Chesapeake-Leopard Affair
The Chesapeake-Leopard affair was an incident that took place off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, on 22 June 1807 when the British warship HMS Leopard fired on and boarded an American frigate USS Chesapeake while searching for deserters from the Royal Navy. The incident was one of the events that led to the War of 1812.
Background
In 1807, as the United States was still struggling to find its footing as an independent nation, the Napoleonic Wars were raging in Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte, having crowned himself Emperor of the French three years before, found himself opposed by a series of ever-shifting coalitions of European nations bankrolled by Great Britain. On land, Napoleon's armies had proved dominant; with such great victories as the Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805) and the Battle of Friedland (14 June 1807), he had conquered Central Europe and was now exerting influence throughout most of the continent. Britain, meanwhile, had smashed French naval power at the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) and was afterwards the undisputed master of the waves. This dichotomy left the neutral United States in a precarious position: to deal with one empire meant to upset the other. President Thomas Jefferson, nervously keeping tabs on the developments in Europe, voiced the concerns of many of his countrymen when he wrote: "What an awful spectacle does the world exhibit in this instant, one man bestriding the continent of Europe like a Colossus, and another roaming unbridled on the ocean" (Wood, 622).
But even as the war created anxiety in America, so, too, did it open the door of opportunity. American merchants were quick to capitalize on the gap in international trade caused by the fighting; with France and Spain no longer able to send merchant ships to their colonies in the West Indies, these colonies reluctantly opened their ports to American ships instead. The Americans would then re-export these Caribbean goods to European markets, making a fortune in the process. In 1807, the combined value of American imports and exports reached $243 million, turning the United States into the largest neutral carrier of goods in the world. When Britain complained that the United States' middleman trade strategy violated their so-called Rule of 1756 – which prevented nations from trading in times of war with ports that had been closed to them in times of peace – the Americans circumvented the rule by importing the Caribbean goods to the United States before re-exporting them to Europe, technically turning them into neutral cargo in the process.
American shipping would become threatened, however, as the Franco-British rivalry reached its stalemate. Unable to directly attack the British Isles due to the power of the Royal Navy, Napoleon decided to instead force Britain's submission by paralyzing its economy. In November 1806, he issued the Berlin Decree, the first block in his Continental System, in which he issued a continent-wide embargo on British trade. Any ship carrying British goods was liable for seizure, including those belonging to neutral countries. Britain retaliated with several orders-in-council, which placed a blockade on all ports that complied with Napoleon's embargo, stipulating that all nations who wished to trade at these ports had to first stop in England to pay transit duties. This, of course, left the American merchants in a difficult situation, as they could no longer trade at any European port without running afoul of either the French or the British. Before long, the warring empires were each seizing neutral American ships; between 1803 and 1812, France seized 558 American vessels, while the British captured 917.
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