egulate foreign trade. Jefferson's main goal was to avoid war, but the Embargo Act only delayed what seemed to be the inevitable. The Embargo Act caused a complete boycott of British and European goods, and it was supposedly an ultimatum for the discontinuation of British and European harassment of American ships. The Embargo Act in turned backfired, because it hurt the merchants through the discontinued trade with superpower, Great Britain and other European countries, and was three times more costly than war itself. On the other hand, the Embargo did have positive attributes because the merchants began to develop domestic manufacturing, which slowly made the United States economically independent from other countries' economies. Ironically, Jefferson'
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