In the middle of February, at a moment when Americans expected daily the arrival of a British treaty marked by generous concessions, Napoleon’s Berlin Decree reached the United States. Commerce was instantly paralyzed, and merchants, Congressmen, Cabinet, and President turned to Turreau anxiously inquiring what was meant by this blockade of the British Islands by a Power which could not keep so much as a frigate at sea. Turreau could give them no answer. “Your Excellency will readily believe,” he wrote home,[300] “that this circumstance does not put us in a better position here.” The influence of France in the United States was never lower than at the moment when England turned Lord Grenville and Lord Erskine out of power, in order to install Spencer Perceval and Lord Eldon at the head of a Tory reaction. Jefferson’s objections to a British treaty would have had no weight with the Senate if the treaty had been tolerable; the Berlin Decree and the Emperor’s conduct in regard to Florida would have reconciled Madison to almost any British alliance. Turreau was so well aware of the danger that he exerted himself in remonstrances and semi-threats, and told[301] one member of the Cabinet after another that “at a moment when Europe, leagued together against the maritime tyranny of England, was laboring to throw off the yoke of that Power and to secure for all navigating nations freedom of commerce and the seas,” it was particularly improper for the United States to accept any treaty which did not expressly secure all disputed points, and that no treaty would be observed by England unless made under the auspices and by the guaranty of Napoleon. In view of the recent fate that had overtaken Powers like Switzerland and Venice, which had put themselves under the auspices of Napoleon, this argument produced no conviction. Turreau might better have left to the English the task of repairing Napoleon’s mistakes; but these mistakes had accumulated until it depended upon England alone whether the United States should join her in the war. Not only had the Emperor offended Jefferson and Madison by his peremptory stoppage of the Florida purchase,--he had also declared war upon American commerce in a decree which Jefferson and Madison could not but suspect to be in some mysterious way connected with his sudden change of front toward Spain and Florida; while in the face of these difficulties he left his own minister at Washington in such discredit that Turreau was reduced to beg sixty thousand dollars from the American Treasury to meet consular expenditures at a moment when he should have been pressing complaints about the frigate “Impétueux,” destroyed by the English within American jurisdiction, and when he should have been threatening the most fatal consequences if President Jefferson should sign any treaty whatever with England.[302]