It was for the United States to assert herself, regardless of the odds, or sink into a position of supine dependency upon the will of Great Britain and the wooden walls of her invincible navy.
[Footnote 1: See _Jefferson and His Colleagues_, by Allen Johnson (in _The Chronicles of America_).] "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights!" was the American war cry.

It expressed the two grievances which outweighed all others--the interference with American shipping and the ruthless impressment of seamen from beneath the Stars and Stripes.

No less high-handed than Great Britain's were Napoleon's offenses against American commerce, and there was just cause for war with France.

Yet Americans felt the greater enmity toward England, partly as an inheritance from the Revolution, but chiefly because of the greater injury which England had wrought, owing to her superior strength on the sea.
There were, to be sure, other motives in the conflict.

It is not to be supposed that the frontiersmen of the Northwest and Southwest, who hailed the war with enthusiasm, were ardently aroused to redress wrongs inflicted upon their seafaring countrymen.