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Posted on 04/26/2025 4:48:50 AM PDT by daniel1212
Jefferson, who had always advised minimal government interference, contradicted his own principles by putting in place this law, which gave him extraordinary and unprecedented power over all American trade.
The Embargo Act was an embargo declared by the USA, under President Jefferson, against Britain and France, the prime combatants in the Napoleonic Wars...
the U.S. declared their neutrality in the faraway war, seeking to keep its trade links with European countries unharmed. However, wartime circumstances meant that both Britain and France did their best to hamper the sources of revenue of the other faction....
The worst incident in a series of impressments was the altercation between the American ship USS Chesapeake and the British ship HMS Leopard...
The Chesapeake–Leopard affair, in particular, enraged the American people, ..This led to a public demand for the mobilization of military and formal declaration of war....President Jefferson, however, wanted to pursue peaceful means of retaliation, and, going against public opinion, decided to impose commercial restrictions.
The Embargo Act was passed on December 22, 1807. ..and banned import as well as export to and from American ports and harbors...Though the act had been passed to protect American trading, it went against its purpose. The ban on all naval export hurt the American economy, which was largely dependent on the export of produced goods at the time....
One unintended benefit of the law was that the American industry received a jump start. New England, in particular, enjoyed a significant boom in manpower and output...
The Embargo Act of 1807 was repealed in the final days of the Jefferson administration.
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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.
Deep into my memory...this is what I remember. The War of 1812 would emerge and finally be settled by the Treaty of Trent....iirc
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”.
I am a proud member of the LGBFJB community.
Let’s Go Brandon!
I like that!
We should all use it
Commutards will think you’re woke, they’ll never figure it out
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.
So the headline is wrong The Embargo Act actually helped the economy.
Yes it always better to be 3rd world agrarian state then an industrial power house. Yes massa, yes.
BTTT
Comparing then to now is a waste of time. Two different worlds.
Google farm tools 1820, 1830 and look at where we were. Industrialization was a long time coming.
Good to see someone knows history, Thanks
No, that is not how a sound verdict is arrived at, any more than it would be by judging based upon one negative aspect of the embargo.
Most of history that is BS. The USA became an industrial powerhouse behind a high tariff wall. FACT. Thank the Lord Free Traitors™ were properly quelled back then.
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