A History of the American People

in the Columbia estuary. Within a few months it had been reported in the leading St Louis
newspapers that `it appears that a journey across the Continent of N. America might be
performed with a wagon, there being no obstruction in the whole route that any person would
dare call a mountain. Thus the concept and the route of the Oregon Trail came into existence.
Since during his presidency Jefferson had in effect created the Deep South and laid the
foundations of the West, it is disappointing to relate that his period in office ended in failure and
gloom. But so it was, because neither he nor Madison knew how to steer the United States
through the troubled waters of the Napoleonic Wars. The truth is, they were emotionally
involved, a fatal propensity in geopolitics. In 1803 the renewal of the great war between
republican France and the royalist coalition led by Britain made it possible for the United States
to get Louisiana cheap but in other respects it was a disaster for a commercial and maritime
power such as America had now become. Britain's victory at Trafalgar in November 18o5, in
which the Franco-Spanish battlefleet was destroyed, made it supreme at sea. Bonaparte's
victories against Austria and Russia at Friedland (1807) put the whole of Continental Europe at
his mercy. In order to destroy British exports, gold from which financed the resistance to his
tyranny, he imposed what was known as the Continental System, a punitive embargo on British
goods. The British responded with their Orders in Council which allowed British blockading
fleets to impound even neutral ships, caught violating an elaborate set of rules designed to hit
France and its allies commercially. Jefferson in turn passed the Non-Importation Act (April
1806), which banned most British goods and embargoed all non-American shipping.
It is important to realize that all three parties were divided on these measures. The mechanics
and economics of international trade were little understood. Policies, shaped in ignorance, often
produced the opposite effect of that intended. Bonaparte's Continental System led to trouble with
most of his allies and satellites and did his cause more harm than Britain's. The Orders in
Council, ill understood and difficult to enforce, harmed Britain's trade most. The Non-
Importation Act failed completely, though it certainly angered Britain. The commercial clauses
of Jay's treaty expired in 1807 and Monroe, now envoy in London, failed to get sufficient
backing from Jefferson and Madison to reach a settlement. The result was a series of incidents
between British warships and United States vessels culminating in a naval battle off Norfolk in
which the British frigate Leopard, searching for deserters serving on US ships, forced the
American frigate Chesapeake to strike its colors, seized four men aboard, and hanged one of
them. The fury caused by this incident, visible from America's shore, was such that if Congress
had been sitting war must have followed. Jefferson himself was confused. His intellect told him
that Britain and America, being both major maritime and trading powers, had a mutual interest in
enforcing the freedom of the seas and the free exchange of traffic and goods at all ports-
something the Continental System challenged. The two powers should have worked out a
sensible joint policy and renewed Jay's treaty on its basis. But all Jefferson's republican emotions
tugged him in the direction of France, and his hatred of monarchy blinded him to the fact that
Bonaparte's military dictatorship-adumbrating the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century-was
an infinitely greater threat to individual liberties than Britain's constitutional and parliamentary
crown.
Jefferson managed to keep America out of war for the time being, but in order to respond to
the war-fever in some way he got Congress, in December 1807, to pass the Embargo Act,
virtually without discussion, which effectively ended all American overseas commerce by
forbidding US ships to leave for foreign ports. How Congress failed to throw out this absurdity is
a mystery. While American ships remained in harbor, their crews idle and unpaid, smuggling