Note 8 — Chapter II

So indiscriminate were English officers in these outrages, that it sometimes happened that black men were seized as English seamen. At that time the public opinion of the world was such, that few statesmen troubled themselves much about the rights of negroes. But in another generation, when it proved convenient in the United States to argue that free negroes had never been citizens, it was remembered that the cabinets of Jefferson and Madison, in their diplomatic discussions with Great Britain, had been willing to argue that the impressment of a free negro was the seizure of an American citizen.—Bryant's History of the United States.