slowly and surely America was drifting towards war, as the only escape from the evils produced by the European struggle, which embargo and non-importation heightened instead of alleviating.