A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (37 page)

Between John Adams’s conclusion of the Quasi War in 1799 and renewed attacks on neutral American commerce in 1806, New England traders had carried on a brisk trade with both France and Britain, earning an estimated $60 million annually. But Britain objected to a particularly lucrative aspect of this trade—Caribbean goods shipped to America in French vessels and then reshipped to France in neutral American vessels. Britain aimed to crush these “broken voyages” through the Orders in Council (1806 and 1807), prohibiting American trade with France and enforced by a British blockade. When Americans tried to run the blockade, the Royal Navy seized their ships and impressed (drafted) American sailors to serve His Majesty. Britain justified this kidnapping by insisting that all of the impressed sailors—ultimately numbering 10,000—were in fact British deserters. Americans once again found themselves treated like colonial subjects in a mercantile system, forced yet again to demand fundamental neutral rights and freedom of the seas. As tempers flared, the U.S. administration aimed its fury at Great Britain, whose strong navy represented a greater threat to American shipping than France’s. Jefferson’s old prejudices now resurfaced with dangerous consequences: failing to construct large warships as the Federalists had, Jefferson’s navy consisted of some two hundred, single-gun gunboats incapable of anything other than intercepting ill-armed pirates or the most basic coastal defense.

Jefferson avoided war for many reasons, not the least of which was that he had spent much of his administration dismantling the federal army and navy and now was in no position at all to fight on land or sea. Congress sought to accommodate his policies with the 1806 Nonimportation Act. Britain, however, was unfazed by the boycotts and continued to attack and seize shipping. An 1807 clash on the open oceans between the American ship
Chesapeake
and Britain’s
Leopard
resulted in four Americans dead, eighteen wounded, and four impressed. “Never since the battle of Lexington,” wrote Jefferson, “have I seen the country in such a state of exasperation.”
¹¹³

In order to avoid the war that should have naturally followed the
Chesapeake-Leopard
duel, Jefferson combined nonexportation with nonimportation in the Embargo Act of December 1807. This law prohibited Americans from trading with any foreign countries until France and Britain buckled under to national and international pressure and recognized America’s free-trade rights. But the results of the Embargo Act were disastrous. Neither Britain nor France acquiesced and in blatant violation of federal law, New Englanders continued to trade with Britain, smuggling products along the rugged New England coast and through the ports of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. When Jefferson left office in 1809, the main results of his well-intentioned foreign policy were economic downturn, a temporarily revived Federalist opposition, and a perception by both France and England that the United States was weak and lacking in conviction.

Exit the Sage of Monticello

Former president Jefferson at last returned to his beloved Monticello in 1809. Appropriately, Monticello faced west, anticipating the future, not replaying the past. Jefferson’s record had, in fact, replayed some past mistakes too often. Republicans had undoubtedly reshaped the federal government in a democratic and leaner form. The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition were nothing less than magnificent triumphs. But the (technically illegal) Louisiana Purchase had added more to the public domain than Washington or Adams had, requiring, even in minimalist Jeffersonian terms, a bigger army, navy, and federal bureaucracy to protect and govern it. The judiciary contests and foreign policy exercises, except for the decisive preemptive war against the pirates, had not advanced the nation’s interests. In losing the judiciary battles to Marshall, Jefferson’s obsolete agrarian Republic was scraped away to make room for a capitalist engine of wealth creation. Moreover, his years in office had done nothing to relieve his personal debts, rebuild his deteriorated friendship with Adams, or constrain the size of government. In some ways, the nation he helped found had, like an unruly teenager, grown beyond his ability to manage it in the way he had envisioned. His successor, fellow Founder James Madison, in many ways proved a far better father for the child.

Quids and War Hawks

The career of James Madison symbolized the breadth of early American republicanism. Beginning in 1787 as a Federalist advocate of a strengthened national state, Madison jumped ship in the 1790s to form a Republican opposition party demanding a return to decentralized, agrarian, frugal, and peaceful government. It was in this philosophical mood that Madison inherited Jefferson’s mantle of succession in 1809, but he also inherited the foreign policy and war fever he had helped create as Jefferson’s secretary of state. The War of 1812 naturally swung the American political pendulum back to the more vigorous nationalist beliefs of early Federalism, returning Madison’s philosophical journey to a point near, though not exactly coinciding with, his 1787 Federalist beginnings.

As the Republicans amassed a huge national following during the 1800–1808 period, their Federalist opponents began to wither. This important political development was much more complex than it appears on the surface. To begin with, the Federalist party died a slow death that was not absolutely apparent until around 1815. Throughout Madison’s two terms in office, he faced stiff Federalist opposition and even saw a brief revival of Federalism at the ballot box. At the same time, whatever ideological purity the Republicans may have possessed in the 1790s became diluted as more and more Americans (including former Federalists) flocked to their banner.

That this specter of creeping Federalist nationalism was seen as a genuine threat to Republican ideological purity is evident in the clandestine efforts of James Monroe to wrest the 1808 Republican presidential nomination from his colleague Madison. Monroe, an old Anti-Federalist who had served the Jeffersonians well as a congressman and diplomat, led a group of radical, disaffected southern Republicans known as the Quids, an old English term for opposition leaders. Quids John Randolph, John Taylor, and Randolph Macon feared the Revolution of 1800 had been sidetracked by a loss of vigilance. They complained there was too much governmental debt and bureaucracy, and the Federalist judiciary had too free a reign. Quids aimed to reverse this turn to centralization by nominating the radical Monroe to succeed Jefferson. But they met defeat in the Madison-dominated Republican congressional caucus.

That November, Madison and his running mate George Clinton (the aged New York Anti-Federalist) faced off against Federalists Charles Cotesworth Pinkney and Rufus King. Madison won handily—122 electoral votes to 47—yet the Federalists had actually bettered their 1804 numbers; furthermore, they gained twenty-four new congressmen (a 34 percent increase) in the process. They fared even better in 1812, with antiwar sentiment fueling support for Federalist De Witt Clinton, who garnered 89 electoral votes to Madison’s 128. This temporary Federalist resurgence was partially due to the administration’s mistakes (especially the embargo), but much credit goes to the Young Federalists, a second generation of moderates who infused a more down-to-earth style into the formerly stuffy Federalist political demeanor.

Many Young Federalists, however, bolted the party altogether and joined the opposition. A prime example was John Quincy Adams, who resigned as Massachusetts’ Federalist senator and joined the party of his father’s archenemies. Adams’s defection to Republicanism may seem incredible, yet on reflection it shows considerable political savvy. Adams had already recognized that the Federalist Party was dying and he wisely saw there was room for moderate nationalist viewpoints in an expanded Republican Party. Most important, however, young Adams astutely perceived that his only hope for a meaningful national political career (and the presidency) lay within the political party of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

During his first term in office, Madison attempted to carry forward the domestic aims of the Revolution of 1800. Gallatin, the chief formulator of Republican fiscal policy, stayed on as secretary of the treasury, and he and the president continued the Republicans’ policy of balanced budgets and paying off the national debt, pruning administrative and military expenditures to balance the ledgers. Republicans continued to replace retiring Federalist judges, though the new ideological breadth of the Republican Party, combined with Marshall’s dominance of the Supreme Court, tempered the impact of these appointments. Meanwhile, the diplomatic crisis continued, ultimately rendering many of the administration’s domestic policies unattainable.

Madison assumed office at a time when diplomatic upheaval and impending warfare made foreign policy the primary focus of his administration. The former secretary of state certainly possessed the credentials to launch a forceful foreign policy, yet through his political party’s own efforts, he lacked an army and navy to back that policy up. This fact would ultimately bring the administration to the brink of disaster.

Because of strong domestic opposition to Jefferson’s embargo, Madison immediately called for its repeal. He replaced it with the Nonintercourse Act(1809), which forbade trade only with France and Britain (the embargo had forbidden all foreign trade) and promised to reopen trade with whichever party first recognized America’s neutral rights. This policy, a smuggler’s dream, failed utterly; it was replaced by Macon’s Bill No. 2 (1810), which reopened trade with both France and Britain, but again promised exclusive trade with whichever power recognized America’s right to trade. The French eagerly agreed, and with their weak navy, they had nothing to lose. But the British naturally resumed seizing American ships bound for France, at which point the administration was stymied. Peaceable coercion had failed. War with Britain seemed America’s only honorable alternative.

Pushing Madison and the nation toward war was a group of newly elected congressmen, many from the West, most notably Henry Clay of Kentucky. Known as the War Hawks, the group included Peter Porter of New York, Langdon Cheves and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and Clay’s Kentucky colleague, Richard M. Johnson. They elected Clay Speaker; then, using his control of the committee system, they named their own supporters to the Foreign Relations and Naval Committees. Although some of the maritime issues only touched their constituencies indirectly, the War Hawks saw Britain (and her ally Spain) as posing a danger in Florida and the Northwest, in both cases involving incitement of Indians. In 1811, General William Henry Harrison won the Battle of Tippecanoe against British-aided Shawnee warriors in Indiana, launching a renewed Indian war in the Old Northwest. At the same time, frontier warfare fueled expansionist desires to invade Canada, and perhaps Spanish Florida as well. Southern and western farmers openly coveted the rich North American agricultural lands held by Britain and Spain.

Madison’s war message of June 1, 1812, concentrated almost exclusively on maritime rights, noting “evidence of hostile inflexibility” on the part of the British. This put the Federalists, whose New England ships were the ones being attacked, in the ironic position of having to vote against that declaration, in part because of their pro-British sentiments and in part because they just opposed “anything Republican.”
¹¹⁴
The War Hawks, equally paradoxically, did not suffer directly from impressment, but they represented deep-seated resentment and anger shared by many Americans. They fumed that a supposedly free and independent American republic still suffered under the yoke of British military and buckled under her trade policies.

On June 4 and June 18, 1812, Congress voted for war, with the House splitting 79 to 49 and the Senate 19 to 13. This divided vote did not bode well for a united, successful war effort. Nor could the nation expect to successfully fight with its most advanced and industrialized section ambivalent about the conflict. Yet strong Federalist opposition (and a weak military) did not seem to dampen Republican enthusiasm for a war they now termed the “Second War of American Independence.”

“Half Horse and Half Alligator” in the War of 1812

Americans’ recollections of the War of 1812 provide an excellent example of selective memory. Today, those Americans who know anything about it at all remember the War of 1812 for Andrew Jackson’s famed Battle of New Orleans(1815), one of the most spectacular victories in the history of the American military, and more generally, that we won. What most Americans do not know, or tend to forget, is that the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks
after
the war ended. Slow communications delayed news of the peace treaty, and neither British nor American troops in Louisiana learned of the war’s end until after the famed battle.

The United States squared off against a nation that possessed the greatest navy on earth and would soon achieve land superiority as well. The British could count on 8,000 Anglo-Canadian and Indian allies to bolster their strength. Americans enjoyed many of the same military advantages held during the Revolution—a defensive stance and Britain’s embroilment in global warfare with France. As in the Revolution, however, the Yankees had few regular troops and sailors to press those advantages. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy possessed a competent officer corps, but few ships and gunboats for them to command—or, to use the British assessment of American naval capabilities, “a few fir-built frigates, manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws.”
¹¹⁵

Events seemed ominous indeed when General William Hull marched his 1,600 regular U.S. Army troops and militia supplement into Canada via Detroit in July of 1812, only to surrender to Anglo-Canadian troops without firing a shot! (Hull became a scapegoat and was court-martialed for cowardice but pardoned by President Madison.) A second Canadian land invasion (in December 1813) fared only a little better, resulting in stalemate, followed by General Jacob Brown’s July 1814 campaign on the Niagara Peninsula, again ending in a stalemate. Three Canadian campaigns, three embarrassments. The long-held American dream of adding Canada to the United States by military conquest ended once and for all during the War of 1812.