All pretense that the embargo was designed to protect American commerce had now to be abandoned. Jefferson did not attempt to disguise his purpose to use the embargo as a great coercive weapon against France and Great Britain. Congress passed supplementary acts and suffered the President to exercise a vast discretionary power which was strangely at variance with Republican traditions. "When you are doubtful," wrote the President with reference to coasting vessels, "consider me as voting for detention." "We find it necessary," he informed the governors of the States, "to consider every vessel as suspicious which has on board any article of domestic produce in demand at foreign markets." Governors of those States which consumed more wheat than they produced were to issue certificates to collectors of ports stating the amount desired. The collectors in turn were to authorize merchants in whom they had confidence to import the needed supplies. Nor did the President hesitate to put whole communities under the ban when individual shipowners were suspected of engaging in illicit trade. He so far forgot his horror of a standing army that he asked Congress for an addition to the regular army of six thousand men. Congress had already made an appropriation of $850,000 to build gunboats. It now appropriated a million and a quarter for fortifications and for the equipment of the militia. Through the long summer of 1808, President Jefferson waited anxiously for the effects of coercion to appear. The reports from abroad were not encouraging. The effects of the embargo upon English economy are even now a matter of conjecture. In the opinion of Mr. Henry Adams, the embargo only fattened the shipowners and squires who devised the orders in council, and lowered the wages and moral standard of the laboring classes by cutting off temporarily the importation of foodstuffs and the raw material for British manufacturers. When Pinkney approached Canning with the proposal that England should revoke her orders upon the withdrawal of the embargo, he was told, with biting sarcasm, that "if it were possible to make any sacrifice for the repeal of the embargo without appearing to deprecate it as a measure of hostility, he [His Majesty] would gladly have facilitated its removal as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American people." The blow aimed at Great Britain had missed its mark.