heme fell through, Jefferson
cultivated especially friendly relations with the government of Napoleon,
not from any of the former Republican enthusiasm, but solely on
diplomatic grounds. Hence, although nominally neutral in the great war,
he bore the appearance of a French partisan.

Jefferson felt that he had in his possession a thoroughly adequate means
to secure {195} favourable treatment from England, by simply threatening
commercial retaliation. The American trade, he believed, was so
necessary to the prosperity of England that for the sake of retaining it
that country would make any reasonable concession. That there was a
basis of truth in this belief it would be impossible to deny; for England
consumed American cotton and exported largely to American markets. With
this trade cut off, manufacturers and exporters would suffer, as they had
suffered in the revolutionary period. But Jefferson ignored what every
American merchant knew, that military and naval considerations weighed
fully as heavily with England as mercantile needs, and that a country
which had neither a ship-of-the-line, nor a single army corps in
existence, commanded, in an age of world warfare, very slight respect.
Jefferson's prejudice against professional armed forces and his ideal of
war as a purely voluntary matter, carried on as in colonial times, was
sufficiently proclaimed by him to be well understood across the Atlantic.
Openly disbelieving in war, avowedly determined not to fight, he
approached a nation struggling for life with the greatest military power
on earth, and called upon it to come to terms for business reasons.

His first effort was made by causing {196} Congress to pass a
Non-importation Act, excluding certain British goods, which was not to go
into effect until the end of 1806. With this as his sole weapon, he sent
Monroe to make a new treaty, demanding free commerce and the cessation of
the impressment of seamen from American vessels in return for the
continued non-enforcement of the Non-importation Act. Such a task was
more difficult than that laid upon Jay twelve years before; and Monroe,
in spite of the fact that he was dealing with the same Minister, failed
to accomplish even so much as his predecessor. From August to December
he negotiated, first with Lord Holland, then, after Fox's death, with
Lord Howick; but the treaty which he signed on December 1, 1806,
contained not one of the points named in his instructions