Embargo Acts. By 1807 the protracted war between Britain and Napoleonic France had reached a stalemate. The British navy had destroyed the Spanish and French fleets in October 1805, giving Britain control of the sea. But France dominated the European continent following Napoleon's victories over Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Without a military option, each side sought to starve the other into submission by depriving it of neutral trade. In this new war of Napoleonic Decrees and British Orders‐in‐Council, both sides preyed on American shipping.
President Thomas
Jefferson and Secretary of State James
Madison strongly believed in using commercial coercion to force England and France to rescind their offensive policies and to respect America's rights as a neutral nation. European economies, they reasoned, depended on American agricultural supplies, while the United States could easily survive without luxuries imported from the Old World. On 22 December 1807 Congress passed the Embargo Act, prohibiting all American exports.
The Embargo Act, amended several times in 1808 to tighten its enforcement, had disastrous effects for America. Neither France nor Britain altered its policy toward neutral trade. Instead, Napoleon seized American ships in European ports, claiming to believe that any ship trading under the American flag must be a British vessel in disguise. The U.S. economy plunged into a severe depression. Resentment against the embargo spread from merchants to farmers to urban workers and erupted into near rebellion in parts of
New England and New York. Jefferson, however, ignored the act's diplomatic failure and the widespread suffering it caused at home, praising it as late as 1815 as “a wise and powerful measure.” Grievances arising from neutral rights issues ultimately helped bring on the
War of 1812.
See also
Depressions, Economic;
Early Republic, Era of the;
Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe.Bibliography
Burton Spivac , Jefferson's English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution, 1979.
Doron S. Ben‐Atar , The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy, 1993.
Doron Ben‐Atar