The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and PrivateJefferson, Thomas
History
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 6 (of 9): Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
To complete and universalize the desolation of the globe, it has been
the will of Providence to raise up, at the same time, a tyrant as
unprincipled and as overwhelming, for the ocean. Not in the poor maniac
George, but in his government and nation. Bonaparte will die, and his
tyrannies with him. But a nation never dies. The English government, and
its piratical principles and practices, have no fixed term of duration.
Europe feels, and is writhing under the scorpion whips of Bonaparte. We
are assailed by those of England. The one continent thus placed under
the gripe of England, and the other of Bonaparte, each has to grapple
with the enemy immediately pressing on itself. We must extinguish the
fire kindled in our own house, and leave to our friends beyond the water
that which is consuming theirs. It was not till England had taken one
thousand of our ships, and impressed into her service more than six
thousand of our citizens; till she had declared, by the proclamation of
her Prince Regent, that she would not repeal her aggressive orders _as
to us_, until Bonaparte should have repealed his _as to all nations_;
till her minister, in formal conference with ours, declared, that no
proposition for protecting our seamen from being impressed, under color
of taking their own, was practicable or admissible; that, the door to
justice and to all amicable arrangement being closed, and negotiation
become both desperate and dishonorable, we concluded that the war she
had for years been waging against us, might as well become a war on
both sides. She takes fewer vessels from us since the declaration of
war than before, because they venture more cautiously; and we now make
full reprisals where before we made none. England is, in principle,
the enemy of all maritime nations, as Bonaparte is of the continental;
and I place in the same line of insult to the human understanding, the
pretension of conquering the ocean, to establish continental rights, as
that of conquering the continent, to restore maritime rights. No, my dear
Madam; the object of England is the _permanent dominion of the ocean_,
and the _monopoly of the trade of the world_. To secure this, she must
keep a larger fleet than her own resources will maintain. The resources
of other nations, then, must be impressed to supply the deficiency of
her own. This is sufficiently developed and evidenced by her successive
strides towards the usurpation of the sea. Mark them, from her first war
after William Pitt, the little, came into her administration. She first
forbade to neutrals all trade with her enemies in time of war, which
they had not in time of peace. This deprived them of their trade from
port to port of the same nation. Then she forbade them to trade from
the port of one nation to that of any other at war with her, although a
right fully exercised in time of peace. Next, instead of taking vessels
only _entering_ a blockaded port, she took them over the whole ocean, if
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