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

by Gordon S. Wood

  Although most Republicans disagreed with Cheves and refused to abandon the weapon of commercial discrimination, they were still reluctant to resort to the imposition of any internal taxes. Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin had urged internal taxes from the beginning, which had helped provoke the most radical Republicans into labeling him “the Rat—in the Treasury.”52 Now at the outset of 1813 Gallatin faced having to pay for the war by borrowing and by issuing treasury notes. But borrowing proved difficult, especially with the New England Federalists working to stymie all lending of money to the government. In March 1813 Gallatin informed the president that the government had scarcely enough funds to carry on for a month. But an offer of Russian mediation of the conflict, which the United States readily accepted, improved the prospects for peace, and Gallatin was able to extract enough money from creditors to see the government through the year 1813. Finally, in June 1813 the Republicans closed their severely divided ranks enough to pass a comprehensive tax bill, which included a direct tax on land, a duty on imported salt, and excise taxes on stills, retailers, auction sales, sugar, carriages, and negotiable paper. All these taxes, however, were not to go into effect until the beginning of 1814—revealing once again, as one Virginia congressman put it, that “everyone is for taxing every body, except himself and his Constituents.”53

  THE GOVERNMENT’S PLAN for the campaign of 1813 was to attack Kingston, Britain’s major naval base on Lake Ontario, York (present-day Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and then Fort George and Fort Erie, which controlled the Niagara River. Since America’s failures in 1812 had been due in large part to Britain’s control of the Great Lakes, especially Ontario and Erie, the U.S. government was determined to reverse that situation. Believing that Kingston was too strongly garrisoned, General Dearborn and his naval opposite Commodore Isaac Chauncey decided to attack York instead and destroy the shipping there. In late April 1813 a detachment of sixteen hundred men under the command of Brigadier General Zebulon M. Pike, the explorer who had discovered Pike’s Peak in 1806, sailed out of Sackets Harbor, on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, and attacked York on the northwest corner of the lake. The Americans overwhelmed the defenders of York, which had only six hundred inhabitants, but suffered heavy casualties, including General Pike. They then proceeded to loot and burn the town, including its public buildings, aided by disgruntled British subjects who came from the countryside. When the Americans evacuated the town, they took with them provisions and military stores and £2, 500 from the public treasury; they even took some books from the subscription library, most of which were soon returned. (But the Canadians did not get the government’s mace back until 1934.) Commodore Chauncey made another destructive raid on York in July, taking what little public property that was left. The British remembered the burning of their Canadian capital when in the following year they burned Washington.54

  The Americans had less success in the Niagara region. After taking Fort George in May 1813, the American forces failed to follow up their initial victory, and the British soon recovered. Fierce fighting went on through the rest of the year with the British eventually ousting the Americans from both Fort George and Fort Niagara. By December 1813 not only had the Americans lost control of the Niagara frontier, but General Dearborn had been relieved of his command, to be replaced by the notorious General James Wilkinson.55

  Although the Americans were not able to gain control of Lake Ontario in 1813, their experience on Lake Erie was different. In the spring of 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry, a twenty-seven-year-old naval officer from Rhode Island, began assembling a fleet of nine vessels at Presque Isle (present-day Erie, Pennsylvania); and in the late summer he sailed for Put-in-Bay, off South Bass Island toward the western end of the lake. On September 10, 1813, Perry’s squadron traded broadsides with a smaller British squadron for over two terrible and bloody hours. When Perry’s flagship, the USS William D. Lawrence (twenty guns), was reduced to a battered hulk, he transferred to the USS Niagara (twenty guns) and carried on the fight for another hour, finally forcing the British ships to surrender. On the back of an old letter Perry scribbled his famous message to General Harrison: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”56 His victory could scarcely have been more significant, for it enabled the Americans to reverse all the defeats they had suffered in 1812.

  With the loss of the British fleet on Lake Erie, Sir Henry Proctor, the British commander in charge of the newly acquired Michigan Territory, knew his situation had become untenable. He thus decided to withdraw from Malden and Detroit and, with his Indian allies led by Tecumseh, retreat northward to the Thames River. Following close on Proctor’s tail was General Harrison with three thousand men, mostly Kentucky volunteers commanded by Congressman Richard M. Johnson, on leave from his legislative duties. Harrison crossed into Canada and on October 5, 1813, caught up with Proctor at Moraviantown. With only 430 soldiers and about six hundred Indian warriors, Proctor’s bedraggled and demoralized force was quickly overrun. In this Battle of the Thames (known to Canadians as the Battle of Moraviantown) Johnson, or one of his troops, killed Tecumseh, shattering his Indian confederacy. When the Indians learned of Tecumseh’s death, recalled a member of the Kentucky militia, they “gave the loudest yells I ever heard from human beings and that ended the fight.” Johnson used his claim that he had killed the famous Indian chief to gain the vice-presidency in 1836.57

  Earlier Tecumseh had helped inspire some Creek Indians, known as Red Sticks, into resisting the American encroachments on the Southern frontier. In 1810 the United States had annexed most of West Florida. Then in 1813, following the outbreak of the war, American troops occupied the last remaining piece of West Florida, the district of Mobile that reached to the Perdido River. (This turned out to be the only piece of conquered territory retained by the United States as a result of the war.) At the same time, clashes among the Creeks themselves, who occupied most of present-day Alabama, escalated into a larger war with the United States. In August 1813 a party of Creeks overran Fort Mims, a stockade located forty miles north of Mobile in southeastern Mississippi Territory, and massacred hundreds of Americans. Despite being warned, the commander of the fort had doubted the possibility of any Indian attack and had left the gates of the stockade open. The result was horrific. “Indians, Negroes, white men, women and children lay in one promiscuous ruin,” declared a member of an American burial party. “All were scalped, and the females of every age were butchered in a manner which neither decency nor language will permit me to describe.” Although the attacking Creeks lost a hundred or so of their men, they killed nearly 250 whites and perhaps another 150 blacks and friendly Indians. This massacre sent shock waves throughout the Southwest.58

  Andrew Jackson, a major general in the Tennessee militia, took charge and moved south with several thousand Tennessee volunteers, including a twenty-seven-year-old Davy Crockett and a twenty-year-old Sam Houston. Jackson fought a series of inconclusive engagements through the fall and winter of 1813–1814. Jackson was having problems holding his army together, but, believing that no army could exist “where order & Subordination are wholly disregarded,” and being a disciplinarian like none other, he knew what to do. Twice he raised his own gun to stop militiamen from leaving, and finally he had a young soldier who had refused to obey an order court-martialed and shot, the first such execution since the Revolution. The lesson took, and, as Jackson pointed out, “a strict obedience afterwards characterized the army.” With his militiamen now more frightened of him than the Indians, Jackson led his army against a band of a thousand or more Red Sticks and on March 27, 1814, at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River, wiped it out. With over eight hundred of the Creek warriors killed in the battle against a loss of only forty-five Americans, even tough-minded “Old Hickory” had to admit that the “carnage was dreadful.” “My people are no more!” cried a surviving chief, Red Eagle. “Their bones are bleaching on the plains of the Tallushatchee, Talladega, [and] Emuckfaw.”59

  On Au
gust 9, 1814, all the Creeks were forced to sign the harsh Treaty of Fort Jackson. Despite instructions from Washington to the contrary, Jackson sought to punish even those Indians who were allies of the United States. They had, he said, “forfeited all right to the Territory we have conquered.”60 The treaty gave to the whites over twenty-two million acres of land—more than half of the territory belonging to the Creeks. Although his superiors in Washington were furious, Westerners were elated. Jackson had broken the Creek nation and, as he himself boasted, had seized the “cream of the Creek country, opening up a communication from Georgia to Mobile.” Although victory in this Creek war did not strategically affect the war with Great Britain, it “could fairly be described,” concludes one historian, “as the most decisive and most significant victory won by the United States in the entire War of 1812.”61

  DESPITE AMERICAN VICTORIES in the Northwest and Southwest, however, the strategic center of the northern frontier along the Niagara and St. Lawrence rivers remained deadlocked. After two years of campaigning, the Americans had not been able to capture and hold any Canadian territory. Equally frustrating was the war at sea. By 1813 Britain’s great naval superiority was finally making itself felt. Needing American foodstuffs in the West Indies and the Iberian Peninsula, where the British army was busy fighting the French, Britain at first had left American trade essentially untouched. And always there were Americans eager to earn money supplying the British. But beginning in December 1812 Britain began blockading Delaware and the Chesapeake; and by mid-1813 it extended its naval blockade from Long Island to the Mississippi. New England was left open until 1814 to allow the New Englanders to continue to supply Halifax and the Royal Navy offshore and to encourage that section’s separatist peace movement.

  By the end of 1813 nearly all of America’s warships were either destroyed or bottled up in their ports. With most of America’s merchant ships driven from the high seas, the country’s commerce was effectively stymied. Exports fell from a peak of $ 108 million in 1807 to $ 27 million in 1813 and $ 7 million in 1814. Imports plummeted from a high of $ 138 million in 1807 to less than $ 13 million by 1814. The government’s revenue fell as well, from over $ 13 million in 1811 to $ 6 million by 1814. Still, a great deal of illegal trade went on with Canada in the Northeast and with the Southeast through Amelia Island in Florida, just south of the Georgia border, and it was not easy to stop. As one enterprising American smuggler recalled, “Men will always run great risks—when great personal profits are expected to be realized.” In 1813 an American lieutenant and his soldiers attempted to arrest thirteen suspected smugglers operating out of a little New York town on the border with Canada. But they quickly discovered that the community was not at all supportive of their efforts. The smugglers were soon released from jail, and instead the lieutenant was arrested; his commander, General Pike, had to bail him out.62

  Because of this excessive leakage, Madison at the end of 1813 made one final effort at an embargo. In December Congress passed the most restrictive measure it had ever enacted. The act forbade all American ships from leaving port, prohibited all exports, outlawed the coasting trade, and gave government officials broad powers of enforcement. The act was so draconian that Congress had to spend the next several months softening some of its effects. Finally, at the end of March 1814—less than four months after he had recommended the new commercial restrictions—Madison, under immense pressure to resume trade both for revenue and diplomatic reasons, called for the repeal of the embargo and the NonImportation Act.

  Although there was severe fighting at Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane in the Niagara region in July 1814, it was inconclusive, and the British decided to take the war to the United States. They intended to invade New York at Lake Champlain and, taking advantage of New England’s sympathy for the British cause, possibly break up the Union. As a diversion to help the Champlain invasion, they planned on bombarding and raiding the Atlantic and Chesapeake coasts. Finally, they aimed to launch an attack on New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. With Napoleon’s abdication in April of 1814—a disaster in Republican eyes—more British soldiers and resources could now be directed at America. Up to now the American war had been an absurd sideshow for the British; indeed, the editor of the Edinburgh Review thought that half the people of Britain did not even realize that their country was at war with America.

  The British invaded New York in the late summer of 1814 along the route General John Burgoyne had followed in 1777, with an imposing force of fifteen thousand men, many of them veterans of the Napoleonic War, perhaps, as one historian has said, “the finest army ever to campaign on American soil.”63 Yet the army’s success depended on British control of Lake Champlain, and that was not to be. On September 11, 1814, a thirty-year-old American naval commander, Thomas Macdonough, and his fleet of four ships and ten gunboats decisively defeated a British squadron of more or less equal size in Plattsburgh Bay. Macdonough had set multiple anchors with springs on their cables that allowed them to wind about, that is, rotate 180 degrees and bring fresh batteries to bear on the enemy. He showed brilliant seamanship that in the opinion of one historian entitles him to be remembered as “the best American naval officer” in the war.64 The British defeat, one of the most crucial in the struggle, compelled its invading army to withdraw to Canada.

  The British were much more successful in their invasion of the Chesapeake. During the previous year the British navy had plundered the coastal towns of Chesapeake Bay. But now the British planned a more serious assault focusing on Baltimore and Washington, the American capital. American officials were slow to perceive the danger, believing that since Washington had no strategic significance the British were not likely to attack it. By mid-August 1814 the British admiral, Sir Alexander Cochrane, and General Robert Ross had arrived in the Chesapeake with two dozen warships and over four thousand British regulars. On August 24 the British soldiers easily overran a motley collection of American militia at Bladensburg, Maryland, just northeast of the District of Columbia. This rout allowed the British to invade Washington that night and burn the White House, the Capitol (which contained the Library of Congress), and other public buildings. When Rear Admiral George Cockburn, the British commander of the Royal Marines and the officer most insistent on attacking Washington, came upon the office of the National Intelligencer that night, he was determined to get revenge. The Intelligencer had been especially critical of Cockburn, portraying him as something of a barbarian. The British commander ordered the destruction of the newspaper’s offices and its printer’s type. “Be sure that all the c’s are destroyed,” he told his men, “so the rascals can’t abuse my name any-more.”65

  The British justified the burning of Washington as retaliation for the Americans’ burning of York in Canada the previous year. While President Madison was with the army outside the capital, his wife, Dolley, gathered up state papers and some White House treasures, including a Stuart portrait of George Washington, and escaped in the nick of time. The British forces led by Ross and Cockburn discovered a table set in the White House with forty covers. The officers dined on the food and wine, with Cockburn drinking a toast to “Jemmy” before he ordered the presidential mansion burned. The flames of the burning buildings in the capital could be seen nearly thirty miles away.66

  After plundering Alexandria, the British moved on Baltimore. Admiral Cockburn and General Ross landed their forty-five hundred marines and soldiers on September 12, 1814, and defeated a force of thirty-two hundred American militiamen, but at the cost of Ross’s life. Meanwhile, Admiral Cochrane bombarded Fort McHenry, firing over fifteen hundred rounds in a twenty-five-hour period on September 13 and 14. A Georgetown Federalist lawyer, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the heavy British bombardment; when he saw the American flag still flying the next morning over the fort, he was inspired to write the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When set to the music of an English drinking song, Key’s creation, according to the recollection of Julia Anne Hiero
nymus Tevis, a young woman going to school in Washington, D.C., in 1814, became a stirring success. She thought “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ should be a consecrated song to every American heart,” not because of “any particular merit in the composition,” but because of “the recollection of something noble in the character of a young and heroic nation.”67 By mid-century the song was widely considered to be the country’s unofficial national anthem, a status the Congress made official in 1931.

  DESPITE THE AMERICANS’ ABILITY to hold Fort McHenry, which compelled the British to withdraw from the Chesapeake, they now faced a series of crises. Blamed for the burning of the capital, John Armstrong resigned as secretary of war and was replaced by James Monroe, who continued as secretary of state as well. The government was having difficulty raising troops and keeping those it had recruited. Over 12 percent of American troops deserted during the war, almost half of them in 1814. Paying for the war was becoming almost impossible. The government’s attempts to borrow money failed miserably as potential lenders refused to buy American bonds, especially as the Federalists continued to discourage lending to the government. In the summer of 1814 many of the proliferating state banks were forced to suspend specie payments for the extraordinary amount of paper notes they had put in circulation since the demise of the Bank of the United States in 1811. Without a national bank the government was unable to transfer funds across the country or to pay its mounting bills. In the fall of 1814 Treasury Secretary George W. Campbell said the government needed $ 50 million, but he had no idea how to raise it. In October he resigned as secretary of the treasury, and in November the government defaulted on the national debt. For all intents and purposes the public credit was defunct, and the United States government was bankrupt.