A few days later Jefferson repeated the warning in stronger language: “I place immense value in the experiment being fully made, how far an embargo may be an effectual weapon in future as well as on this occasion.”[199]
“Where you are doubtful,” continued the instructions to Gallatin, “consider me as voting for detention;” and every coasting-vessel was an object of doubt. On the same day with the letter of May 6 to the Secretary of the Treasury, the President wrote a circular to the governors of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Georgia, and Orleans,—portions of the Union which consumed more wheat than they produced,—requesting them to issue certificates for such quantities of flour as were likely to be needed beyond their local supply. The certificates, directed to the collector of some port usually exporting flour, were to be issued to “any merchant in whom you have confidence.”[200] All other shipments of produce were objects of suspicion. “I really think,” wrote the President to Gallatin, “it would be well to recommend to every collector to consider every shipment of provisions, lumber, flaxseed, tar, cotton, tobacco, etc.,—enumerating the articles,—as sufficiently suspicious for detention and reference here.” He framed new instructions to the governors on this idea: “We find it necessary to consider every vessel as suspicious which has on board any articles of domestic produce in demand at foreign markets, and most especially provisions.”[201]
Gallatin, having early declared his want of faith in the embargo as a coercive measure, was the more bound to prove that his private opinion did not prevent him from giving full trial to the experiment which Executive and Legislature had ordered him to make. He set himself resolutely to the unpleasant task. Instead of following the President’s plan of indiscriminate suspicion and detention, he preferred to limit the suspicious cargo in value, so that no vessel could carry provisions to the amount of more than one-eighth of the bond; but before he could put his system in force, new annoyances arose. Governor Sullivan of Massachusetts, under the President’s circular, issued certificates before July 15 to the amount of fifty thousand barrels of flour and one hundred thousand bushels of corn, besides rice and rye. Gallatin complained to the President,[202] who instantly wrote to the governor of Massachusetts an order to stop importing provisions:—
“As these supplies, although called for within the space of two months, will undoubtedly furnish the consumption of your State for a much longer time, I have thought advisable to ask the favor of your Excellency, after the receipt of this letter, to discontinue issuing any other certificates, that we may not unnecessarily administer facilities to the evasion of the embargo laws.”[203]
That Massachusetts already on the brink of rebellion should tolerate such dictation could hardly be expected; and it was fortunate for Jefferson that the Federalists had failed to elect a governor of their own stripe. Even Sullivan, Democrat as he was, could not obey the President’s request, and excused his disobedience in a letter which was intended to convince Jefferson that the people of Massachusetts were the best judges of the amount of food they needed.
“The seaport towns,” Sullivan wrote,[204] “are supported almost entirely by bread from the Southern and Middle States. The interior of this State live on a mixture of Indian corn and rye in common regimen, but their fine bread and pastry depend on the importations from the southward, carted into the interior. The country towns consume more imported flour than is equivalent for all the grain they carry to market in the seaport towns. Their hogs and poultry consume much Indian corn. The rice imported here from the southward, since the Embargo Act, has been very inconsiderable. The Indian corn is in greater quantities, but that would not find a market in the British or French dominions if there was no embargo. This is an article of great demand here, not as bread, but as sustenance for carriage-horses, draft-horses, etc., and the quantity consumed is really astonishing.”
Sullivan admitted that the habits of the Massachusetts people, contracted under the royal government and still continued, led to the evasion of commercial laws; but he told the President what would be the result of an arbitrary interference with their supplies of food:—
“You may depend upon it that three weeks after these certificates shall be refused, an artificial and actual scarcity will involve this State in mobs, riots, and convulsions, pretendedly on account of the embargo. Your enemies will have an additional triumph, and your friends suffer new mortifications.”[205]
Governor Sullivan was a man of ability and courage. Popular and successful, he had broken the long sway of Federalism in Massachusetts, and within a few months had carried his re-election against the utmost exertions of the Essex Junto; but he had seen John Quincy Adams fall a sacrifice to the embargo, and he had no wish to be himself the next victim of Jefferson’s theories. His situation was most difficult, and he warned the President that the embargo was making it worse:—
“The embargo has been popular with what is denominated the Republican part of the State; but as it does not appear from anything that has taken place in the European Powers that it has had the expected effect there, it has begun to lose its support from the public opinion.... There are judicious men in this State who are friends to the present Administration, and who have been in favor of the embargo as a measure of expedience which ought to have been adopted by the government, but who now express great doubts as to the power of enforcing it much longer under present circumstances. They do not perceive any of the effects from it that the nation expected; they do not perceive foreign Powers influenced by it, as they anticipated. They are convinced, as they say, that the people of this State must soon be reduced to suffering and poverty.... These men consider the embargo as operating very forcibly to the subversion of the Republican interest here. Should the measure be much longer continued, and then fail of producing any important public good, I imagine it will be a decisive blow against the Republican interest now supported in this Commonwealth.”[206]