Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 22, 2025
Property the most absolute and unqualified, is annihilated by legislative acts. The embargo and non-intercourse act, prostrated at a stroke, a forest of shipping, and sunk millions of capital.
The Non-Intercourse Act, passed March 3, 1809, had decreed forfeiture of any French or British ship, or goods, which should enter American waters after May 20, of the same year. The measure was duly communicated to the French Government, and no remonstrance had been made against a municipal regulation, which gave ample antecedent warning.
The body of farmers, laborers, and trading people will favor annexation, ultimately, should the policy of non-intercourse be adhered to on our part, and they will outnumber the office-holding class, and thus the union of the two countries will be secured. It is apparent also that a policy of free intercourse would postpone annexation for a long time, if not indefinitely.
Nothing shows the world-wide nature of the struggle more than such a policy as this; but for a while it seemed justified by its results. After a year's trial America found it impossible to maintain the embargo: and at the opening of 1809 she exchanged it for an Act of Non-Intercourse with France and England alone. But this Act was as ineffective as the embargo.
Ultimately this purpose was not adhered to; but the Emperor was attentive to the President's intimation that "by putting in force, agreeably to the terms of this statute, the non-intercourse against Great Britain, the very species of resistance would be made which France has constantly been representing as most efficacious."
The next step, of course, was to supply their own markets themselves; and the non-intercourse agreements, which were economically prohibitory tariff acts, gave a fitful impulse to various simple industries. In the clash of arms this idea naturally dropped out of the popular mind, but it began to revive soon after the return of peace.
By order of the President, Smith wrote to Armstrong, the American minister at Paris, that "a satisfactory provision for restoring the property lately surprised and seized, by the order or at the instance of the French government, must be combined with a repeal of the French edicts, with a view to a non-intercourse with Great Britain; such a provision being an indispensable evidence of the just purpose of France toward the United States."
He announced that the Orders in Council would be withdrawn on June 10; Madison in turn promptly issued a proclamation reopening trade, and swarms of American vessels rushed across the Atlantic. But Canning, in harsh language, repudiated the arrangement of his over-sanguine agent, and Madison was forced to the mortifying step of reimposing non-intercourse by a second proclamation.
From previous experience it was well understood that such agreements as these, far more drastic than any which had yet been tried, would prove ineffective if they remained purely voluntary associations; and what made the non-intercourse policy of the First Congress distasteful to conservative men were the measures taken to enforce it.
It empowered the commissioners, however, to proclaim a cessation of hostilities in any of the Colonies; to suspend the operation of the Non-intercourse Act; also to suspend, during the continuance of the act, so much of all or any of the acts of Parliament which have passed since the 10th day of February, 1763, as relates to the Colonies; to grant pardons to any number or description of persons, and to appoint a governor in any Colony in which his Majesty had heretofore exercised the power of making such appointment.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking