After fifteen months Congress repealed the law, substituting a Non-Intercourse Act which suspended trade with Great Britain and France until their offending orders were repealed.All such measures were doomed to be futile.Words and documents, threats and arguments could not intimidate adversaries who paid heed to nothing else than broadsides from line-of-battle ships or the charge of battalions.With other countries trade could now be opened.Hopefully the hundreds of American ships long pent-up in harbor winged it deep-laden for the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean.But few of them ever returned.Like a brigand, Napoleon lured them into a trap and closed it, advising the Prussian Government, which was under his heel: "Let the American ships enter your ports.Seize them afterward.You shall deliver the cargoes to me and I will take them in part payment of the Prussian war debt."Similar orders were executed wherever his mailed fist reached, the pretext being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act.More than two hundred American vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar robbery for which France paid an indemnity of five millions after twenty years.It was the grand climax of the exploitation which American commerce had been compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult and bloodshed afloat.There lingers today in many a coastwise town an inherited dislike for France.It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe which beggared many a household and filled the streets with haggard, broken shipmasters.
It was said of this virile merchant marine that it throve under pillage and challenged confiscation.Statistics confirm this brave paradox.In 1810, while Napoleon was doing his worst, the deep-sea tonnage amounted to 981,019; and it is a singular fact that in proportion to population this was to stand as the high tide of American foreign shipping until thirty-seven years later.
It ebbed during the War of 1812 but rose again with peace and a real and lasting freedom of the seas.
This second war with England was fought in behalf of merchant seamen and they played a nobly active part in it.The ruthless impressment of seamen was the most conspicuous provocation, but it was only one of many.Two years before hostilities were openly declared, British frigates were virtually blockading the port of New York, halting and searching ships as they pleased, making prizes of those with French destinations, stealing sailors to fill their crews, waging war in everything but name, and enjoying the sport of it.A midshipman of one of them merrily related:
"Every morning at daybreak we set about arresting the progress of all the vessels we saw, firing off guns to the right and left to make every ship that was running in heave to or wait until we had leisure to send a boat on board to see, in our lingo, what she was made of.I have frequently known a dozen and sometimes a couple of dozen ships lying a league or two off the port, losing their fair wind, their tide, and worse than all, their market for many hours, sometimes the whole day, before our search was completed."The right of a belligerent to search neutral vessels for contraband of war or evidence of a forbidden destination was not the issue at stake.This was a usage sanctioned by such international law as then existed.It was the alleged right to search for English seamen in neutral vessels that Great Britain exercised, not only on the high seas but even in territorial waters, which the American Government refused to recognize.In vain the Government had endeavored to protect its sailors from impressment by means of certificates of birth and citizenship.
