Volume 4: Political Pamphlets
Edited by Stephen Shapiro and Wil Verhoeven

      "I can urge no plea why sentence of combustion should not be passed upon me. Some observing the city where I thus make my appearance may think my pacific doctrine, my system of rationale forebearance and forgiveness carried to a pitch of Quaker extravagance. The truth is, I am no better than an outcast of that unwarlike sect, but cannot rid myself of reverence for most of its practical and political maxims. I feel a strong inclination to admit to an equality of rights and merits, men or all nations and religions; to pass the same sentence on the same conduct, even though the men who practice it bear, at one time, the name of French, at another of English, and at another American: Sometimes that of federalists, and sometimes that of republicans. . . .
      [A]las! those who fancied that the spirit of Europe was regenerated or improved by crossing the Atlantic, are woefully mistaken. . . . If any proof were wanting that our system of political justice is as narrow, selfish, depraved, unfeeling, as that of European states, we have only to consider the purpose of the embargo, the intention of imposing it: the effects on foreign nations which some of us rejoiced that it would, and which the rest of us lamented that it would not produce.

from An Address to the Congress of the United States on the Utility and Justice of Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce. With Reflections on Foreign Trade in General, and the Future Prospects of America (1809)

• 1803-02000 "An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cessation of Louisiana to the French" (1803).
• 1803-03000 "Monroe's Embassy; or, The Conduct of the Government in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi" (1803).
• 1807-00000 "The British Treaty of Commerce and Navigation" (1807)
• 1809-01000 "An Address to the Congress of the United States on the Utility and Justice of Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce" (1809)