The _Chesapeake_ passed out of the capes about noon on June 22, 1807. When about ten miles outside the _Leopard_ hailed saying she had a dispatch for Commodore Barron. This “dispatch” proved to be a copy of an order from the British admiral, Berkeley, to search the _Chesapeake_ for deserters from certain British ships, the order to be first shown to her captain. On Barron’s refusal to submit to such outrage the _Chesapeake_ was fired into by the _Leopard_, without, in the unprepared state of the ship, being able to return a gun. Twenty-one men were killed and wounded, the ship searched and four of the crew, claimed as British deserters, were taken away. “Of these, one was hanged, one died, and the other two, after prolonged disputation, were returned five years later to the deck of the _Chesapeake_ in formal reparation.” A deeper insult to a nation could scarcely have been offered. All the same, it ended only on the part of the administration in what may be called a fit of sulks known as the embargo, which from December, 1807, to March, 1809, took American commerce by the throat and forbade our merchant ships to go to sea. It was much as if a man should reduce himself to bread and water as a revenge against an enemy. Jefferson, meanwhile, with the British practically blockading our ports and taking men from vessels entering New York and other harbors, was seized with a passion for gunboats, and shortly after the _Chesapeake_ incident, which cried aloud for ships-of-the-line instead of the two hundred petty toys he devised and caused to be built, and which could not go to sea without striking their one gun into the hold, we find him saying: “Believing, myself, that gunboats are the only water defence which can be useful to us, and protect us from the ruinous folly of a navy, I am pleased with everything which promises to improve them.”[26] It was a mind far better fitted to deal with the manipulations of a political party than with the care of a nation which he was not so very far from wrecking by an insensate policy of peace at any price. Peace, however, cannot be kept by one only of the interested parties declaring such a preference. One must be in a position to command peace, and this failure was Jefferson’s great mistake, a mistake which from every point of view was to cost us dear. “Whether with or without a war, a navy would have saved us the six years of humiliation which were to intervene between 1806 and 1812; it would have saved the embargo which was to tie to the wharves in rotting idleness more than a million tons of shipping which had been engaged in foreign trade; to bring grass-grown streets to our greatest ports, and strain the sentiment of the several sections of the Union to the point of separation. It would have saved the War of 1812, the capture and burning of Washington, and the shameful ineptitude, with one brilliant exception, of our army commanders in that contest.... There would have