“That the Federalists may attempt insurrection is possible,” he wrote to Gallatin,[209] “and also that the governor would sink before it; but the Republican part of the State, and that portion of the Federalists who approve the embargo in their judgments, and at any rate would not court mob law, would crush it in embryo. I have some time ago written to General Dearborn to be on the alert on such an occasion, and to take direction of the public authority on the spot. Such an incident will rally the whole body of Republicans of every shade to a single point,--that of supporting the public authority.” The Federalists knew when to rebel. Jefferson could teach them little on that subject. They meant first to overthrow Jefferson himself, and were in a fair way to gratify their wish; for the people of New England--Republican and Federalist alike--were rapidly rallying to common hatred of the President. As winter approached, the struggle between Jefferson and Massachusetts became on both sides vindictive. He put whole communities under his ban. He stopped the voyage of every vessel “in which any person is concerned, either in interest or in navigating her, who has ever been concerned in interest or in the navigation of a vessel which has at any time before entered a foreign port contrary to the views of the embargo laws, and under any pretended distress or duress whatever.”[210] When a permit was asked for the schooner “Caroline,” of Buckstown on the Penobscot, Jefferson replied,-- “This is the first time that the character of the place has been brought under consideration as an objection. Yet a general disobedience to the laws in any place must have weight toward refusing to give them any facilities to evade. In such a case we may fairly require positive proof that the individual of a town tainted with a general spirit of disobedience has never said or done anything himself to countenance that spirit.”[211] Jefferson went still further in his reply to a petition from the island of Nantucket for food. “Our opinion here is that that place has been so deeply concerned in smuggling, that if it wants it is because it has illegally sent away what it ought to have retained for its own consumption.”[212]