While Armstrong waited for Napoleon's "friendly and respectful explanations," he was to study the Act of Congress which vested in the President an authority to suspend the embargo:—
- "The conditions on which the suspending authority is to be exercised will engage your particular attention. They appeal equally to the justice and the policy of the two great belligerent Powers now emulating each other in violations of both. The President counts on your best endeavors to give to this appeal all the effect possible with the French government. Mr. Pinkney will be doing the same with that of Great Britain."
The Florida affair remained to be discussed. The President courteously acknowledged the Emperor's wishes "for an accession of the United States to the war against England, as an inducement to which his interposition would be employed with Spain to obtain for them the Floridas." Armstrong was told to say in reply "that the United States having chosen as the basis of their policy a fair and sincere neutrality among the contending Powers, they are disposed to adhere to it as long as their essential interests will permit, and are more particularly disinclined to become a party to the complicated and general warfare which agitates another quarter of the globe, for the purpose of obtaining a separate and particular object, however interesting to them; but," Madison added, "should circumstances demand from the United States a precautionary occupation against the hostile designs of Great Britain, it will
