In defence of the justice and prudence of the embargo the Republicans had much to say. They allowed that the measure was most serious, but protested that it could no longer be put off. They recalled how Great Britain, by interpolations in the sea code of nations, had provoked the Berlin decree of November, 1806; how the allies of France had adopted this decree in 1807; how Great Britain had searched our ships, how she had impressed our seamen, killed our citizens, and insulted our towns; how her officers had scorned to obey the proclamation of the President, and how she had at last commanded every one of her seamen in the service of a foreign state to return at once to the service of his King. They argued that the ocean had become a place of danger, robbery, and disgrace; that a dignified retirement was all that was left us, and would be found most effective in the end; that England would feel the loss of naval stores and supplies so essential to her colonies; that France would suffer by the loss of the luxuries brought from her colonies by our neutral ships; that Spain would be reduced to the verge of starvation by the lack of imported food. But the strongest defence of all was found in two state papers which just at this time reached America and were promptly sent to Congress. One was the long-expected British orders in council of November eleventh, 1807. The other was an order of Napoleon in retaliation for the English order, which has ever since been known as the Milan decree. On November fourteenth, 1807, the day whereon the merchants of London read the new orders in council in the Gazette, Napoleon was at Fontainebleau. There in October he had signed the treaty which sealed the Another is in verse: Embargo read backward, O-grab-me appears, A scary sound ever for big children's ears. The syllables transformed, Go bar 'em comes next, If not removed shortly, will make mob-rage. A caricature of the time represents John Bull holding the head of a cow. "Bony" holds the tail, and Jefferson, on his knees, is milking her. He looks toward Bonaparte for orders, and, as he has no pail, seems to be asking how long he shall continue the waste. 1808. THE MILAN DECREE. 293 fate of Portugal and Spain, and from thence, November fifteenth, he departed for Italy. Passing through Milan and Verona, he reached Venice, turned back, and on December fifteenth was again at Milan, when a copy of the Gazette containing the orders overtook him. He seems never for a moment to have hesitated what to do, and in forty-eight hours his retaliatory order was framed, signed, and issued. Thenceforth any ship, whatever its nationality, that suffered an English officer to search it, or made a voyage to England, or paid any tax whatsoever to the Crown of Great Britain, was denationalized, and whether it came to a French port, or to a port of an ally of France, or, on the high sea, fell into the power of a ship-of-war or privateer, was good and lawful prize. The British Isles were in a state of blockade both by land and sea, and any ship that went into or came out of a port of England on its way to or from any port in the British possessions anywhere on the face of the earth, East Indies or West Indies, India or America, or entered or left places occupied by English troops, was to be seized wherever found.* Some earnest patriots did not fail to notice that the day this decree was made public was the anniversary of the birth of Washington. By that time another prediction of the Federalists began to be fulfilled. The farmers were feeling the embargo. In expectation of a ready market and good prices, they had mortgaged their old land to buy new, and had thus been enabled to raise greater crops of wheat and grain than ever before. In Pennsylvania, in the valleys of the Mohawk and the Hudson, in Vermont, every mill had, until the streams were frozen over, been grinding day and night. In some places the farmers had been holding back their flour in hopes that the supply near the great cities would be quickly shipped and the price put up. In others they were waiting for snow to make transportation more easy. But ere the high prices and the snow came the ports were closed, the demand for flour stopped, and the farmers found themselves in possession of a staple for which they could not get the cost of sowing, reaping, and * American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. iii, p. 290, Annals of Congress, 1808-1809, pp. 1751, 1752. National Intelligencer, February 22, 1808. grinding. If they were honest men, their lot was indeed a hard one. If they chose to be dishonest, two courses lay before them. They might, if living near the boundary, turn smugglers, and hurry their flour over the line to British territory. They might sell it to some one who, tempted by the great profits to be made, was ready to take the risks they would not. Both ways were used, and by the middle of February the embargo was daily broken in a dozen bold, daring, and ingenious ways. The law applied to registered, sea-letter, and licensed ships. But boats of five tons burden and less were not required to register, or take out sea-letters, or licenses to trade. On such, therefore, the embargo had no effect, and they were at once used to evade it. Along the Atlantic border the flour was sent to the nearest available port, hurried into a schooner or a snow, bonds were given not to land it out of the United States, and all sail was spread. If the food was intended for the West Indies, the vessel ran down the coast to St. Mary's, a little hamlet in southern Georgia on the American side of St. Mary's river, then part of the boundary line between the United States and the possessions of Spain. There the barrels were put on board of boats of less than five tons and carried over the river, or to a sloop waiting off the coast for a cargo for Bermuda or St. Kitts. When the provisions were intended for Great Britain the run was up the coast to Eastport, and then over the Passamaquoddy in small boats, and so to the Halifax market. On the Canadian border the smuggling was bolder and more impudent still. In Vermont a favorite way was to load a dozen sleds or wagons and drive toward Canada. A hill with steep slopes and close to the boundary line would be selected and a rude hut put up on the summit. The hut must be so made that when a stone was pulled from the foundation the floor would fall, the sides topple over, and the contents of the structure be thrown on English ground. When thus built, the sleds would be unloaded, the potash and flour, the pork, and the lumber put in, the stone removed, and the barrels sent rolling into Canada. Once there, they became English property and were quickly carried off. So many and so bold did the evasions become that the 1808. SECOND SUPPLEMENTARY ACT. 295 members of the Committee on Commerce and Manufacture took up the matter and bade their chairman move that they be instructed to inquire if any amendment to the embargo laws was necessary. When the instruction was given the committee at once asked leave to report a bill, and, leave being given, instantly presented it. At that particular time, the eleventh of February, Rose had but lately concluded his arrangement with Madison, and had not yet made known his demand for a disavowal of the reputed acts of Commodore Barron. It is likely, therefore, that word was sent to the chairman of the Committee on Commerce not to press a bill whose restrictions would have been felt severely along the frontier of Canada and Nova Scotia. However this may be, nothing more was done till February nineteenth, when the mission of Rose had really ended. Then the House by a great majority went into Committee of the Whole and took up the Supplementary Bill. In the long debate which followed much was said about the expediency, the necessity, the justice, the hardships, the futility of such a measure. But the sensational speech, the speech which threw the committee into violent commotion and roused the evil passions of certain members, was made by Barent Gardenier, of New York, late on a Saturday afternoon. He described the bill, and correctly, as intended not to lay an embargo, but to prescribe non-intercourse. He declared that its true meaning was that the people of the United States should sell nothing but what they sold to each other. He complained that no one could give any reason for the acts; that an unseen hand was guiding the country on step by step to ruin; that mystery overshadowed everything; that the representatives knew nothing, and were suffered to know nothing; that they were mere automata; they legislated, but knew not why or wherefore; they moved, but knew not who moved them; and that under this secret influence they were "forging chains to fasten" the country "to the car of the imperial conqueror." Again and again in the course of his speech members sprang to their feet and called him to order. Some begged the Speaker to stop him; others cried out, "Let him go on." Again and again the Speaker commanded him to keep within the rules of propriety. When he had done, the House rose. But on the following Monday member after member repelled with scorn the charge of French influThe language of one was so strong that Gardenier sent a challenge; the two met on the duelling grounds at Bladensburg and Gardenier was severely wounded. ence. When passed, the law provided that no boat of five tons or under should leave any port unless bonds in twice the value of boat and cargo had been given to land the cargo in the United States. If the boat had never been employed in foreign trade, if its use had always been confined to rivers, bays, sounds, and lakes within the jurisdiction of the United States, a bond equal to two hundred dollars per ton would be sufficient. If not masted, or, if masted, not decked, and confined to rivers, bays, or sounds not adjacent to foreign territory, no bond was required unless the Collector thought one necessary, in which case he might exact thirty dollars per ton. Export by land was next forbidden, and every cart, wagon, sleigh, or wheeled conveyance so engaged, with the animals dragging it and the goods it contained, was declared forfeit, and a fine not greater than ten thousand dollars laid upon the owners. By this act the embargo was spread over every lake, bay, and river in the country. Henceforth every market-boat that carried potatoes and cabbages over the river from New Jersey to New York; every sloop that came down the Hudson with skins and flour; every dugout that fished and dredged for oysters in Chesapeake Bay; every broadhorn that floated on the Ohio river; every sail-boat that went out with a pleasure party to sail or fish, must be furnished, if the Collector wished it, with a clearance. To enforce the law in the seaports and on the large bays was a matter of no great difficulty; but to enforce it on the Canadian border was all but impossible. The ease with which it could there be evaded, the profits to be made by evading it, turned whole communities into smugglers and embargo-breakers. This was true along the whole frontier from Eastport to Michilimackinaw, but especially true at such convenient spots as Detroit, Buffalo, Lewiston, Sackett's Harbor, and, above all, Lake Champlain. Every letter that came down from St. Albans or Whitehall declared that the most open and elaborate |