Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  There were also a couple of other reasons that some people in the country wanted us to go to war, though these weren’t stated quite as openly. One was that there were some questions about the exact part of Florida that had been acquired under the Louisiana Purchase, and some politicians wanted us to go down there and just grab all of it, including the part that was still controlled by Spain, which was Britain’s friend and ally at that time. And some other people thought that a war might give us a good excuse to move in the opposite direction and take over Canada.

  We weren’t prepared for war at all. The United States had never developed a military force that was of any consequence, and Madison was also harassed with generals who didn’t know what to do or how to do it, and harassed with a militia that didn’t want to fight and was willing to surrender. Madison wasn’t to blame for the situation because it was a development of the American attitude that had brought about the isolation of the government of the United States from the rest of the world. They didn’t think they would ever be invaded, or they would ever have to defend themselves, so, when the time came, they had no first-rate military minds trained to meet the situation. And Madison just didn’t have all the support he needed to win a war. A lot of people wanted to save their property without doing anything about it. They thought it would protect their property if they didn’t fall out with the British. They thought that maybe they wouldn’t be taken over even if the British won the war.

  This was the position in which Madison found himself at that time. The American Army consisted of about 3,000 soldiers, many of them drunkards and petty criminals who’d chosen military service as an alternative to going to jail, and these men were supplemented by only about an additional 7,000 militia, some of these of the same caliber as the regular soldiers. The people who ran the Army were men like General James Wilkinson, the fellow who collaborated with Burr when Burr tried to start his own country, and who was corrupt and stupid, and General William Hull, who’d been a good soldier in the Revolutionary War but was now grossly fat and clearly senile. The Navy consisted of about two dozen ships. And because a lot of people were against the war, that gasbag Daniel Webster and others insisted that Madison’s plan to draft men into the Army and Navy was unconstitutional; the governor of Connecticut refused to supply men for the services; the Connecticut assembly got so agitated that it announced that the state was pulling away from the United States and was “free, sovereign, and independent”; and other parts of New England also almost seceded. Naturally, the Federalists called it Mr. Madison’s War. Well, they do that every time. The War Between the States was called Lincoln’s War, and World War II was called Roosevelt’s War, and I suppose also Truman’s War though never in my presence. But I don’t think the War of 1812 was any more Madison’s war than it was most of the rest of the country’s. A clear majority of the people wanted to fight the British because of the commercial situation with which the country was faced.

  Madison just didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t get much in the way of advice from the people around him, either. His vice president was George Clinton, the fellow who had been one of his rivals for the presidency, and Clinton was so disgruntled at the fact that he was just vice president when he really wanted to be president that he made it clear he wasn’t going to do a thing except draw his paycheck. (The only thing for which Clinton is remembered is that the Bank of the United States’ charter came up for renewal in 1811, and there was an absolute tie in the vote in the Senate on whether or not to renew it. Clinton broke the tie by voting not to renew it. That was because Madison had made it clear that he wanted it renewed.)

  Clinton was sixty-nine when he became vice president, and he died in office in 1812 and was replaced by Elbridge Gerry, whose principal qualification for being given the job was that he was sixty-eight and party leaders felt he was probably too old to be any opposition to James Monroe, who was hoping for the presidency after Madison. Gerry also did little except die in office in 1814.

  Madison’s secretary of state was Robert Smith of Maryland, whose performance was so poor that Madison finally fired him in 1811, and he was replaced by Monroe. And Madison’s secretary of war was William Eustis of Massachusetts, who was also fired for poor performance in 1812, to be followed by John Armstrong of New York, also fired for the same reason in 1814, and then followed by Monroe, wearing two hats as secretary of state and secretary of war. And his secretary of the navy was Paul Hamilton of South Carolina, whose alcoholism became so noticeable that he had to quit in 1812 and was replaced by William Jones of Pennsylvania. As you can see, it was quite a mess.

  On June 1, 1812, Madison finally gave in and asked Congress to allow him to declare war on the British, and on June 18, Congress said that he could go ahead; the final vote was an unenthusiastic nineteen senators for it and thirteen senators against, seventy-nine representatives for it and forty-nine against.

  The war was a disaster for us from the start, and the worst thing about it was that it could have been avoided completely because, on June 16, the British finally voted to stop harassing American shipping. But we didn’t know anything about that because of the slowness of communications in those days, and we plunged blindly into battle. We were beaten at almost every turn. The plan was to start off the war by invading Canada, and even though the best British soldiers were still busy fighting against Napoleon, other British soldiers had no trouble at all preventing that from happening. As just one example of our defeats, an American army of about 2,000 men led by fat old Bill Hull started in that direction, but an army of British soldiers and Indian allies approached them in Detroit, and even though the American army was larger, Hull gave up in terror without a shot being fired on either side. He was later court-martialed for the surrender and sentenced to death, but pardoned in view of his good service as an officer in the Revolutionary War.

  The British also blockaded our east coast and prevented essential supplies from coming to us from other European countries for just about the entire war.

  And our most humiliating defeat came in almost the same way as the business in Detroit, when the British, who were determined to retaliate because Americans had destroyed some public buildings in Toronto, which was then called York, decided to try to take our capital. They landed with about 5,000 men near Washington, and even though the American commander, General W. H. Winder, sent an even larger force to meet them at Bladensburg, Maryland, the American soldiers turned and ran to hide in Washington after ten Americans were killed and forty were wounded. It was such a rout that a number of British soldiers, running closely after the Americans in the bright sunlight, were put out of action not by bullets but by sunstroke. The British then entered Washington and set fire to the Capitol Building and the White House, and Madison and his wife Dolley had to leave the White House in a hurry and head down into Virginia to keep from being captured. Dolley Madison ran around the building before they left to make sure that the pictures of George Washington and Martha Washington by Gilbert Stuart, which were part of the decorations of the East Room at the White House, were saved.

  Madison was actually exposed to gunfire himself. He wasn’t a coward by any means, and he took active charge of some of the battles. I think he was the only commander in chief who ever took the field. He did that because his generals weren’t any good. He had to do it. The general in charge of Washington just backed up and backed up and then laid down, and the same was true of a lot of his other generals. The British took Washington so easily that British soldiers settled themselves inside the presidential residence and ate the hot meal that Dolley Madison had been cooking when she and her husband had to abandon the place and run away, and the only reason the British left the city after just one day is that a storm started up, and they were afraid that their ships would be damaged and they went to move them.

  There were some victories, of course, and a lot of heroic soldiers and sailors, too. The ironic thing was that, even though the British prided themselves, and with reaso
n, on being in command of the seas, most of our victories were in sea battles, and so were most of the other memorable events of the war. The frigate USS Constitution, the one most American remember as Old Ironsides, won a number of battles in the War of 1812. Captain Oliver Hazard Perry got together a small fleet on Lake Erie, whipped the British soundly there, gained control of the Great Lakes, and sent a message that became a patriotic phrase repeated over and over during the war, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Captain Thomas McDonough won another decisive battle against the British on Lake Champlain and kept a large British force from coming down from Canada. Captain James Lawrence, dying of wounds on the USS Chesapeake, also said something that Americans remember to this day, “Don’t give up the ship!” Francis Scott Key, standing on a British ship on a mission to try to arrange a prisoner exchange, saw British guns pounding Fort McHenry but failing to subdue the fort, and he was moved by the sight of an American flag at the fort and wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  And on land, General William Henry Harrison, later our ninth president, managed to chase the British deeply into Canada at one point and killed Tecumseh, the Indian chief who was a British ally. And of course there was that big battle at New Orleans in which old Andrew Jackson kept the city from being captured by the British, and in which there were 2,000 British casualties and only twenty-one American losses (though “only” is probably the wrong word for even a single loss in a war).

  But mostly it was one defeat after another, and our big break was that Britain and France were still in bitter conflict, and the British couldn’t pay too much attention to fighting the war against the United States. The British were like the people of any free country after long years of war; they really didn’t want to fight anymore. They sent over a lot of mercenaries and didn’t take as serious a hand in the fighting here as they might otherwise have taken. They were tired, just as all the rest of the world was, of the continued wars that had been carried on by Napoleon and the British prior to that time, and they just didn’t feel like coming over and trying to reconquer the colonies that had won their freedom. If it hadn’t been for the Napoleonic wars, they probably would have taken us over, because they were perfectly capable of doing it.

  That was all very lucky for us, and Madison was privately quite happy when Russia offered to serve as mediator between our country and Britain. John Quincy Adams had been sent to St. Petersburg in 1809 as our first United States minister to Russia, and he was there when Napoleon, still thinking he could conquer the world, invaded that country in 1812. That made a lot of Russians sympathetic toward Britain because France was now their common enemy, but Adams had become a good friend of Czar Alexander I over the years and convinced Russia to allow commercial American ships to enter Russian ports and do a lot of other things to help us out. That led to the Czar’s offer to step in and try to end the war. Britain, however, didn’t like the idea of dealing with a third party, and eventually direct talks started up between our two countries.

  The United States was represented by Adams, Henry Clay, who was then Speaker of the House, Albert Gallatin, who was Madison’s secretary of the treasury, and Jonathan Russell, our minister to Sweden and a very persuasive negotiator. The talks took place on neutral ground in the city of Ghent, located in what is now Belgium. And finally a peace treaty was signed on December 24, 1814.

  There were two real O. Henry twists to the end of the war. The first was that our great victory at the Battle of New Orleans, which, though it made a national hero of Andy Jackson and led him in time to the presidency, and made Americans take pride in themselves all over again, was tragically unnecessary. It took place, as I’ve mentioned, on January 8, 1815, and that, as you see, was more than two weeks after the signing of the peace treaty - but news traveled so slowly in those days that neither the British nor the Americans knew it and went about trying to kill each other. And the second was the result of the war itself, which, like many, most, or possibly all wars, accomplished absolutely nothing.

  First of all, there wasn’t a syllable in the peace treaty about the British injustices that had brought about the war; no promise whatever that the British would stop boarding American ships or stop pressing American sailors into the British navy. Second, there wasn’t even a mention of one other longtime American complaint, that many of the attacks by Indians on American settlers were the result of British financing and stirring up of Indian tribes that were British allies, and, in fact, fought alongside the British on many occasions during the War of 1812. And third, the war was ended in an agreement that is called status quo ante bellum, which simply means that each side gives up all captured territory and goes back to owning only what it owned before the war.

  And again like most or all wars, there were plenty of negative results of this one. A total of 286,730 Americans had left their homes and their families to fight in the war, and nearly 7,000 men came back in different condition or didn’t come back at all; the final count was 4,505 wounded and 2,260 dead. British casualties were considerably higher. Our national debt, already very high, became considerably higher because of the huge costs of the war. And a lot of merchants and companies went out of business, partly because most of their sales were based on supplying war materials, and partly because they couldn’t withstand the return of competition from British goods now that the war was over, and in 1819, we had our first real American depression.

  As some historians have put it, Madison left the White House in 1817 “with relief,” more than happy to turn the job and the headaches over to someone else. (It was now really a white house. Its basic external material was gray sandstone, but this was blackened by smoke after the British set the building on fire, as you’ll recall, and the architect who did the job of repairing and refurnishing it, James Hoban, decided to paint it white to cover up the smoke damage. The place was little more than a shell when Hoban went to work on it, and it took about three years to get it back in shape again. During that period, the Madisons lived in a place called Octagon House, just as Mrs. Truman and Margaret and I lived to a certain extent out of suitcases at Blair House when the White House started to fall apart again.) The man who followed as president, James Monroe, had an overwhelming victory over the Federalist candidate, John Quincy Adams, and Madison returned to Virginia and lived there for nineteen years until his death at the age of eighty-five in 1836.

  He outlived all of the friends who’d worked with him at the Constitutional Convention, but unfortunately, like Jefferson, he was pretty broke when he left the White House and relatively poor for the remainder of his life. This was partly because of continuously bad crops on his extensive land holdings, but also because, like Washington’s wife Martha, Dolley Madison was a widow when she married Madison, and she brought to her marriage a son, John Todd, who was kind of a bum and kept building up gambling debts and other debts that Madison had to pay.

  But the Madisons lived together quietly and happily at the Madison estate, Montpelier, for the remainder of Madison’s life, interrupting his retirement only to serve on the board of regents with Jefferson at the University of Virginia and taking over as rector there after Jefferson’s death in 1826. Madison became increasingly weak in the final month of his life, and I’ve heard stories to the effect that his physician, Dr. Robley Dunglison, gave him stimulants at his request so that he could die on July 4 like Adams and Jefferson. But on June 28, as he was eating his breakfast, he suddenly showed signs of difficulties in swallowing, and a niece who was breakfasting with him asked him if anything was the matter. “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear,” Madison said, and then he closed his eyes, and he was gone.

  Dolley returned to Washington after Madison’s death and reentered the city’s social life. She was seventeen years younger than her husband, having married him in 1794 when he was forty-three, and she was only twenty-six, and she was still a good-looking and vivacious woman, and she loved parties and dances and good times even though she was born a Quaker and
grew up under very quiet circumstances in North Carolina, Virginia, and then Philadelphia. Her first husband, a Quaker lawyer named John Payne Todd, whom she married in 1790, died three years later in a smallpox epidemic, and Madison spotted her shortly after that and asked a mutual acquaintance - Aaron Burr, of all people! - to introduce them.

  Dolley was thrown out of the Society of Friends after her second marriage because Madison wasn’t a Quaker, and she became a social force in Washington, first as official hostess for Jefferson because he was a widower, and then for her husband. She lived until the age of eighty-one and continued as the social leader in Washington, famous for her charm and wit and the magnificence of her parties, until her death in 1849, past Monroe’s presidency and John Quincy Adams’ and Jackson’s. She didn’t have a lot of money and eventually had to sell Madison’s detailed record of the activities of the Constitutional Convention, which had been kept secret until then, to Congress for $30,000, and then sell Montpelier, but her parties remained the best in the country.

  Don’t underestimate the importance of her work as hostess or of social life in Washington in general, either. Social leaders are necessary because foreign governments are very much intrigued with social affairs, and one of the duties of the president of the United States is to act as the social head of the country. In doing that, he gives receptions and entertainments all the time, and it’s a privilege for someone to be invited to the White House and to one of these functions as a guest of the president. These functions are usually held for the heads of states who are friendly with us, and for other visiting men and women who are important politically and socially in other countries. It’s a genuinely important program that has to be carried on, and in the days of Dolley Madison, it was even more important than it is now because we were a very young country and working all the time at developing friendships and relationships with other countries and with influential people from those countries. Dolley Madison became so well liked and so important to her country, so much like what the Japanese call a Living National Treasure, that she was made an honorary member of the House of Representatives. She couldn’t become an actual member of the House in those days, so she was made an honorary member, and I think it was both appropriate and an honor to which she was entitled.