A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“Peaceable coercion” was a colossal bust. Jefferson was the first president to learn that economic sanctions are an overrated tool of foreign policy. The British and French continued kidnapping American seamen, and the Embargo Act ravaged U.S. exports. Tariff revenue fell by more than half.16 Infuriated New England merchants faced bankruptcy, and a huge market was created for smuggling from U.S. ports and through Canada. So rampant was the defiance of Jefferson’s embargo that when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and put his brother on the throne, the French discovered 250 American ships in Spanish ports and seized their cargoes. When the U.S. minister to Paris protested, Napoleon calmly informed the envoy he was only helping to enforce the Embargo Act.17 Before leaving office, Jefferson saw the act repealed and replaced by a Nonintercourse Act which prohibited U.S. ships from trade only with Britain and France. Jefferson retired to Monticello believing himself to have been a failed president. He wrote to a friend: “Within a few days I retire to my family, my books, and my farms [at Monticello]. . . . Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.”