James Monroe, of Monroe Doctrine fame, was then American minister in London.  Canning, the British foreign minister, who heard the news first, wrote an apology on the spot, and promised to make ‘prompt and effectual reparation’ if Berkeley had been wrong.  Berkeley was wrong.  The Right of Search did not include the right to search a foreign man-of-war, though, unlike the modern ‘right of search,’ which is confined to cargoes, it did include the right to search a neutral merchantman on the high seas for any ‘national’ who was ‘wanted.’  Canning, however, distinctly stated that the men’s nationality would affect the consideration of restoring them or not.  Monroe now had a good case.  But he made the fatal mistake of writing officially to Canning before he knew the details, and, worse still, of diluting his argument with other complaints which had nothing to do with the affair itself.  The result was a long and involved correspondence, a tardy and ungracious reparation, and much justifiable resentment on the American side.

Unfriendliness soon became Hostility after the Chesapeake affair had sharpened the sting of the Orders-in-Council, which had been issued at the beginning of the same year, 1807.  These celebrated Orders simply meant that so long as Napoleon tried to blockade the British Isles by enforcing his Berlin Decree, just so long would the British Navy be employed in blockading him and his allies.  Such decisive action, of course, brought neutral shipping more than ever under the power of the British Navy, which commanded all the seaways to the ports of Europe.  It accentuated the differences between the American and British governments, and threw the shadow of the coming storm over the exposed colony of Canada.

Not having succeeded in his struggle for ‘Sailors’ Rights,’ Jefferson now took up the cudgels for ‘Free Trade’; but still without a resort to arms.  His chosen means of warfare was an Embargo Act, forbidding the departure of vessels from United States ports.  This, although nominally aimed against France as well, was designed to make Great Britain submit by cutting off both her and her colonies from all intercourse with the United States.  But its actual effect was to hurt Americans, and even Jefferson’s own party, far more than it hurt the British.  The Yankee skipper already had two blockades against ‘Free Trade.’  The Embargo Act added a third.  Of course it was evaded; and a good deal of shipping went from the United States and passed into Canadian ports under the Union Jack.  Jefferson and his followers, however, persisted in taking their own way.  So Canada gained from the embargo much of what the Americans were losing.  Quebec and Halifax swarmed with contrabandists, who smuggled back return cargoes into the New England ports, which were Federalist in party allegiance, and only too ready to evade or defy the edicts of the Democratic administration.  Jefferson had, it is true, the satisfaction of inflicting much temporary hardship on cotton-spinning Manchester.  But the American cotton-growing South suffered even more.