The very suggestion of an embargo had an unexpected effect upon American shipmasters. To avoid being shut up in port, fleets of ships put out to sea half-manned, half-laden, and often without clearance papers. With freight rates soaring to unheard-of altitudes, ship-owners were willing to assume all the risks of the sea--British frigates included. So little did they appreciate the protection offered by a benevolent government that they assumed an attitude of hostility to authority and evaded the exactions of the law in every conceivable way. Under guise of engaging in the coasting trade, many a ship landed her cargo in a foreign port; a brisk traffic also sprang up across the Canadian border; and Amelia Island in St. Mary's River, Florida, became a notorious mart for illicit commerce. Almost at once Congress was forced to pass supplementary acts, conferring upon collectors of ports powers of inspection and regulation which Gallatin unhesitatingly pronounced both odious and dangerous. The President affixed his signature ruefully to acts which increased the army, multiplied the number of gunboats under construction, and appropriated a million and a quarter dollars to the construction of coast defenses and the equipment of militia. "This embargo act," he confessed, "is certainly the most embarrassing we ever had to execute. I did not expect a crop of so sudden and rank growth of fraud and open opposition by force could have grown up in the United States."
The worst feature of the experiment was its ineffectiveness. The inhibition of commerce had so slight an effect upon England that when Pinkney approached Canning with the proposal of a quid pro quo--the United States to rescind the embargo, England to revoke her orders-in-council--he was told with biting sarcasm that "if it were possible to make any sacrifice for the repeal of the embargo without appearing to deprecate it as a measure of hostility, he would gladly have facilitated its removal AS A MEASURE OF INCONVENIENT RESTRICTION UPON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE." By licensing American vessels, indeed, which had either slipped out of port before the embargo or evaded the collectors, the British Government was even profiting by this measure of restriction. It was these vagrant vessels which gave Napoleon his excuse for the Bayonne decree of April 17, 1808, when with a stroke of the pen he ordered the seizure of all American ships in French ports and swept property to the value of ten million dollars into the imperial exchequer. Since these vessels were abroad in violation of the embargo, he argued, they could not be American craft but must be British ships in disguise. General Armstrong, writing from Paris, warned the Secretary of State not to expect that the embargo would do more than keep the United States at peace with the belligerents. As a coercive measure, its effect was nil. "Here it is not felt, and in England... it is forgotten."