Jefferson’s friends accepted the medicine with a wry face as the only alternative to supine submission or open war.  His opponents, without offering any solution of their own, denounced it as a contemptible plan that brought neither relief nor honor.  Beset by the clamor that arose on all sides, Congress, in the closing days of Jefferson’s administration, repealed the Embargo law and substituted a Non-intercourse act forbidding trade with England and France while permitting it with other countries—­a measure equally futile in staying the depredations on American shipping.

=Jefferson Retires in Favor of Madison.=—­Jefferson, exhausted by endless wrangling and wounded, as Washington had been, by savage criticism, welcomed March 4, 1809.  His friends urged him to “stay by the ship” and accept a third term.  He declined, saying that election for life might result from repeated reelection.  In following Washington’s course and defending it on principle, he set an example to all his successors, making the “third term doctrine” a part of American unwritten law.

His intimate friend, James Madison, to whom he turned over the burdens of his high office was, like himself, a man of peace.  Madison had been a leader since the days of the Revolution, but in legislative halls and council chambers, not on the field of battle.  Small in stature, sensitive in feelings, studious in habits, he was no man for the rough and tumble of practical politics.  He had taken a prominent and distinguished part in the framing and the adoption of the Constitution.  He had served in the first Congress as a friend of Hamilton’s measures.  Later he attached himself to Jefferson’s fortunes and served for eight years as his first counselor, the Secretary of State.  The principles of the Constitution, which he had helped to make and interpret, he was now as President called upon to apply in one of the most perplexing moments in all American history.  In keeping with his own traditions and following in the footsteps of Jefferson, he vainly tried to solve the foreign problem by negotiation.

=The Trend of Events.=—­Whatever difficulties Madison had in making up his mind on war and peace were settled by events beyond his own control.  In the spring of 1811, a British frigate held up an American ship near the harbor of New York and impressed a seaman alleged to be an American citizen.  Burning with resentment, the captain of the President, an American warship, acting under orders, poured several broadsides into the Little Belt, a British sloop, suspected of being the guilty party.  The British also encouraged the Indian chief Tecumseh, who welded together the Indians of the Northwest under British protection and gave signs of restlessness presaging a revolt.  This sent a note of alarm along the frontier that was not checked even when, in November, Tecumseh’s men were badly beaten at Tippecanoe by William Henry Harrison.  The Indians stood in the way of the advancing frontier, and it seemed to the pioneers that, without support from the British in Canada, the Red Men would soon be subdued.