Unconquered Read Free

beet-red.
    “We don’t need Jared’s money, Father,” said Jonathan, soothing the older man. “Look at it from my point of view. If you invest his money in the family business then we are beholden to him, and I do not want that. You have my baby son, John, after me, as heir. Let Jared go his own way.”
    Jared won, and immediately following his twenty-first birthday, he sailed for Europe.
    He stayed several years, first studying at Cambridge, and then getting polish in London. He was never idle. He made discreet investments, reaped his profits, and then reinvested. He had an uncanny knack, and his London friends nicknamed him the Golden Yankee. It was a sport among the bon ton to try and find out where Jared Dunham was placing his next investment so they might place their money where he did. He traveled in the best circles, and though pursued at every turn, enjoyed his freedom and remained single. He bought himself an elegant townhouse on a small, fashionable square near Greene Park which was furnished in excellent taste and staffed with a core of well-trained servants. For the next several years Jared Dunham then traveled back and forth between America and England, despite the problems between the two countries, and France. When he was not in residence in London the house was managed by his very competent secretary, Roger Bramwell, a former American naval officer.
    Jared’s first return to Plymouth, Massachusetts, found the peoples of New England in an uproar over the Louisiana Purchase. Though a Federalist like his father and brother, Jared Dunham didn’t believe as they did that expansion west would subordinate New England’s commercial interests to the agricultural South. Rather he saw a greater market for his goods. What bothered the politicians and bankers, he believed, was the definite possibility of losing their political superiority and clout; and this was, of course, a serious consideration.
    The peoples of the East were different from their southern and western counterparts. The owner of a vast plantation scarcely held the same views or had the same interests as a Massachusetts merchant prince; but then his views were also quite different from those of a fur trapping mountain man. Jared saw no serious conflict, although other Federalists did.
    In Europe war had again broken out. England constantly agitated in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin against the French emperor, trying to persuade Tzar Alexander, Emperor Francis, and King Frederick Wilhelm to join in a common alliance against Bonaparte.
    None of these leaders would listen, hoping perhaps that if they remained neutral, the French would not deign to notice them, and go away. Besides, the French army seemed unbeatable although Britain still dominated the seas, a fact that rankled Bonaparte. Still, mid-Europe was controlled mostly from the land and not the seas, so the English were of little help.
    When England successfully withstood the combined French and Spanish navies at the Battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon next resorted to an economic war against his greatest enemy. From Berlin he issued a decree ordering the seizure of all British goods in his and his allies’ territory and forbidding English ships entry from his and all allied ports. Napoleon believed that France could produce all the goods previously supplied by England; and the continent’s supplies of non-European articles would be delivered by neutral nations, primarily the United States.
    England was quick to act in response to the Berlin Decree with their own Orders in Council. Neutral vessels were forbidden from stopping at ports from which the British were excluded unless they first stopped at British ports to take on consignments of British goods.
    Napoleon’s next move was to declare that any neutral ship obeying the Orders in Council would be subject to confiscation, and, indeed, many American ships were seized. Enough of them, however, got through the various blockades, and on the