Wars, embargoes, and confiscations might interrupt but they could not seriously harm it.
In the three years after 1789 the merchant shipping registered for the foreign trade increased from 123,893 tons to 411,438 tons, presaging a growth without parallel in the history of the commercial world.

Foreign ships were almost entirely driven out of American ports, and ninety-one per cent of imports and eighty-six per cent of exports were conveyed in vessels built and manned by Americans.

Before Congress intervened, English merchantmen had controlled three-fourths of our commerce overseas.

When Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, fought down Southern opposition to a retaliatory shipping policy, he uttered a warning which his countrymen were to find still true and apt in the twentieth century: "If we have no seamen, our ships will be useless, consequently our ship timber, iron, and hemp; our shipbuilding will be at an end; ship carpenters will go over to other nations; our young men have no call to the sea; our products, carried in foreign bottoms, will be saddled with war-freight and insurance in time of war--and the history of the last hundred years shows that the nation which is our carrier has three years of war for every four years of peace." The steady growth of an American merchant marine was interrupted only once in the following decade.

In the year 1793 war broke out between England and France.