The New England Federalists continually worried about their declining political fortunes even as the administration’s unpopular policies of commercial coercion gave them false hopes of regaining power. By 1809 many citizens of Massachusetts were looking to their state to protect them from the machinations of the Republicans in Washington. Some even began talking of New England seceding from the Union. Fear and dislike of the Republicans and what they represented in the spread of democratic politics made many Federalists rethink the significance of America’s break from Great Britain. Compared to Catholic France or that country’s atheistic revolutionaries, Britain seemed more and more to be, in the words of Timothy Pickering, “the country of our forefathers, and the country to which we are indebted for all the institutions held dear to freemen.”17
Because most Americans were anxiously trying to establish their distinct national identity, such Anglophilic sentiments were bound to be misinterpreted and used against the Federalists. The leader of the Federalists in the House of Representatives, Josiah Quincy, realized only too keenly the mistakes many of his colleagues were making in professing an emotional attachment to Great Britain. Not only did such professions do “little credit to their patriotism,” but they did “infinitely less to their judgment. The truth is,” he said in 1812, “the British look upon us as a foreign nation, and we must look upon them in the same light.”18
Confronted by a Napoleonic tyranny and the democratic rumblings at their feet, the New England Federalists could scarcely restrain their affection for England, which seemed to them to be a rock of stability in a revolutionary world gone mad. This was why their Republican opponents, like Joseph Varnum, Republican congressman from Massachusetts and Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1810, believed that they could not trust the Federalists, even in Varnum’s case those from his own state. Varnum had “for a long time been convinced,” he told a colleague in March 1810, “that there was a party in our Country, fully determined to do everything in their power, to Subvert the principles of our happy government, and to establish a Monarchy on its ruins; and with a view of obtaining the aid of G.B in the accomplishment of their nefarious object, they have Inlisted into her service, and will go all lengths to Justify and support every measure which she may take against the Nation.” Establishing America’s separate identity as a nation was difficult enough, the Republicans believed, without having a large segment of the society yearning to reconnect with “a foreign nation, whose deadly hate has pursued us from the day when America said she would be free.”19
With many Republican leaders holding these sorts of opinions, the war in their minds became both a second war for independence and a defense of republicanism itself. In this sense the Federalists helped contribute to the Republicans’ move toward war; they made many Republicans feel that not only was the Union in danger but further vacillation—talking of war and doing nothing—had become impossible. A few Federalists, like Alexander L. Hanson of Maryland, even welcomed the possibility of war, confident that the Republicans would so mismanage it as to discredit their party and bring the Federalists back into power.20
The Republicans offered a variety of reasons why they felt they had to move toward war, most having to do with saving both republicanism and the nation’s honor; but ultimately they were compelled to go to war because their foreign policy left them no alternative. America had been engaged in a kind of warfare—commercial warfare—with both Britain and France since 1806. The actual fighting of 1812 was only the inevitable consequence of the failure of “peaceful coercion.” Wilson Cary Nicholas of Virginia put his finger on the problem early in 1810. The failure of “every mode of coercion short of war,” he told Jefferson, now left little room for choice. “We have exhausted every means in our power to preserve peace. We have tried negotiations until it is disgraceful to think of renewing it, and commercial restrictions have operated to our own injury. War or submission alone remain.” In deciding between these alternatives, Nicholas, along with many other Republicans, could not “hesitate a minute.” By June 1812 the need to go to war with Great Britain, declared Secretary of State James Monroe, had become inescapable. “We have been so long dealing in the small way of embargoes, non-intercourse, and non-importation, with menaces of war, &c., that the British government has not believed us. We must actually get to war before the intention to make it will be credited either here or abroad.”21
Perhaps some good would come out of a war. Some predicted it would destroy the parties and bring the country together. “The distinction of Federalists and Republicans will cease,” declared Felix Grundy in May 1812; “the united energies of the people will be brought into action; the inquiry will be, are you for your country or against it?”22 Some Republicans even came to see the war as a necessary regenerative act—as a means of purging Americans of their pecuniary greed and their seemingly insatiable love of commerce and money-making. They hoped that the war with England might refresh the national character, lessen the overweening selfishness of people, and revitalize republicanism.23 “War,” said the enterprising Baltimore journalist Hezekiah Niles in 1811, “will purify the political atmosphere. . . . All the public virtues will be refined and hallowed; and we shall again behold at the head of affairs citizens who may rival the immortal men of 1776.” When told that a war might be expensive, a Maryland congressman responded with indignation. “What is money?” he said. “What is all our property, compared with our honor and our liberty?” Americans must put aside their partisan divisions and concern for profits, urged the editors of the Richmond Enquirer. “Forget self,” they said, “and think of America.”24
SINCE THE REPUBLICANS BELIEVED that war was a threat to republican principles, whatever kind of war they fought would have to be different from the wars the Old World had known. As Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin pointed out at the outset, the Republicans needed to conduct a war without promoting “the evils inseparable from it . . . debt, perpetual taxation, military establishments, and other corrupting or anti-republican habits or institutions.”25
Although the Republicans in the Congress knew that the country’s armed forces were not ready for any kind of combat, they nonetheless seemed much more concerned about the threat the American military might pose to the United States than to Great Britain. Armies and navies, said John Taylor of Caroline, “only serve to excite wars, squander money, and extend corruption.”26 Thus the Republicans prepared for the war in the most curious and desultory manner. They had strengthened the army and navy in 1807, but in 1810 wondered whether they really needed these military increases after all, even though the possibility of war was still in the air.27 Since armies and navies cost money, strengthening them meant new taxes, and that was not what good Republicans voted for.
In the spring of 1810 the Republican Congress, confronted with the dilemma of increasing taxes, decided instead to debate the possibility of reducing all the expensive armed forces. John Taylor of South Carolina (not to be confused with Virginia’s John Taylor of Caroline) wanted the army substantially cut back and the whole navy put in mothballs, except for those vessels used to carry dispatches. Since the country was not actually at war, said Congressman Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, there was no need for the military. “Unless you use them, the Army and Navy, in times of peace, are engines of oppression.” Yet in the next breath Johnson, befitting his hawkish reputation, was ready to go to war against both Britain and France at the same time. His colleague from Kentucky, Samuel McKee, declared that “even if war itself was certain, it would be perfectly unnecessary to keep on foot this establishment.” “For defence from a foreign foe,” he preferred the militia—the citizen-soldiers, “the hardy sons of the country”—to the corrupt dregs of the regular army. “Would any gentleman be willing to submit the defence of everything he holds dear, to men who have loitered out their days in camps and in the most luxurious ease and vice?” As for the navy, what purpose could it have? Since it could never be large enough to take o
n the British navy, better that the United States have none at all. Since the existence of military establishments only bred war, which in turn magnified executive power, McKee would reduce the American military as drastically as he could. Never mind simply reducing the army, declared Congressman Macon; it ought to be abolished outright. But the Congress did not want to go that far, and by a two-to-one margin it voted merely to reduce the army and navy, not to eliminate them entirely.28
Following the election of more War Hawks to the Twelfth Congress in 1810, however, talk of war became more and more prevalent. Still, the Republicans in Congress remained reluctant to face up to the implications of going to war, and so they dawdled and debated.
Finally Congress in January 1812 added twenty-five thousand regular troops to the ten thousand previously authorized. In addition, it provided for the raising of fifty thousand one-year volunteers, with the states rather than the national government, however, having the authority to appoint the volunteer officers; and in April 1812 it authorized the president to call out one hundred thousand militiamen who would serve for six months. But efforts to classify by age and arm the militia were stymied by state jealousies. Some congressmen even objected to the phrase “the militia of the United States”; it was, they said, the “militia of the several States,” until called into the service of the United States.29 Since the militia (and some included the volunteers as well) could not legally serve abroad, there were doubts raised over the government’s plans to invade Canada as a means of bringing pressure to bear on Great Britain.
At least Congress voted for an army; the navy was another matter. A bill to build twelve ships of the line and twenty frigates ran into stiff opposition. Congressman Adam Seybert of Pennsylvania predicted that such an increase in the navy would have the most awful consequences. Unlike the army, the navy would not be disbanded at the end of the war and thus, as “a permanent Naval Establishment,” might “become a powerful engine in the hands of an ambitious Executive.” Not only was a navy expensive, it would lead to impressment and naval conscription. “If the United States shall determine to augment their navy, so as to rival those of Europe, the public debt will become permanent; direct taxes will be increased; the paupers of the country will be increased; the nation will be bankrupt; and, I fear,” concluded Seybert, “the tragedy will end in a revolution.”30
With such dire results predicted, it was not surprising that the Republican Congress at the end of January 1812 finally decided that the United States did not actually need a navy to fight the impending war. The House by a vote of sixty-two to fifty-nine defeated the proposal to build twelve ships of the line and twenty-four frigates. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was only one of many Republicans who in the early months of 1812 voted against all attempts to arm and prepare the navy, who opposed all efforts to beef up the War Department, who rejected all tax increases, and yet who in June 1812 voted for the war.31
After much hand-wringing over the problem of paying for the war, the Congress finally agreed to some tax increases, but only on the condition they were to go into effect when war was actually declared. The president was relieved that at last the Republicans in Congress had “got down the dose of taxes. It is the strongest proof,” he told Jefferson in March 1812, “they could give that they do not mean to flinch from the contest to which the mad conduct of G.B. drives them.”32 Taxes would only cover a portion of the cost of the war; the rest would have to be borrowed. Of course, in 1811, even as war seemed increasingly likely, the Republicans had killed the Bank of the United States, which some knew was the best instrument for borrowing money and financing a war. This failure to re-charter the BUS proved to be disastrous for the war effort.
In other respects too the government was ill prepared for war, partly because many people did not believe that it was actually going to have to fight. Many congressmen wanted to go home for a spring recess in 1812. When the recess was denied, many of them left anyway, making it difficult to gather a congressional quorum even as the country was presumably moving toward war. As late as May 1812, the British minister in Washington was totally confused about what the Republicans were up to, the signals were so mixed. Could a country go to war when its War Department, with only the secretary and a dozen inexperienced clerks, was so chaotically disorganized? With no general staff, the secretary of war communicated directly with individual generals and acted as the army’s quartermaster general. The United States, complained the secretary of war, William Eustis, presented the “rare phenomenon” of a country going to war with an army lacking staff support.33 In April 1812 many Republicans opposed a bill providing for two assistant secretaries of war, even though it had been suggested by the president. Some Republicans thought that such additional offices were the opening wedge to executive tyranny. But with Federalist help the bill squeaked through.
Finally, on June 1, 1812, President Madison delivered his war message to Congress. He dwelt exclusively on Britain’s impressment of sailors from American ships and its abuses of American neutral rights—the two issues for Republicans that most flagrantly violated the sovereign independence of the United States. Indeed, said Madison, evoking the ominous phrase of the British Declaratory Act of 1766, the recent British aggressions against American shipping had rested on nothing but their “claim to regulate our external commerce in all cases whatsoever.” In effect, the president said, Great Britain was already in “a state of war against the United States.”34 On June 18, Madison signed the congressional declaration of war, which was enthusiastically supported by many Republicans who for the previous six months had voted against all attempts to prepare for the war.
Although Congress had created an army on paper, the actual army on the eve of the war consisted of 6, 744 men, scattered across the nation at twenty-three different forts and posts. New York, for example, had less than a third of the men needed to defend its harbor.35 The generals responsible for leading the army were not very impressive. Although sixty-one-year-old Henry Dearborn was a distinguished Revolutionary War veteran and former secretary of war in Jefferson’s cabinet, he was more interested in politics than in war-making and reluctant to assume a command. Nevertheless, “Granny,” as he came to be called by his troops, was appointed the senior major general responsible both for commanding the Northern Department and for drawing up the initial plans for invading Canada. Fifty-nine-year-old William Hull had been in the Revolutionary War, but he had suffered a stroke and his best days were behind him. Since he was the governor of Michigan Territory and the only candidate for a command in the territory, he was appointed brigadier general in charge of the North Western Department, a command that was separate from Dearborn’s. The junior officers were not in better shape. There were only twenty-nine field-grade officers (colonels and majors), many of them either incompetent or too old for active service. Winfield Scott, a twenty-six-year-old newly appointed lieutenant colonel, was an energetic and brilliant exception. He thought most of his fellow officers were “swaggerers, dependents, decayed gentlemen . . . utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever.”36
After much jousting between the Congress and the president over the appointment of more officers, Madison by the end of the year had issued commissions to over eleven hundred individuals, 15 percent of whom immediately declined them, followed by an additional 8 percent who resigned after several months of service. By November 1812, ten months after Congress had authorized increasing the regular army by twenty-five thousand, only 9, 823 men had been recruited—hardly surprising since the recruiting officers often could not even offer the recruits a decent uniform and a pair of shoes. By the end of 1812 a real army scarcely existed. Very few of its companies were at full strength, and very few of the recruits had any training whatsoever for combat.
MANY AMERICANS INITIALLY SAW the war as a way of dealing with the problem of the Indians in the Northwest. Ever since the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, the Indians of the Northwest Territory had been pushed back by relentless hordes of
white settlers. Finally in 1805 the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his half brother Tenskwatawa (better known as the Prophet) attempted to halt this steady encroachment by forming some sort of confederation. The Prophet led an Indian revival movement that denounced white ways and white goods and preached a return to the virtues of traditional Indian culture. At the same time, Tecumseh—an impressive, commanding man and perhaps the most extraordinary Indian leader in American history—attacked the practice of making land cessions to the Americans, dozens of which had been made under Jefferson’s presidency. He proposed that the Northwestern tribes adopt a policy of common landowning in order to resist white expansion. From Prophet’s Town at the junction of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers in Indiana Territory, the Shawnee brothers spread their message throughout the region, resulting in 1810 in an alarming increase in Indian raids on white settlers.37
Although the ideas of Tecumseh and the boastful Prophet alienated as many Indians as they inspired, Americans in the Northwest believed they faced a well-organized Indian conspiracy. William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, was eager to establish Indiana’s statehood and pleaded for troops to crush the conspiracy. “If some decisive measures are not speedily adopted,” he told the secretary of war in the summer of 1811, “we shall have a general combination of all the tribes against us.”38 Since the administration was preoccupied with its negotiations and possible war with Great Britain and did not want an Indian war, it was reluctant to give Harrison any regular troops. But under pressure from the other territorial governors in the region, the federal government finally gave way and committed a regiment of regulars to Harrison’s command. By the fall of 1811 Harrison had assembled an army of two hundred and fifty regulars, one hundred Kentucky volunteer riflemen, and six hundred Indiana militiamen.
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