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Pierce’s death was a grisly reminder that since the resumption of the Napoleonic Wars in 1803, both Britain and France had redoubled their efforts to curb the lucrative carrying trade of neutral nations, the United States above all. For Britain’s Royal Navy, that task had been made immeasurably easier by Admiral Nelson’s 1805 destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar. But the Royal Navy was experiencing severe shortages of manpower. Able seamen were deserting by the thousands—more often than not for the rapidly growing American merchant marine, where conditions and pay were vastly better and captains wouldn’t look too closely at a man’s documents. So new instructions had gone out for British warships to search neutral vessels with particular vigor and “press” deserters back into service. Since Britain didn’t recognize U.S. naturalization laws—and since her captains were also given to a certain carelessness about paperwork—as many as a thousand men every year, the innocent along with the guilty, American as well as British, found themselves serving time before the mast in the Royal Navy.

As the hub of American neutral commerce, New York was an obvious place for His Majesty’s forces to ferret out both contraband and deserters (virtually every British vessel that put into the port after the turn of the century was said to leave shorthanded). Since as early as 1804, the Royal Navy had been patrolling nearby waters so relentlessly that the British consul in the port admitted it was as good as under blockade. The Lean-der, one of three frigates on station outside New York in the spring of 1806, routinely detained a score or more ships at a time. Any seaman suspected of being a British subject was impressed on the spot.

As word of Leander’s attack on Richard raced through the city, angry crowds converged on the waterfront. One party of volunteers set out in a pilot boat to recover a pair of merchantmen taken by the Leander and about to be sent up to the prize courts in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Other parties seized five of the Leander’s supply boats, and a “prodigious mob—huzzaing” hauled their contents off to the almshouse for distribution to the poor.

When John Pierce’s headless corpse went on display at the Tontine Coffee House a day or so later, the mood in New York turned so ugly that the British consul predicted his house would be burned by a mob and he himself would be taken hostage. Mayor Clinton and the Common Council had Pierce buried at public expense and directed all ships in the harbor to fly their flags at half-mast. President Jefferson barred Leander from American ports and issued an unenforceable order for the arrest of her captain (who, to no one’s surprise, was afterward exonerated by a Royal Navy court-martial). Newspapers in Philadelphia and Richmond talked of war.

O GRAB ME

But there was to be no war—not yet.

A week before the Leander incident, already incensed by British violations of neutral commerce and the impressment of American seamen, Congress had passed a Non Importation Act. Reminiscent of American resistance to parliamentary taxation in the 1760s and 1770s, the measure promised to end the sale of numerous British manufactures in the United States, effective the following November—unless, that is, His Majesty’s government mended its ways before then. Secretary of State James Monroe sailed at once for London to open negotiations.

The threat of American economic retaliation could not overcome the momentum of events. In mid-May, with the American public still in a furor over the Leander, the British blockaded the European coast from Hamburg to Brest. Napoleon’s answer came in the Berlin Decree of December 1806, which demanded that all neutral nations discontinue further trade with Great Britain. More concerned with bringing pressure to bear on France than avoiding trouble with the United States, His Majesty’s government scuttled a treaty just negotiated by Monroe and Ambassador William Pinkney. Nonimportation had failed.

The year 1807