The frontiersmen, never free from the hostility of the savage, sought to explain it by every cause except the true one--their constant invasion of the lands reserved to him by the National Government in treaties made with him. Here lies at least one explanation of the long endurance of British commercial wrongs by the United States before war was declared. The West, with its grievance of Indian tampering, had not yet come into control of national affairs. The frontiersmen, by their conquests of nature, had come to despise the strength of all enemies. With no commerce to be endangered by a foreign war, safe in the almost roadless interior from the peril of invasion, the Western representatives were able to carry by storm in Congress their temporising, commercial brethren of the coast. When discussing the embargo bill as a preliminary war measure in 1812, Clay, made Speaker during his first session in the House, scorned the appeal of New York for peace, in her defenceless condition, as her representatives described her. "I do not wish to hear," said Clay, "of the opinion of Brockholst Livingston or any other man. I consider this a war measure, and approve of it because it is a direct precursor of war." Fourteen Legislatures of the South and West, he said, had put themselves on record as wishing to avenge the insults of Britain. The Legislature of his own State had supported Jefferson's embargo four years previously with such zeal that they almost passed a measure abolishing the English common law in Kentucky courts.