by Conrad Black
The Americans could reasonably expect that the British would soon be in a position to send large numbers of battle-hardened troops and commanders to fight in America. The defeats on Lake Erie and at Detroit were in sharp contrast to the Duke of Wellington’s victories in Spain. Castlereagh declined the intervention of the czar, but in November 1813 he sent a diplomatic message to Monroe offering direct negotiations. Madison and Monroe agreed and, contrary to normal practice, in which such negotiations are conducted secretly, Madison sought and achieved confirmation of a high-powered peace delegation to go to Ghent, in what is now Belgium, to negotiate. The American negotiating team would be the minister to Russia, Adams; the emissary who had been nominated to negotiate under the czar’s aegis, James A. Bayard; Speaker of the House and war-hawk leader Henry Clay; the chargé in London, Jonathan Russell, and the Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. Madison could scarcely have emphasized his desire for peace more clearly. The American group considerably outranked their British analogues, Lord Gambier, Henry Goulburn, and William Adams. At the conference, the Americans were a motley group, as Clay would sometimes return from a night of gambling and carousing to encounter the purposeful Adams having just concluded his morning prayers, but Gallatin shepherded them along and they were quite congenial.68
5. MILITARY AND DIPLOMATIC DEVELOPMENTS IN 1814
To Madison’s considerable credit, he finally recognized the complete failure of his and Jefferson’s hare-brained, counter-arithmetical commercial restriction policy—that it was riddled with smuggling and corruption, that is had done much more damage to the United States than to those against whom it had supposedly been applied, and that it had not motivated Britain to be less unreasonable. On March 31, 1814, he recommended to the Congress the abandonment and repeal of the entire program. Whatever may be said of the errors that led to these policies and their lengthy unsuccessful implementation, the president renounced them with a lack of official vanity and humbug that set an admirable precedent rarely followed in the subsequent history of his great office. Provision was made to protect new manufacturing industries with special tariffs for two years after peace should occur, but the repeal of the Embargo and Non-Importation Acts was approved easily by both houses of the Congress.
The late Tecumseh had managed to stir up the Creek Indians in Alabama, who seized Fort Mims, about 35 miles north of Mobile, and massacred more than half of the nearly 600 people in the fort, including a good many women and children. The major general of the Tennessee militia, Andrew Jackson, organized 2,000 volunteers (hence the identifying slogan of the state), and went on the warpath against the Creeks. There were a number of skirmishes won by both sides, but in March 1814, Jackson, now at the head of 3,000 men, overwhelmed the Creek stronghold at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, killed approximately a thousand Indian braves, and carried off more than 500 Indian women and children as prisoners. In a treaty in August, the Creeks signed over two-thirds of their land to the United States. This came two weeks after the Generals Harrison and Lewis Cass signed the Treaty of Greenville with the Delaware, Miami, Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandot Indians, in the coalition assembled by Tecumseh, in consequence of which those tribes again flipped sides and declared peace with the Americans and war on the British. These were not large forces involved (there had been more than 500,000 soldiers engaged on the two sides in the Battle of Leipzig), but the antics of the Indians were extremely disturbing to the settlers, and they tended to ignore Euro-American niceties about women and children. These generals wrote a new chapter in the American political lionization of generals, even when their fame arose in small engagements. Jackson, Harrison, and Cass would, between them, be major party nominees to the presidency six times between 1824 and 1848, and win three times, and the only one of them who did not become president, Lewis Cass, became secretary of state instead. Senior military officers would receive electoral votes for president or vice president in 27 of America’s first 30 quadrennial elections, 1788–1904. Eleven of America’s first 25 presidents would be distinguished military officers, and the first 30 elections would produce 15 terms with soldier-presidents and three with military vice presidents.
Castlereagh was about to become the co-star, along with Austria’s Metternich and the imperishable Talleyrand and the Holy See’s cunning delegate, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, of the immense Congress of Vienna, which would reorder much of the world, Napoleon having gone into exile at Elba, off the Italian coast, in April. (Talleyrand sold the argument that Napoleon, whom he had served as foreign minister for eight years, was an impostor who had inflicted himself on France in Cromwellian manner, and that France, with Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, was a fully fledged member of the Holy Alliance that had defeated Napoleon, a considerable feat of diplomatic advocacy.) Capable statesman as he was, Castlereagh pursued a negotiated peace and escalation of the War of 1812 at the same time. As his delegation sat down with the Americans at Ghent, the British sent 14,000 veterans of the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular Army to Canada in the summer of 1814, and the Royal Navy ignored Madison’s olive branch in repealing the embargo and reinforced its blockading fleets against America. The British high command produced a much more imaginative plan to win the war than the humdrum American efforts to charge into Canada yet again by the Lake Champlain, Niagara, and Detroit approaches. They were also vastly more competent than those responsible for the British conduct of the American Revolutionary War. Twenty years of fighting Napoleon had sharpened their staff work and greatly fortified their officer talent.
A three-pronged attack was envisioned, in the footsteps of Montcalm and Burgoyne on the inevitable Lake Champlain and another go at the Niagara crossing; and amphibious attacks on Chesapeake Bay, just southeast of Washington, and at New Orleans. The U.S. regular army was only 34,000 men at the start of October 1814. There were as many as 100,000 militiamen and reservists, but they were scattered through all the states in various conditions of preparedness, command competence, experience, and equipment. The better reservist leaders, such as Jackson and Harrison, were very capable, and Jackson, who had survived hand-to-hand combat with Indians (including a hatchet-wound to the cranium), had been a drummer in the Revolutionary War, and had personally killed a number of men in military and civilian capacities, was a fierce personality who was about to stride to the forefront of national affairs and remain there for 30 years. The charlatan Wilkinson survived another court-martial but finally left the army for even greener financial pastures, trying in Burrite fashion to buy part of Mexico. Winfield Scott and Jackson were the rising figures in the army now.
The Americans launched a preemptive strike at Niagara, which yielded a fine American victory at Chippewa in July, led by General Winfield Scott, who took only about half the 500 casualties of the British. Scott would prove to be probably the greatest American general between Washington and Greene and the Civil War, and was now embarked on a career of 50 years as a military hero. (He, too, would be an unsuccessful presidential candidate, in 1852.) Three weeks later, there was a further action involving about 6,000 men evenly divided, at Lundy’s Lane, near Niagara Falls. It was a stalemate, though the Americans withdrew, and both sides took about 850 casualties. The British failed to take Fort Erie, but the Americans vacated it anyway a few months later—another indecisive engagement almost within earshot of the thundering falls. The British attack down Lake Champlain was repulsed in a naval battle in September, although the Americans were outnumbered. The British commander, Sir George Prevost, who mishandled 11,000 well-trained soldiers, was sacked, but that would prove the last time in history these singularly unsuccessful routes of invasion in both directions, Niagara and Lake Champlain, would be exploited (other than by armies of amiable tourists moving in both directions at once).
The Chesapeake Bay landings would be more successful, and were really an elaboration on previous coastal raids all along the American littoral, and on Pitt’s “descents” on France in the Seven Years’ War. This British movement of their la
nd forces in pin-pricks on the perimeter of their enemies, facilitated by their usual naval superiority, would continue through the World Wars, including Gallipoli and Zeebrugge in World War I (unsuccessful), and the Greek and Crete operations and Dieppe (Canadian forces) in World War II (also unsuccessful). The 4,000 men of the British attacking force departed directly from France for their American targets in June 1814, with a brief stop at Bermuda, and were landed on August 19, an ambitious undertaking in amphibious warfare for the time. The objective was to burn Washington to avenge the burning of Toronto (York) the previous year. The American commander, the inept General William Winder, failed with a ragtag of 7,000 reservists and sailors to stop 3,000 of Wellington’s veterans at Bladensburg, nine miles from Washington, with Madison and the cabinet looking on and the Americans scattered as the British marched, unopposed, into Washington on August 24. The president and his cabinet colleagues fled (on foot in Madison’s case, because of problems with his horse) in different directions and the government temporarily disintegrated.
The British burned the Capitol, and all the other government buildings except the patent office, including the White House, which Mrs. Madison had fled with a portrait of George Washington under her arm, after coolly organizing the removal of as much as possible; she was refused shelter by the irate wife of a farmer who had just been conscripted, an astounding, even endearing display of official disorder. The white paint slapped onto the executive mansion’s seared outer walls gave the building its subsequent name. Apart from a couple of residences, a newspaper office, and the naval dock (which the Americans blew up themselves), the British forces showed correct discipline and avoided indiscriminate destruction or looting. The British left by sea on the 25th, unharried, and Madison and his colleagues returned on August 27, to a less-exuberant welcome from the citizenry. Madison again fired the secretary of war, John Armstrong, and now took the extreme step of replacing him with Monroe, who took over the War Department while retaining the State Department, a unique event in American history to this day. Monroe was now a virtual co-president, supervising the defense of the country and the negotiation of peace. The British had scored a great propaganda victory of little straight military significance, but their attempt to take Baltimore three weeks later failed. The Americans prepared thoroughly and repulsed the British from what was then one of America’s largest cities. The unsuccessful British bombardment of Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key to write the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
6. THE END OF THE WAR
The peace conference at Ghent continued through the autumn. The British opened by demanding a rewriting in their favor of the Canadian border through the northern New England states and Michigan and Minnesota, and the establishment of an Indian buffer state in the Northwest. The Americans demanded reparations and an end of impressments and the blockade. They rejected any changes of territorial boundaries from the start of the war, and claimed none. They had been faithful throughout to their demands, and it must be said that despite Madison’s bumbling, and the frightful indignity of having their capital razed to the ground, they had shown considerable pluck, and fought their corner quite well after the initial debacle of their 1812 invasion of Canada. Madison, though he provoked acute nostalgia for the steady and formidable Washington as a war leader, showed remarkable honesty, partly naïve and partly the result of creeping resignation and the disillusioning cynicism of experience. When news of the burning of Washington reached the Congress of Vienna, the British stiffened their demands. When news of the American victory on Lake Champlain arrived, it was sobering.
The Duke of Wellington, the world’s most illustrious military commander with Napoleon in involuntary retirement, was offered the command in Canada. He was not eager for it, as the United States now had over eight million people, and there was no possibility of subduing the whole country, or permanently gouging large parts out of it. The British had been at war for 21 of the previous 22 years, and had supported an immense navy constantly in action throughout that time, and armies of 75,000 to 90,000, most of the units steadily in action for the last six years in a very costly and severe war in Spain. (The duke had been Sir Arthur Wellesley when he departed for Spain in 1808, and when he returned he had the unprecedented pleasure of having his patents read in the House of Lords as baron, viscount, earl, marquis, and duke, recognizing his successive victories in that very long war in Spain and Portugal.)
Wellington was more interested in jointly leading the British in the Vienna discussions that rewrote the map of much of Europe than in embarking for a nebulous mission in Canada. He had commanded armies in India as well as Spain, and preferred not to do it again. This was all for the best, as Napoleon famously returned from Elba in March 1815 and conducted one more campaign, narrowly lost at Waterloo, where Wellington won one of the most important and closely contested battles in the history of the world. His absence could have been decisive, as the Prussian Blucher and whomever the British would have named in Wellington’s stead could not have defeated Napoleon, generally reckoned the greatest military commander in history. (Waterloo was, after Leipzig, his only defeat in scores of battles, many of them won against heavy odds and by tactical tours de force of genius.)
The duke advised his government that after the American victory on Lake Champlain, the British were not entitled by the results on the ground to demand territorial concessions. On November 26, 1814, the British abandoned their demand for territorial concessions and an Indian buffer zone in the Northwest. As the world would now be at peace, impressments and blockades seemed, and were, a stale-dated issue. The British were not going to pay reparations and indemnities and the Americans didn’t seriously expect them to, as the chief victor in Europe and now the most powerful nation in the world. The Americans made some uncontroversial fishing concessions, but that was all.
The long British struggle with France going back 500 years to Joan of Arc, and accentuated after the Reformation and the rise of national governments, and especially by Louis XIV and then the almost departed emperor, had finally been resolved in favor of Britain. The island nation was tired and strained by costs and casualties and the first stresses of the industrial age, and it didn’t want an endless war in America, but it was not going to do more than end the war and leave things as they had been. And if the Americans tried to chase the British out of Canada now, they would find Wellington and his army tramping down the shores of Lake Champlain and across the Niagara River, and they would not remind anyone of General Burgoyne or Governor Prevost. The Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24 and peace soon broke out.
True to its frequently absurd nature, and symmetrically with the fact that America declared war as the casus belli of the British blockade was being removed, the greatest battle of the war occurred two weeks after the peace was concluded, and so did not influence the results at all, but was important for other reasons. General Andrew Jackson had been named commander of the military district from New Orleans to Mobile, by Monroe, and characteristically ignored Monroe’s orders not to disturb Spanish Florida, and seized Pensacola. When he learned of British forces approaching, he retired to Baton Rouge to be ready to repulse British landings wherever they appeared on the Gulf coast. The British landed 7,500 men under General Sir Edward Pakenham (the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law) 40 miles east of New Orleans, starting on December 13.
Jackson bustled down to New Orleans starting on December 15 and was able to attack the British on December 23. He furiously constructed defensive positions around New Orleans, and Pakenham attacked Jackson’s 4,500 men with 5,300 of his regulars on January 8, 1815. Jackson placed Tennessee and Kentucky marksmen with long rifles in forward trenches, and advantageously placed his artillery to smash the British line as well. The advance of the British, walking upright in tight formation, presented a splendid target. There was a second British advance after the first was driven back. It was a madly unimaginative attack plan by Pakenham, who was killed
as his army was badly defeated and took over 2,000 casualties, compared with only eight American dead and 13 wounded. Jackson became America’s greatest hero, its greatest warrior since Washington, and its most successful political leader since Jefferson, and eventually, with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, one of the four most important American presidents in the first 140 years of its history.
News of the Battle of New Orleans reached the still fire-ravaged capital of the United States before the news of the Treaty of Ghent, and greatly salved American sensibilities after the scorching there and the inelegant flight of the government. The treaty arrived on February 11, was ratified unanimously by the Senate (meeting in temporary quarters) on February 15, and proclaimed by Madison on February 17. It had been a silly little war in many ways; it should have been fought earlier and more wisely by the Americans, yet they suffered only 1,877 dead and 4,000 wounded. The economic cost had been heavy and the strain on national unity had been considerable. It was an opportunity lost and Madison went far too long with the foolishness of Jefferson’s notions of economic war. Yet the United States had accomplished something in fighting successfully to keep its head up against the greatest powers in the world, and particularly the overwhelming master of the world’s seas. The Royal Navy was deployed across all the world’s oceans, “wherever wood could float” as Napoleon grudgingly said (with as large, in numbers of ships, and as far-flung a fleet as the United States would deploy at the end of World War I, when Admiral Nimitz’s mighty Pacific Fleet took 400,000 men to sea when it sailed). The war’s farcical aspect had been diluted by Madison’s lack of pomposity and endearing preparedness to acknowledge error.
The Americans, though without so skillful a propagandist as Jefferson to tart up a rather squalid little war, apart from the successes of Perry and Jackson, still managed to present it as a milestone on the road to full national maturity. Gallatin, no Jefferson or Paine or Hamilton, but a formidable talent in a less-crowded field, declared: “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and characters which the Revolution had given. The people . . . are more American; they feel and act more as a nation.”69 In the end, the last of the nation’s founders to retire had finally, and reluctantly, done the honorable thing to defend the nation’s honor and sovereignty, and, in his way, had done so successfully. Washington and Adams and Hamilton would have taken over Canada and ended up buying peace with a cash settlement. But it was just that, an opportunity lost, not a defeat, and considering the power of the opponent, it lightly enhanced America’s status in the world. Ancient and mighty France had to endure the British army in Paris for a prolonged period. They didn’t burn anything but they stayed as long as they pleased, and the Duke of Wellington “bought” the British embassy on the Faubourg St. Honore. Today it remains there, next to the United States embassy, and both are only a cricket ball or baseball’s throw from the residence of the president of the (Fifth) Republic.