Americans were being impressed because there was a desperate need for men in the Royal Navy to fight against Napoleon's fleets. During the Napoleonic Wars, there was an estimated 6000 American citizens impressed into the Royal Navy. Once the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the British no longer needed to impress American seamen and the issue died.
I'm not interested in the Treaty of Tilsit. You suggested that Great Britain declared war on the United States when it stopped shipping hemp from Russia to Great Britain. The problems with this assertion are 1) the United States declared war on Britain, not Britain on the United States. 2) The Treaty of Ghent is important since it ended the War of 1812, yet it never mentions anything about hemp or shipping. One would think that if this was the cause for the war, it would be mentioned in the treaty. 3) Such an assertion completely ignores the greater context of the time. To dismiss western security as a secondary or tertiary issue shows a lack of understanding what was occurring at the time. Tecumseh was allying all of the western tribes from the Great Lakes to Florida against the United States. In the middle of this up-rising, Britain was supplying the tribes with weapon and supplies for the war, primary through the fort system they never surrendered after the Treaty of Versailles.
I have done a search on several web sites that make the claim you do about the importance of hemp in the War of 1812. These histories lack a critical reading of the events and show an inability to place them within the context of the time. Instead of providing a history of hemp, they construct a story of hemp as history. I don't deny that the hemp trade out of Russia was an important issue at the time, but to suggest that it was anything other than peripheral to the larger issues of the time is to show a lack of historical understanding.
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