flourished and British ships had a monopoly of legitimate trade. By a cunning piece of legal
legerdemain Bonaparte impounded $10 million of American goods on the ground that he was
assisting Jefferson's embargo. It was the most serious political mistake of Jefferson's entire
career because it led the Northern shipping and manufacturing interests to assert, with some
plausibility, that the government was being run in the interests of the Virginia Dynasty' and its slave-owning planters by a pack of pro-French ultra-republican ideologues. The government was forced to capitulate, backtracking by getting Congress to pass the Non-Intercourse Acts (1809), which got some commerce going again but left everyone's feelings, at home and abroad, raw and inflamed. The damage to Jefferson's reputation caused by the miseries of the embargo, and the often cruel and disreputable attempts to enforce it, is reflected in the angry letters which poured into his office and which he read with mounting distress.Take off the Embargo, return to Carters
Mountain and be ashamed of yourself and never show your head in Publick Company again.' I am Sir a Friend to Commerce and No Friend to your Administration.'Mr President if you know
what is good for your future welfare you will take off the embargo.' Look at the Situation in the Country when you Took the Chair and look at it now. I should think it would make you sink with despair and hide yourself in the Mountains.'You are bartering away this Countrys rights honor
and Liberty to that infamous tirant of the world (Napolien).' I have agreed to pay four of my friends $400 to shoat you if you dont take off the embargo.'Here I am in Boston in a starving
condition ... you are one of the greatest tirants in the whole world.' Jefferson endorsed some of
these letters abusive' orwritten from tavern scenes of drunkenness.' But others were detailed
and circumstantial accounts of the distress caused, such as one written on behalf of 4,000
penniless seamen in Philadelphia-'Sir we Humbly beg your Honur to Grant us destras Seamen
Sum relaf for God nos what we will do.' Some were from destitute seamen's wives claiming that
their children were without bread. There were over 300 petitions signed by many hands, multiple
threats-one from 300 yankee youths between 18 & 29'-If I dont cut my throat I will join the
English and fight against you. I hope, honored sir, you will forgive the abrupt manner in which
this is wrote as I'm damn'd mad.' One of many desperate letters says the writer has been forced to
steal food to feed his children and intends to take to highway robbing. Jefferson, who had been an optimist up to the turn of the century, was now gloomy, shaken, and demoralized. During his final months in office, government policy disintegrated, with desperate legislative expedients passing backwards and forwards between the two Houses of Congress, and between Congress and executive, in confused attempts to get off the hook of the embargo. Finally, under the pretense of standing up to both France and Britain, Congress passed the Non-Intercourse Act (1809), which effectively repealed the embargo. Jefferson wearily signed it into law on March z, writing to his friend Pont de Nemours:Within a few days I retire
to my family, my books and my farms [at Monticello] ... Never did a prisoner, released from his
chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. The truth is, he had
virtually ceased to be in charge of affairs during the last few months of his presidency, and he
left office a beaten man.
But worse was to come. Madison had been preparing for the pres dencv all his life. First-born
son of the wealthiest planter in Orange County, he came from the summit of the civilized
Virginia gentry. He had been elaborately educated, especially under the great Witherspoon at
Princeton. He had studied history, political theory, and economics all his life, as well as the
classics. He had known Jefferson since 1776 and the two men's intimate correspondence is a