Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Taking advantage of Tecumseh’s absence in the South, where the Indian leader was recruiting more tribes to his cause, Harrison marched upon Prophet’s Town. He camped outside of the town on November 6, 1811, apparently intending to enter the Indian settlement the next day to order the tribes to disperse. Urged on by the Prophet, six or seven hundred Indians surprised Harrison’s troops during the predawn hours of November 7 and inflicted about two hundred casualties before being driven off. Although Harrison’s force suffered twice as many casualties as the Indians, it was able the next day to burn the abandoned Prophet’s Town, thus enabling Harrison to call the Battle of Tippecanoe a victory.

  Although the Madison government claimed that this ambiguous victory had brought peace to the Northwest frontier, Westerners in the region knew differently and stressed their continued vulnerability to Indian attacks, especially if the Indians were supported by the British in Canada. It was not surprising therefore that an invasion of Canada became central to America’s war plans in 1812. Not only would such an invasion help to pressure the British to make peace, but it would end their influence with the Northwestern Indians once and for all and bring about Britain’s full compliance with the peace treaty of 1783. Although Madison’s government always denied that it intended to annex Canada, it had no doubt, as Secretary of State Monroe told the British government in June 1812, that once the United States forces occupied the British provinces, it would be “difficult to relinquish territory which had been conquered.”39

  Besides the possibility of removing the Indian threat, the Republicans had other reasons for wanting to take Canada from Great Britain: they thought it was already filled with Americans. Many Loyalists who had fled the Revolution lived in Canada, and since the 1790s perhaps fifty thousand American citizens, many frustrated with the archaic system of landholding in New York, had left the United States in search of cheap land and had moved into the southwest corner of Lower Canada (present-day Quebec) and into Upper Canada (present-day Ontario, and southwest of Lower Canada). With so many Americans willing to leave the United States for cheap land, it is no wonder the Republicans were worried about the strength of their countrymen’s attachment to the nation. Canada was becoming less a sterile snow-clad wilderness and more a collection of substantial British colonies that the United States could no longer ignore. Smuggling over the northern border had undermined the embargo and weakened other Republican efforts to restrict trade with Britain. Moreover, evidence mounted that Canada was becoming a major source of supply for both the British West Indies and the mother country itself, especially for timber. With the development of Canada freeing the British Empire from its vulnerability to American economic restrictions, President Madison was bound to be concerned about Canada.

  ALTHOUGH GROWING, Canada seemed especially vulnerable to an American invasion. It had only about five hundred thousand people compared to the nearly eight million in the United States, and it was still economically rather undeveloped. Since two-thirds of the people of Lower Canada were of French descent, their loyalty to the British crown was doubtful. Upper Canada, that is, the Niagara area, which was the most likely site of an invasion, had a white population of only seventy-seven thousand, of whom one third or more were American in origin and perhaps sympathy.40 In mid-July 1812 Governor Daniel Tompkins of New York was sure that half the militias of both Lower and Upper Canada “would join our standard.”41 Since the Canadian frontier from Quebec to Mackinac Island at the junction of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan stretched well over a thousand miles, it seemed difficult to defend. Jefferson expressed the confidence of many Republicans in 1812 when he predicted the invasion of Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.”42

  The plan for invasion involved a three-pronged attack on the areas of Detroit, Niagara, and Montreal. Although Montreal was supposedly the main objective, the unwillingness of Massachusetts and Connecticut to supply militia for the assault on Montreal made the western attack on the Detroit frontier seem more feasible. William Hull and his two thousand troops were to march from Ohio to take the British Fort Malden south of Detroit. Hull’s officers, who jealously quarreled over precedence with one another, had little confidence in their commander, dismissing him as old and indecisive even before the force set out. When Hull’s troops reached the Canadian border in July 1812, two hundred members of the Ohio militia refused to cross over into Canada, claiming that they were a defensive force only and could not fight outside of the United States.

  Hull hoped for little or no resistance. He urged the people of Canada to remain in their homes or join the American cause; perhaps as many as five hundred did in fact desert the Canadian militia. Although Fort Malden was only lightly defended, Hull was worried about his supply lines and kept delaying his attack. When he learned that Fort Mackinac, at the junction of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, had surrendered to British forces on July 17, he became more apprehensive, fearing that Indians from the north would now descend on him. Without Fort Mackinac in American hands, Hull believed that Fort Dearborn at the present site of Chicago could not be held, and he ordered its evacuation, which eventually took place on August 15. On August 6, 1812, Hull finally ordered an attack on Fort Malden, only to cancel it the next day when he heard that British regulars were on their way to the threatened fort. When Hull next decided to retreat to Detroit, many of the militia officers wanted to remove him from command, but the regular officers stopped the mutiny.

  The British commander, Major General Isaac Brock, the governor of Upper Canada, took advantage of Hull’s timidity and mobilized his troops to march on Detroit. His force included a mixture of two hundred fifty regulars, four hundred militia, and about six hundred Indians under Tecumseh’s leadership. Capitalizing on Hull’s dread of Indian atrocities, Brock arranged to have a bogus document fall into American hands in order to feign having more Indian troops than he actually had. Hull, paralyzed with fear that he was cut off from his supplies and faced an overwhelming force, including Indians that might massacre the women and children in the Detroit fort, surrendered on August 16, 1812, without firing a shot. After taking Detroit, Brock annexed the whole territory of Michigan and made it part of the dominion of His Majesty George III.

  Hull’s surrender of Detroit shocked everyone, and rather unfairly he alone was held responsible for the disaster. Hull was eventually courtmartialed for cowardice and neglect of duty and was sentenced to death, with a recommendation of mercy because of his Revolutionary War service and advanced age. Madison accepted this recommendation and commuted Hull’s punishment to dismissal from the army. With the loss of the forts at Detroit, Mackinac, and Dearborn, the whole Northwest lay open to British invasion and Indian raids.

  Although the administration wanted someone else to command the Western forces, it was compelled by local pressure, especially from Kentucky, to appoint William Henry Harrison, the alleged hero of Tippecanoe, as the commanding general to replace Hull. In the winter of 1812–1813 Harrison sent a detachment of eight hundred fifty troops to protect settlers at Frenchtown eighteen miles southwest of Malden (now Monroe, Michigan). Attacked on January 21, 1813, at the River Raisin by a force of about twelve hundred British and Indians, the outnumbered Americans surrendered. When the British troops had left with the American prisoners who could walk, the Indians allied to the British became drunk and massacred dozens of the wounded prisoners who had been left behind. “Remember the Raisin” became an American rallying cry throughout the Northwest.

  The invasions of the eastern portions of Canada were no more successful. Although Major General Henry Dearborn was presumably responsible for the area from Niagara eastward to New England, he scarcely seems to have comprehended what was expected of him. As customs collector for Boston, he was reluctant to leave New England. Although he had helped design the invasion plan and had received explicit instructions, he nevertheless wondered to the secretary of war about “who was to have command of the operations in Upper Canada; I take it for granted,” he sa
id, “that my command does not extend to that distant quarter.” Instead of launching an attack on Montreal from Albany and thus relieving some of the pressure on Hull in the West, Dearborn spent months in New England trying to recruit men and build coastal defenses.43

  When Dearborn seemed confused about his responsibilities for the Niagara campaign, Governor Daniel Tompkins of New York took matters into his own hands and appointed Stephen Van Rensselaer commander-in-chief of the New York militia. Although Van Rensselaer had no military experience, he was a Federalist, and Tomkins thought this appointment might ease some of the Federalist opposition to the war. In October 1812 Van Rensselaer with four thousand troops successfully attacked Queenston Heights on the British side of the Niagara River, and in the process killed the heroic General Brock, who had returned from Detroit to take command of the British defense. When Van Rensselaer sought to send the New York militia to reinforce the troops in Queenston Heights, they, like the militia in the West, developed constitutional scruples and refused to leave the country. Consequently, the American force, numbering about a thousand men, was soon overwhelmed by British reinforcements and on October 13, 1812, was forced to surrender. The Battle of Queenston Heights became a rich site of memory for the victorious Canadians and an important stimulus for their own emerging nationalism. Brock’s death turned him into a cult figure in Upper Canada, and numerous streets, towns, and a university were named after him.44

  In the East, General Dearborn had not yet begun to move against Canada. Only in November 1812, after prodding by the exasperated secretary of war, did Dearborn’s army, numbering between six and eight thousand men, set out from Albany northward toward Canada. Again the state militia refused to cross the border, and Dearborn abandoned his feeble attempt at an invasion. His entire venture, recalled a contemporary, was a “miscarriage without even the heroism of disaster.”45

  The three-pronged American campaign against Canada in 1812 had been a complete failure. What was worse, the failure was due less to the superiority of the Canadian resistance and more to the inability of the United States to recruit and manage its armies.

  THE WAR AT SEA IN 1812 helped to take some of the sting out of that failure. Although the Republicans in Congress had decided in January 1812 not to build any new ships, seventeen ships, including seven frigates, still survived from the naval buildup during the Quasi-War with France in the late 1790 s. The U.S. Navy had no large ships of the line that carried seventy-four guns, but three of the frigates, the USS Constitution, the USS President, and the USS United States, had forty-four guns and were bigger and sturdier than most other foreign frigates. Although Britain had hundreds of vessels, they were spread about the world. In 1812 Britain had only one ship of the line and nine frigates operating out of its North American stations at Halifax and Newfoundland.

  The Constitution, captained by Isaac Hull, thirty-nine-year-old nephew of General William Hull, was the first American warship to acquire fame in the war. After escaping from a British squadron in July 1812 in one of the longest and most exciting chases in naval history, the Constitution on August 19 defeated HMS Guerrière, a thirty-eight-gun frigate under the command of Captain Richard Dacres, who earlier had contemptuously challenged the American naval commanders to frigate-to-frigate duels at sea. When during the engagement, which took place 750 miles east of Boston, a British broadside bounced harmlessly off the Constitution’s hull, one of the crew supposedly exclaimed that “her sides are made of iron,” and the legend of “Old Ironsides” was born. The London Times was stunned by the American victory. Since “never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American,” the paper predicted that the victory was likely to make the Americans “insolent and confident.”46

  As a consequence of the Constitution’s victory, Madison’s government gave up its original idea of keeping the navy bottled up in the harbors as floating batteries. Instead, America’s ships were divided into three squadrons and ordered to fan out over the central Atlantic trade routes and to take advantage of every opportunity to meet and destroy the enemy. In October 1812 the United States under the command of thirty-three-year-old Stephen Decatur, the hero of Tripoli in 1804, showed brilliant seamanship in defeating and capturing HMS Macedonian six hundred miles west of the Canary Islands. A prize crew sailed the Macedonian, which was only two years old, across the ocean—a very risky venture—and into the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island. Since the Macedonian was the first and only British frigate ever brought into an American port as a prize of war, its capture made Decatur a hero all over again. The officers and crew of the United States received $300,000 in prize money, the largest award made for the capture of a single ship during the war.47

  A series of successful single-ship engagements followed, including the victory of the Constitution, now captained by William Bainbridge, over HMS Java off the coast of Brazil in December 1812. During the war there were eight sloop and brig engagements, and in all but one the American ships were victorious. Losing these single-ship engagements was a new experience for British seamen. In twenty years of naval warfare and numerous single engagements between British and French frigates, only once, in 1807, had the British ever been beaten. “It is a cruel mortification,” said one British minister, “to be beat by these second-hand Englishmen upon our own element.” In all, the American navy in 1812 defeated or captured seven British warships, including three frigates, and fifty merchantmen and lost only three small warships, each with eighteen guns or less.48

  But the real American threat to Britain on the high seas came from the country’s privateers, the naval equivalent of the militia and what one Republican called “our cheapest and best navy.”49 Most of the five hundred registered privateers were small vessels that made only a single cruise; only about two hundred of the five hundred were large enough to carry fifty men or more. Although there may have been only fifty privateers at sea at any one time, they were generally very profitable. Operating off the coast of Canada and in the West Indies, the American privateers captured 450 prizes in the first six months of the war. (Throughout the remainder of the war they would capture 850 more British merchant vessels.) The most successful privateers were James D’Wolf’s Yankee, sailing out of Bristol, Rhode Island, which captured eight British vessels valued at $300,000, and the Rossie, operating out of Baltimore, which seized eighteen ships worth nearly $1,500,000. American privateers did enough damage to British trade in the West Indies to temporarily force insurance rates up to 30 percent of the value of the cargo.50 Although America’s successes at sea in 1812 were of little strategic significance in determining the outcome of the war—the British navy soon recovered its dominance of the oceans—they did boost American morale and help to compensate for the disgraceful defeats on land.

  IN 1812 AMERICA’S NAVAL SUCCESSES may even have helped Madison win a second term as president. Although two-thirds of the Republican congressmen supported Madison as the nominee of the party (with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts as the vice-presidential nominee), many of the Northern Republican congressmen, disillusioned with Madison’s leadership and the dominance of the Virginia Dynasty, wanted someone more sympathetic to Northern commerce. Consequently, Republican members of the New York state legislature selected DeWitt Clinton, the handsome and popular mayor of New York City, as their Republican nominee for the presidency. The Federalists decided to nominate no one but instead to support Clinton without formally endorsing him, for fear of undermining his Republican backing outside of New York.

  In the November 1812 election Clinton carried all the seaboard states from New Hampshire through Delaware and part of Maryland. Madison won all the rest, including Pennsylvania, which further established its role as the keystone state in the Republican party. The revelation that the Federalists were supporting Clinton helped carry Pennsylvania for the president. Madison received 128 electoral votes to Clinton’s 89, a smaller margin of victory than the president had received in 1808. The Republicans lost se
ats in Congress, especially in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The Federalists captured control of most of the states of New England as well as the states of New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. By taking advantage of the mismanagement of the war and the frightening news of the savage Baltimore riots in the summer of 1812, the Federalists made their most striking electoral gains since the 1790 s. The Federalists mistakenly thought the fortunes of the Republicans were dying and theirs were on the rise.

  THE GOVERNMENT STRUGGLED to recover from the failures of 1812. As long as Britain was holding American territory and winning the war, it was impossible to make the former mother country come to terms. Canada had to be successfully invaded, and that meant the United States’ military forces would have to be beefed up and reformed. In the winter of 1812–1813 Madison replaced Secretary of War William Eustis with John Armstrong, a New Yorker and the leader of the abortive Newburgh mutiny in 1783 (the attempt by some Continental Army officers to pressure the Congress), and Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton with William Jones, a Philadelphia merchant and former congressman. Congress finally agreed that the country needed a navy and in January 1813 voted to construct six additional frigates and four ships of the line. Prodded by Madison, Congress also provided for an additional twenty-two thousand regular troops and raised the pay of the soldiers in order to spur enlistments. It added staff officers and improved the ordering and distribution of supplies to the army. Under these wartime pressures Republican congressmen were being compelled to swallow many of their principles.

  What they were not willing to give up, at least not easily, was their traditional opposition to any kind of internal taxation. But there were problems. If the Republicans were to avoid imposing internal taxes, they needed the revenue from customs duties on imports, most of which were British goods. Yet the Non-Intercourse Act, which was part of the war effort, presumably prohibited the importation of British goods. Nonimportation made no sense, declared Congressman Langdon Cheves, a War Hawk from South Carolina. “It puts out one eye of your enemy, it is true,” he said in December 1812, “but it puts out both your own. It exhausts the purse, it exhausts the spirit, and paralyses the sword of the nation.”51