by Hugh Brogan
The diplomatic proceedings of the next three years are too tedious and sterile a subject to be worth more than summary treatment. Napoleon did everything he could to bring on a quarrel between the United States and Britain. It slowly dawned on British statesmen, diplomats and manufacturers that such a quarrel was not in their country’s best interests. The Americans, having patiently negotiated and endlessly waited for the victory of common sense, finally gave up and declared war in June 1812, just as Britain altered her policy by suspending the notorious Orders in Council which had substantially shut off American trade with Europe and the West Indies.
The War of 1812 was one of the most unnecessary in history, and reflects as little credit on Britain as any she has ever fought. It was in keeping with its character that it should break out just as one of its chief causes was removed, and that its greatest battle (New Orleans) should be fought just after peace was signed.6 But though the war was unnecessary in the sense that the British could and should have prevented it by concessions, it was also, from the American point of view, inescapable. The Royal Navy kidnapped 3,800 American sailors and pressed them into that service. The Orders in Council ruthlessly subordinated American economic interests to the political interests of the British Empire: American farmers blamed the Orders, perhaps unfairly, for a fall in agricultural prices that produced a depression in the West in the years immediately before the war. On the frontier, it was universally believed that Indian restlessness – this was the epoch of Tecumseh’s great project7 – was stirred up by British agents, though American oppression was the real cause. The choice before America, Jefferson sadly agreed with his successor as President, James Madison, was war or submission – to fight, or to undo one of the main achievements of the Revolution by accepting total subordination in international affairs to Britain. Looking back over the period since 1783, American leaders could not falter. Britain really had to be taught a lesson. As John Quincy Adams put it,8 it was not just a matter of dollars and cents; no alternative was left but war ‘or the abandonment of our right as an independent nation’. So thought President Madison when he sent his war message to Congress; and so thought the rising generation of politicians in Congress, the so-called War Hawks, led by Henry Clay of Kentucky (1777 – 1852) and John Caldwell Calhoun of South Carolina (1782 – 1850). Never in American history was a war entered on in a more sober frame of mind, even though Clay cheerfully promised the early conquest and annexation of Canada.
The war lasted for two years and a half and was not very satisfactory for either side. Canada was not taken, but nor was the United States successfully invaded: British expeditions were checked on the Great Lakes, at Baltimore and, by Andrew Jackson, at New Orleans. The British had much the best of things at sea, but the Americans, with next to no navy, won several creditable victories (as in the celebrated duel between the frigates USS Constitution and HMS Guerrière, in 1812) and raided the British merchant marine very profitably. Both sides occasionally disgraced themselves. The British mounted a series of destructive raids on coastal towns and villages, which only inflamed the patriotic anger of their civilian victims. The Americans lynched one general of the Revolutionary War and crippled another (Light Horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert E. Lee) because they were opposed to the present struggle. The British captured Washington and burned its public buildings down (not its private ones): when the Presidential Mansion was restored, it was painted white, and has been known as the White House ever since. General William Henry Harrison broke the power of Tecumseh and the Indians of the North-West at the battles of Tippecanoe (1811) and Thames river (1813), while General Jackson did the same for the Indians of the South.9
New England, or the dominant faction in that region, sulked near-treasonably throughout the war, because maritime trade was disrupted. In the autumn of 1814 representatives of the New England states met in a convention at Hartford, Connecticut. At the back of their minds was the project of seceding, or threatening to secede, from the federal Union, but the demands they actually sent to Washington were only for some amendments to the Constitution. Unluckily for them, but luckily for America, their messengers arrived in the federal capital at the same time as the news of the Battle of New Orleans and the signature of the Peace of Ghent (December 1814); the Yankees had to go home looking very silly.
The peace treaty (negotiated by Albert Gallatin, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay) was little more than an agreement to stop fighting: neither side made any explicit concessions. Its inconclusive language concealed an important truth. England had at last learned that war with the United States was almost invariably not worthwhile. By her behaviour since 1764 she had alienated the respect and affection of her quondam colonies so thoroughly that it would take her more than a century to get back onto solidly friendly terms with them; she had also taught the Americans, much too thoroughly, that the only means to get on in the harsh world of diplomacy was by bullying and inflexibility; but still, the two countries had much more in common with each other than they had disagreements, and ever after 1814 both, in the last resort, were able to accept the fact. In spite of repeated war-scares during the nineteenth century, there has never been another Anglo-American conflict; and the credit for that may in large measure be given to the lessons taught the British by President Madison and his officers.
So thoroughly were the lessons learned that in 1823, during the next administration, that of President James Monroe (1758 – 1831), George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, actually proposed a formal alliance between England and the United States for the purpose of resisting any attempt by the powers of the Holy Alliance (France, Prussia, Austria and especially Russia) to re-conquer the colonies of the Spanish Empire, then in revolt against their metropolis. The idea was tempting, and the now ancient Jefferson advised agreement; but John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s Secretary of State, thought otherwise, and persuaded the President. A message was drafted and sent to Congress that showed with absolute clarity what American statesmen had learned from the long era of perilous neutrality and what they thought was to be their country’s place in the world:
the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
This is the famous Monroe Doctrine. Canning thought it a piece of impertinence, for the United States was far too weak to enforce it against any determined challenge from a great power; it was the Royal Navy which, for good British reasons (the preservation of global primacy, and of ascendancy in the markets of the New World), would for the rest of the century stand between North and South America and any aggressors; but it was nevertheless an effective warning to Great Britain that another war might follow if any serious attempt was made to extend the British Empire over, for example, the Isthmus of Panama; a warning that acted as an effective deterrent. The Doctrine also contained, in germ, the aspiration of the United States to wield its own hegemony over the New World – an aspiration that would in due course ripen into action.
There was another important passage in Monroe’s message, a quid pro quo for the Doctrine:
Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.
It was the doctrine of Washington’s Farewell Address, of Jefferson, of what came to be called isolationism. It expressed a deep wish to be left alone and a rather pathetic belief that the United States would actually be so left if it made its wishes and intentions plain. Had not the Farewell Address pointed out that ‘Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation’? And that Europe was a long way away? Such utterances should be protection enough, and Americans clung to t
hem long after they had lost whatever value they had ever had (and, as we have seen, it was never much). To repeat, the real guarantor of American peace and isolation was the Royal Navy; if that shield should ever crack, the American people would be faced with some very unpleasant problems, for which their favourite diplomatic doctrines did little or nothing to prepare them.
Meantime the shield was intact, and the Americans were free to turn their backs on the Atlantic and carry out the conquest of their continent.
The international dilemmas of the 1790s left a permanent mark on American domestic history, for reasons that had as much to do with personalities as with politics.
The leadership of the American Revolution had been singularly homogeneous, singularly united and singularly durable. Quarrels and debates made little difference: no guillotine waited for those who were on the losing side in either case. John Dickinson, who had voted against the Declaration of Independence, played a valuable part in the 1787 convention. Patrick Henry, who voted against the Constitution, remained influential enough to secure the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Samuel Adams and John Hancock were genteel rivals for political power in Massachusetts until Hancock’s death in 1793, which cleared the way for Adams to enjoy the Governorship at last. George Washington was quite reasonable in his hope that his administration would reflect this underlying harmony. No doubt there would be disputes about policy, clashes of personal ambitions, collisions of interests. What George III had called ‘that hydra, faction’, and which Washington disliked as much as his former sovereign, would perhaps raise its many poisoned heads. There might even be a tendency for society to break up into rival parties – another dreadful word – of rich and poor. But surely all such tendencies could be overcome with the aid of stout John Adams, his Vice-President; of James Madison, expected to display the same leadership in the new House of Representatives that he had in the Constitutional convention; of Washington’s old comrade-in-arms, General Knox, who was to continue as Secretary of War; of Thomas Jefferson, reluctantly giving up his ministership to the Court of France (like all good Americans, he had fallen in love with Paris) to be the first Secretary of State; of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. The leadership which had held together in war would do so in peace, equally to the country’s benefit.
Within a year of Washington’s assumption of office these hopes were falsified. It was not the President’s fault. Hamilton was the rock of offence. The policies which he pushed through were profoundly divisive, however beneficial they proved in the long run; how divisive was demonstrated by the fact that the splits they provoked showed themselves first in Washington’s official family.
Perhaps a family quarrel was inevitable. The two Virginians, Jefferson and Madison, differed fundamentally from Hamilton as to the present and future destiny of the United States. Coming from a populous farmers’ republic, where equal aspirations for all white men was the general creed, they wanted no radical changes. Jefferson supported the extension of the United States across the continent, but he thought it would take a thousand years or so. Let the Americans grow more prosperous and civilized, by all means; but let them do so like Virginians; let them shape their own lives in manly independence and have as little government, state or national, as possible. Above all, let them eschew the sort of economic activity which led the population to huddle in great cities. Jefferson had been happy in Paris and professed a strong, optimistic belief in the virtue of the common man, but he viewed great cities, he said, ‘as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man’. They must never arise in America to corrupt the people. Nor must growing national wealth lead to a growing class of the wealthy. He had no more use for merchant princes or financial titans than he had for Napoleon (gentlemen farmers were another thing). A concentration of wealth would bring about a concentration of political power; and then let the republicans of America beware.
This vision was perhaps equally marked by prescience and wishful thinking. Hamilton regarded it as so much moonshine, and was shocked as he gradually discovered that his old friend Madison shared it. He himself, having been born in the West Indies (he arrived in New York as a young man on the make at the age of seventeen), was immune to the claims of the states on the first loyalties of their citizens, claims which were so powerful with most other Americans. His own loyalty was given exclusively to the nation as a whole. He was immensely exhilarated by the possibilities that he saw arising from the creation of a new national state on a vast and virgin continent. The federal government’s first business, he thought, was by every appropriate means to increase its strength and thus safeguard the glorious future. His understanding of the economic forces at work in the world was profound, and he relied on them to build up the United States. In a sense, he was the heir of the mercantilists. At any rate he believed that a strong unitary American commonwealth could encourage trade and industry far more effectively than the old loose federation of small states, and would in turn be strengthened by the new wealth it fostered. A class of rich men – merchants, financiers, manufacturers – linked with the governmental system by such institutional devices as a funded National Debt and a national bank like the Bank of England, could immensely benefit all their fellow-citizens by their energy, foresight and riches. True, such a system would be inegalitarian and undemocratic (since power would remain in the hands of those with property). Hamilton did not care. He never pretended to be a democrat: he thought democracy, which put power in the hands of the unenlightened multitude, was a disease. Human nature, in his opinion, was basically selfish, and talk of republican virtue was so much cant. ‘Ambition and avarice’ were the most reliable pillars of the state. None of the prophets of disinterestedness would be satisfied with a mess of porridge, even a double helping, when they might get a decent salary for their services. No, the art of government was to curb and guide men’s greedy appetites into useful courses, so that, as the Scottish economist Adam Smith proposed, private vice could be public gain. Hamilton was a prophet of capitalism and passionately believed that a political and economic system dominated by capitalists would in the end produce the greatest happiness for all.
In theory, the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views of life were and are incompatible; in practice they can be reconciled, at least in part. Much of American social and economic history has been taken up with the attempt to blend them. For the weakness of the one was the strength of the other. Jeffersonism was too static, too backward-looking; Hamiltonism was too narrowly cynical about human nature. And the two creeds have this in common, that they both encouraged the economic individualism and the national ambitions of the new republic. Jefferson himself, in the course of his long political career (which extended even after his retirement from the Presidency in 1809), assimilated many Hamiltonian policies and ideas. Hamilton never returned the compliment; but then, in spite of his intellectual brilliance, he was greatly Jefferson’s inferior as a practical politician. He was not wholly unlike George Grenville. He carried on public affairs with a high hand and trampled on too many people’s toes: Jefferson was always bland and friendly, at least to men’s faces. Furthermore, Hamilton’s views of human nature were anything but flattering to American voters, and voters love to be flattered. In the end they were bound to prefer Jefferson’s sincere, if imperceptive, compliments on their honesty to Hamilton’s sharp truths.
In 1790 George Washington, a practical politician himself, was probably more concerned with the personal than with the ideological antipathy between his two ministers, but he was perfectly competent to contain it. The result was that while Jefferson set up the American diplomatic service, Hamilton left his mark on the first Washington administration with a series of dazzling achievements.
If the United States was to survive in a dangerous world, he said, its government must be strong and above all ‘energetic’ (a favourite word). To be so, it must have solid finances and a good name in the world’s money markets. So the Secretary of the Treasury courted the
speculators. These were not popular men; they were widely suspect as unscrupulous operators who knew how to get rich when everyone else was getting poor. But Hamilton thought them essential collaborators; and, having studied the methods of the younger Pitt (then at the peak of his fame as England’s youngest Prime Minister and wizard financier), he knew how to attract them. He hoisted a signal that the United States government was anxious to favour them by proposing, in his Report on the Public Credit (9 January 1790), not only to pay the national debt (there had been talk of repudiating it) but to fund it, that is, to make arrangements by which the payment of the principal and interest of the debt should always, automatically, have first charge on the public revenues (which would come from a tariff and an excise). This was reassuring; he further proposed that the federal government should add the outstanding debts of the states from the Revolutionary War to its own debt, and pay them off in the same way. In short, £80 million of worthless, or nearly worthless, paper debts suddenly became very attractive investments indeed, and speculators who had not already bought a large holding hastened to do so before the innocent realized what was involved. Hamilton’s final achievement was the establishment of the Bank of the United States (1791) to facilitate both government borrowing and private finance. He was rewarded with a sudden burgeoning of national prosperity.