gmertca, , ?|emp, an& JUapoleon - Vote Hemp

Trade in Time of Warhealthy 92 per cent. 6 The American sailor and merchant, andthe myriads whose livelihood depended on the prosperity ofthose two—the ship-builder, lumberman, fisherman, stevedore,coastal and piedmont farmer, silversmith, etc.—experiencedthe greatest fortune they had ever known . Th e illwind that scorched and shriveled a whole generation inEurope carried the United States into the sunny latitudes ofitsfirst boom.Being a war profiteer, however, is not a life of joy unalloyed.There was always the danger that w e would be sucked into thewar. In a time when even a hermit would have found itdifficult to remain neutral, the United States was a peddlerhawking his wares in every port in the world. George Wash ­ington tried to save his country from any involvement by declaringour neutrality in 1793 and forbidding any American tocarry to any belligerent "those articles which are deemed contrabandby the modern usage of nations . . . ," 7 but, ofcourse, the difficulty was, wh o is to define contraband? If twome n are trying to strangle each other, then the very air becomescontraband.Very early in the war, Britain, in an effort to strangle theeconomy of the French empire, began to seize American vesselsbound to and from the ports of France and her colonies on theslightest pretext. Th e aggravation of these seizures, added tothe chronically annoying and illegal presence of British troopsin the forts of our Northwest, might well have brought us intothe war on the side of France if the Washington administrationhadn't been so unshakeably dedicated to neutrality. John Jaywas sent to England to settle the differences between Britainand the United States by negotiation. Th e treaty that he