A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming Page A

South and Southerners, with tragic consequences for America’s future. 4
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    Nothing came of Senator Pickering’s plot. Slandered and smeared with special savagery by the Jeffersonian Republicans as a traitor to the party, Burr lost his race for governor of New York. Jefferson’s landslide reelection in 1804 soon swept the Republican Party into power in Massachusetts. But the seeds of discontent and suspicion of Virginia’s leadership had been planted in many minds. These burst into dangerous bloom in Jefferson’s second term, when he confronted the threat of war with Great Britain over London’s arrogant interference with American overseas commerce. The British insisted their blockade of France and her European allies entitled them to seize American ships and kidnap American sailors into the Royal Navy. The French were equally ready to assault American ships trading with Britain. Instead of war, the president declared an embargo against trade with Britain, France, and the rest of the civilized world.
    The embargo had a devastating impact on New England, home of most of America’s million-ton merchant fleet. Tens of thousands of restless, angry seamen were left idle in her ports. In Newburyport, once the third busiest harbor in Massachusetts, seventy ships rocked and rotted at their anchors. Merchants went bankrupt everywhere. One critic raged that it was like “cutting a man’s throat to cure a nosebleed.” In December 1808, on the first anniversary of the president’s decree, down-at-the-heel sailors dragged a mastless ship along Newburyport’s rundown streets, with a helmsman wearing a placard: “Which way shall I steer?”
    Massachusetts Federalists used the embargo’s distress to publish a warning: “A Separation of the States and its Consequences to New England.” Led by Senator Pickering (Fisher Ames had died), the Federalists regularly condemned President Jefferson’s supposed partiality to France. When some infuriated New Englanders began smuggling exports and imports to and from Canada in defiance of the embargo, the president asked Congress to pass a force bill, empowering him to make war on them with the U.S. Army and Navy.
    This policy only deepened New England’s sense of alienation. Connecticut’s legislature, in a special session, declared that the state had the power to reject both the embargo and the force bill as unconstitutional. The state had a duty “to interpose a protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the people and the assumed powers of the federal government.” A Vermont grand jury expressed outrage at the idea of the U.S. Army and local law officers enforcing the president’s proclamation against trade with Canada. Rhode Island militiamen, called out by the governor, refused to arrest violators of the embargo. New England was giving the man who had said a state could nullify an act of Congress in 1798 (when the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts) a demoralizing taste of his own medicine. 5
    In the House of Representatives, Virginia’s John Randolph, a Jefferson enemy, intoned that all of Europe—and most Americans—saw the United States as “a divided people, imbecile and distracted.” Aghast at the widespread disgust with the embargo, the Republicans repealed it on President Jefferson’s last day in office. It had accomplished little or nothing. But the Republican Party, still buoyed by the Louisiana Purchase, remained potent at the polls, electing James Madison as Jefferson’s successor.
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    The uproar over the embargo proved to be only a warm-up for the War of 1812. President Madison struggled to achieve peace with France and England, but the two belligerents declined to cooperate. Republican congressmen from Kentucky and