Yankee skippers were dominating the sugar trade of Cuba and were
rolling across the Atlantic with the coffee, hides, and indigo of
Venezuela and Brazil. Their fleets crowded the roadsteads of
Manila and Batavia and packed the warehouses of Antwerp, Lisbon,
and Hamburg. It was a situation which England could not tolerate
without attempting to thwart an immense traffic which she
construed as giving aid and comfort to her enemies. Under cover
of the so-called Rule of 1756 British admiralty courts began to
condemn American vessels carrying products from enemies' colonies
to Europe, even when the voyage was broken by first entering an
American port. It was on record in September, 1805, that fifty
American ships had been condemned in England and as many more in
the British West Indies.

This was a trifling disaster, however, compared with the huge
calamity which befell when Napoleon entered Berlin as a conqueror
and proclaimed his paper blockade of the British Isles. There was
no French navy to enforce it, but American vessels dared not sail
for England lest they be snapped up by French privateers. The
British Government savagely retaliated with further prohibitions,
and Napoleon countered in like manner until no sea was safe for a
neutral ship and the United States was powerless to assert its
rights. Thomas Jefferson as President used as a weapon the
Embargo of 1807, which was, at first, a popular measure, and
which he justified in these pregnant sentences: "The whole world
is thus laid under interdict by these two nations, and our own
vessels, their cargoes, and crews, are to be taken by the one or
the other for whatever place they may be destined out of our
limits. If, therefore, on leaving our harbors we are certainly to