A few days later Jefferson repeated the warning in stronger language: “I place immense value in the experiment being fully made, how far an embargo may be an effectual weapon in future as well as on this occasion.”[199] “Where you are doubtful,” continued the instructions to Gallatin, “consider me as voting for detention;” and every coasting-vessel was an object of doubt. On the same day with the letter of May 6 to the Secretary of the Treasury, the President wrote a circular to the governors of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Georgia, and Orleans,--portions of the Union which consumed more wheat than they produced,--requesting them to issue certificates for such quantities of flour as were likely to be needed beyond their local supply. The certificates, directed to the collector of some port usually exporting flour, were to be issued to “any merchant in whom you have confidence.”[200] All other shipments of produce were objects of suspicion. “I really think,” wrote the President to Gallatin, “it would be well to recommend to every collector to consider every shipment of provisions, lumber, flaxseed, tar, cotton, tobacco, etc.,--enumerating the articles,--as sufficiently suspicious for detention and reference here.” He framed new instructions to the governors on this idea: “We find it necessary to consider every vessel as suspicious which has on board any articles of domestic produce in demand at foreign markets, and most especially provisions.”[201] Gallatin, having early declared his want of faith in the embargo as a coercive measure, was the more bound to prove that his private opinion did not prevent him from giving full trial to the experiment which Executive and Legislature had ordered him to make. He set himself resolutely to the unpleasant task. Instead of following the President’s plan of indiscriminate suspicion and detention, he preferred to limit the suspicious cargo in value, so that no vessel could carry provisions to the amount of more than one-eighth of the bond; but before he could put his system in force, new annoyances arose. Governor Sullivan of Massachusetts, under the President’s circular, issued certificates before July 15 to the amount of fifty thousand barrels of flour and one hundred thousand bushels of corn, besides rice and rye. Gallatin complained to the President,[202] who instantly wrote to the governor of Massachusetts an order to stop importing provisions:-- “As these supplies, although called for within the space of two months, will undoubtedly furnish the consumption of your State for a much longer time, I have thought advisable to ask the favor of your Excellency, after the receipt of this letter, to discontinue issuing any other certificates, that we may not unnecessarily administer facilities to the evasion of the embargo laws.”[203]