The British Ministry soon laid aside any doubts they might have felt on the subject. Lord Grenville, who retired with Pitt, was succeeded as Foreign Secretary by Lord Hawkesbury, afterward better known as Lord Liverpool. The new Ministry negotiated for peace with Bonaparte. Oct. 1, 1801, the preliminaries were signed, and the world found itself again in a sort of repose, broken only by the bloody doings at St. Domingo and Guadeloupe. England returned, like France and Spain, to the rigor of the colonial system. The customs entries of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia rapidly diminished in number; American shipping declined; but Madison was relieved from the burden of belligerent disputes, which had been the chief anxiety of his predecessors in the State Department. Yet peace did not put an end to all difficulties. Rufus King continued to negotiate in London in regard to the outstanding British debts, twice recognized by treaty, yet still unpaid by the United States; in regard to the boundary of Maine and that of the extreme northwest territory at the source of the Mississippi; and finally, in regard to impressments; while Edward Thornton at Washington complained that, in spite of peace and the decline of American shipping, encouragement was still offered to the desertion of British seamen in every port of the United States,--in fact that this means was systematically used to prevent British shipping from entering American ports in competition with the shipping of America. When Madison alleged that the national government had no share in such unfriendly conduct, Thornton thrust under his eyes the law of Virginia,--a law enacted by President Jefferson’s political friends in his political interests,--which forbade, under penalty of death, any magistrate of Virginia to be instrumental in surrendering deserters or criminals, even in cases where they were bound by treaty to do so. Madison could not deny that this legislation was contrary to a treaty right which the United States government was bound to enforce. He admitted that American shipmasters and consuls in British ports habitually asked the benefit of the British law, and received it; but he could hold out only a remote hope that mutual legislation might solve the difficulty by applying the merchant-seamen laws of the two countries reciprocally. In conversation with Thornton he lamented, with every appearance of sincerity and candor, the deficiency of the existing laws, and did not dispute that Great Britain could hardly be blamed for refusing the surrender of seamen on her side; but when Thornton asked him to order the return of a man who under aggravated circumstances had deserted from the British ship-of-war “Andromache” in the port of Norfolk, and had been immediately engaged on the United States revenue cutter there, Madison replied in a note coldly reiterating the fact, with which both parties were already acquainted, that neither the law of nations nor