Jefferson now appealed to Congress, and the result was the Non-importation Act, or Embargo, forbidding Americans to trade with France and England.  This policy was intended as a pressure on English merchants.  But it was a half-measure and did not affect British legislation, which had for its object the utter annihilation of American commerce.  Neither France nor England was hurt seriously by the Embargo, while our ships lay rotting at the wharves, and our merchants found that their occupation was gone.  The New England merchants were discouraged and discontented.  It was not they who wished to see their ships shut up by a doubtful policy.  They would have preferred to run risks rather than be idle.  But Jefferson paid no heed to their grumblings, feeling that he was exhibiting to foreign powers unusual forbearance.  It is singular that he persevered in a policy that nearly the whole body of merchants censured and regarded as a failure; but he did, and Congress was subservient to his decrees.  No succeeding president ever had the influence over Congress that he had.  He was almost a dictator.  He found opposition only among the Federalists, whose power was gone forever.

At last, when the farmers and planters joined with the shipping interests in complaining of the Embargo, Jefferson was persuaded that it was a failure, and three days before his administration closed it was repealed by Congress.  But even this measure did not hurt the party which he had marshalled with such transcendent tact; for his friend and disciple, James Madison, was elected to succeed him in 1809.

The Embargo had had one result:  it deferred the war with Great Britain to the next administration.  That conflict of 1812-15 was not a glorious war for America except on the ocean.  It was not entered upon by the British with any hope of the conquest of the country, but to do all the harm they could to the people who had achieved their independence.  On the part of the United States it was simply a choice between insult, insolence, and injury on the one hand, and on the other the expenditure of money and loss of life, which would bear as hard on England as on the United States.  Both parties at last wearied of a contest which promised no permanent settlement of interests or principles.  The Federalists deprecated it from the beginning.  The Republican-Democracy sustained it from the instinct of national honor.  Probably it could not have been avoided without the surrender of national dignity.  It was the last of our wars with Great Britain.  Future difficulties will doubtless be settled by arbitration, or not settled at all, in spite of mutual ill-will.  England and America cannot afford to fight.  Our late Civil War demonstrated this,—­when, with all the ill-feeling between the two nations, war was averted.  The interests of trade may mollify and soften international jealousies, but only forbearance and the cultivation of mutual and common interests can eradicate the sentiments of mutual dislike.