and our sailors, responsive to their will, gathered with their Briarean
arms the wealth of every realm. Foreign statesmen in the recesses of the
cabinet, and economists in the closet, beheld with amazement the rapid
growth of our marine. They saw a nation, which had not then attained its
seventeenth year, enjoying a commerce which nearly equalled in tonnage
that which England had been gradually forming from the date of the
Norman Conquest to that hour--a period of near eight hundred years. At
such an epoch a strict neutrality in respect of the contending powers
was the dictate alike of duty and interest. But such a policy was
distasteful to England and France; and the result was the issuing of his
successive decrees by Napoleon from Berlin and Milan, and the
promulgation of the successive British orders in council. These
iniquitous measures, the last mentioned of which, the British orders in
council, have been since pronounced illegal by the courts of England
herself, declared our ships with their cargoes forfeitable to England if
they touched a French port, and to France if they touched a port in
England or her dependencies.

In such a conjuncture opinions might well differ in respect of the
proper means of redress. The administration of Jefferson sought it by
long, able, and most urgent appeals to the sense of justice of the
contending parties, but sought in vain. When mere diplomacy, though
managed by the consummate ability and adroitness of William Pinkney at
the court of St. James, and by our ablest men fit the court of Napoleon,
proved fruitless, the administration, at the earnest solicitation of its
representatives at the hostile courts, determined to sustain our
diplomatic action by such legislative measures as were likely to reach
the interests of the contending powers. Non-intercourse and the embargo,
which kept our ships in port, followed; and the administration, still
pressing upon the belligerents the injustice and impolicy of their