American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “The conquest of Canada is in your power,” Clay had told the Senate. “I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.…” As Speaker, Clay renewed his pressure on the Administration to go to war.

  But war against whom? Britain was the wrong enemy, Federalists were asserting; the French were preying on American commerce—especially ships bound for eastern ports of Europe with lucrative cargos of grain. Members of Congress were attacking both governments. “The Devil himself could not tell, which government, England or France, is the most wicked,” Nathaniel Macon exclaimed. For a time the Administration actually contemplated a triangular war. The whole “business is become more than ever puzzling,” Madison wrote Jefferson late in May 1812. “To go to war with Engd and not with France arms the federalists with new matter, and divides the Republicans some of whom with the Quids make a display of impartiality. To go to war agst both, presents a thousand difficulties, above all, that of shutting all the ports of the Continent of Europe agst our Cruisers who can do little without the use of them.” The Federalists, he feared, would exploit such difficulties. The only argument for “this triangular war as it is called” was that it might hasten a settlement with one of the two nations. But Madison was doubtful even of this. Jefferson and other cooler heads could hardly imagine war with both powers. Britain had been by far the more provocative, and the more recently provocative. And Britain was an old enemy, France an old ally.

  So it would be war with Britain, and Britain alone. Madison was determined to act, and he was strongly backed by the Secretary of State. “Our wrongs have been great; our cause is just.…Let war therefore be forthwith proclaimed against England,” Monroe wrote anonymously in the Republican party’s newspaper, the Washington National Intelligencer. But Madison and Monroe knew that for such a drastic step the Administration must have the united support of Congress, and the Federalists were waiting for a ship to arrive from England with London’s final answer to America’s protests. But when H.M.S. Hornet sailed into New York Harbor, she brought few signs of British conciliation.

  On June 1 Madison sent his war message to Congress. After a long statement of trade and impressment grievances he concluded: “Such is the spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped on our country, and such the crisis which its unexampled forbearance and conciliatory efforts have not been able to avert.” Madison had prudently canvassed the Congress to be sure of a war measure, and young “war hawks” such as Clay and John C. Calhoun, the South Carolinian who headed the House Foreign Affairs Committee, guided the measure through Congress. Even so, the results betrayed deep division in the Congress, as the House voted for the war bill 79 to 49, and the Senate, after several days’ intensive debate, by only 19 to 13. The tally was strongly partisan, as about three-quarters of the Republicans present in the House voted for war, and the Federalists there voted against. The result had a sectional cast too, as Westerners voted almost solidly for the war bill, Southerners did so strongly, aside from John Randolph and a half dozen mountain Virginians and North Carolinians, and the central Atlantic states voted heavily for the bill. But the northern states—even the northern seaboard—were not solidly against the measure. Indeed, so many economic, xenophobic, expansionist, geographical, and particularist (land hunger, hostility toward Indians) factors seemed to be interwoven in the congressional vote that the pundits of the day, and historians ever since, have debated the causal forces.

  Cutting through all these forces, and possibly the most powerful but certainly the least measurable of them all, was ideology. Almost all Americans were deeply angered by Britain’s maritime policies, and especially by impressment, and they were angered by impressment because it struck blatantly at the heart of a most solemn credo. Two astute observers of the day understood this. Said John Quincy Adams: “The State, by the social compact is bound to protect every one of its Citizens.…The principle for which we are now struggling is of a higher and more sacred nature than any question about taxation can involve. It is the principle of personal liberty, and of every social right.” Said John C. Calhoun: “This is the second struggle for our liberty.” Individual liberty from the slavery of impressment, and national honor and independence from Britain—these were fused in the public mind. A Fourth of July toast in Boston captured this feeling best: “The War—The second and last struggle for national freedom—A final effort to rescue from the deep the drowning honor of our country.”

  By the summer of 1812 James Madison not only had a military struggle on his hands; he also had a political one. This was a presidential election year, and Madison, like his three predecessors, was running for a second term. In May, at the height of the fever for war, he had been unanimously nominated by the congressional caucus, composed of Republican members of Congress. But later that month, New York Republican legislators, rebelling against the Virginia dynasty in their party, nominated De Witt Clinton for president. Nephew of Vice-President George Clinton, who had just died in office, De Witt was typical of the new breed of young, opportunistic politicos who were challenging Republicans and Federalists of the old school.

  Clinton’s nomination put the Federalists into a dilemma. If they chose a true-blood Federalist of the John Marshall caliber—and Marshall was sounded out—they still could not hope to defeat an incumbent President at the polls (Marshall declined to swap a chief-justiceship in hand for a presidency in the bush). At a party convention in New York—the first “grass roots” nominating convention in America—the Federalists, amid much misgiving, left the way open for state Federalist parties to support Clinton. Soon Clinton’s supporters were appealing to antiwar New Engenders with such slogans as “Madison and War! or Clinton and Peace!” while promising voters farther south that the New Yorker as President would prosecute the war with vigor. Since electors would be chosen during the summer and fall, Madison was under constant pressure to provide military victories.

  Rarely, however, have military pretensions and military resources diverged more sharply. The Administration’s strategy was aggressive: to strike north into Canada, to join hands with Canadians believed to be eager to throw off the British yoke, and to seize Montreal after isolating it from the west. To accomplish these aims, Madison could muster an assortment of army officers who had never commanded men under fire but who had won posts through connections in Washington or through election by troops in the field; a regular army of about 12,000 men scattered in outposts around the nation’s borders; a potentially large militia, but currently under state control and unavailable in most of New England because of hostility there to the war; a small but professional navy; all too few engineers and other experts; and an almost nonexistent command structure, so that each ship and every army in the field would have to operate virtually on its own. During the long months and years of deteriorating relations with Britain and France, Congress had never faced up to the need for a major defense program. Canada’s forces were small and scattered too, but they were well trained, with experienced officers.

  Amid great expectations General William Hull led several regiments of regulars and volunteers north from Dayton through Ohio swamps and wilderness to Detroit. From Detroit he dispatched troops across the frontier into Canada, then issued a proclamation advising Canadians either to come over to the American side or to stay at home; white men found fighting with Indians, he added, would not be taken prisoner but shot. Facing Hull on the Niagara frontier were Canadian troops and “Tecumseh’s revenge.” Biding his time after Tippecanoe, the Indian chief had mobilized over a thousand warriors to support the Canadians.

  Tecumseh was to prove Hull’s undoing both militarily and psychologically. While the American dawdled, fast-moving Indian braves harassed his long communication line to the south. The British commander, having intercepted American dispatches, adroitly played on Hull’s mounting fear that he and his men would be cut off and
turned over to the mercy of the redskins. More and more distraught over the plight of the civilians, who included his daughter and grandchildren, Hull lost his nerve. He surrendered without firing a shot. He was later court-martialed, sentenced to death for cowardice, and pardoned by Madison for earlier bravery.

  A hard-riding horseman brought the shocking news to the President while he was en route to Montpelier for relief from the Washington heat. Madison immediately turned back to the capital and summoned a cabinet meeting. More bad news was arriving from the north. Hull had sent a young captain to Fort Dearborn (on the present site of Chicago) to evacuate the post. Several hundred Potawatomies fell upon the small band of soldiers and civilians and massacred over half of them. The Indians beheaded the youthful commander, cut out his heart, and ate it.

  Gloom in Washington was relieved only by news from Boston. About 750 miles off the coast, the Constitution, under Captain Isaac Hull (a nephew of the disgraced general), had caught up with H.M.S. Guerrière, closed with her, poured in heavy broadsides of round and grape, and reduced her to such a gaping hulk that the British surrendered and the Guerrière, useless even as a prize, was put to the torch. This small but electrifying victory at sea, and the repulses all along the Canadian frontier, epitomized the course of the war during its first year.

  Now under heavy criticism from Federalists and antiwar Republicans, Madison and his Cabinet laid their plans for 1813. A heavier effort would be mounted both in the North and on the Atlantic. Congress boosted soldiers’ pay, expanded the regular army, and authorized more warships. Madison decided to sack his Secretary of War, William Eustis, a Massachusetts physician and Republican politico with little war experience, as well as his Secretary of the Navy, who was reported often to be in his cups by midday. New secretaries, Madison hoped, would weed out the incompetents among the high command.

  Would the commander in chief himself be sacked? By fall Madison’s foes were seizing on every blunder and mishap to fortify their arguments about unpreparedness and Washington fumbling. They made much too of the congressional caucus as undemocratic, even aristocratic. “The current Elections,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “bring the popularity of the War or of the Administration, or both, to the Experimentum crucis.” With New England leaning toward Clinton and the South and West toward Madison, New York and Pennsylvania were the swing states. In New York, where electors were chosen by the state legislature, the Federalist floor manager, a young and inexperienced state senator from Kinderhook named Martin Van Buren, so brilliantly outmaneuvered the Republicans that he won a clear majority in the legislature—and hence all of New York’s 29 electoral votes—for Clinton. In Pennsylvania’s popular balloting for presidential electors, the Clinton men capitalized on dissatisfaction over the war effort in the western mountain country, but Madison swept the more populous areas. Pennsylvania’s 25 electoral votes for the President were decisive in the electoral college, which Madison carried by only 128 to 89. The President began his second term—and his stepped-up war effort—with a dubious vote of confidence.

  The Administration planned to make 1813 a year of decision in the North by building up its land, water, and amphibious forces across the long frontier stretching from Detroit along Lakes Erie and Ontario and up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. Madison now had a new War Secretary in John Armstrong, a New York politician and diplomat, and a new Navy Secretary in William Jones, a Philadelphia merchant-politician, but his key appointment was General William Henry Harrison, of Tippecanoe fame, as senior officer in the Northwest. Harrison’s early efforts to retake Detroit, however, ended in one bloody defeat and one ambush by his old adversary, Tecumseh. Harrison prudently went on the defensive while Commodore Isaac Chauncey built warships on Lake Erie to control this crucial waterway. Chauncey had the help of a twenty-eight-year-old naval officer, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, a Rhode Islander who had gone to sea at eleven and had already fought the Barbary pirates. The British too were feverishly building up their fleet strength on the lakes, but vital supplies were slow in coming from a far-off motherland now in mortal conflict with France.

  By summer’s end Perry’s ships were strong enough to risk engagement with the Royal Navy. The small fleets met off the island of Put-in-Bay in the bloodiest naval fight of the war. Earlier in the year, after the British frigate Shannon had crippled the Chesapeake off Boston, the dying American captain had murmured, “Don’t give up the ship.” Perry had this last order inscribed on the colors of his flagship, the Lawrence, but after the Lawrence was smashed almost to pieces, with 80 percent of her men casualties, Perry coolly shifted his flag to another ship and directed the demolition of the British fleet. Then he sent to Harrison another memorable war cry, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

  Otherwise, 1813 did not turn out to be very decisive in the north. To be sure, Perry’s triumph allowed Harrison to move 4,500 men across Lake Erie to Fort Maiden, south of Detroit, and to force the British, over Tecumseh’s protest, to evacuate Detroit, and move east, where Harrison caught up with the British force on the north bank of the Thames, taking almost 500 prisoners and killing Tecumseh. But the crucial drive northeast to Montreal faltered in the face of powerful resistance. The Americans occupied York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and burned the Assembly houses and other public buildings, but this proved a Pyrrhic victory.

  For two years the adversaries had looked like a couple of roustabouts fighting in a barnyard, each throwing wild haymakers at the other, drawing much blood but not coming close to knocking the other out. Would the third year be any different? The global balance of mobiles was swaying as Napoleon, after repeated defeats at the hands of the Prussian and Austrian and Russian troops he had once beaten so decisively, abdicated his throne and departed for Elba. For Americans this meant that crack British regiments would soon be shipping out of Bordeaux and other French ports for America. But the American Army was becoming more professionally led too, as Madison and Armstrong replaced older generals with men like Jacob Brown, George Izard, Andrew Jackson, and Winfield Scott. During 1814 combat in the north focused on the Niagara area between Lakes Erie and Ontario; fighting to the west dwindled into raids and skirmishes. Scott led well-drilled troops to a victory over the British at Chippewa, an engagement treasured ever since by West Pointers because of the English commander’s surprised cry: “Those are Regulars, by God!” Three weeks later, in the heaviest ground action of the war, Scott’s and Brown’s men were so badly mauled in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane that they fell back on Fort Erie, which the British promptly put under an unsuccessful siege.

  Frustration and stalemate also characterized the action much farther east, on Lake Champlain. In a combined land-sea offensive for which they were becoming famous, British troops drove down the western shore of the lake, in coordination with a large fleet headed toward American warships and troops concentrated at Plattsburgh. Captain Thomas Macdonough was ready for the attack and after a furious engagement destroyed all the enemy vessels except for several gunboats. Their dream of an advance south along the Hudson shattered, the British pulled back to Canada.

  For the Americans, sadder events were at hand to the south. Powerful British fleet units had been ranging for months up and down the Atlantic coast, blockading major ports, putting in landing parties to raid and burn small ports, bottling up a good part of the American fleet in well-protected harbors. Single American warships and privateers, cruising far across the Atlantic and even into the Pacific, won some glorious victories, but these were hardly more than pinpricks to the Royal Navy, augmented after Elba by reinforcements from European waters. During the early summer of 1814, rumors reached Washington that the Royal Navy planned a massive attack up the Chesapeake. Madison and his generals, doubting that enemy assault troops would move very far from their warships, and not sure just where the British would strike, took disorganized half-measures for defense.

  In mid-August, news arrived that a mighty British armada of warships and transports had
suddenly appeared at the mouth of the Patuxent River. Then came reports that several thousand enemy troops were marching toward Washington. In a nightmare of misjudgments as to enemy plans, poor communication among state militias intent mainly on protecting their own turf, and mediocre generalship, a large but separated collection of American defense forces was overcome one by one. The British assault at Bladensburg, a few miles east of Washington, sent the militias streaming back toward the capital. The President, who with Monroe had been closely reconnoitering the defense of Washington, escaped into the Virginia countryside. There he met up with Mrs. Madison, who had managed to send off documents, plate, and the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, hastily torn out of its frame, before she fled from the White House with dinner still set on the table. When the President and his party returned to Washington after the British withdrew, they found the White House and the Capitol building in smoking ruins. The British also had run a few warships up the Potomac and exacted a king’s ransom of vital military stores from the merchants of Alexandria as the price of leaving the city unburned.

  Washington burned—the first family sent scurrying to safety—Alexandria humiliated: a wave of mortification and anger swept through the country, even into New England. Nonetheless, the British raid on Washington turned out to be more important psychologically than militarily. The American war effort by the end of 1814 was still so decentralized that the head could be cut off for a time without harming local efforts by mainly state militias: Indeed, when the British amphibious army moved on up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, it was bloodily repulsed by the militia. But these events in the heart of the country excited a patriotic nerve, and it was perhaps this nerve that was touched when Francis Scott Key, after watching the bombardment of Baltimore forts through the night, strained to see whether the flag was still there—and, assured that it was, wrote a star-spangled anthem.