In 1790 more than two thousand ships, brigs, schooners, and smaller craft had entered and cleared, and the merchants met in the coffee-houses to discuss charters, bills-of-lading, and adventures.Sailors commanded thrice the wages of laborers ashore.Shipyards were increasing and the builders could build as large and swift East Indiamen as those of which Boston and Salem boasted.
Philadelphia had her Stephen Girard, whose wealth was earned in ships, a man most remarkable and eccentric, whose career was one of the great maritime romances.Though his father was a prosperous merchant of Bordeaux engaged in the West India trade, he was shifting for himself as a cabin-boy on his father's ships when only fourteen years old.With no schooling, barely able to read and write, this urchin sailed between Bordeaux and the French West Indies for nine years, until he gained the rank of first mate.At the age of twenty-six he entered the port of Philadelphia in command of a sloop which had narrowly escaped capture by British frigates.There he took up his domicile and laid the foundation of his fortune in small trading ventures to New Orleans and Santo Domingo.
In 1791 he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty.So successfully did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be the wealthiest merchant in the United States.In that year one of his ships from China was captured off the Capes of the Delaware by a British privateer.
Her cargo of teas, nankeens, and silks was worth half a million dollars to him but he succeeded in ransoming it on the spot by counting out one hundred and eighty thousand Spanish milled dollars.No privateersman could resist such strategy as this.
Alone in his old age, without a friend or relative to close his eyes in death, Stephen Girard, once a penniless, ignorant French cabin-boy, bequeathed his millions to philanthropy, and the Girard College for orphan boys, in Philadelphia, is his monument.
The Treaty of Amiens brought a little respite to Europe and a peaceful interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips again in 1803.For two years thereafter the United States was almost the only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the Stars and Stripes.
England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and merchantmen, from the face of the waters.France and Holland ceased to carry cargoes beneath their own ensigns.Spain was afraid to send her galleons to Mexico and Peru.All the Continental ports were begging for American ships to transport their merchandise.It was a maritime harvest unique and unexpected.
Yankee skippers were dominating the sugar trade of Cuba and were rolling across the Atlantic with the coffee, hides, and indigo of Venezuela and Brazil.Their fleets crowded the roadsteads of Manila and Batavia and packed the warehouses of Antwerp, Lisbon, and Hamburg.It was a situation which England could not tolerate without attempting to thwart an immense traffic which she construed as giving aid and comfort to her enemies.Under cover of the so-called Rule of 1756 British admiralty courts began to condemn American vessels carrying products from enemies' colonies to Europe, even when the voyage was broken by first entering an American port.It was on record in September, 1805, that fifty American ships had been condemned in England and as many more in the British West Indies.
This was a trifling disaster, however, compared with the huge calamity which befell when Napoleon entered Berlin as a conqueror and proclaimed his paper blockade of the British Isles.There was no French navy to enforce it, but American vessels dared not sail for England lest they be snapped up by French privateers.The British Government savagely retaliated with further prohibitions, and Napoleon countered in like manner until no sea was safe for a neutral ship and the United States was powerless to assert its rights.Thomas Jefferson as President used as a weapon the Embargo of 1807, which was, at first, a popular measure, and which he justified in these pregnant sentences: "The whole world is thus laid under interdict by these two nations, and our own vessels, their cargoes, and crews, are to be taken by the one or the other for whatever place they may be destined out of our limits.If, therefore, on leaving our harbors we are certainly to lose them, is it not better as to vessels, cargoes, and seamen, to keep them at home?"A people proud, independent, and pugnacious, could not long submit to a measure of defense which was, in the final sense, an abject surrender 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.
