“he was admitted freely into society and heard the conversation at private tables.” Had Jefferson known that a British emissary was secretly waiting at Boston to profit by the result of eight years’ Republican policy, he could not but have felt deep personal mortification mingled with his sense of wrong. Of all Jefferson’s hopes, perhaps the warmest had been that of overthrowing the power of his New England enemies,--those whom he had once called the monarchical Federalists,--the clergy and the Essex Junto. Instead of overthrowing them he had given them, for the first time in their lives, unlimited power for mischief; he had overthrown only the moderate Federalists, who when forced to choose between treason and embargo submitted to the embargo and hated its author. The Essex Junto became supreme in New England; and behind it stood the power of Great Britain, ready to interpose, if necessary, for its defence. Jefferson submitted in silence, and even with an air of approval, to the abrupt abandonment of his favorite measure. He admitted that the embargo had failed; he even exaggerated its evils, and described it as more costly than war. His language implied that the failure of peaceable coercion was no longer a matter of doubt in his mind. “The belligerent edicts,” he wrote to Armstrong,[388] “rendered our embargo necessary to call home our ships, our seamen, and property. We expected some effect, too, from the coercion of interest. Some it has had, but much less on account of evasions and domestic opposition to it. After fifteen months’ continuance, it is now discontinued because, losing fifty million dollars of exports annually by it, it costs more than war, which might be carried on for a third of that, besides what might be got by reprisal.” To Dupont de Nemours Jefferson wrote in the same strain.[389] He signed without the betrayal of a protest the bill repealing the embargo, and talked of war as a necessary evil. Not until more than a year afterward did he admit the bitterness of his disappointment and mortification; but July 16, 1810, he wrote to his old Secretary of War a letter which expressed, in his familiar note of irritability, the feelings he had pent up:[390]--