as Jefferson was writing at this
very time, they would have classed him with the armchair critics who
had no proper conception of a sailor's duty. "I hold the right of
expatriation," wrote the President, "to be inherent in every man by the
laws of nature, and incapable of being rightfully taken away from him
even by the united will of every other person in the nation."

In the year 1805, while President Jefferson was still the victim of
his overmastering passion, and disposed to cultivate the good will of
England, if thereby he might obtain the Floridas, unforeseen commercial
complications arose which not only blocked the way to a better
understanding in Spanish affairs but strained diplomatic relations
to the breaking point. News reached Atlantic seaports that American
merchantmen, which had hitherto engaged with impunity in the carrying
trade between Europe and the West Indies, had been seized and condemned
in British admiralty courts. Every American shipmaster and owner at once
lifted up his voice in indignant protest; and all the latent hostility
to their old enemy revived. Here were new orders-in-council, said they:
the leopard cannot change his spots. England is still England--the
implacable enemy of neutral shipping. "Never will neutrals be perfectly
safe till free goods make free ships or till England loses two or three
great naval battles," declared the Salem Register.

The recent seizures were not made by orders-in-council, however, but in
accordance with a decision recently handed down by the court of appeals
in the case of the ship Essex. Following a practice which had become
common in recent years, the Essex had sailed with a cargo from Barcelona
to Salem and thence to Havana. On the high seas she had been captured,
and then taken to a British port, where ship and cargo were condemned
because the voyage from Spain to her colony had been virtually
continuous, and by the so-called Rule of 1756, direct trade between a
European state and its colony was forbidden to neutrals in time of war
when such trade had not been permitted in time of peace. Hitherto, the
British courts had inclined to the view that when goods had been landed
in a neutral country and duties paid, the voyage had been broken.
Tacitly a trade that was virtually direct had been countenanced, because
the payment of duties seemed evidence enough that the cargo became a
part of the stock of the neutral country and, if reshipped, was then a
bona fi