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There was an abundance of other principles that were just as obvious, and just as unanswerable as this, which were violated by the daily practices of impressment, but they all produced no effect on the members of Congress and public writers that sustained the right of the English, who as blindly espoused one side of the main question as their opponents espoused the other.
Boundaries, negro claims, and British debts were easily disposed of by reference to boards of arbitration. Two others, awkward and threatening, but not immediately pressing, were the impressment of British seamen, real or pretended, from American ships, and the exclusion of American vessels from the trade of the British West Indies.
Although all, with the exception of myself, were in possession of genuine legal documents that should have served as impregnable barriers against impressment, yet they had witnessed so many facts showing the utter disregard of human or divine laws on the part of the commanders of British ships-of-war when in want of men, that they awaited the result of the visit with fear and trembling.
Erskine considered that his government would approve of his not urging these points too earnestly, inasmuch as the other side refrained from insisting upon the abandonment of impressment of seamen on board American ships. But Mr. Madison's indignation must have covered up a good deal of mortification. He could hardly have been without the sensation of one hoisted by his own petard.
Moreover, the men engaged in these short voyages were more immediately at hand for impressment in war, owing to the narrow range of their expeditions and their frequent returns to home ports. In 1783, therefore, the Navigation Act had become in general acceptance a measure not merely commercial, but military.
The only excuse for the impressment of American seamen was that sailors from the British men-of-war were apt to desert when they reached an American port, and frequently shipped on board American vessels. The chief reason was the severity of naval discipline and the low wages paid by the British government.
To the Senate of the United States: In compliance with the desire of the Senate expressed in their resolution of the 22d of November, on the impressment of seamen in the service of the United States by the agents of foreign nations, I now lay before the Senate a letter from the Secretary of State with a specification of the cases of which information has been received.
Stories connected with it, if authentic, though rare, would, indeed, make a deep impression on the public; and what was really the exception would be taken for the rule. There is no evidence to show that even from the middle of the seventeenth century any considerable number of men was raised by forcible impressment.
He had that practical knowledge of seamanship of which the country stood much in need, and it was humiliating to find that impressment seemed to be necessary to teach him to use it for her advantage. Many neighbouring young men, less fortunate than himself, had been pressed and taken; and their absence seemed a reproach to him.
The mode of exercising this "right of search," so far as relates to the impressment of seamen, I have already had occasion to illustrate, and the incident which I now relate will explain with tolerable clearness the mode in which the British exercised this right in relation to property.
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