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Supplemental:... the Napoleonic Wars threatened to drag the United States once again into a conflict between Britain and France, and in fact came close to doing so on June 22, 1807, when HMS Leopard fired upon the USS Chesapeake off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia. The Chesapeake quickly surrendered, and a British search party boarded the ship and removed four suspected deserters.

The Chesapeake Affair was seen as an embarrassment to the Navy and an affront to America’s honor....Jefferson retaliated by implementing an economic embargo designed to deprive Great Britain of American goods. In this brief message delivered on December 18, Jefferson urged Congress to act, which it did four days later by passing the Embargo Act of 1807. Trade between the United States and the belligerent powers of Europe was for all practical purposes prohibited.

Enforcement of the embargo proved impossible, particularly in New England, whose economy was based on maritime commerce... In the end, the embargo proved ineffective, crippling the American economy but having minimal impact abroad.

But the attractiveness of economic weapons to American policymakers lived on, and the United States has habitually resorted to economic sanctions in hopes of influencing the behavior of other nations without having recourse to military coercion.- https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-embargo-act/

The Embargo Act - and the harm to their economic interests that resulted from it - is what caused New England to threaten to secede from the US.

This only became a terrible, rotten, evil, wicked thing to do when Southerners seceded when their economic interests were threatened with great harm (for the 2nd time) by massive tariffs lobbied for by New England based corporate interests.

If this post is in reference to current tariffs, two comments:

- Import tariffs aren’t expert tariffs or embargo’s.

- actual price increases from the current tariffs are nowhere near the impact Biden’s oil industry shutdown had on gas prices in 2021 or housing price inflation due to his COVID / loose money policies, all of which earned him he moniker “FJB”.

President Madison declared another embargo, in 1812. It worked.

The British, faced with a loss of trade, and revenue, while locked not just not in a maritime war with Napoleon, but with an extended land war, in Spain and Portugal, repealed the Orders in Council that were the primary cause of trouble between the United States, and the British Empire.

But the slowness of communications meant that the United States did not know it had won the diplomatic showdown, and Congress declared war in June, 1812.

Causes, Effects, and Significance of the Embargo Act of 1807...The ban ..hurt the American economy, which was largely dependent on the export of produced goods...One unintended benefit of the law was that the American industry received a jump start.

So the headline is wrong The Embargo Act actually helped the economy.