Then, during the war, the expelled American loyalists had _ex parte_ stories to tell that added indignation to animosity. The successful American cruisers added to the ill feeling. At the same time the British authorities observed a tendency among the foremost hands in the British navy that was not a little alarming. While their navy lost, in the years from 1776 to 1780, 19,788 men through disease and battle, no less than 42,069 deserted. Some of these deserters were, of course, Americans who had been impressed, but many a good British tar learned about the opportunities in the new land and made haste to go to meet them.
In short, it was through natural and unavoidable causes that the influential Britons came to regard their "American cousins" with a feeling of, say, intense animosity not wholly unmingled with apprehension.
Keeping in mind this mental attitude, recall the fact that a command of the sea was then absolutely essential to the well-being of the British people, and further, that the supremacy which the British then boasted had been obtained, and maintained for a century, by good hard fighting; and further still, that many British thinkers had been alarmed at such American progress as had been manifested even a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Bluntly stated, while the British people had learned to hate the American, they suddenly saw that he alone had shown an ability to dispute that supremacy upon the sea which seemed absolutely necessary for the preservation of their national existence. And as an independent citizen of the world he was in a position to force the issue. It follows, therefore, that the British were naturally led to do all they could to oppose all progress in the United States. The "ruinous restrictions" of which the Charleston ship-builders made mention were a natural sequence of the success of the Revolution.
While the British were thus hostile upon the sea (they were also holding American territory in the West, and inciting the Indians to war), the French and the Spanish were united in an effort to cut off all that part of the United States west of the Appalachians. For civilization was then in the primitive state where men, though they talked about international law, were guided only by unenlightened selfishness, and acknowledged no other court of appeal than that afforded by the sword.