Jefferson still clung to the embargo; but Madison and his friends, deferring to the reasons of Story and Adams, and yielding to the adverse current now setting strongly against Democracy, March 9, 1809, repealed the obnoxious act.  Such was the end and signal failure of a measure alike disastrous at home and abroad, a measure which had falsified all the predictions of its author.  Its avowed object was to secure our seamen from impressment, to protect our commerce, and preserve our ships; its presumed object was to cooeperate with France, and starve England into submission:  but none, of these objects were effected.  Instead of rescuing our seamen, it imprisoned them all at home, and deprived them of the food which they found even in the prisons of the enemy.  Instead of protecting our commerce, it tamely resigned it to England, and either left our exports to perish or reduced their value sixty per cent.  It seized all our ships at home, and left most of them to decay, without giving the sufferer the claim to ultimate redress which consoled him in cases of foreign seizure.  It aided France so little, that this “deed of magnanimity” was in a few months forgotten.  Instead of impoverishing or humbling England, it poured into her lap the riches of the world, and increased the insolence of her tone; while it impoverished our own nation, broke the spirit of the commercial classes and alienated them from Government, and gave the first of a series of blows to the nation from which it did not recover for a quarter of a century.

But the pusillanimous policy which prompted the embargo survived its repeal.  The Chinese theory still showed itself, not in measures for defence, but in impotent measures for restriction or prohibition, and finally in a declaration of war against England on the very eve of her triumph by the power of her navy and commerce over the greatest captain of the age:  a war declared by our rulers without an army, navy, officers, coast-defence, or national credit, for the avowed purpose of securing free trade and sailors’ rights by measures which the mercantile community rejected.  In its progress, the want of discipline, forts, ships, munitions of war, credit abroad, and frugality at home, was most severely felt; and the principal honor derived from it arose from the exploits of the few frigates left to us by improvidence and parsimony, from the achievements of the Northern troops of Scott, Brown, and Miller, disciplined during the war, and the courage and sagacity of the veteran Jackson and his Western volunteers behind their cotton ramparts at New Orleans.

If, during the seven years of trial and suffering, from 1808 to 1815, in which nearly one-half of the wealth of New England was extinguished, her citizens became indignant at the wanton sacrifice of their means and of the best opportunity Fortune ever gave them to gain riches by commerce,—­if the public sentiment found expression alike through the press, in town-meetings, in legislative halls, and even in