Northern failure had developed a deep mortification when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a bold naval captain, on his own initiative, appeared to have struck a real blow at the South.

His action seemed to indicate that the fighting forces of the North, if free from the trammels of Washington red tape, could, and would, carry on energetic war.

Certainly it was but a slight incident to create such Northern emotion, yet the result was a sudden lifting from despondency to elation.
But almost equally with this cause of joy there operated on American minds the notion that the United States had at last given to Great Britain a dose of her own medicine in a previous era--had exercised upon a British ship that "right of search" which had been so keenly resented by America as to have become almost a _permanent_ cause of a sense of injury once received and never to be forgotten.

There was no clear thinking about this; the obnoxious right of search in times of peace for vagrant seamen, the belligerent right exercised by Britain while America was a neutral, the practice of a "right of visit" claimed by Britain as necessary in suppression of the African Slave Trade--all were confused by the American public (as they are still in many history textbooks to this day), and the total result of this mixing of ideas was a general American jubilation that the United States had now revenged herself for British offences, in a manner of which Great Britain could not consistently complain.

These two main reasons for exultation were shared by all classes, not merely by the uninformed mob of newspaper readers.
At a banquet tendered Captain Wilkes in Boston on November 26, Governor Andrews of Massachusetts called Wilkes' action "one of the most illustrious services that had made the war memorable," and added "that there might be nothing left [in the episode] to crown the exultation of the American heart, Commodore Wilkes fired his shot across the bows of the ship that bore the British lion at its head[437]." All America first applauded the act, then plunged into discussion of its legality as doubts began to arise of its defensibility--and wisdom.