In 1803 the foreign trade of Plymouth was at the height of its prosperity. In that year it was carried on by seventeen ships, sixteen brigs and forty schooners, and the duties paid into the Plymouth Custom House amounted to nearly one hundred thousand dollars. The above list of vessels shows how much the trade was reduced during the first quarter of the last century. This was due to the embargo act passed Dec. 22, 1807, on the recommendation of President Jefferson, and later to the war of 1812. The embargo act prohibited the departure from United States ports of all but foreign armed vessels with public commissions, or foreign merchant ships in ballast, or with such cargo only as they might have on board when notified of the law. All American vessels engaged in the coasting trade were obliged to give bonds to land their cargo in the United States. This embargo was repealed by a law taking effect March 15, 1809, except so far as it related to France and Great Britain, and their dependencies, and in regard to them also after the next session of Congress. Of course such a law struck a severe blow at the trade on which Plymouth most depended for the support of its people, and at a town meeting held in August, 1808, a petition to the President for a suspension of the embargo, was adopted in which it was stated that “prohibitory laws that subject the citizens to grevious privations and sufferings, the policy of which is at least questionable, and the temptations to the violations of which from the nature of man are almost irresistible, will gradually undermine the morals of society, and introduce a laxity of principle and contempt of the laws more to be deplored than even the useless waste of property.” The President replied that “he would with great willingness have executed the wish of the inhabitants of Plymouth had the Berlin and Milan decrees, and the British orders in Council, which endangered the safety of neutral ships been repealed, but while the edicts remain, Congress alone can suspend the embargo.” During the fifteen months of the continuance of the embargo, many of the business men of Plymouth were seriously crippled, and to some who survived its effects, the war which followed it, brought absolute ruin. During the war the wharves were crowded with vessels with their topmasts housed, and canvas bags, which received the name of Madison night caps, covered the hounds of their rigging. It is not to be supposed that yankee shrewdness entirely failed to evade the watchfulness of government officers, whose duty it was to prevent departures from port. Some of the vessels were already loaded with cargoes of fish for the West Indies when the war embargo began, and those which succeeded in the darkness of some stormy night in quietly setting up their rigging, and bending their sails, and getting to sea, found ready markets for their fish at from fifteen to twenty dollars per quintal.