American protests over this practice nearly boiled over into war fever in 1807 when the British frigate Leopard stopped the American warship Chesapeake just outside its namesake bay. James Barron was the Chesapeake’s commanding officer, and because he did not expect to encounter a hostile environment until he arrived in the Mediterranean, he was apparently unconcerned that the Chesapeake’s deck was littered with crates of supplies, its guns secured, and its powder and shot stowed below.* When the Leopard signaled that it had dispatches to deliver, Barron obligingly hove to and waited for the small boat containing a blue-coated lieutenant to be rowed across. The “dispatches” turned out to be a letter from the British captain demanding that three men, all of them deserters from the Royal Navy whom he believed to be on board the Chesapeake, be turned over to him. Barron was convinced that there were no British deserters on his ship and refused the request. The lieutenant made it clear that he was under specific orders and that serious consequences might result if Barron did not accede. When Barron remained adamant and sent the lieutenant back to his ship, the Leopard opened fire. Unable to reply due to the disorganized state of the gundeck, the officers and men on the hapless Chesapeake simply absorbed the punishment until finally a single gun could be fired in a gesture of defiance before Barron ordered the flag lowered. As the white smoke from the guns drifted away, the lieutenant returned and claimed his three deserters, and the Leopard departed.7
News of this outrage raced through the States. Impressing sailors from merchant vessels was bad enough, but opening fire on an American ship of war elevated the dispute to a crisis. President Thomas Jefferson came under tremendous pressure to do something. Jefferson, however, saw little national benefit, other than the mitigation of hurt pride, to be gained from a war with England, and his reaction was muted. Still, his complaints were sufficient to secure an apology from the British, who were no more eager for war than he was. The British commodore who had ordered the recovery of the deserters was recalled, and two of the seized men were returned (one had already been hanged for desertion). Nevertheless, American anger and bitterness lingered as British “insults” to American nationality and pride continued.
The unlucky American frigate USS Chesapeake under way. The Chesapeake not only was the victim of HMS Leopard in 1807 but was subsequently defeated and captured by HMS Shannon in the War of 1812 in the battle that claimed the life of James Lawrence. Lawrence’s dying words—“Don’t give up the ship”—inspired the flag that Perry flew during the Battle of Lake Erie. (U.S. Navy)
Less dramatic but equally divisive were the disputes between America and Britain over economic policy. By 1806 Britain had gained unquestioned command of the sea, due largely to Lord Nelson’s spectacular victory at Trafalgar in October 1805 over the combined fleets of France and Spain. For their part, the French had gained dominance on land due to Napoleon’s equally spectacular victories over the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz (1805) and the Prussians at Jena-Auerstadt (1806). The British were masters of the sea; the French were masters of the land. Because neither side could effectively threaten the other, each side sought to apply indirect pressure through economic sanctions. Napoleon began the economic warfare by declaring from French-occupied Berlin that no European nation would henceforth be allowed to trade with England (the so-called Berlin Decrees). England reciprocated with an Order in Council proclaiming that all nations trading with France or its allies would be treated as hostile. Caught in the middle of these opposing declarations was the neutral United States. Jefferson tried to avoid entanglement by declaring an embargo on all American trade, a policy that failed to influence the great powers abroad and which led to widespread smuggling at home before it was finally repealed in 1809.8
A third source of conflict between the United States and Britain was British sympathy for and support of several of the western Indian tribes in the Old Northwest. Despite the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded the territory north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi to the United States, the British maintained close relations with the native tribes of the Northwest, and particularly the Iroquois. On one hand, such a policy was intended to keep the peace and protect the handful of Canadian trappers and traders who ventured into the region of the Great Lakes, but in addition, British support for the Indians was a deliberate strategy to counterbalance American influence in the area. Americans resented the continued British influence in the Northwest and suspected that British agents were deliberately encouraging Indian raids against American outposts.9
American suspicions increased in 1808 when the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh, brother of the visionary leader known as the Prophet, met with British officials at Fort Malden, on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, to urge that they form a military alliance to drive the Americans from the region. The British did not say yes, but neither did they say no. Tecumseh met with the Americans, too. In 1810 he told the American militia general William Henry Harrison that the western Indians would not sign any more treaties that gave away Indian lands, and that further encroachments by the Americans on those lands would be met with force. When Indian raids against American outposts continued, Harrison organized a campaign to capture and punish those who were conducting the raids. As his militia army approached the Prophet’s village on the Tippecanoe River in what is now central Indiana, the Indians struck. The Prophet had assured the warriors that American bullets could not harm them, and they attacked fearlessly, if improvidently. In the Battle of Tippecanoe (November 7, 1811) they suffered horrible losses, but they also killed or wounded nearly two hundred Americans before they were driven off, and the next day Harrison’s men burned the Prophet’s village.10
Frustrated and embittered by his brother’s defeat, Tecumseh again appealed to the British. This time he arrived at Fort Malden bearing a beaded belt, or wampum, that the British had given the Iroquois years earlier, after the French and Indian War, as a token of permanent friendship and support. Brandishing this token, Tecumseh called upon the British to honor their pledge. This time the British were more receptive. Having decided that war with America was now likely if not imminent, the British agent, Matthew Elliott, sent off a request for five hundred British troops to act in concert with the Indians in an attack on Fort Detroit once war commenced. Americans in the area were now convinced that this Anglo-Indian alliance was a direct threat to their security. In March 1812 the Niles Weekly Register declared flatly that the Indian raids on the frontier “are instigated and supported by the British in Canada.”11
The convergence of these events in Europe, on the high seas, and in the forests of the American Northwest brought the crisis in Anglo-American relations to a climax. One group of mostly western and southern congressmen, soon dubbed the “War Hawks,” argued that because British dominance at sea was insurmountable, the best means of bringing England to account was to threaten her Canadian possessions. It was obvious that the United States lacked the resources to create a navy that could confront the British on the high seas. But the British commitment to the ongoing European war meant that British Canada was weakly garrisoned. The War Hawks argued that the invasion and occupation of Canada would not only suppress the Indian raids but also enable the Americans to hold Canada as a bargaining chip in the subsequent negotiations concerning both impressment and the hated Orders in Council. One of the prominent War Hawks, House Speaker Henry Clay, wrote a friend in 1813: “When the war commenced, Canada was not the end but the means; the object of the war being the redress of injuries, and Canada being the instrument by which that redress was to be obtained.”12
This new bellicosity led Congress to enact a number of measures during the winter of 1811–12 designed to put the country on a war footing. One act authorized an increase in the size of the regular army from ten thousand to thirty-five thousand; another authorized the president to call out a hundred thousand militia volunteers. When it came to naval preparations, however, Congress balked. A bill introduced by South Carolinian Langdon Cheves
to build ten new frigates failed to pass in either house, not because members believed that war could (or should) be avoided but because they perceived that the coming war was likely to be fought along the Canadian border and not on the high seas. Many congressmen were instinctively suspicious of standing naval forces and argued that a permanent naval establishment was likely to become a tool of oppression. After all, wasn’t British tyranny on the high seas the source of the current problem? “Navies,” Congressman William Bibb of Georgia insisted, “are calculated to produce mischief.”13
The British were not intimidated by the American preparations, but neither were they eager to add one more nation to their long list of foes in a war that had been going on intermittently for nearly two decades. In June 1812, therefore, the British repealed the Orders in Council, but it was too late. That same month the U.S. Congress declared war.
The American decision to declare war was astonishingly reckless. To be sure, Britain was engaged in a world war with Napoleonic France, which would prevent her from focusing all of her national strength against the United States, but the disparity in power between Britain and America, particularly at sea, was an unbridgeable gulf. The U.S. Navy in 1812 consisted of a total of 17 ships of war and 165 harbor defense gunboats, most of which carried only a single cannon and which could not operate on the high seas. By contrast, the Royal Navy had over 1,000 warships on its navy list, 719 of them in commission, 261 laid up in ordinary, and 62 more under construction. And many of those ships were double- or triple-deck ships of the line carrying up to a hundred or more guns each. A fair measure of the disparity in naval power between the opponents is the fact that the Royal Navy had three times as many ships as the United States Navy had guns.14
The War Hawks insisted that this didn’t matter. They hoped to seize Canada with a militia army and hold it as a hostage for future negotiations, and they insisted that the conquest would be an easy one: “a mere matter of marching,” as more than one described it. The War Hawks noted that Britain had wrested Canada from the French less than fifty years before, and they insisted that the allegiance of the population to British rule was questionable. In fact, Americans convinced themselves that the Canadians would not fight, or at least that they would not fight effectively. One congressman described them as “a debased race of poltroons” who would bolt and run at “the mere sight of an army of the United States.”15 But in order to overawe the “poltroons” of Canada, the United States would first need an army, and in spite of congressional authorization to raise new troops, its army was no more ready for war than its navy.
In 1812 the U.S. Army comprised two very different elements: a “frontier constabulary” consisting of small garrisons strung out across the western frontier to keep an eye on the Indians, and a quite separate body of men who were assigned to the coastal artillery along the Atlantic seaboard.16 But there was no field force; no “army” that could march to Canada or anyplace else. Where would this “army of the United States” come from? The answer was the militia.
The American citizen soldier was then (and to a certain extent remains today) part of American popular culture. The prototype was the Minuteman who stood on Lexington Green to defy the redcoats in 1775. Despite Washington’s subsequent skepticism about the value of militia troops during the Revolutionary War, an American myth emerged about the fighting prowess of the militia. According to this myth, America’s security depended on its farmer-soldiers, men who in time of danger would seize their muskets from over the mantelpiece, muster on the village common, and march off to war to defend the Republic from either the heathens on the frontier or the hired legions of a European enemy.* By 1812 the idea that the nation’s military strength rested in its militia had become a matter of faith. In fact, the militia had never performed all that well in battle, and in any case by 1812 the leaders of the various militia units were either superannuated leftovers from the Revolution or, more often, ambitious politicians who had obtained militia commissions for their social cachet or political value. A militia army meant indifferent discipline, insecure logistic support, and questionable leadership.
Despite that, American optimism was not entirely misplaced, for Canada was indeed vulnerable. In 1812 Canada was not the continental giant it is today; it consisted primarily of a series of towns and villages along the valley of the St. Lawrence River. Some likened British Canada to a tree lying on its side: the “roots” of this tree spread out from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, past Newfoundland, and into the Atlantic Ocean; the “trunk” was the St. Lawrence River, reaching inland past Quebec and Montreal to the “branches” of the tree, which were the five Great Lakes. “Lower Canada” referred to Quebec and the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence near the roots of the tree (even though they appear above the rest of Canada on a map), and “Upper Canada” meant the area south and west of Montreal bounded by Lakes Ontario and Erie to the south and Huron to the north. To kill this tree, it was fairly obvious that Americans should aim to sever the trunk, and the obvious place to apply the ax was Montreal. An American thrust up the traditional invasion route of the Hudson River Valley and along the axis of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence would cut the upriver settlements off from the life-giving river, and Canada would fall.17
But it didn’t happen that way. A number of factors conspired to wreck this strategic plan before it even got started. First of all, the absence of a standing U.S. Army meant that a militia field army had to be assembled, and that took time. While time passed, Americans were distracted by other wartime demands. Most importantly, the British deliberately diverted attention from the vulnerable trunk of the Canadian tree to its branches by unleashing the Indian threat in the Northwest. The campaign that should have begun at Montreal, therefore, began instead at Detroit. And it began badly.
In June of 1812, while Congress debated a declaration of war against England and Napoleon launched his ill-fated invasion of Russia, an American brigadier general named William Hull was marching what he grandly called the “American Army of the Northwest” through the forests of Ohio and Michigan toward Detroit, cutting a military road as he went. A Revolutionary War veteran and governor of Michigan Territory, Hull had enough military experience and knowledge of the local geography to realize the dangers of launching an invasion of Upper Canada before gaining naval control of Lake Erie, and his first instinct was to postpone an offensive until the lake was secured. But under pressure to act quickly, Hull decided that an American conquest of the lake’s north shore would deny British warships their bases and thereby secure naval control without a navy. His first instinct was the correct one.
If Hull’s advance to Fort Detroit was less disastrous than Napoleon’s march to Moscow, his campaign was nevertheless a strategic calamity of the first order for the United States. To begin with, Hull chose to build his road through the Black Swamp, which slowed his progress considerably. Even more ill-considered was his decision to send his sick, and all of his baggage, ahead on the small schooner Cuyahoga across Lake Erie. On the very day that the Cuyahoga set sail, news arrived at British-held Fort Malden at the mouth of the Detroit River that Congress had declared war. When the Cuyahoga sailed blithely past Fort Malden en route to Detroit, six British soldiers in a rowboat stopped it, clambered on deck, and declared it to be a prize of war. The British thereby obtained not only a number of American prisoners, as well as most of the American army’s entrenching equipment and all of its baggage, but also a copy of Hull’s orders, his personal correspondence, and the army’s muster rolls. Only after Hull arrived at Detroit in early July did he learn that war had been declared and that he had already suffered a serious setback. The news bred caution in a man who was already supremely cautious.18
It was Napoleon Bonaparte (now en route to Moscow) who asserted that “in war, it is not men who make the difference, but the man.” What won battles, in other words, was not numbers but leadership. Whether that was true of Napoleon’s victories (and his defeats), it was certainly true of th
e campaign along the banks of the Detroit River in the summer of 1812. Though Hull commanded an army of twenty-six hundred men, including one regular U.S. Army regiment, he lacked the will to use his army effectively. By contrast, his British opponent, Major General Isaac Brock, had only about seven hundred men, half of them Canadian militia, but he possessed both a burning determination and a willingness to take risks.
Hull began his campaign by issuing a proclamation to the Canadians announcing that he bore them no hostility and offering “Peace, Liberty, and Security” as long as they did not interfere with his invasion. If they did, however, he promised “instant destruction.” Alas, Hull’s actions did not match his words. Once he finally crossed the Detroit River into Canadian territory to begin his march toward the British outpost at Fort Malden, he moved slowly and cautiously, stopping en route to build a blockhouse. Because the British controlled the waters of both Lake Erie and the Detroit River, all of Hull’s supplies had to come overland, which made them vulnerable to raids, and when Brock’s Indian allies raided his supply lines, Hull concluded that he was overextended. While a bolder man might have pressed on, Hull decided, as he said later, “that an attempt on Malden should never be made until there was an absolute certainty of success,” though he should have known as well as anyone that in war there is no such thing as “an absolute certainty.” Even so, Hull decided to give up his advance and fall back across the river to Fort Detroit.19
Decision at Sea Page 5