The first of these measures was an “Act for the more effectual preservation of peace in the ports and harbors of the United States.” Under this law any United States marshal, on the warrant of any United States judge, was bound to board any British or other foreign ship-of-war lying in American waters, and seize every person charged with having violated the peace. If the marshal should be resisted, or if surrender was not made, he must call in the military power, and compel surrender by force of arms. If death should ensue, he should be held blameless; but the resisting party should be punished as for felonious homicide. Further, the President was authorized to interdict at will the ports of the United States to all or any armed vessels of a foreign nation; and to arrest and indict any foreign officer who should come within the jurisdiction after committing on the high seas “any trespass or tort, or any spoliation, on board any vessel of the United States, or any unlawful interruption or vexation of trading-vessels actually coming to or going from the United States.” Such laws were commonly understood in diplomacy as removing the subject in question from the field of negotiation, preliminary to reprisals and war. The Act was passed with little debate in the last hours of the session, in the midst of the confusion which followed the acquittal of Judge Chase. Merry immediately called on the Secretary of State, and asked him for some assurance that might serve to quiet the apprehensions which his Government would feel on reading the Act.[291] Madison could give none, except that the President would probably not exercise for the present his discretionary powers. As for the words, “any trespass or tort,” Madison frankly avowed “he could not but confess they were meant to imply the impressment of any individual whatsoever from on board an American vessel, the exercise of which pretended right on the part of his Majesty’s officers was a matter, he said, which the sense of the people at large would never allow the government of this country to acquiesce in.” To this announcement Merry replied in substance that the right was one which would certainly never be abandoned by his Government; and there the matter rested at the close of Jefferson’s first term. Madison assured the British minister that the authority granted to the President by Congress over foreign ships of war in American waters would not at present be enforced. He went even a step further toward conciliation. The Legislature of Virginia was induced quietly to modify the Act which had hitherto offered so much encouragement to the desertion of British seamen.[292]