the respective pretensions of the two parties, not specially reserved, were abrogated by the operation of the

treaty of peace, of September 30, 1800, or were renounced, at least as between the countries, by the circumstances connected with its ratification. Reclamations, which had been reserved by that treaty, or such as were, at the time, deemed to be valid by the plenipotentiaries of the two powers, were provided for by one of the conventions, concluded on the 30th of April, 1803, for the purchase of Louisiana.1

neutral

The Berlin and Milan decrees, the commencement of that system which had for its object the exclusion of English produce and manufactures from the whole European Continent, had not, with the Orders in Council professed to be based on them, then been issued. But, the practice of paper blockades was begun, and an apology for those decrees and other obnoxious imperial ordinances, which laid the foundation for claims that occupied our diplomacy for more than a quarter of a century, and until their liquidation under President Jackson, had, according to that belligerent code which considered the spoliation of one enemy a just ground for an equivalent violation of property by the other, already been afforded. The practice of impressing seamen from our merchantmen, when visited by British men-of-war, under the belligerent plea of the right of search for contraband, or, according to the rule that then prevailed, for enemy's property, which had been a ground of complaint from the earliest days of the French Revolution, and which, at all events, had no pretension of retaliation, founded on the enemy's proceedings, to support it, had been resumed on the termination of the peace, established by the Treaty of Amiens. Not only had the rule of the war of '56-never asserted in the intervening one of the American Revolution, and for captures under which compensation had been made,

United States Statutes at Large, vol. i. pp. 561, 565, 572, 578, 624, 743. Vol. ii.

pp. 7, 39.

1 See Part IV. c. 4, § 3, p. 611, note.

in pursuance of the Treaty of 1794, been revived; but, instead of its being confined to a prohibition of the direct trade between the enemy's colonies and the mother country, colonial produce, though reëxported from the United States, in accordance with the rule, as announced by Lord Hawkesbury to the American Minister, Mr. Rufus King, in 1801, was captured and condemned in the Courts of Admiralty.'

What was well calculated to increase the offensive character of the British proceedings was, that, while they excluded all neutral vessels from the trade assumed to be open to them in war but not in peace, that is to say, from the enemy's colonial and coasting trade, a communication with the enemy's colonies was encouraged, by licenses and other means. Thus, by the Act of 45 Geo. III. c. 57,2 (27th of June, 1805,) free ports were established in the English West India islands, and an intercourse formed between them and the enemy's colonies and settlements. The articles therein mentioned, being the growth, produce, or manufacture of any of the colonies or plantations in America, belonging to any European State, were allowed to be imported, from any of those colonies or plantations, into the enumerated ports, in any foreign vessel whatever, not having more than one deck, and owned and navigated by persons inhabiting those colonies or plantations. Tobacco was especially permitted to be exported from those countries to the enumerated ports, and from thence to the United Kingdom. The exportation from those ports to any of the colonies or plantations in America, belonging to or under the dominion of any foreign European sovereign, in any vessel in which importations were authorized, of "rum, the produce of any British island, and also" (in order, it would seem, to encourage the British navigation engaged in the slave-trade,) "of negroes, which shall have been brought into the said island in British

1 American State Papers, vol. vi. p. 268.

2 British Statutes at Large,

built ships, owned, navigated, and registered according to law," was particularly favored. All other articles, except those specially prohibited, might likewise have been thus exported. Goods, also, from any port of Europe, were allowed to be, in the same way, brought into the British islands, and from thence to be exported in a British vessel to any British colony in America or the West Indies, and an Order in Council, of the 5th of August, 1805, prohibited, under the penalty of confiscation of the vessel and cargo, all intercourse of neutrals with the enemy's colonies, except through the free ports.

The same course was subsequently pursued, in reference to the trade with the Continent of Europe, after the blockade of the French coast. By the Act of 48 Geo. III. c. 37,1 (14th April, 1808,) the king was empowered by an Order in Council to permit, during hostilities, goods to be imported into any port of Great Britain or Ireland, from any port or place from which the British flag was excluded, in any ship or vessel belonging to any country, whether in amity with England or not. And it is stated that, while all regular neutral commerce was interdicted, 8,000 English licenses were granted in 1811, and that in 1808 and 1809 the system had been carried to a still greater extent. Thus English vessels had been authorized by their own government to violate a blockade, which this same government had been obliged, according to their own declaration, to establish for the purpose of legitimate defence, and which it so vigorously maintained against neutrals.2

It was the seizure, in 1805-6, of a large number of vessels, whose cargoes had been landed and the duties on them paid, which it had been previously declared would be deemed to break the continuity of the voyage, that, in connection with the subject of impressment, induced President Jefferson, in April, 1806, to

1 British Statutes at Large,

2 See Martens, Recueil, Supp. tom. v. p. 449, for the Orders in Council regulating the trade. Manning's Law of Nations, p. 340. Hautefeuille, Droits des Nations Neutres, tom. i. p. 158.

unite Mr. Pinkney with Mr. Monroe in that mission, which led to the conclusion, sub spe rati, of the treaty with Lord Holland and Lord Auckland, that failed to meet the approbation of the Executive. The absence of any provision with regard to impressment would have been sufficient to have prevented its submission to the Senate. The official note, which the American Plenipotentiaries had received from the British Commissioners, pledging their government to caution in the exercise of the practice, so far from being deemed a substitute for an express stipulation, might have been regarded as a recognition of the pretension; while a proposed reservation, at the moment of signing the treaty, and which was intended to justify the retaliatory measures that might be founded on the French decree of November 21st, 1806, and control our proceedings towards a third party, for the vindication of our neutral rights, would alone have rendered a ratification, on our part, inadmissible. By the British it was expressly declared, that their ratification would not be given, unless the French either withdrew the Berlin decree or the United States gave their government assurances that they would not submit

to it.1

On Mr. Wheaton's return to America, he entered on the practice of his profession in his native town, but the character of the business, usually intrusted to a young lawyer in a provincial capital, is not such as was calculated to call into exercise the particular attainments of our author. There was, however, in the condition of the world ample scope for the talents of a young American, conversant by practical observation with the events that characterized the first part of the nineteenth century. The seven years from 1806 to 1813, which comprise the period that elapsed between Mr. Wheaton's return home and his final removal from his native State, were precisely those during which the neutral powers were exposed to the alternate aggressions of the two great belligerents; "the

1 American State Papers, vol. vi. p. 368.

conduct of both of whom," in the language of Mr. Madison, when Secretary of State, "displayed their mutual efforts to draw the United States into a war with their adversary;" and among maritime States, America, after the gross violation of the law of nations by England towards Denmark, in 1807, stood alone.

Mr. Wheaton, whose nearest relatives were of the school of Jefferson, and whose republican sentiments were unavoidably strengthened by his European residence, was, during these years of comparative leisure, an efficient supporter, by his contributions to the periodical press, of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. The Rhode Island Phoenix, afterwards the Rhode Island Patriot, copies of which are still preserved in the Historical Society of the State, contain many papers from his pen. Among his fellow laborers of that period were the present venerable Judge Pitman, of the United States District Court, and the late Governor Fenner, both of whom belonged to the Republican party, as the friends of the administration were then termed, while its opponents, according to the political nomenclature of the day, were called Federalists. Jonathan Russell was also associated with him in the task of instructing the public mind of New England, as to the wrongs which their country was receiving at the hands of the European belligerents; and with him, while the diplomatic representative of the United States. successively in Paris and London, in 1810, 1811, 1812, as well as during his residence abroad, as a Commissioner at Ghent, and our first Minister to Sweden, he carried on a continued correspondence, which would elucidate many details connected with that eventful period of our diplomacy.

The letters addressed to Mr. Wheaton, at this time, from distinguished citizens in different sections of the Union, show, that his reputation was already being established beyond the limited bounds of his native State, and it would seem that his appointment as Secretary of Legation, either to Paris or London, was then contemplated. Among his correspondence of 1811 there is a letter from one of the Heads of Department,