Nevertheless, Jefferson treated Monroe with the greatest consideration. At this period Monroe and Madison were both candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Jefferson’s choice was Madison, but he remained impartial between them; and he withheld Monroe’s treaty from publication at a time when to publish it would have given a fatal blow to Monroe’s prospects. In every way, in fact, he exerted himself to disguise and soften Monroe’s discredit. The wisdom of Jefferson’s course as to the treaty was shown before three months had elapsed by an act of British aggression, which, had the Monroe treaty been accepted, might fairly have been laid to its door. In June, 1807, the British frigate Leopard, having been refused permission to search the American frigate Chesapeake, fired upon the Chesapeake, which was totally unprepared for action, and, after killing three men and wounding eighteen, refused to accept the surrender of the ship, but carried off three alleged deserters. This event roused a storm of indignation, which never quite subsided until the insult had been effaced by the blood which was shed in the war of 1812. “For the first time in their history,” says Mr. Henry Adams, “the people of the United States learned in June, 1807, the feeling of a true national emotion.” “Never since the battle of Lexington,” wrote Jefferson, “have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present.” War might easily have been precipitated, had Jefferson been carried away by the popular excitement. He immediately dispatched a frigate to England demanding reparation, and he issued a proclamation forbidding all British men-of-war to enter the waters of the United States, unless in distress or bearing dispatches. Jefferson expected war, but he meant to delay it for a while. To his son-in-law, John Eppes, he wrote: “Reason and the usage of civilized nations require that we should give them an opportunity of disavowal and reparation. Our own interests, too, the very means of making war, require that we should give time to our merchants to gather in their vessels and property and our seamen now afloat.” Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, even criticised the President’s annual message at this time as being too warlike and “not in the style of the proclamation, which has been almost universally approved at home and abroad.” It cannot truly be said, therefore, that Jefferson had any unconquerable aversion to war. Mr. Canning, the British Foreign Minister, went through the form of expressing his regrets for the Chesapeake affair, and sent a special envoy to Washington to settle the difficulty. Reparation was made at last, but not till the year 1811.