Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (29 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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True to its frequently absurd nature, and symmetrically with the fact that America declared war as the casus belli of the British blockade was being removed, the greatest battle of the war occurred two weeks after the peace was concluded, and so did not influence the results at all, but was important for other reasons. General Andrew Jackson had been named commander of the military district from New Orleans to Mobile, by Monroe, and characteristically ignored Monroe’s orders not to disturb Spanish Florida, and seized Pensacola. When he learned of British forces approaching, he retired to Baton Rouge to be ready to repulse British landings wherever they appeared on the Gulf coast. The British landed 7,500 men under General Sir Edward Pakenham (the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law) 40 miles east of New Orleans, starting on December 13.
Jackson bustled down to New Orleans starting on December 15 and was able to attack the British on December 23. He furiously constructed defensive positions around New Orleans, and Pakenham attacked Jackson’s 4,500 men with 5,300 of his regulars on January 8, 1815. Jackson placed Tennessee and Kentucky marksmen with long rifles in forward trenches, and advantageously placed his artillery to smash the British line as well. The advance of the British, walking upright in tight formation, presented a splendid target. There was a second British advance after the first was driven back. It was a madly unimaginative attack plan by Pakenham, who was killed as his army was badly defeated and took over 2,000 casualties, compared with only eight American dead and 13 wounded. Jackson became America’s greatest hero, its greatest warrior since Washington, and its most successful political leader since Jefferson, and eventually, with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, one of the four most important American presidents in the first 140 years of its history.
News of the Battle of New Orleans reached the still fire-ravaged capital of the United States before the news of the Treaty of Ghent, and greatly salved American sensibilities after the scorching there and the inelegant flight of the government. The treaty arrived on February 11, was ratified unanimously by the Senate (meeting in temporary quarters) on February 15, and proclaimed by Madison on February 17. It had been a silly little war in many ways; it should have been fought earlier and more wisely by the Americans, yet they suffered only 1,877 dead and 4,000 wounded. The economic cost had been heavy and the strain on national unity had been considerable. It was an opportunity lost and Madison went far too long with the foolishness of Jefferson’s notions of economic war. Yet the United States had accomplished something in fighting successfully to keep its head up against the greatest powers in the world, and particularly the overwhelming master of the world’s seas. The Royal Navy was deployed across all the world’s oceans, “wherever wood could float” as Napoleon grudgingly said (with as large, in numbers of ships, and as far-flung a fleet as the United States would deploy at the end of World War I, when Admiral Nimitz’s mighty Pacific Fleet took 400,000 men to sea when it sailed). The war’s farcical aspect had been diluted by Madison’s lack of pomposity and endearing preparedness to acknowledge error.
The Americans, though without so skillful a propagandist as Jefferson to tart up a rather squalid little war, apart from the successes of Perry and Jackson, still managed to present it as a milestone on the road to full national maturity. Gallatin, no Jefferson or Paine or Hamilton, but a formidable talent in a less-crowded field, declared: “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and characters which the Revolution had given. The people . . . are more American; they feel and act more as a nation.”
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In the end, the last of the nation’s founders to retire had finally, and reluctantly, done the honorable thing to defend the nation’s honor and sovereignty, and, in his way, had done so successfully. Washington and Adams and Hamilton would have taken over Canada and ended up buying peace with a cash settlement. But it was just that, an opportunity lost, not a defeat, and considering the power of the opponent, it lightly enhanced America’s status in the world. Ancient and mighty France had to endure the British army in Paris for a prolonged period. They didn’t burn anything but they stayed as long as they pleased, and the Duke of Wellington “bought” the British embassy on the Faubourg St. Honore. Today it remains there, next to the United States embassy, and both are only a cricket ball or baseball’s throw from the residence of the president of the (Fifth) Republic.
Madison, true to his nature and having learned his lesson, recommended retention of an army of 20,000, and most of the navy that had been built up, but the Congress reverted to its former condition, cut the army to 10,000, sold gunboats, and returned the Great Lakes to an unarmed state. Madison did have the pleasure of sending Captain Stephen Decatur to give the Dey of Algiers, and his analogues in Tunis and Tripoli, another good thrashing at sea with a 10-ship squadron, extracting concessions and return of hostages and tribute and reparations from the Barbary leaders and ending this problem (and legitimizing after all the wording of the Marine Corps anthem). A complete restoration of normal and favorable trade terms with Britain was agreed in a commercial convention in July 1816.
In one of the last major initiatives of his administration, Madison again sounded a little like his Federalist predecessors in supporting the rechartering of a Bank of the United States. This was recommended by the Treasury secretary, Alexander J. Dallas, as necessary to patch back together the chaotic state of the country’s finances after the war with Britain. A very weak measure setting up a bank that would be severely circumscribed was passed by the Congress but vetoed by Madison. Then the men who would lead the Congress for the next 35 years, despite intermittent dalliances in the administration (all three would be secretaries of state)—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster—joined forces and put through a serious bill. Calhoun would speak for the South, Clay for the West and Midwest, and Webster for New England. Calhoun was a Democrat, as the Democratic-Republicans were about to be called officially, and the other two would emerge as Whigs, when the Federalists metamorphosed into that party, and their relations with each other were never especially warm. But they played an immense role, greater than any of the presidents between Jackson and Lincoln, except Polk, in the long denouement of the related problems of slavery and states’ rights. The new bank would have $35 million of authorized capital, one-fifth posted by the federal government, which would name five of the 25 directors. The bank would receive federal government deposits and not pay interest on them, and in other respects resembled Hamilton’s original bank. It would be a normative and stabilizing influence, controlling the money supply and maintaining reasonable consistency of credit in the country, through, eventually, 25 branches. The bank was one of Madison’s principal presidential achievements.
In his very last material act as president, Madison vetoed a bill for federal construction of roads and canals that Calhoun, congressional leader of the South, had put forward, to be financed from the dividends of the Bank of the U.S. This was a remarkable acceptance by Calhoun of Hamilton’s constitutional justification of implied powers, and showed also how far Calhoun would move, from advocating a generous interpretation of the federal government’s powers to enact a measure for national unity and closer union, to where he would end his career, 35 years ahead. Madison remained true to his own concepts of the Constitution, imposing his veto with the unique authority of the principal draftsman.
The president honored the Washington and Jefferson tradition and declined to seek a third term. He would leave office a respected president, moderately popular for his unpretentious nature, thought slightly unserious after the British descent upon Washington, and remembered by the knowledgeable for his irreplaceable contributions to the Constitution.
7. JAMES MONROE AS PRESIDENT
 
Having held almost every other post, including senator, governor, minister to France and to Britain, and secretary of state and of war, James Monroe was almost a case of the office seeking the man. There was a challenge from the former minister to France, war secretary and current Treasury secretary William H. Crawford of Georgia, as a younger man (44, compared with Monroe’s 58) and not a Virginian, unlike Monroe and three of the four presidents to date. The House caucus of the Democratic-Republicans chose the nominee and Monroe won this test 65 to 54. Vice President Gerry had died in office, and Monroe and his colleagues appeased New York with the selection for that position of that state’s governor, Daniel D. (an improvised initial that did not stand for anything) Tompkins. Rufus King, respected political veteran and former vice presidential candidate, was nominated by the Federalists, who were no longer a coherent party, and did not offer a vice presidential candidate.
The result was a foregone conclusion; Monroe won 183 electoral votes to 34 for King, who took only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Federalists vanished from the scene, in, as a Boston newspaper would describe it as Monroe toured New England, “an era of good feeling.” Monroe, too, had come a long way having opposed the Constitution as too centralist, he now seemed more a follower of the first Virginian president than of the next two. In his inaugural address, he called for armed forces adequate to protect the nation’s interests and a policy that would favor manufacturing. He had a strong administration, with Tompkins, John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, Crawford at the Treasury, John C. Calhoun at the War Department, and Richard Rush as attorney general. More talented than any cabinet since Washington’s first administration, it more resembled such British coalitions as Pelham and Newcastle’s “broad-bottom” government of 1744–1754, or Grenville and Fox’s “government of all the talents” of 1806.
The long process of building a close Anglo-American relationship took its first step with what was called the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, though it had been entirely agreed between Monroe and Castlereagh. It substantially disarmed the Great Lakes (which the Congress had unilaterally done anyway). It was also implicit that the same principle would govern the land frontier between the United States and Canada. This agreement would be supplemented by the Convention of 1818, signed for the United States again by Richard Rush, then minister in London, and by Albert Gallatin, now the minister in Paris. This convention extended the border along the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods (northern Minnesota) to the Rocky Mountains, and agreed to negotiate the border through the Rockies to the Pacific in 10 years, in which time citizens of both signatory countries could move freely in the Far Pacific territory. The United States also obtained modest fishing concessions in Newfoundland waters.
The fierce and Anglophobic Andrew Jackson was placed in charge of American forces on the Georgia-Florida border, across which many runaway slaves and hostile Indians had fled. There were some incidents and Jackson’s standing orders were to clear the area between the U.S. border and the Spanish forts. Jackson wrote to President Monroe that if he were advised, through “channels . . . that possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States . . . in sixty days it will be accomplished.” He received no reply, which for as bellicose an American expansionist as Jackson was all the encouragement he needed to invade East Florida in April 1818.
He captured Pensacola in May and captured two English traders whom he accused of fomenting slave and Indian and even Spanish action against the United States (Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister). Jackson hanged the first and shot the second. British and official American opinion condemned Jackson; Clay proposed censure in the House, and the war and Treasury secretaries, Calhoun and Crawford, agreed. The secretary of state, the very able John Quincy Adams, was negotiating with the Spanish for control of Florida. Jackson’s antics considerably strengthened his bargaining position and he entirely approved Jackson’s action. Public opinion rose up in support of the general, and neither Monroe nor the Congress took any action against him. Thus reinforced, Adams negotiated the cession to the U.S. of all Florida, and the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Adams, son of the former president, had studied in France and the Netherlands, was a former senator, had served in diplomatic capacities as a teenager, and had served all the previous presidents, as minister in the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. He had been the senior diplomat in the Ghent peace delegation and would prove one of the most capable secretaries of state in American history.
8. THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE
 
At the end of 1819, there were 22 states in the Union, 11 free and 11 slave, with Maine and Missouri having applied for admission. The slave states, apart from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, were Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The free states, apart from those in the original 13, were Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The northern states were growing more quickly than the southern states, as that was where most immigrants arrived, and Europeans, the source of most immigration, did not want to move to a semi-tropical climate, and were unfamiliar with dealing with people of African origin. Most Americans were in free states, and despite the three-fifths rule, the congressional delegations of the free states were substantially larger than those of the South. When amendments were proposed prohibiting slavery in the Missouri Territory, which was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, there was very spirited reaction from southerners, and a series of heated debates and close votes, as the strains on a country half free and half slave, with a constitutional arrangement for favoring slave states in congressional delegations and presidential and vice presidential electoral votes, began, as was widely foreseen, to tear at national unity. After acrimonious and confused debate for nearly four months, a compromise proposed by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois was adopted. Maine and Missouri were admitted as states, Maine as a free state and Missouri without restriction on slavery, and the balance of the Louisiana Territory west of Missouri and north of the line 36°30 (the continuation of the Arkansas-Missouri border) would not be a slave-holding area.

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