American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But this was also a time of disillusion and disenthrallment for the Americans. By the end of 1814 military prospects looked so bleak that the Administration was willing to settle for the status quo ante as the basis of a peace negotiation with Britain. In purely strategic terms, the war was a standoff at this time, but if one measures war achievements by war aims, the United States had lost, for there was little sign that Britain was prepared to yield any of its “rights.”

  If American military aspirations were deflated, however, the American way of war was even more directly challenged. American leaders had not been pacifists; Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, were naïve neither about the bellicose tendencies of humankind nor about the likelihood of clashes among nations in a world of independent sovereign states. They recognized that national security was a prime responsibility of government. The Constitution listed the “common Defense” even before the “general welfare” as the power and duty of Congress; and in the Federalist John Jay wrote that, of all the people’s needs, “providing for their safety seems to be the first.”

  The problem, especially in a republic, was how to maintain a military establishment strong enough to protect the people’s safety but controlled enough not to invade their liberties—in short, how to harness the war beast. No easy solution was possible in a world of shifting mobiles and in a young nation led by men who could not agree even on the definition of liberty, as the Alien and Sedition Acts had demonstrated. This dilemma left the nation ambivalent over both the theory and the practice of war. Ideologically, most Americans opposed heavy defense expenditures, large standing armies, centralized military decision making and administration, military professionalism in the form of a permanent officer class. In practice they knew the need for protection from predator nations on their borders. The upshot was reliance on defensive measures such as coastal fortifications, scatteration of the federal troops among many ports and posts, heavy dependence on state militias, the building of gunboats as the prime naval weapon, and acceptance of a small but professional navy as “safer” than a professional army. Such half-measures proved woefully inadequate in the War of 1812. Typically the state militias lacked—at least until they were well blooded—adequate discipline, professionalism, and soldierly skills; and commanders lacked the necessary generalship. The United States Military Academy had been founded at West Point in 1802, but the nation still had no considered strategic doctrine or even a native military literature. The Royal Navy proved to be skillful in evading the coastal defenses, and the scores of gunboats, while occasionally useful in shallow water, could not begin to cope with the great British ships of the line. The nation did have a strong potential of military arms. During the 1790s Rhode Island and Maryland “furnaces” had begun casting and boring cannon for fortresses and frigates, and by the turn of the century the Springfield Armory, established by the government, could produce over 5,000 muskets a year. It was the government’s need for quantities of guns that enabled Eli Whitney in New Haven to finance and organize mass production through development of power tools, interchangeability of parts, and mass assembly.

  Even so, the fact that the United States was a third-rate military power centrally affected its pretensions, whether in peace or war. While General Hull marched on Canada with 900 men, Napoleon was invading Russia with an army of half a million. Fourteen hundred sailors fought in the decisive battle for Lake Champlain, a mere tenth of the number present at Trafalgar. Napoleon’s taking of Moscow and his bitter, death-ridden retreat had far more to do with the future security of the United States than the British capture of Washington. Once Napoleon was defeated, the United States had little chance of victory.

  The greatest lack in the American way of war was a leadership that could define and pursue a set of national ends that had some relation to the needs and aspirations of the people and the political and military capabilities of the nation. American involvements and interests abroad—most notably a world trade that brought American ships and sailors into dangerous waters—far outran American commitments and capabilities. The men who organized the governmental system so brilliantly for the effective but prudent conduct of domestic affairs did not shape an equivalent strategy for the conduct of military and other foreign affairs. Indeed, the genius of the former strategy—the dispersion of power—ran counter to the commanding military need for concentration of power and speed of deployment. And the military failure lay largely in the ideology of peace.

  If Americans had been abjectly defeated in the War of 1812, out of desperation they might have shaped a new strategy of war, as other vanquished nations had done. But they were not so defeated. And then, in January 1815, came stunning news that left Americans in euphoria and put the whole war in a happier light. For some months a major general of the Tennessee militia, Andrew Jackson, had been warring against the Creek Indians—who earlier had been aroused by a visit from Tecumseh, encouraged by the British, and armed by the Spanish. After wiping out a Creek force of 900 braves at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson turned to the defense of New Orleans, which the British were planning to capture in order to control the Mississippi. Jackson was ready for the redcoats when they marched against his breastworks on January 8. Within an hour American cannon and rustic sharpshooters cut down over 2,000 men. American casualties were reported to be twenty-one. The British retreated to their ships.

  The Battle of New Orleans came too late to affect the terms of a treaty of peace that was being completed in far-off Europe even as the British advanced on Jackson’s redoubts. That treaty reflected the nation’s low military estate before Jackson’s victory. It also reflected the shifting balance of political forces in Britain and America—especially the rising opposition of English trading and manufacturing interests to the war, and the continuing criticism and foot dragging of a declining but still potent group of antiwar Federalists, mainly along the New England coast.

  WATERSIDE YANKEES: THE FEDERALISTS AT EBB TIDE

  In mid-December 1815 a small group of genteel, prosperous-looking men filed into the tall and spacious council chamber of the Connecticut State House, a majestic building designed by Charles Bulfinch and located not far from the Connecticut River. This was a group of potential rebels, meeting amid great excitement. Angry over the British occupation of part of Maine, fearful that Washington would not protect the New England coast against the British, and resentful above all toward the Virginia dynasty and its embargoes and other interferences with New England commerce, this company of New England Federalists was meeting to consider drastic, though nonviolent, action against Washington. Federalist newspapers in Boston, including the respectable Columbian Centinel, were calling for actions that bordered on secession. In Washington, Secretary of War Monroe was concerned enough to send to Hartford a confidential agent, in the guise of an army recruiting officer, to report back intelligence on this dangerous group, but the officer was not able to get into the secret sessions. Monroe was alarmed enough to authorize federal troops in New York to take prompt action in the event of an uprising.

  Monroe need not have worried. What was happening in Hartford was not a lunge for power by a fearsome party cabal. It was something far less portentous and far more poignant—a final convulsive effort, half protest, half death cry, of a movement slowly passing out of existence. The plight of the Federalists was doubly ironic. A political force that had been organized by men who were militantly anti-British and anti-Tory was now dying in part because its leaders were considered American Tories and pro-British. And its leaders, seemingly reluctant to demand freedom of the seas for American shipping, were the political descendants of an earlier generation of men who had emerged from the port cities of America to assert their maritime rights against the British navy.

  The waterside Yankees who survived as political forces after the Revolution had been a formidable crowd, even in their second ranks. George Cabot—born of a North Shore merchant, dropped from Harvard in his freshman year for rebelliousne
ss and neglect of studies, and soon thereafter the master of a schooner in the transatlantic trade—believed in an ordered, hierarchical, deferential, inegalitarian society run by the best people, like himself. Timothy Pickering, born in Salem, was a cantankerous, outspoken elitist, so politically outrageous and personally unpopular that Federalist party leaders kept their distance from him. Theophilus Parsons, born in Byfield, a few miles southwest of Newburyport, practiced law in the latter city and then in Boston, opined that the whole government, not just the Senate, should be under elitist control, and later became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where he was dubbed “The awfullest Parsons” by young lawyers. Samuel Sewall, born in Boston, practiced law in Marblehead before moving to Maine, and later succeeded Parsons as chief justice. Stephen Higginson, born in Salem, later an import merchant in Boston and a naval officer, took an openly elitist position in his writings and frowned on the politicking of younger Federalists.

  Some Federalists of the old school stood a bit apart from these men. Fisher Ames, born in Dedham, was so egregiously alarmist and pessimistic about the dangers of democracy, indeed so “lethargic, raving, sanguine and despondent,” as he described himself, as to embarrass other Federalists. And Harrison Gray Otis, born of an eminent Boston family, combined his elitist views with such elegance of bearing and moderation of political tactics as to give him a special role in linking old-school and new-school Federalists.

  The Federalists meeting in the port city of Hartford were the financial and political heirs of merchant shippers, whalers, shipbuilders, fishermen, sailmakers, and hosts of others engaged for over a century in trading and shipping out of the ports of the northeastern seaboard. Some of these men operated out of inland towns, such as Hartford and Poughkeepsie, that could be reached by oceangoing vessels tacking back and forth up wide rivers. But most presided over their offices, countinghouses, wharves, and shipping fleets in the string of coastal ports stretching from Portsmouth to New York City and points south. And what a coastline this was—gnarled and wrinkled and scoured by sea and ice, battered by suddenly gathering summer storms and winter tempests, and broken by small rivers that invited a wharf to be built along the low banks and flatlands where they joined the Atlantic.

  To a returning sea captain most of the port towns presented familiar sights. He would emerge from a forest of ship’s masts and furled sails to pick his way through a maze of bags and boxes, barrels and chests alongside warehouses, sail lofts, mast yards, and rope walks, until he came to the closely packed houses of artisans, small merchants, and single or widowed women shopkeepers. He would walk along the streets here, where ground-floor shops opened up on the sidewalks and living quarters nestled in the overhanging upper stories, with their peaked gables, tiny-paned windows, and hand-split clapboards darkened by a century of salt and rain. Heading farther into town, he would come onto High Street, flanked by three-story square-built brick homes of the wealthier merchants. When he entered one of these houses to report on his voyage, the captain would find objects imported from previous Voyages: china from the Far East, furniture from England and France, hangings from Spain, souvenirs from West Africa. And climbing to the widow’s walk, captain and merchant could scan a wide panorama from the busy harbor below to the fields and blue hills disappearing into a summer haze to the west.

  These ports had their distinctive features too. In the Massachusetts crescent stretching from Cape Ann to Cape Cod, Salem was the largest, grandest city to the north, the sixth city in the United States in1790. No one has pictured the Salem of that year better than Samuel Eliot Morison: “Her appearance was more antique even than that of Boston, and her reek of the salt water, that almost surrounded her, yet more pronounced. For half a mile along the harbor front, subtended by the long finger of Derby Wharf, ran Derby Street, the residential and business center of the town. On one side were the houses of the gentry, Derbys and Princes and Crowninshields, goodly gambrel or hip-roofed brick and wooden mansions dating from the middle of the century, standing well back with tidy gardens in front. Opposite were the wharves, separated from the street by counting-rooms, warehouses, ship-chandlers’ stores, pump-makers’ shops, sail-makers’ lofts; all against a background of spars, rigging, and furled or brailed-up sails.…”

  Close by Salem—and long viewed by Salemites as the town of people who were “rude, swearing, drunken, and fighting” and, worst of all, poor—lay Marblehead, the leader in the Yankees’ great cod-fishing industry. Long before the Revolution, Marblehead had a fleet of 120 fishing schooners sailed by more than a thousand hands. Sloops or schooners with seven or eight men could make four or five round trips a year to fine fishing grounds such as Georges Bank off Cape Cod, and a fisherman kept an eye cocked for mackerel and herring as well. A string of fishing towns to the south of Boston—Cohasset, Plymouth, Cape villages, reaching around to Nantucket and New Bedford—kept hundreds of ships in the fishing trade. Plymouth soon would become less noted for her fishing, or even as the Pilgrims’ landing place, than as a center for rope making.

  In the center of the Massachusetts crescent, and at its heart, lay Federalist Boston. With its total tonnage several times larger than that of any rival, Boston was not only the great port of the Commonwealth but its financial, intellectual, political, and cultural center. It was pre-eminently a city of the sea, drawing much of its wealth and its sustenance from Atlantic waters, by which it was virtually isolated when the spring tides reached far inland on the flats west of Beacon Hill. As one approached the city by the Charles River Bridge, Boston seemed “almost to stand in the water, at least to be surrounded by it, and the shipping, with the houses, trees, and churches, having a charming effect.” Boston boasted of its fine buildings, and especially of the man who designed many of them, Charles Bulfinch, but not of its maze of streets, which were reputed to be almost as muddy and rutted as the original cow paths, and just as narrow and tortuous. Outside the harbor stood probably the most famous lighthouse in America, “Boston Light,” founded almost a century before, repeatedly devastated by fire, destroyed in turn by each side during the Revolution, but always rebuilt.

  Boston was the financial hub of New England and of much of the Northeast, as well as of her own state. Providence, along with such Connecticut ports as New Haven and New London, had harbors deep enough to ship goods directly across the Atlantic, but Hartford and other, shallower ports dispatched their goods to Boston for transshipment overseas. Produce from Springfield, Northampton, and other towns north of the rapids above Hartford had to be sent down the Connecticut River on barges to Hartford, for transferal to deep-water harbors. Logs from the Vermont and New Hampshire banks of the river were floated down to shipbuilders perched along the lower reaches of the Connecticut.

  Boston also transshipped goods from north of Cape Ann—from the old docks of Newburyport and Portsmouth and Portland. The execrable roads inland made it easier for some of these ports to trade by sea with Boston than by land with towns not far inland. Boston merchants had long enjoyed close commercial relationships with their northern neighbors “down east”; Boston indeed was the capital of Maine for many years. But the northern Yankees valued above all their independence from London or Boston. When Portland refused to ship her highly prized masts for use of the British fleet during the first year of the Revolution, the Royal Navy bombarded the city and burned much of it to the ground. Established societies in Bangor and Portsmouth enjoyed looking down on the vulgar nouveaux riches of Boston.

  Yankee merchants were profit takers. They made money—and lost it—by buying, swapping, shipping, and selling goods in whatever way seemed most profitable. For this purpose they bought, built, used, and sold not only merchant ships but fishing boats, coasters, whalers, privateers, and smaller craft. They traded in whatever commodity would turn a likely profit: fish, bricks, butter, timber, hay, brooms, buckets, molasses, in exchange for mahogany, coffee, sugar, cocoa, tea, spices, nails, machinery, fashions, silks—hundreds of things from sco
res of ports around the world. Sometimes they dealt also in rum, opium, and human flesh. “Commerce occupies all their thought,” a foreign observer wrote in 1788, “turns all their heads, and absorbs all their speculations.” When they felt that conditions permitted or required it, the Yankees smuggled goods and sent out privateers to prey on “enemy” ships.

  To take profits the merchants took risks. Their ships were sunk off Cape Hatteras or Cape Horn, burned by accident, captured or destroyed by French or British men-o’-war, seized by pirates off Morocco. Seamen took much greater risks—of life itself—with little profit. “A mariner’s life was the most dangerous calling a man could choose during the age of sail,” according to three historians of the period. “…Sunken ledges and sandy shoals reached out from the scenic New England coast to impale hundreds of hapless ships driven before a winter gale or lost in a thick summer fog.” Of Salem’s four hundred widows in 1783, most had finally waited in vain on the widow’s walks atop their mansions, or in a dwelling down by the wharf.

  Merchants were the social and political, as well as economic, leaders of their ports. They presided over a pervasive class system of merchants, veteran sea captains, and professional men at the top, master artisans and clerks in the middle, and dock laborers and seamen at the bottom. The merchants sent their sons to Harvard or out to sea eventually to become sea captains, imported the finest silver and linens from abroad, had their wives and daughters painted by Copley and adorned in the latest London fashions, maintained mansions both near their businesses and out in country seats. The lower classes did none of these things. The merchants set themselves off by their manner of dress—perhaps a scarlet broadcloth coat, fancy ruffles, and sword—and by their demand for deference from their inferiors, in the form of a finger to the brow or the tipping of a hat.