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By Root 8095 0

opened with a volley of British orders in council further curtailing neutral trade between France and France’s allies. American hostility to the former mother country mounted in June when HMS Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake off Norfolk Roads, Virginia, killing three sailors. Jefferson, in a fury, directed all British warships to leave American waters. His Majesty’s government replied that it intended to pursue deserters with even greater zeal—and its resolve was stiffened by outrages like the one that occurred in New York the following September, when a crowd of dockworkers and sailors prevented six escaping British seamen from being returned to their ship. In a General Blockade Order of November 1807, the British then prohibited all neutral trade through ports closed to English shipping: if France barred British trade, in other words, France would have no trade. Napoleon retaliated in December 1807 by asserting that any vessel that submitted to British inspection, willingly or unwillingly, was subject to seizure. If the Americans didn’t make Britain respect their rights as neutrals, the emperor would treat them as Britain’s de facto allies.

As the probability of American involvement in the Anglo-French struggle increased month by month, “fortification fever” swept New York. The invasions of 1664, 1673, and 1776 left no doubt as to Manhattan’s vulnerability to attack by sea, but only Fort Jay on the northern end of Governors Island—thrown up during the war scare of 1794 and rebuilt as Fort Columbus in 1806—afforded the city any protection from enemy warships. Over the spring and summer of 1807, therefore, teams of military engineers got to work on a system of forts and batteries for the Upper Bay that would take four years to complete.

President Jefferson was now coming round to the view that a second war with Great Britain was both inevitable and necessary. In mid-December 1807 the president asked Congress to place a total embargo on vessels leaving American ports—not to bring economic pressure on the belligerents, he explained, but to get American ships and seamen “out of harm’s way” and give the nation time to prepare for war. An Embargo Act quickly passed both houses and was signed into law three days before Christmas.

It was a colossal blunder. Besides causing no appreciable harm to the British economy, the embargo gave Napoleon the opportunity to grab ten million dollars’ worth of legitimate American shipping on the grounds that it must perforce be illicit. In a single stroke, moreover, the embargo brought a decade of unprecedented American prosperity to a dead stop. Exports tumbled 80 percent in 1808. Imports fell 60 percent. What this amounted to, one critic charged, was a deranged act of self-mutilation—an attempt “to cure the corns by cutting off the toes.”

In New York the whole leg seemed to have been amputated. John Lambert, who returned to the city in April 1808, was overwhelmed by its “gloomy and forlorn” appearance. “The coffee-house slip, the wharfs and quays along South-street, presented no longer the bustle and activity that had prevailed there five months before,” Lambert wrote. “Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package, was to be seen upon the wharfs. Many of the counting-houses were shut up, or advertised to be let; and the few solitary merchants, clerks, porters, and labourers, that were to be seen, were walking about with their hands in their pockets. Instead of sixty or a hundred carts that used to stand in the street for hire, scarcely a dozen appeared, and they were unemployed.”

A few quick-witted merchants managed to stay afloat in the crisis, here slipping through loopholes in the law, there falling back on old-fashioned smuggling. John Jacob Astor got permission from President Jefferson to let an “esteemed citizen” of China named Punqua Wingchong return home on the Beaver. No sooner had the Beaver cleared port than Punqua Wingchong was rumored to be “a common Chinese dockloafer” conscripted by Astor to hoodwink the government (in fact Wingchong appears to have been a Hong merchant sent