The whole period was a succession of great events.  The acquisition of Louisiana, stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, laid, in 1803, the foundations of that imperial domain which the steamboat and railroad were to convert to use in after-years.  The continental empire of Napoleon and the island empire of Great Britain drifted into a struggle for life or death which hardly knew a breathing space until the last charge at Waterloo, and from the beginning it was conducted by both combatants with a reckless disregard of international public opinion and neutral rights which is hardly credible but for the official records.  Every injury inflicted on neutral commerce by one belligerent was promptly imitated or exceeded by the other, and the two were perfectly in accord in insisting on the convenient doctrine of international law, that, unless neutral rights were enforced by the neutral against one belligerent, the injury became open to the imitation of the other.  In the process of imitation, each belligerent took care to pass at least a little beyond the precedent; and thus, beginning with a paper blockade of the northern coast of the continent by the British Government, the process advanced, by alternate “retaliations,” to a British proclamation specifying the ports of the world to which American vessels were to be allowed to trade, stopping in England or its dependencies to pay taxes en route.  These two almost contemporary events, the acquisition of Louisiana and the insolent pretensions of the European belligerents, were the central points of two distinct influences which bore strongly on the development of the United States.

The dominant party, the republicans, had a horror of a national debt which almost amounted to a mania.  The associations of the term, derived from their reading of English history, all pointed to a condition of affairs in which the rise of a strong aristocracy was inevitable; and, to avoid the latter, they were determined to pay off the former.  The payment for Louisiana precluded, in their opinion, the support of a respectable navy; and the remnants of colonialism in their party predisposed them to adopt an ostrich policy instead.  The Embargo act was passed in 1807, forbidding all foreign commerce.  The evident failure of this act to influence the belligerents brought about its repeal in 1809, and the substitution of the Non-intercourse act.  This prohibited commercial intercourse with England and France until either should revoke its injurious edicts.  Napoleon, by an empty and spurious revocation in 1810, induced Congress to withdraw the act in respect to France, keeping it alive in respect to England.  England refused to admit the sincerity of the French revocation, to withdraw her Orders in Council, or to cease impressing American seamen.  The choice left to the United States was between war and submission.