A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Quids and War Hawks

  The career of James Madison symbolized the breadth of early American republicanism. Beginning in 1787 as a Federalist advocate of a strengthened national state, Madison jumped ship in the 1790s to form a Republican opposition party demanding a return to decentralized, agrarian, frugal, and peaceful government. It was in this philosophical mood that Madison inherited Jefferson’s mantle of succession in 1809, but he also inherited the foreign policy and war fever he had helped create as Jefferson’s secretary of state. The War of 1812 naturally swung the American political pendulum back to the more vigorous nationalist beliefs of early Federalism, returning Madison’s philosophical journey to a point near, though not exactly coinciding with, his 1787 Federalist beginnings.

  As the Republicans amassed a huge national following during the 1800–1808 period, their Federalist opponents began to wither. This important political development was much more complex than it appears on the surface. To begin with, the Federalist party died a slow death that was not absolutely apparent until around 1815. Throughout Madison’s two terms in office, he faced stiff Federalist opposition and even saw a brief revival of Federalism at the ballot box. At the same time, whatever ideological purity the Republicans may have possessed in the 1790s became diluted as more and more Americans (including former Federalists) flocked to their banner.

  That this specter of creeping Federalist nationalism was seen as a genuine threat to Republican ideological purity is evident in the clandestine efforts of James Monroe to wrest the 1808 Republican presidential nomination from his colleague Madison. Monroe, an old Anti-Federalist who had served the Jeffersonians well as a congressman and diplomat, led a group of radical, disaffected southern Republicans known as the Quids, an old English term for opposition leaders. Quids John Randolph, John Taylor, and Randolph Macon feared the Revolution of 1800 had been sidetracked by a loss of vigilance. They complained there was too much governmental debt and bureaucracy, and the Federalist judiciary had too free a reign. Quids aimed to reverse this turn to centralization by nominating the radical Monroe to succeed Jefferson. But they met defeat in the Madison-dominated Republican congressional caucus.

  That November, Madison and his running mate George Clinton (the aged New York Anti-Federalist) faced off against Federalists Charles Cotesworth Pinkney and Rufus King. Madison won handily—122 electoral votes to 47—yet the Federalists had actually bettered their 1804 numbers; furthermore, they gained twenty-four new congressmen (a 34 percent increase) in the process. They fared even better in 1812, with antiwar sentiment fueling support for Federalist De Witt Clinton, who garnered 89 electoral votes to Madison’s 128. This temporary Federalist resurgence was partially due to the administration’s mistakes (especially the embargo), but much credit goes to the Young Federalists, a second generation of moderates who infused a more down-to-earth style into the formerly stuffy Federalist political demeanor.

  Many Young Federalists, however, bolted the party altogether and joined the opposition. A prime example was John Quincy Adams, who resigned as Massachusetts’ Federalist senator and joined the party of his father’s archenemies. Adams’s defection to Republicanism may seem incredible, yet on reflection it shows considerable political savvy. Adams had already recognized that the Federalist Party was dying and he wisely saw there was room for moderate nationalist viewpoints in an expanded Republican Party. Most important, however, young Adams astutely perceived that his only hope for a meaningful national political career (and the presidency) lay within the political party of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

  During his first term in office, Madison attempted to carry forward the domestic aims of the Revolution of 1800. Gallatin, the chief formulator of Republican fiscal policy, stayed on as secretary of the treasury, and he and the president continued the Republicans’ policy of balanced budgets and paying off the national debt, pruning administrative and military expenditures to balance the ledgers. Republicans continued to replace retiring Federalist judges, though the new ideological breadth of the Republican Party, combined with Marshall’s dominance of the Supreme Court, tempered the impact of these appointments. Meanwhile, the diplomatic crisis continued, ultimately rendering many of the administration’s domestic policies unattainable.

  Madison assumed office at a time when diplomatic upheaval and impending warfare made foreign policy the primary focus of his administration. The former secretary of state certainly possessed the credentials to launch a forceful foreign policy, yet through his political party’s own efforts, he lacked an army and navy to back that policy up. This fact would ultimately bring the administration to the brink of disaster.

  Because of strong domestic opposition to Jefferson’s embargo, Madison immediately called for its repeal. He replaced it with the Nonintercourse Act(1809), which forbade trade only with France and Britain (the embargo had forbidden all foreign trade) and promised to reopen trade with whichever party first recognized America’s neutral rights. This policy, a smuggler’s dream, failed utterly; it was replaced by Macon’s Bill No. 2 (1810), which reopened trade with both France and Britain, but again promised exclusive trade with whichever power recognized America’s right to trade. The French eagerly agreed, and with their weak navy, they had nothing to lose. But the British naturally resumed seizing American ships bound for France, at which point the administration was stymied. Peaceable coercion had failed. War with Britain seemed America’s only honorable alternative.

  Pushing Madison and the nation toward war was a group of newly elected congressmen, many from the West, most notably Henry Clay of Kentucky. Known as the War Hawks, the group included Peter Porter of New York, Langdon Cheves and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and Clay’s Kentucky colleague, Richard M. Johnson. They elected Clay Speaker; then, using his control of the committee system, they named their own supporters to the Foreign Relations and Naval Committees. Although some of the maritime issues only touched their constituencies indirectly, the War Hawks saw Britain (and her ally Spain) as posing a danger in Florida and the Northwest, in both cases involving incitement of Indians. In 1811, General William Henry Harrison won the Battle of Tippecanoe against British-aided Shawnee warriors in Indiana, launching a renewed Indian war in the Old Northwest. At the same time, frontier warfare fueled expansionist desires to invade Canada, and perhaps Spanish Florida as well. Southern and western farmers openly coveted the rich North American agricultural lands held by Britain and Spain.

  Madison’s war message of June 1, 1812, concentrated almost exclusively on maritime rights, noting “evidence of hostile inflexibility” on the part of the British. This put the Federalists, whose New England ships were the ones being attacked, in the ironic position of having to vote against that declaration, in part because of their pro-British sentiments and in part because they just opposed “anything Republican.”114 The War Hawks, equally paradoxically, did not suffer directly from impressment, but they represented deep-seated resentment and anger shared by many Americans. They fumed that a supposedly free and independent American republic still suffered under the yoke of British military and buckled under her trade policies.

  On June 4 and June 18, 1812, Congress voted for war, with the House splitting 79 to 49 and the Senate 19 to 13. This divided vote did not bode well for a united, successful war effort. Nor could the nation expect to successfully fight with its most advanced and industrialized section ambivalent about the conflict. Yet strong Federalist opposition (and a weak military) did not seem to dampen Republican enthusiasm for a war they now termed the “Second War of American Independence.”

  “Half Horse and Half Alligator” in the War of 1812

  Americans’ recollections of the War of 1812 provide an excellent example of selective memory. Today, those Americans who know anything about it at all remember the War of 1812 for Andrew Jackson’s famed Battle of New Orleans(1815), one of the most spectacular victories in the history of the American military, and more generally, that we
won. What most Americans do not know, or tend to forget, is that the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the war ended. Slow communications delayed news of the peace treaty, and neither British nor American troops in Louisiana learned of the war’s end until after the famed battle.

  The United States squared off against a nation that possessed the greatest navy on earth and would soon achieve land superiority as well. The British could count on 8,000 Anglo-Canadian and Indian allies to bolster their strength. Americans enjoyed many of the same military advantages held during the Revolution—a defensive stance and Britain’s embroilment in global warfare with France. As in the Revolution, however, the Yankees had few regular troops and sailors to press those advantages. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy possessed a competent officer corps, but few ships and gunboats for them to command—or, to use the British assessment of American naval capabilities, “a few fir-built frigates, manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws.”115

  Events seemed ominous indeed when General William Hull marched his 1,600 regular U.S. Army troops and militia supplement into Canada via Detroit in July of 1812, only to surrender to Anglo-Canadian troops without firing a shot! (Hull became a scapegoat and was court-martialed for cowardice but pardoned by President Madison.) A second Canadian land invasion (in December 1813) fared only a little better, resulting in stalemate, followed by General Jacob Brown’s July 1814 campaign on the Niagara Peninsula, again ending in a stalemate. Three Canadian campaigns, three embarrassments. The long-held American dream of adding Canada to the United States by military conquest ended once and for all during the War of 1812.

  On the high seas, the United States fared somewhat better. American privateers carried on the Revolutionary strategy of looting British shipping, but with little tactical impact. The U.S. Navy, with minimal forces, somehow won 80 percent of its initial sea battles. Although the strategic impact was insignificant, these actions yielded the most famous lines in American seafaring. Captain James Lawrence in 1807, for example, his ship the Chesapeake defeated by the Leopard and her veteran crew lying mortally wounded, shouted, “Don’t give up the ship. Fight her till she sinks.”116 The war also produced the most notable one-on-one naval confrontation in the annals of the U.S. Navy when the Constitution engaged the British Guerriere. Marines boarded the British ship, and after blasting away her rigging, forced her to surrender. After the battle, the resiliency of the Constitution’s hull left her with the nickname, Old Ironsides. It was a single engagement, but the London Times noted its galling significance: “Never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American.”117

  Much of the war at sea did not go as well. Jefferson’s gunboats, thoroughly outclassed by British frigates, retreated to guard duty of ports. This constituted a demoralizing admission that Jefferson’s policies had failed, and was confirmed by a congressional vote in 1813 to fund six new frigates, essentially doubling the U.S. fleet in a single stroke!118 There were also famous naval battles on inland waters. On Lake Erie in 1813, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry built a fleet from scratch, deployed it on the lake, and defeated the British in an impressive victory at Put-in-Bay. Not to be outclassed by Captain Lawrence, Perry declared afterward, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”119 Those few victories gave Americans hope that after the second full year of war, the tide was turning.

  After the British defeated Napoleon at Leipzig in October 1813, they turned their attention to the North American war. Fortified by battle-hardened veterans of the European theater, England launched an ambitious three-pronged offensive in 1814 aimed at the Chesapeake Bay (and Washington, D.C.), Lake Champlain, and New Orleans. They planned to split America into thirds, crippling resistance once and for all.

  Initially their plan worked well. On August 24, 1814, 7,000 American militiamen turned tail, allowing the British army to raid Washington, D.C., and burn government buildings, sending President Madison and his wife running to the countryside, literally yanking valuables off the White House walls as they ran to save them from the invaders. The British had not intended to burn the White House, preferring to ransom it, but when they could find no one to parlay with, they torched everything. This infamous loss of the nation’s capital, albeit temporary, ranks alongside Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Corregidor as low points in American military history, and the destruction of the White House marked the most traumatic foreign assault on mainland American soil until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the British withdrew, they unsuccessfully bombarded Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, inspiring patriot Francis Scott Key to compose “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Farther north, at Plattsburgh, New York, Sir George Prevosts’s 10,000–man army met defeat at the hands of an American force one-tenth its size at the Battle of Chippewa. There American regulars relieved the militia—with stunning results. At a distance of seventy yards, the British and American infantry blasted at each other until the British broke, and the Americans, clad in the gray cadet uniforms of the United States Military Academy, chased them off the field. The British commander, shocked that he had not come up against militia, blurted, “Those are Regulars, by God.”

  On nearby Lake Champlain, a concurrent naval battle brought a spectacular American victory. Captain Thomas Macdonough, the thirty-year-old American commander, rallied his sailors, reminding them, “Impressed seamen call on every man to do his duty!” Although knocked unconscious by a soaring decapitated sailor’s head, Macdonough delivered so much firepower that he sent Prevost and the British running.

  Despite these morale builders, there was more potential trouble in store. By late fall of 1814, a 3,000–man British army under General Edward Packenham was en route, via ocean vessel, to attack New Orleans. More than two years of warfare on land and sea had produced no clear victor.

  Combat and stalemate had, however, inspired new opposition from New England’s Federalists. When war commenced, Federalists thwarted it in many ways, some bordering on treason. A planned invasion of Canada through lower Maine proved impossible because the Massachusetts and Connecticut militias refused to assist. Meanwhile, New Englanders maintained personal lines of communication with Britons, providing aid and comfort and thereby reducing the bargaining powers of American negotiators at Ghent. And they appeared to be rewarded at the polls with solid 1812 electoral gains in the presidential campaign and large 1814 victories for Federalists in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland.

  Their dissent came to a head with the Hartford Convention of December 1814, which marked the height of Federalists’ intransigence and the last installment in their dark descent. Federalist delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island gathered in Hartford, Connecticut; discussed and debated administration foreign policy and other issues; and concluded by issuing a call for a separate peace between New England and Britain and constitutional amendments limiting the power of southern and western states. (This was the second time New Englanders had danced around the issue of secession, having hatched a plot in 1804 to leave the Union if Jefferson was reelected.)

  Across the ocean at Ghent, in Belgium, British and American negotiators, including Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Albert Gallatin, parlayed well into the Christmas season. The days wore on, and Adams complained to his diary that the gregarious Clay kept him awake all night drinking and gambling with their British colleagues. At last, both sets of negotiators conceded they possessed no military advantage. Britain’s European victory over Napoléon, meanwhile, opened up a series of prospects and obligations they needed to immediately pursue. At long last, both nations agreed it was time to compromise and end the War of 1812.

  On Christmas Eve the deal was struck. Americans withdrew their two major demands—that Britain stop impressing American seaman and officially acknowledge neutrals’ trade rights and freedom of the seas. Both sides knew that Britain’s European victory meant England would now honor those neutral rights de facto if not de jure. Other territ
orial disputes over fishing waters and the American-Canadian boundary near Maine were referred to commissions (where they languished for decades). The Treaty of Ghent thus signified that, officially at least, the war had changed nothing, and the terms of peace were such that conditions were now the same as they had been prior to the war—status quo ante bellum.

  Madison must have been apprehensive about presenting such a peace without victory for the approval of the U.S. Senate. Fortunately for Madison’s party, news of the Ghent Treaty arrived in Washington, D.C., at exactly the same time as news of an untimely, yet nevertheless glorious, American military victory. On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson’s odd coalition of American troops had pounded General Packenham’s British regulars and won the famed Battle of New Orleans.

  Jackson’s victory was mythologized, once again with a David and Goliath twist in which outnumbered American sharpshooters defeated the disciplined redcoats.

  The fact was that Jackson’s men were seasoned combat veterans of the Creek Indian theater of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend(1814). Now, at New Orleans, they were joined by a polyglot collection of local French (Creole and Cajun), Spanish, and free black troops, with a few Caribbean pirates under Jean Laffite thrown in for good measure. The nub of the army remained hard-core Jackson veterans, except for key Creole militia artillery units. Together they manned the breastworks of Chalmette (near New Orleans) and awaited Packenham’s force of 2,600.