Notes on Warships, [ca. 30 April 1806]
Notes on Warships
[ca. 30 April 1806]
Treaty privileges of Ships of war in foreign ports
1. p 34 no right to visit for municipal objects
see Resoln. of H. of Comons & H of L in 1739—approvd. by the King—Resd. that the subjects of G.B. have an evident right to navigate in the Amn. Seas, as well in going to as in returning from any part of the dominions of H Majesty; & that it is a manifest violation of this right—to visit such vessels at open sea, under pretext that they are freighted with Contraband or prohibited merchandizes.
Ms, two copies (DLC: Rives Collection, Madison Papers). Undated; conjectural date assigned based on citations from George Chalmers’s Collection of Treaties between Great Britain and Other Powers that refer to the rights and privileges alloted to foreign ships in the ports of the treaty countries, and the supposition that JM compiled this list between 25 Apr. 1806, when a cannonball from the British warship Leander killed an American sailor in New York harbor, and 3 May 1806, when Jefferson issued a proclamation ordering the three British warships at New York to leave the harbor (Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 [Berkeley, Calif., 1968], 106–8). Second Ms in Daniel Brent’s hand, docketed by JM: “Cases of exclusion by weak powers of War Ships beyond a safe number” and on verso “Federal Miscellanies.”