Duxbury and The Embargo
An 1808 Petition from the Duxbury Town Meeting to President Thomas Jefferson on the Subject of The Embargo Act, along with Jefferson's Reply
[Readers: since we are in the season of Presidential politics, I thought I’d take a close look at the correspondence of one local Town Meeting, Duxbury’s, with the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, concerning Jefferson’s Embargo, formally the Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited American trade with the world in an attempt to keep the fledgling republic out of the ongoing wars between Napoleonic France and its allies, on the one side, and the United Kingdom and its allies, on the other. Both powers violated American and other neutral rights, with Britain in particular impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy. Jefferson’s solution was an extreme form of ultimately self-destructive economic warfare, the Embargo. New England, as the most commercial section of the nation, greatly suffered under the Embargo, leading to extreme unhappiness in the region.
UPDATE, 8/18/24 — I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this petition was first brought to my attention in my childhood by The Duxbury Book, edited by Katherine Pillsbury, Robert Hale, and Jack Post, and published in 1987 on the 350th anniversary of the Town’s incorporation.
Note: Jefferson’s party were the Democratic-Republicans, often just called The Republicans; confusingly for modern readers, these are the ancestors of today’s Democrats. The opposition party was the Federalist Party, of President Adams and Sec. Hamilton. They essentially “went extinct” after the War of 1812, and are not the lineal ancestor of any modern party.
This piece, for paid subscribers only, who have been very patient, has been adapted from my doctoral dissertation. I have attempted as best as I could to preserve the original spelling and punctuation in historical documents. In addition, the footnotes in the online version and the emailed version differ slightly, the former having one more footnote; the online version is the most current, and I apologize for any errors. Thanks to all for reading and subscribing! — Ben Cronin]
With the growth of shipbuilding in Duxbury and coastal New England during the age of the French Revolution and its attendant wars, the town became increasingly enmeshed in larger, Atlantic-scale concerns. By the first decade of the 19th century, the titanic struggle between Great Britain and Napoleonic France had ensnared even this small coastal community.