Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  The British plan was to attack in three principal areas: in New York, along Lake Champlain and the Hudson River, which would sever New England from the rest of the union; in New Orleans, which would block the vital Mississippi artery; and in Chesapeake Bay, a diversionary maneuver tactic that would draw off U.S. manpower. The British objective was to bring America to its knees and thereby extort major territorial concessions in return for peace. By the fall of 1814, the situation looked very bleak for the United States. The nation was flat broke, and in New England, opponents of the war had begun talking about leaving the Union.

  Late in the summer of 1814, American resistance to the attack in Chesapeake Bay folded. The British, under Major General Robert Ross, triumphed in Maryland at the Battle of Bladensburg (August 24), when inexperienced Maryland militiamen commanded by the thoroughly incompetent General William H. Winder broke and ran in panic. Ross invaded Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public buildings, including the Capitol and the White House, as President Madison and most of the government fled into the countryside.

  Ross next set his sights on Baltimore, but at last met stiffer resistance. His forces bombarded Fort McHenry, in Baltimore Harbor, on September 13-14, 1814. The event was witnessed by a young Baltimore lawyer, Francis Scott Key (1779-1843), while he was detained on a British warship. Peering anxiously through the long night, Key saw at dawn that the “Star-Spangled Banner” yet waved; the fort had not fallen to the British, who ultimately withdrew. Key was moved to write a poem that eventually became our national anthem.

  Salvation on Lake Champlain

  Even while Washington burned and Baltimore fell under attack, a grim band of 10,000 British veterans of the Napoleonic wars was advancing into the United States from Montreal. On land, nothing more than an inferior American force stood between them and New York City. But on September 11, 1814, American naval captain Thomas MacDonough (1783-1825) defeated and destroyed the British fleet on Lake Champlain. This event was sufficient to send into retreat the British army, which feared losing its lines of communication and supply.

  The failure of the British offensive along Lake Champlain added some high cards to the hand of American peace negotiators meeting with their British counterparts across the ocean in the Flemish city of Ghent. The war-weary British decided to forego territorial demands, and the United States, relieved to escape without major losses, let up on its demand that Britain recognize American neutral rights. The Treaty of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814, restored the “status quo antebellum,” and the document was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate on February 17, 1815.

  Hero of New Orleans

  The official outcome of the Treaty of Ghent is misleading; for America was not the same after the war as it was before. To begin, the nation suffered a crippling economic depression—though it would, in time, recover. More important, withdrawal of British support for its wartime Indian allies greatly weakened the hostile tribes, making the West that much riper for white expansion. Finally, in the world of 1814, trans-Atlantic communication was anything but instantaneous. Word of the Treaty of Ghent did not reach General Andrew Jackson, who, fresh from victory against the “Red Stick” Creek Indians in the South, had moved on to New Orleans to engage 7,500 British veterans under Major General Edward Pakenham sailing from Jamaica to attack the city.

  Jackson’s forces consisted of 3,100 Tennessee and Kentucky volunteers, in addition to New Orleans militiamen and a ragtag mob of locals, which Jackson wisely kept well to the rear. Jackson’s inferior forces withstood a fierce artillery bombardment and repulsed two British assaults on their defensive positions. On January 8, 1815, the British, having terrible losses (including the death of Pakenham and his two senior subordinates), withdrew. Although the War of 1812 had actually ended in December 1814, Jackson gave his countrymen their most glorious victory of the war.

  To most Americans, it now mattered little that the War of 1812 had been mostly a misery and a disaster. The victory at New Orleans, which made Americans feel like they had won the war, greatly strengthened the bonds of nationhood and made the economic and physical hardships seem worthwhile. This last battle also gave to America a new hero, a “westerner” born and bred far from the traditional seaboard seats of power. As Jefferson had before him, Andrew Jackson would lend his name to an entire era.

  The Least You Need to Know

  The War of 1812 was provoked by Westerners, who were eager to expand the territory of the United States.

  Although the war brought great hardship to the United States, it ultimately reinforced the bonds of national unity.

  Stats

  The Battle of Queenston was a terrible American defeat: 2250 U.S. soldiers lost their lives and 700 became prisoners of war. The British lost 14 men, with 96 wounded. However, the brilliant General Isaac Brock was among the slain.

  Main Event

  The Hartford Convention met in Hartford, Connecticut, from December 15, 1814, to January 5, 181 S. Twenty-six delegates from five New England states gathered to protest the disastrous Democratic-Republican conduct of the war. The secret convention raised alarms that the delegates were plotting secession; however, the resolutions they actually formulated were quite tame—principally a call for amending the Constitution to weaken the influence of the South on the federal government. Indeed, some recent historians suggest that the Hartford Convention was actually a (successful) attempt by moderate Federalists to head off radical Federalist attempts to bring about a secession movement. Whatever its intention, the Hartford Convention turned out to be a bad public relations move for the Federalists. They were generally regarded with deepening suspicion and, outside of New England, the party rapidly collapsed.

  Main Event

  Key penned “The Star-Spangled Banner” on September 14, 1814, but the music for it had been written in 1777 by the Englishman John Stafford Smith. The music was a setting for another poem, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which was a favorite of a London drinking club called the Anacreontic Society. Smith’s original is a celebration of the pleasures of music, love, and wine. The melody soon became popular in the United States—both before and after Key made up the new words for it. In fact, by 1820, at least 84 different poems were being sung to the “Anacreontic melody.”

  “The Star-Spangled Banner” instantly became a popular patriotic air and was the informal anthem of the Union Army during the Civil War. The U.S. Army adopted the song officially during World War 1, but it did not become truly the national anthem until March 3, 1931, when President Herbert Hoover signed it into law.

  Word for the Day

  The Latin phrase status quo antebellum is common in treaties and underscores the utter futility of much combat. The phrase means literally “the way things were before the war.”

  Stats

  The British lost 2, 100 men at the Battle of New Orleans, including commanding general Edward Pakenham. Jackson’s badly outnumbered troops suffered fewer than 100 casualties.

  Fanfare for the Common Man

  (1814-1836)

  In This Chapter

  President Monroe’s misnamed “Era of Good Feelings”

  The Monroe Doctrine

  Economic crisis: the Panic of 1819

  The Missouri Compromise

  Jacksonian Democracy

  Casualties of the War of 1812 included many soldiers, settlers, and Indians. Casualties also included the U.S. economy, which declined sharply during the war, bottoming out in the Panic of 1819. Also slain in battle was the British desire to fight any more wars with its erstwhile colonies. No, Great Britain certainly didn’t lose the War of 1812, but it didn’t win it, either. Britain came away convinced that fighting the United States just wasn’t worth doing. A final casualty was the Federalist party. Federalists, all of whom bitterly questioned the wisdom of the war and some of whom even advocated dissolution of the union because of it, were seen as unpatriotic and lacking in resolve. In 1816, Democratic-Republican James Monroe, presented to the
electorate as the heir apparent of James Madison, handily won election to the presidency.

  Good Feelings

  The history of the American democracy is filled with contradictions, and one of the great misnomers that describes this nation in the years following the War of 1812 is the “Era of Good Feelings.” The famous phrase was coined sarcastically by a Federalist newspaper following the reelection of Monroe in 1820, when he stood unopposed and was ushered into office by an electoral vote of 231 to 1. Monroe himself was popular, revered by the people as the last of the “cocked hats”—an affectionate name for the Founding Fathers. However, Monroe presided over a country that, although proud of its nationhood after the war, was seriously torn by bitter sectional rivalries and disputes over the interpretation of the Constitution.

  Monroe tried to salve sectionalism by appointing a stellar cabinet that included the best political minds of the day, among them John Quincy Adams (Secretary of State), John C. Calhoun (Secretary of War), and William H. Crawford (Secretary of the Treasury). But these leading lights soon disputed with one another, not only over philosophical and sectional issues, but over who would succeed Monroe as president.

  A Democratic-Republican, Monroe nevertheless broke with Thomas Jefferson and supported the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, which had been the brainchild of Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The bank was popular with the East Coast “establishment,” because it effectively gave them control of the nation’s purse strings. The bank was bitterly opposed by Westerners, however, who needed easy credit to expand and establish themselves.

  Those Westerners also argued for a loose interpretation of the Constitution, particularly the phrase in the Preamble, “to promote the general welfare.” These words, Calhoun and Henry Clay (powerful Congressman from Kentucky) argued, mandated the federal government to build the roads the West badly needed to develop its commerce and economy. Monroe consistently vetoed road-building bills, but did support a high tariff on imports, which aided the industrialized Northeast. This tariff heightened sectional strife.

  Erie Canal

  Monroe’s opposition to federally built roads for the West did not stop-and may even have spurred—development of the nation’s first great commercial link between the East Coast and the vast inland realm. Gouverneur Morris, U.S. Senator from New York, proposed in 1800 the construction of a great canal from New York City to Buffalo on Lake Erie. The project was approved by the New York legislature in 1817, and it was completed in 1825. Running 363 miles, the Erie Canal was a spectacular engineering achievement and a testament to American labor. The project was also a stunning commercial triumph, which quickly repaid the $7 million it had cost to build and soon returned an average of $3 million in annual profits—all without the assistance of the federal government.

  The success of the Erie Canal, which truly inaugurated the commercial opening of the West, touched off a canal-building boom, linking the Northeast with the western system of natural waterways. By 1840, the United States boasted 3,326 miles of canals. The result was a trend toward commercial strength that helped pull the nation out of its postwar economic funk. The canals also tied the Northeast more securely to the West, thereby making deeper the growing division between the North and South, which had few east-west connections.

  Among then Family of Nations

  The completion and success of the Erie Canal justifiably puffed the nation’s pride, even if its economy was still shaky and the jarring demands of sectionalism increasingly strident. The United States under Monroe could at least point to growing prestige among the family of the world’s nations. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated the Rush-Bagot Agreement and the Convention of 1818 with Britain. The first document established the U.S. border with Quebec, hitherto a bone of contention, and established the precedent of a nonfortified, open border between the United States and Canada.

  The second document, the Convention of 1818, addressed the issue of the disputed Oregon Territory (that is, the land west of the Rocky Mountains, north of the 42nd parallel to the 54 Degrees 42’line). The convention specified joint U.S. and British occupation of the area—a temporary solution to a hot dispute, but also a demonstration that England now took American sovereignty seriously.

  On February 12, 1819, Adams concluded a treaty with Luis de Onis, Spain’s minister to Washington, that secured both western and eastern Florida for the United States. With the acquisition of Florida, a prime objective of the War of 1812 was realized—albeit belatedly. A thornier problem was the establishment of the border between the United States and Mexico, at the time a colonial possession of Spain. Adams wanted a border that would pull Texas into American territory. However, to get Florida, he ultimately sacrificed Texas and agreed on a boundary at the Sabine River, the western boundary of the present-day state of Louisiana. The United States renounced all claims to Texas. That renunciation was destined to endure during the handful of years before the revolutions by which Mexico won its independence from Spain. After the Texan War for Independence in 1836, U.S. rights to the territory would become a cause of war.

  Yet one more treaty was concluded, this one with the czar of Russia, who had asserted a claim to the California coast as far south as San Francisco Bay. Adams managed to talk Czar Alexander I into a position north of the 54 Degrees 42’ line, so that Russia would no longer be a contender for the Oregon Territory. The czar did retain his claim to Alaska, which at the time, nobody in the United States wanted anyway.

  Monroe Doctrine

  Although these foreign agreements were of great importance to establishing American sovereignty, the cornerstone of Monroe’s foreign policy came in 1823 and has been stamped with the president’s name. The origin of the Monroe Doctrine is found in the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars. These wars touched South America, sparking widespread revolution. After peace was re-established in Europe in 1815, Spain began making noises about reclaiming its colonies. President Monroe responded in his 1823 message to Congress with the four principles now known as the Monroe Doctrine:

  1. The Americas were no longer available for colonization by any power.

  2. The political system of the Americas was essentially different from that of Europe.

  3. The United States would consider any interference by European powers in the Americas a direct threat to U.S. security.

  4. The United States would not interfere with existing colonies or with the internal affairs of European nations, nor would the U.S. participate in European wars.

  Bad Feelings

  The so-called Era of Good Feelings was filled with plenty of distinctly bad feelings, a mixture of present financial hardships and an anxiety-filled foreboding of political and civil calamity just over the horizon.

  American System

  Monroe and Calhoun were driven by a vision of what came to be called the “American System,” a way of harnessing the full power of the federal government to nurture struggling American industry through a protective tariff to ward off competition from imports; the creation of the Bank of the United States to provide a reliable source of credit to industry; and federal financing of road, canal, and harbor construction. Unfortunately, Monroe and Calhoun were never able to agree on all three of these components. While both supported the bank, Monroe repeatedly vetoed bills to fund “internal improvements”—roads and the like—while he endorsed heavy tariffs. Without adequate transport, Calhoun noted with bitterness, the West could not compete commercially with the East. He also said that the tariff, instead of protecting all American industry, fostered eastern development while operating to keep the isolated West financially strapped. A three-legged stool can stand; a two-legged one cannot. The American economy tottered.

  Panic of 1819

  Economic conditions in the wake of the War of 1812 read like a recipe for disaster:

  Start with a grinding war debt.

  Add high tariffs to create commodity inflation.

  Stir in wild speculation on
western lands opened by the war.

  Overextend manufacturing investments.

  Pour the whole thing down the drain.

  From 1811, when constitutional challenges prevented the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, until 1816, when it was revived under Monroe, a host of shabby state banks rushed to provide credit to practically all comers. Then, when the war broke out, all the state banks (except for those in New England) suspended the practice of converting paper bank notes to gold or silver (“specie”) on demand. The value of all that paper money so recklessly loaned now plummeted. Banks failed, investors collapsed, businesses went belly up.

  Monroe’s Second Bank of the United States stepped in with a plan to stabilize the economy by sharply curtailing credit and insisting on the repayment of existing debts in specie. This plan preserved the Bank of the United States, but it hit the nation hard. “The Bank was saved,” one pundit of the day observed, “but the people were ruined.” In the West and South, individuals were particularly hard hit, and these states passed laws to provide debt relief, but not before 1819, when the panic peaked.