This mixture of feline qualities,--energy, astuteness, secrecy, and rapidity,--combined with ignorance of other natures than his own, was shown in the act with which he concluded his arrangements of Aug. 5, 1810. About a fortnight before, by a secret decree dated July 22, 1810,[208] he had ordered the proceeds of the American cargoes seized at Antwerp and in Dutch and Spanish ports, valued by him at six million dollars, to be turned into the Treasury as a part of his customs revenue devoted to the service of 1809–10. In French ports he held still some fifty ships in sequestration. Cadore’s letter of August 5 mentioned these ships as sequestered,--a phrase implying that they would be held subject to future negotiation and decision, liable to be returned to their owners; yet on the same day Napoleon signed another secret decree[209] which condemned without hearing or judgment all the ships and cargoes declared to be still in sequestration by the letter that could hardly have yet been sent from Cadore’s office. Every vessel which had arrived in French ports between May 20, 1809, and May 1, 1810, suffered confiscation by this decree, which further ordered that the American crews should be released from the dungeons where they were held as prisoners of war, and that from August 5 to November 1, 1810, American ships should be allowed to enter French ports, but should not discharge their cargoes without a license. The Decree of August 5 was never made public. Armstrong indeed employed the last hours of his stay in Paris in asking whether the French government meant to admit further negotiation about these seizures,[210] and Cadore replied that the law of reprisals was final;[211] but when Albert Gallatin, as minister at Paris some ten years afterward, happened to obtain a copy of the document, he expressed his anger at its secrecy in language such as he used in regard to no other transaction of his public life. “No one can suppose,” he wrote,[212] “that if it had been communicated or published at the same time, the United States would with respect to the promised revocation of the Berlin and Milan Decrees have taken that ground which ultimately led to the war with Great Britain. It is indeed unnecessary to comment on such a glaring act of combined injustice, bad faith, and meanness as the enacting and concealment of that decree exhibits.” These epithets would not have disturbed Napoleon. Politics were to him a campaign, and if his opponents had not the sense to divine his movements and motives, the disgrace and disaster were none of his.