American character appeared at its best and at its worst in these three years of war. Even the British press could not gainsay the resourcefulness and intelligence of the American soldier and sailor, though the phrase "Yankee smartness" conveyed also the unpleasant imputation of trickiness and moral laxity. Wherever conditions permitted a fair test, the superiority of the American gunner was incontestable. The greater losses of the British whenever the armies met on even terms proved the superior marksmanship of the American militiaman. The adaptation of the fast-sailing schooner to privateering was further evidence of an alert intellect which was quick to adapt means to ends. This quality, to be sure, has been bred in every frontier folk by the very necessities of existence, but it appeared in marked strength in the American of this time. While the shipbuilders of New England were laying the keels of these privateers, Robert Fulton was perfecting his steamboat on the Delaware and Hudson rivers. In the year before the war, the first steamboat appeared on the Ohio, and before the end of the war fourteen were plying on Western waters, and opening up a new era in the American colonization of the continent. This instinctive adaptation of means to ends was less successful in the realm of American politics. No celerity could compensate for want of prevision on the part of the authorities at Washington. The lesson of the war was not lost upon James Madison, at least. "Experience has taught us," said he in a message to Congress,--and the words amounted to a confession of error,--"that neither the pacific dispositions of the American people nor the pacific character of their political institutions, can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears, beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period of the world; and the same faithful monitor demonstrates that a certain degree of preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disaster in the onset, but affords also the best security for the continuance of peace."