Embargo Act (December 22, 1807)

All this set going the great American series of counter-measures, which also, so far as they concerned Great Britain, were affected by the latest act of aggression, the so-called 'Chesapeake Affair' of June, 1807. A British man-of-war requested to be allowed to search the American frigate Chesapeake with the object of recapturing some alleged deserters from the British navy; and when the request was refused, as a matter of course, the British vessel opened fire, captured the American man-of-war, and took away four of the crew. To this was added the American annoyance at the British practice of impressing for naval service sailors on American trading vessels on the pretext that, having been born before the American states became independent, they were British subjects; and this, combined with the Chesapeake Affair, gave rise to a very pretty diplomatic conflict.

But what gave the principal impulse to the American commercial, or rather anti-commercial, intervention was not the measures of Great Britain, but rather those of France, that is to say, the new adaptation of the Berlin decree, which brought it about that a stranded American vessel, the Horizon, had that part of its cargo which was of British origin declared fair prize. However, the new Orders in Council were known in the United States (in fact, though not officially) when on December 22, 1807, Congress and the President enacted the Embargo Act, which is one of the most interesting legislative products of the period. As has already been indicated, it was a self-blockade of the purest water, but, unlike Napoleon's, an open and direct one. An embargo was laid on all vessels lying in American ports and bound for foreign ports. The only exceptions were foreign vessels, which were allowed to depart after being informed of the enactment of the law; and vessels in the American coasting trade were to give security that the cargo should be discharged in an American port. Almost at the same time the Non-importation Act, passed in the previous year against British goods, was put into force and excluded importation in foreign bottoms from the only power that was in a position to carry on trade by sea. Under the pressure of the unreasonable procedure of both the combatants, the American government thus sought to cut off at a blow the abnormally large trade and shipping that the United States had until then enjoyed. In principle the policy was impartial, inasmuch as it was intended, on the one hand, to deprive Great Britain of American cotton and grain, as well of sales on the American markets, and, on the other hand, to put an end to the colonial trade from which France and Spain and their colonies derived equal advantages, and also to the importation of the industrial products of the European Continent into America. Although the measure was thus indisputably two-sided, the simultaneous enforcement of the one-sided Non-importation Act gave the policy the appearance of being directed distinctly against Great Britain. That country, indeed, had touched on a particularly tender point by imposing duties on the goods which compulsorily passed through its territories, inasmuch as both the United States and the British opposition put it on a level with the taxation of American trade which in the preceding generation had given the final impulse to the Declaration of Independence by 'the old thirteen'.

President Jefferson's motive seems to have been partly the bias of the plantation owners, emphasized by his physiocratic tendency toward regarding agriculture as the highest work of man and his grave distrust of everything which departed from agriculture. To begin with, at least, he undoubtedly considered, as the American historian, Channing, says, 'that to put an end to, let us say, three quarters of the commerce of the United States would be a blessing, albeit somewhat in disguise'. But evidently this, like most of the measures of the different powers in the commercial war, was also a measure of reprisal, an endeavour to compel the embittered belligerents to be reasonable. In fact, unlike the majority of their own measures, it was a sincere attempt in that direction. It seems also as if the Embargo Act was a means of saving the great American merchant fleet, the largest next to that of Great Britain, from the extinction which must otherwise have been the almost necessary consequence of the Berlin and Milan decrees and of the Orders in Council. Thus, for instance, a large ship-owner in Maryland stated that of fifteen vessels which he had dispatched during the bare four months between September 1 and the enactment of the Embargo Act, only three had arrived at their destination, while two had been captured by the French and the Spaniards, one had been seized at Hamburg, and nine had been taken to England.

However, it is rather an academic question what the effect of the Embargo Act would have been had it been obeyed, for nothing was further from reality. It makes an almost moving impression to see how one supplementary law after another, each more detailed and more draconic than the other, seeks to stop up the holes in the original law, which was very summary; but it has seldom been shown more distinctly that a constant succession of new laws on the same subject means a constant disobedience to the provisions of the law. As early as January 9, 1808, special enactments were made as to the security that coasting and fishing vessels would have to give, and it was declared that the exceptions made in the Embargo Act in favour of public armed vessels did not apply to privateers (chapter 8). On March 12, in the same year, foreign vessels also were required to give security to the extent of four times the value of vessel and cargo, or twice as much as for native vessels, that they would not sail to foreign ports; and for fishing vessels, a declaration was imposed under oath as to whether any of the catch had been sold during the trip. At the same time, however, the President was authorized, very imprudently, to grant vessels the right to go in ballast to foreign ports in order to fetch from there the property of American citizens, on giving a pledge to return with that property, and not to carry on any other trade, etc. (chapter 33). Still more forceful was the intervention a month and a half later by a law of April 25, which both forbade all loading of vessels except under the control of the authorities, and also in general terms forbade any vessel to depart, without the special permission of the President, to any United States port or district which was adjacent to foreign territory; and the customs staff was charged to take under their care any suspiciously large stocks of goods in such border regions. Further, the law gave to naval and customs vessels the right of search and authorized the customs staff, pending the President's decision, to detain vessels suspected of intending to break the law, and so on (chapter 66). Finally, on January 9, 1809, there was passed an Enforcement Act, which summoned all the weak public powers of the Union to compel obedience to the law. Thus the President was authorized to employ the fighting forces of the United States by land and sea and to hire the imposing number of thirty vessels for the purpose. At the same time all the previous laws were made more severe. Vehicles were also subjected to the embargo, in order to prevent the law from being circumvented by land routes; permission had to be obtained for the loading of vessels; and the right of the customs officials to refuse permission was extended to the right of ordering the discharge, in suspected cases, of goods already loaded, and also to take goods from vessels into their custody; and the surety deposited was raised to six times the value of the goods. Finally, the right to sail to foreign countries for American property was annulled.

These convulsive regulations give a kind of negative to the actual circumstances, which would seem to have been characterized by even more systematic transgressions of the law than generally occurred during that exceptionally lawless period. In Passamaquoddy Bay, on the borders of British North America, and on the St. Mary's River, which formed the boundary toward the still Spanish Florida, there were collected whole flotillas of American vessels, which, under the pretence of sea damage, put in with flour and fish at the ports of Nova Scotia and of the West Indian Islands, and gave the skippers' need of money to pay for repairs as an excuse that the cargoes had been sold there. This transfer of trade outside the territories of the Union went to the north, west, and south. Northward seven hundred sledges went back and forth between Montreal in Canada and the boundary of the State of Vermont; and at the same time great quantities of potash were imported into Quebec. That city and Halifax in Nova Scotia had halcyon days, the former having more shipping than the whole of the United States; and the British governor of Nova Scotia declared that the Embargo Act was 'well calculated to promote the true interests of His Majesty's American colonies', which, to say the least, was not its intention. In the West Indies, it is true, there appeared at first a serious shortage of foodstuffs and timber, accompanied by a great rise in prices; and the French islands never regained their former prosperity. But many circumstances contributed to this; and in the British West Indies the prices of grain sank again rapidly, and a number of American vessels went there, as also to Havana, where on one occasion, in 1808, there lay nearly a hundred at one time. On the cotton market at Charleston, where the law had evidently been effective in 1808, an agent stated that it had been broken every week since December of that year and January of 1809. Of course the right to sail for American property abroad was particularly abused, and was therefore finally cancelled. Five hundred and ninety vessels are said to have left under this pretext, and as a rule they stayed away, like the American tonnage which happened to be outside the limits of the United States when the law was passed, and which took very good care not to come again under their jurisdiction. On the other hand, of course, those vessels which remained at home in obedience to the law remained largely without employment. Admiral Mahan supposes that those that remained in the states were in the majority, although, on the other hand, the complaints about the sufferings that the law was alleged to cause gained in volume from the desire to make party capital out of the matter. That part of the trade which, as far as one can judge, was hit hardest was the export of raw materials to Europe, especially the export of raw cotton from the Southern States to England. Thus Liverpool received only 25,426 bags in 1808 as compared with 143,756 bags, or nearly six times as much, in 1807. Even that part of the British importation of raw materials which was not directly dependent on American supplies showed a great decline in 1808. This was presumably due to the general shortage of shipping that was a consequence of the withdrawal from traffic of a fairly large part of the second largest mercantile fleet in the world.

In spite of the immense extent to which the law was disregarded, therefore, it would be an exaggeration to call the Embargo Act ineffective as a means of giving trouble to the belligerents. During the years 1808 and 1809 the British opposition never wearied of holding up to the government the disastrous consequences that its Orders in Council had had by giving rise to the Embargo Act, which had cut off both the supply of raw materials from the United States and, above all, the possibility of sales there. In accordance with the good old British parliamentary custom, they made the government responsible for all the maladies of the body politic, while the government, also in the usual stereotyped fashion, pictured the situation in as favourable a light as possible and ascribed the undeniable difficulties to other causes. Any inquiry of scientific value, however, must consider the course of economic development as a whole, and for this reason the question of the effects of the Continental System on the belligerents has been held over for separate treatment in the fourth part of this work. In any case, the difficulties accruing to Great Britain in consequence of the Embargo Act were not of such consequence as to lead its government in 1808 either to rescind the Orders in Council or even in the least degree to modify their application. On the contrary, Canning, as foreign secretary, conducted the almost continuous exchange of notes with an ironic superiority and a diplomatic skill which were calculated to irritate more and more the American government with its clumsier methods.