The seas now being safe to American commerce, our merchants at once took advantage of their opportunity. Mr. Slidell offered his son-in-law, then but twenty years of age, the command of a merchant vessel loaded for Holland. He applied for furlough. As war with Algiers threatened, permission was not granted, and Matthew and James Alexander Perry began service on board the _Chippewa_. This was the finest of three brigs in the flying squadron, which had been built to ravage British commerce in the Mediterranean. Serving, inactively, on the brig _Chippewa_, until December 20, 1815, Perry procured furlough, and in command of a merchant vessel, owned by his father, made a voyage to Holland. He was engaged in the commercial marine until 1817, when he re-entered the navy. The Virginian Horatio, son of the freed slave, who to-day ploughs up the skull of some Yorick, Confederate or Federal, turns to his paternal Hamlet, of frosty pow, to ask: “What was dey fightin’ about?” A similar question asks the British Peterkin and the American lad, of this generation, concerning a phase of our history early in this century. Besides being “our second war for national independence,” the struggle of 1812 was emphatically for “sailors’ rights.” At the beginning of hostilities there were on record in the State Department, at Washington, 6,527 cases of impressed American seamen. This was, doubtless, but a small part of the whole number, which probably reached 20,000; or enough to man our navy five times over. In 1811, 2,548 impressed American seamen were in British prisons, refusing to serve against their country, as the British Admirality reported to the House of Commons, February 1, 1815. In January, 1811, according to Lord Castlereagh’s speech of February 8, 1813, 3,300 men, claiming to be Americans, were serving in the British navy.[3] The war settled some questions, but left the main one of the right of search, claimed by Great Britain, still open, and not to be removed from the field of dispute, until Mr. Seward’s diplomacy in the _Trent_ affair compelled its relinquishment forever. Three years struggle with a powerful enemy, had done wonders in developing the resources of the United States and in consolidating the Federal union. The American nation, by this war, wholly severed the leading strings which bound her to the “mother country” and to Europe, and shook off the colonial spirit for all time. Among the significant appropriations made by Congress during the war, was one for $500 to be spent in collecting, transmitting, preserving, and displaying the flags and standards captured from the enemy.