t urging
these points too earnestly, inasmuch as the other side refrained from
insisting upon the abandonment of impressment of seamen on board
American ships. But Mr. Madison's indignation must have covered up a
good deal of mortification. He could hardly have been without the
sensation of one hoisted by his own petard. It was only two years since
Mr. Jefferson, with his approval, had rejected the Monroe-Pinkney treaty
because instructions had not been literally complied with. Mr. Canning,
in following that example, could have pleaded, had he chosen, much the
stronger justification, under the circumstances of the two cases; and
Mr. Madison could not fail to remember, without being reminded of it,
when this agreement was thrown back in his face, that he had been
willing to accept it without any protection of the rights of American
seamen, the want of which was the ostensible reason for rejecting the
Monroe-Pinkney treaty.

However, the administration was now compelled to meet anew the old
difficulties which the Erskine agreement had failed to dispose of. The
President's first duty was to issue a second proclamation, recalling the
previous one which had sent to sea every American ship in port. They
could all come back, if they would, to be made fast again at their
wharves, till the recurrent tides at last should ripple in and out of
their open seams, and their yards and masts drop piecemeal upon the
rotting decks. But many never came back, preferring rather the risk of
being sunk or burned at sea, which happened to not a few, or of capture
and confiscation by the belligerents whose laws they defied. Erskine was
followed by a new ambassador from England, Mr. Jackson. His mission,
however, had no other result than to widen the breach between the two
nations. A controversy almost immediately arose between the minister and
Mr. Smith, the secretary of state,--or rather Mr. Madison himself, who,
as he complained at a later period, did most of Smith's work as well as
his own,--touching the arrangement with Erskine. Jackson intimated, or
was understood as intimating, that the administration must have known
the precise terms on which Erskine was empowered to treat with the
government of the United States; and when a denial was made with a good
deal of emphasis on the part of the administration, the insinuation was
repeated almost as a direct charge. Of course there could be but one
conclusion to correspondence of this sort; furth