by Conrad Black
Madison delivered his request for a declaration of war on June 1; seventeen days to extract the declaration, with New England, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware voting against, illustrated how not to go to war. The country was sharply divided from the start, far more than it had been on the issue of independence from Britain, or than the South would be about seceding or the North over subduing secession nearly 50 years later. Not until the latter stages of the Vietnam War would America be so divided while exchanging fire with an enemy. Madison identified impressments of American sailors, violation of U.S. neutrality and territorial waters, the blockade of U.S. ports, and the related refusal to retract the enabling orders in council (as if the provocations would have been less galling if they weren’t declared official policy, but only judicial decisions) as the reasons for war. Indians were not mentioned.
Because of three full terms of mismanagement of America’s war-making powers and strategic position opposite Great Britain, the United States did not enter the war with such advantages as it should have enjoyed. Britain had its main army in Spain and was in no position to send heavy units to America. Its navy was fully engaged enforcing the blockade on France and its allied and conquered territories. The United States had 30 times as many people as Canada, and the U.S. Navy, though only 16 ships, had advantages of proximity and resupply, and was manned entirely by carefully selected and trained men. Against that, its army was not trained at all, public opinion was fragmented badly from the start, and there was no capacity to raise money efficiently since the lapse of the Bank of the United States. Madison was responsible, building on Jefferson’s woeful traditions in these matters, for all of these problems.
The British only cuffed the Americans about because they ruled the oceans and knew that the United States had no military capability to inconvenience them in Canada or the West Indies. Countries, like people, do what they think they can get away with, with impunity. Madison was ultimately correct to go to war, but it would not have been necessary if he had not been swindled so artistically by Napoleon. The war—late, poorly prepared both in war-making terms and in preparation of public opinion—was still the right thing to do if it were successful. If the United States had emerged from it in possession of Canada, none of the impotent saber-rattling and vapid posturing of the various embargoes would have counted for anything.
Madison, a profoundly pacifistic man, despite his eminent position as a revolutionary, did finally conclude that there was no option but war, and started with every opportunity to make the war a great success and another immense accretion to the territory of the United States. And he started it in high fettle, visiting each government department, rendering pep talks wearing a “little round hat and huge cockade.”67
The original American military plan was a harking back to the unfulfilled dreams of the previous wars about the ease of taking Canada (which had only been done by Britain in 1759, by penetrating the vast St. Lawrence like an endoscopy and seizing Quebec). There were to be the now traditional three parallel approaches: General Henry Dearborn would scoot up Lake Champlain and take Montreal; General Stephen Van Rensselaer would cross into Canada at the Niagara River and take what was to become Toronto; and a westerly force under General William Hull would attack across the St. Clair River at what is now Detroit and clean up whatever was left. The Americans were poorly trained militia, and the previous Washington and Adams Administrations’ commitment to a permanent general staff and the development of detailed provisional war plans had been abandoned. Thus, all that was imagined were predictable approaches toward Montreal and at the western ends of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Hull’s drive across the Detroit River into Canada was the first off, but it proceeded only a few miles and then he withdrew after a month, as he was rightly fearful of being cut off by Tecumseh, who had thrown his lot in with the British and Canadians following their capture of the American post on Michilimackinac Island. Hull abruptly surrendered Detroit to General Isaac Brock without any exchange of fire, and the Indians seized Fort Dearborn (Chicago) on August 15 and massacred the garrison. His entire force of 2,000 were instant POWs. Hull was court-martialed for cowardice and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted because of his Revolutionary War service, and he was dishonorably discharged.
As if for the convenience of the defenders, the Americans deferred the attack at Niagara until the complete rout and capture of the Detroit forces, and Brock awaited Rensselaer on the Niagara River starting in late August. (Rensselaer had no military experience, but he was a Federalist and was appointed by New York governor Daniel Tompkins in a move to placate political opposition.) After two months, the Americans attacked at Queenston Heights and won the engagement, killing Brock. As the struggle reached its climax, the New York reservists declined to assist the rest of the American force, because their obligation to do so did not extend beyond the borders of the state. The British repulsed the invaders, and Van Rensselaer retired and was replaced by General Alexander Smyth. Smyth dithered for over a month before attempting another invasion of Canada, which was easily repulsed on November 28, and he was sacked. Dearborn set out from Plattsburg for Montreal on November 19, hoping to coordinate with Smyth. His New York reservists also refused to cross the border into Quebec, and Dearborn returned diffidently to Plattsburg. After this sequence of fiascoes, Madison fired the war secretary, William Eustis, and replaced him with John Armstrong, who proved abrasive and unsuitable.
In the first year of the conflict, the United States did do better on the ocean and on the Great Lakes, and in single-vessel combat more than held its own with the Royal Navy, which had swept the waters around Europe of adversaries. Monroe had been asked by Madison at the end of the year to test the waters with peace overtures to the British. Once again, Madison had completely misjudged the prospects. The United States had had such a ludicrous start to the war that the British had no incentive at all to negotiate. As part of the same ambivalence about the war, the United States had maintained a chargé in London even after the outbreak of war, and the chargé advised the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh (Marquis of Londonderry), that peace could be had if the British would abandon impressment of American sailors, and blockades of American ports, and pay for damage to American ships and forts. Castlereagh declined to negotiate on that basis, and a British overture from Admiral Warren, who commanded their forces in Halifax, directly to Monroe was rejected by Monroe unless the British promised to abandon impressment. This was not acceptable and the desultory war continued into 1813.
3. THE 1812 ELECTION
The presidential election of 1812 saw the origin of what became a wartime tradition of the nomination of a peace candidate by the party out of office. George Clinton’s capable nephew, De Witt Clinton, mayor of New York City and champion of the Erie Canal, which he later built, as governor, was nominated by the New York state antiwar Republicans, with former Empire loyalist Jared Ingersoll for vice president, and the Federalists, fading and fragmented, endorsed both candidates. With the antiwar Democratic-Republicans having defected, President Madison was unanimously renominated by the Democratic-Republican congressional caucus. George Clinton had died, and Elbridge Gerry was nominated for vice president with Madison.
Of the principal founders of the country, Franklin had been too old to participate in the government, and Washington, Hamilton, and Adams were men of affairs, practical officers, and people of commercial and administrative talent. None of them was particularly talented politically, other than, in the broadest sense, Washington. Jefferson the great polemicist and political theorist and Madison the great constitutional expert did not possess great practical skills of administration or the instinct of the national interest other than in an idealized sense of natural expansion into unpopulated areas. They thought it was sufficient to raise the lamp to the world and have a balanced Constitution and economical government and all else would follow, and they suspected Adams and Hamilton of being commercially dominated wa
rmongers, with fragile attachment to any notion of individual or popular rights (quite unfairly in the case of Adams).
There were limitations to the Adams-Hamilton view of a dominating state and powerful standing armed forces, counting nothing on the goodwill of nations or the halcyon powers of America’s founding principles and institutions. But the first group, prominently including Franklin, had an unerring instinct for the national interest, for the self-interestedness of other countries, for the limitations of sonorous assertions of inalienable rights as substitutes for armed force and the will to use it. Their strategic grasp never faltered, where Jefferson and Madison allowed the United States to lapse back into neo-colonial irrelevance, having neither the strength to threaten British possession of Canada, nor the strategic weight and diplomatic finesse to hold any sort of balance between France and Britain in wars that involved all the European powers for decades.
But Jefferson and Madison were immensely skillful politically. Their unpretentious method of government, tendency to devolve government to the states, and emphasis on broadening the suffrage and generalizing availability and quality of education while reducing taxes all hugely endeared them to the country. Hamilton and Adams, who between them won only one serious election, Adams as president, and that only because of Washington’s endorsement and by a narrow margin, had no such appeal or success. This was the problem of the Federalists, who began as supporters of the Constitution but once the Constitution was adopted and implemented never developed as a party and merely became a group of interests, and not such widespread interests at that—essentially the commercial and financial elites of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The Democratic-Republicans essentially controlled the whole political spectrum, and most of the political competition in the country was between its factions. In these circumstances, inept though Madison’s delayed, hesitant, backing into war had been, unwise though it was to go to war as head of a divided country, if he ran the war intelligently, he had yet a great chance to pick the fine plum of Canada, not a huge population but a huge rich area.
The interesting precedent in the 1812 election was the emergence of an antiwar party. In future wars, whenever they were waged or at least discussed for long enough, support and opposition to the war tended to be the demarcation in the presidential election: Clay leading antiwar opposition to Polk over Mexico in 1844; McClelland against Lincoln in the Civil War in 1864; Eisenhower promising to end the Korean War, though on favorable terms, in 1952; McGovern opposing the Vietnam War against Nixon in 1972; and both John Kerry and Barack Obama somewhat, though perhaps ambiguously, against the Iraq War in 2004 and 2008. America’s participation in World War I would be between elections, and Woodrow Wilson ran as the man who “kept us out of war” and then asked for a declaration of war six weeks after he was reinaugurated. Franklin D. Roosevelt promised peace through strength and all aid short of war for the democracies in 1940, and his opponent, Wendell Willkie, though he supported his program, accused FDR of leading the nation into war. The only direct attack on the United States in history, by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, was so brazen, premeditated, and unannounced that there was practically unanimous support for participation in World War II when it came.
De Witt Clinton gave it a good try, but Madison prevailed, 128 electoral votes to 89, with Gerry winning 131 to 86 over Ingersoll. The Federalists, in what would be their last vigorous performance, made substantial congressional gains, as all the New England and Middle Atlantic states down to Virginia, except Vermont and Pennsylvania, went for the opposition.
4. THE WAR: THE CAMPAIGNS OF 1813
Despite the success of individual American sea captains in single-ship duels with the British, and despite the fact that the Royal Navy was blockading practically all of Europe from Bahia in Spain to the Baltic, and from Gibraltar to Naples, it was still able to dispatch the forces necessary to blockade the entire American Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and to keep the blockade almost airtight throughout the war, though it left New England and New York untroubled for a time, in order to encourage the domestic political opposition. But the blockade was extended to the northern tip of the American coast in 1814. Throughout this time, the British caused havoc along the whole coast, with shore raiding parties and amphibious hit-and-run missions. American privateers and commerce raiders did a great deal of damage around the British Isles and in southern sea lanes as time went on, forcing the British to convoy ships to and from the Americas, but the British blockade of the United States, while it spurred the development of domestic manufacturing, did raise prices and depress farm incomes.
The Americans made significant progress in 1813, though they paid dearly for the absence of a military commander of the quality of Washington, Greene, Marion, and Morgan, until late in the war. A group of Kentuckians, including Speaker Henry Clay, engaged William Henry Harrison, victor of Tippecanoe, to take charge of their militia and try to recapture Detroit. Madison then named Harrison a major general of the U.S. Army (he had been a major general of militia), and confirmed his orders. He had 10,000 men. The Americans were defeated at Frenchtown in January and suffered about 1,000 casualties, but they defeated the British and Tecumseh at Fort Meigs in May and at Fort Stephenson in August. Harrison was enabled to carry out his orders to retake Detroit only after the decisive victory of Captain Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. (Perry had the advantage of experienced, salt-water navy veterans, against relatively inexperienced lake sailors.) Perry sent Harrison the famous message “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” In June, the dying Captain James Lawrence, on board the Chesapeake, in a duel with the British Shannon, had given the more famous order “Don’t give up the ship,” which became the motto of the United States Navy. (Perry’s flagship on Lake Erie was named Lawrence after him.) Harrison pushed into Canada at the western end of Lake Erie. It was in this campaign in September of 1813 that Tecumseh was killed by Colonel Richard Johnson at Moravian Town, with the result that the Indians wholly deserted the British and Canadians, removing great anxiety from the American northwest frontier communities. (Johnson would run successfully for vice president of the U.S. in 1836 on the memorable slogan “Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Who Killed Tecumseh?”)
The American attack on Ontario at the Niagara point of entry, under General Henry Dearborn and Colonel Winfield Scott, was a good deal more professionally executed than the slapstick farce of the previous year. The Americans took York (Toronto), and against Dearborn’s orders key buildings in the city were burned down, including the house of assembly and the governor’s house. (The explorer General Zebulon Montgomery Pike was killed in the actions around Toronto, aged 52.) Dearborn was replaced by the egregious General James Wilkinson, Aaron Burr’s former collaborator and allegedly a member of the Conway conspiracy against George Washington, who had fluffed up his own role in the victory of Saratoga while serving as General Gates’s messenger to the Continental Congress conveying news of the victory and the surrender of Burgoyne. Typically, Madison had just finished trying to court-martial Wilkinson (who had also been fired as clothier general of the army for taking kickbacks on the material for uniforms), and Wilkinson had only been released on Christmas Day, 1811. He was one of American history’s ultimate (more or less likeable) scoundrels.
Wilkinson was to attack along the St. Lawrence to Montreal, while General Wade Hampton followed the well-trodden path north along Lake Champlain, and the two armies were to converge and take Montreal, which was defended by 15,000 British soldiers, well dug in around the city. Hampton approached to the Chateauguay River, suffered a minor defeat in a skirmish, and withdrew his 4,000 men back into New York state. Wilkinson suffered a defeat of one section of his 10,000-man force and then ducked into winter quarters too, very prudently, in mid-October. It wasn’t quite as absurd an attack toward Montreal as the previous year’s, but was only a marginal improvement, and the Americans never threatened or came within 50 miles of Canada’s largest city. The nature of the war e
scalated when the Americans burned a village near Niagara Falls. The British and Canadians seized Fort Niagara in December, wounding or capturing about 500 of the American defenders, and then the Indians laid waste some of the upper New York countryside around Niagara, and occupied and burned down Buffalo in the last couple of days of 1813. It was a little war but a nasty one.
The lack of enthusiasm for the war in the U.S. administration was never a secret, in 1813 as in 1812. America’s able minister to Russia, President Adams’s son John Quincy Adams, had encouraged the offer of mediation from the czar, Alexander I, who had ignored the Napoleonic blockade to facilitate American commerce with Denmark and with Russia itself. Once Napoleon had attacked Russia, in June 1812, Russia and Britain were firm allies, and the Russian emperor had some influence with Britain, especially after the Russian armies and the Russian winter had ground down Napoleon’s Grand Army, which had intimidated all Europe for over eight years. Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, and then, in October 1813, the first real battlefield defeat he sustained in his career, at Leipzig, at the hands of the combined Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and Swedish armies, as the British were finally driving the French out of Spain after more than six years of combat, signaled a decisive shift in the war in Europe.