1. “Anticipation of Marginal Notes on the Declaration of Government of the Ninth of January, 1813. in the American National Intelligencer,” a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of the Prince Regent’s 9 Jan. 1813 statement on “the causes and origin of the war,” appeared in the May 1813 issue of the Pamphleteer. In his declaration, the Prince Regent had asserted that the “real cause of the present war” was the “marked partiality” of the United States “in assisting the aggressive tyrany of France.” The blockade of European ports declared by the British in 1806 had been legal; by disputing its legality the United States was in effect justifying the Berlin and Milan decrees, which were acts of unprovoked French aggression, and against which the United States had failed to register adequate protest. The Embargo and Nonintercourse Acts subsequently passed by Congress were “principally leveled against … Great Britain,” and the conditions on which the United States offered to revoke them were more favorable toward France than Great Britain. Further, the Prince Regent argued, the repeal of the Berlin and Milan decrees by the French government was only conditional, and likely a ruse, but had been treated as authentic and absolute by the United States. When the British government nevertheless repealed its orders in council contingent on the reciprocal repeal of U.S. trade restrictions, and offered terms for an armistice, it was rebuffed by Congress’s passage of a law prohibiting all trade with Great Britain, and by U.S. insistence on unacceptable armistice conditions that included, among others, Great Britain’s renunciation of its right of impressment. That right, the Prince Regent insisted, was nonnegotiable; naturalization in the United States did not absolve British subjects of their duty to serve the crown.

Joy contested these arguments in detail in the body of his essay. In the preface, he attributed recent U.S. naval victories to the fighting skills and desire for revenge acquired by American sailors previously impressed by the British, and criticized Lord Richard Wellesley and admiralty judge Sir William Scott for taking positions less accommodating toward the United States than those they had formerly held. He included an extract from a statute that, “for the better encouraging foreign mariners and seamen” to serve on British ships, granted naturalization as a British subject to any foreigner who did so for two years. Comparing such inducement to “the tedious process of five years’ residence under record, and all the formalities of the American law, which a seaman must encounter like every other man” in order to gain U.S. citizenship, Joy argued, showed that no “undue encouragement is held out by the American government, to entice our seamen into their service” (The Pamphleteer 1 [1813]: 487–538).