On the success of Barlow’s mission the fate of President Madison might depend. As long as France maintained her attitude of hostility to the United States, war against England would be regarded by a majority of the Northern people with distrust and dislike. On that point Madison was justly timid. The opposition of New England and New York must be quieted, and in order to quiet it Madison must prove France to be honest in respecting American rights; he must show that the decrees had been really repealed as he had so often and still so obstinately asserted, and that the vast confiscations of American property under the authority of those decrees would receive indemnity. The public had commonly supposed France to be comparatively a slight aggressor; but to the general surprise, when Congress, before the declaration of war against England, called for a return of captures under the belligerent edicts, Monroe’s report showed that the seizures by France and by the countries under her influence in pursuance of the decrees were not less numerous than those made by England under the Orders in Council. The precise values were never known. The confiscations ordered by Napoleon in Spain, Naples, Holland, Denmark, Hamburg, and on the Baltic outnumbered those made in his empire; but all these taken together probably exceeded the actual condemnations in British prize-courts. This result, hardly expected by the American government, added to its embarrassment, but was only a part of its grievances against Napoleon. Not only had France since 1807 surpassed England in her outrages on American property, but while England encouraged American commerce with her own possessions, Napoleon systematically prohibited American commerce with his empire. He forbade American vessels to import sugar or other colonial produce except by special license; he imposed a duty of sixty cents a pound on Georgia cotton worth twenty or twenty-five cents; he refused to take tobacco except in small quantities as a part of the government monopoly; and he obliged every American ship to carry for its return cargo two thirds in silks and the other third in wines, liquors, and such other articles of French produce as he might direct. The official returns made to Congress showed that in 1811 the United States exported domestic produce to the amount of $45,294,000, of which France and Italy took only $1,164,275.