Embargo of 1807

The Embargo Act, passed by Congress on December 22, 1807, stopped almost all exports from the United States. It was a declaration to Great Britain and France that the United States expected free and uninhibited access to the seas. President Thomas Jefferson believed that a prohibition on trade with Great Britain and France would lead the European powers to acknowledge neutral maritime rights.

During the wars that accompanied the French Revolution (1789-99), the United States enjoyed increasing

A cartoon opposing the Embargo Act in which the cartoonist depicts the embargo as a turtle preventing a smuggler from selling a keg of New England rum to the British. The word ograbme is embargo spelled backwards. (New York Public Library)

Wealth as a “neutral carrier,” especially in the reexport trade in which merchants would ship goods from the European colonies to the United States and then to Europe to avoid seizure by warring powers that were blockading direct trade between European countries and their colonies. In the early 19th century the war between Great Britain and France became something of a stalemate as Napoleon Bonaparte dominated the continent of Europe and Great Britain controlled the seas. Both sides decided to engage in economic warfare. Napoleon created the Continental System with the Berlin Decree (November 21, 1806) to exclude the British from European markets. The British countered by intensifying their blockade issuing Orders in Council (November 11, 1807), which affirmed that any nation that wanted to trade with Napoleonic Europe had to first obtain a license from Great Britain. Napoleon then issued the Milan Decree (December 17, 1807), which stipulated that any ship that stopped in a British port or was searched by a British vessel would be seized by France and her allies when it sailed into a European port. Taken together, the British and French regulations created an impossible situation for the United States as a neutral trader.

Compounding this diplomatic gridlock was a crisis with Great Britain precipitated by the Chesafeake-Legfard AEEAIR (June 22, 1807) in which a British warship fired upon and forced a U. S. warship to surrender so that the British could search for deserters from his majesty’s navy. This episode could easily have led to war, and throughout the summer there was a great deal of saber rattling in the United States. However, Jefferson hoped to avoid war and turned to economic coercion instead. Jefferson believed that Europe needed exports from the United States, which were generally food and agricultural products such as cotton and tobacco, more than the people of the United States needed the manufactured items of France and Great Britain. From Jefferson’s perspective the imports were mere luxury items that the virtuous republican citizenry did not need. On December 14, 1807, Congress instituted the long delayed Non-Importation Act and then passed the embargo eight days later, which prohibited U. S. ships from sailing to foreign ports and closed the borders to trade with Florida and Canada.

Unfortunately for Jefferson, the United States was more dependent on foreign markets than he ever imagined, and farmers were not as independent as he had thought. The embargo devastated the economy. Within months the waterfront was a desolate no-man’s land with grass growing on wharves where once hustling and bustling commerce had thrived. Within a year exports sank from about $108 million to $22 million and imports from $144 million to $58 million. The reexport trade almost disappeared entirely. There was a human cost behind these numbers. Sailors and the maritime trades went begging for work. Farmers could not sell their produce as wheat went from two dollars a bushel to 75 cents a bushel. In the South growers of tobacco, cotton, and rice had even greater price drops. Sheriff sales appeared everywhere as virtuous yeomen became bankrupt and their property foreclosed. To make matters worse, smuggling proliferated along porous borders and in seaports on the coast. Congress had to strengthen enforcement procedures several times, and Jefferson even went so far as to declare the people in the area around Lake Champlain, as “combining and confederating” to form “insurrections” so that they could illegally trade with Canada.

There were also political repercussions as Jefferson’s second term as president became marked as a failure. The Federalist Party rallied in 1808, reasserting itself in New England, forcing John Quincy Adams out of the Senate, and making gains in New York and elsewhere. Federalist Party leaders such as Josiah Quincy and Timothy Pickering attacked the embargo as a useless instrument that only hurt the United States and had little impact on Great Britain. Mocking the policy further were Federalist Party newspaper editors who jumbled the letters in the word embargo and called vessels guarding the coast “ograbme cutters” and enforcers of the law “Gen. ograbme.” They also published cartoons showing anyone willing to trade with the British as being threatened by a sea turtle named “Ograbme.” Despite the growing popularity of the Federalist Party, the Democratic-Republican Party candidate, James Madison, still won the presidential election, but the Federalist Party once again emerged as a national force.

By the time Madison was about to be inaugurated nearly everyone from both parties recognized the futility of the embargo and the act was repealed. Congress replaced it with the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, which eased trading restrictions.

See also eoreign aeeairs.

Further reading: Louis Martin Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1927); Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979).