Patriotic Fire (3 page)

Among those who chronicled one such outrage was the French-born American naturalist and artist John J. Audubon, who, on a return trip from France, encountered one of these impressment interceptions. “We were running before the wind under all sail, but the unknown gained on us at a great rate and after a while stood to the windward of our ship about half a mile off. She fired a gun, the ball passed within a few yards of our bows; our captain heeded not, but kept on his course, flying the American flag. Another and another shot was fired at us; the enemy closed upon us.” When the captain hove to, the English ship sent over a boat containing two officers and a dozen armed sailors, who demanded all the captain’s papers and then ransacked the ship.

“Every one of the papers proved to be in perfect accordance with the laws existing between England and America,” wrote Audubon, but the English “robbed the ship of almost everything that was nice in the way of provisions, took our pigs, and sheep, coffee and wines and carried off our two best sailors.”

True, some impressed seamen were deserters from the British navy, but most were legitimate American citizens, which led to fractious confrontations, the most outrageous of which was the so-called
Chesapeake
Affair in 1807. In this incident, the new captain of an American frigate-of-war, the
Chesapeake,
took the ship prematurely to sea before all her guns were installed and, just off the Virginia coast, was jumped by the British fifty-gun warship
Leopard,
out searching for crewmen. An unequal fight ensued in which some twenty of
Chesapeake
’s seamen were killed or wounded, and the British carried off four others—three Americans and one Briton—claiming they were deserters.

In this way, more than six thousand Americans found themselves suddenly impressed into British service, a development that did not sit well at all with the American people, and which no amount of U.S. diplomacy could seem to rectify.

Further, both the British and the French put a clamp on the Americans’ right to trade with their enemies (meaning each other), and that drove a tremendous hole in America’s burgeoning economy. U.S. merchant ships were seized wherever found and impounded in English or French ports and their cargoes confiscated. The United States might have gone to war with both Britain
and
France over this issue, but ultimately chose war with England because, after a series of victories over the French navy, England was by far the strongest maritime power and thus was causing most of the trouble. For their part, the Americans wanted nothing to do with the fighting that was going on in Europe, and the slogan “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” was quickly taken up by newspaper editors and pamphleteers.

As America’s anger festered, her citizens became even more incensed by the treatment they were receiving in the British press; their country and its president were constantly lampooned and belittled as second-rate and cowardly. The British view was that while they themselves were engaged in a war of survival against the greatest menace the world had known (Napoleon), the timid and greedy Americans—instead of joining with them in this noble cause—had chosen to remain neutral.

When all the jawboning diplomacy produced no effect, the Jefferson administration began pushing economic sanctions through Congress in the hope that England would come to her senses and start respecting American rights on the seaways. First, in 1806, was the so-called Non-Importation Act, which forbade importing British goods but, by necessity, included so many loopholes to keep American manufactories going that it did little good. Next came the far more damaging Embargo Act of 1807, which forbade imports and exports into or out of America to or from
any
nation at all. The problem was, most of the resulting damage was done not to the British but to the U.S. economy. In 1807 Americans exported some $108 million worth of goods (more than $1 trillion in today’s dollars); within a year that figure had sagged by 75 percent and the nation sank into a severe economic depression. Britain quickly found other export markets in South America. One political critic compared Jefferson’s laws with “trying to cure corns by cutting off the toes.” These two measures would still rank near the very top of “stupid and shortsighted legislation” were such an analytic list ever kept. Clearly something else had to be done.

I
n the meantime, out in what was referred to then as the West—Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan—the British, from their strongholds in Canada, were stirring up the Indians to prey on American settlers. This produced, of course, no idle fear; many remembered all too well the ravaging of British-backed Indian tribes during the Revolution. For instance, a letter from a British officer to Canada’s governor-general had been widely circulated in the press, in which the Englishman informed his boss that “at the request of the Seneca Chiefs I send herewith to your excellency under the care of James Boyd, eight packs of scalps cured, dried, hooped and painted with all the Indian triumphal marks.”

He then went on to inventory this grisly gift: Box no. 1 contained “43 scalps of congress soldiers killed in different skirmishes . . . also 62 farmers killed in their houses, the hoops red, the skin painted brown and marked with a black hoe, a black circle all around to denote their being surprised in the night and a black hatchet in the middle to denote their being killed with that weapon.”

The other boxes held even more ghoulish relics: “93 farmers killed in their houses. White circles and suns shew they were killed in the daytime; 97 farmers, hoops green to show working in fields . . . 102 farmers, 18 marked with yellow flame to shew that they were burned alive . . . 81 women, long hair, those braided to shew they were mothers . . . 193 boys scalps various ages . . . 211 girls scalps, big and little, small yellow hoops marked hatchet, club, knife, etc. . . . Mixture 122 with box of birch bark containing 29 infant scalps small white hoops. Only little black knife in middle to shew they were ripped out of mother’s body.”

It is not recorded how the British governor-general received this macabre present, but publication of the accompanying cover letter, whether it was authentic or not, had the effect of galvanizing both terror and disgust among Americans who learned of it, and the notion that the British were back at it again incited grave indignation.

As if that weren’t enough, a charismatic forty-three-year-old Shawnee Indian chief named Tecumseh went on a warpath of his own, which threatened dire consequences for Americans all over the southern and western states and territories.

After having suffered the death of his father at the hands of Americans when he was six years old, Tecumseh (or “Shooting Star,” as the name has been translated) developed a blinding hatred for the white race, which, when he grew older, turned into rage as settlers pushed deeper into his homeland of Indiana, Ohio, and other nearby states. It was recounted by a friend that Tecumseh said he “could not look upon the face of a white man without feeling the flesh crawl on my bones.” As he grew into adulthood, Tecumseh became a natural leader with a dignified bearing that even white men remarked on. Tall, handsome, intelligent, and brave, Tecumseh was remembered by a British officer this way: “In his appearance and nobel bearing one of the finest-looking men I have ever seen.”

The only atmosphere that the myriad of American Indian tribes had known in their history was eternal war—mostly with each other but recently, of course, with the settlers, too; and with the relentless American push westward, Tecumseh concluded that unless this expansion were stopped, the Indians would soon become extinct in a world dominated by whites. Thus he embarked on a stupendous undertaking: he would visit all the major tribes in what is today the Midwest and the South and persuade them to join a vast, warlike “Indian Confederation,” extending from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, backed and supplied by the British, to bring the Americans’ westward movement to an abrupt halt.

In the late summer of 1811, with about two dozen of his braves, Tecumseh set out in canoes from his village on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana and traveled down the Mississippi to convert the southern tribes: the great Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations.*
 
⁴
Tecumseh’s party had painted its war clubs red, for which they were soon given the sobriquet “Red Sticks,” but their first encounters were something less than successful. The Choctaws under Chief Pushmataha were unreceptive, the Chickasaws less so, but with the Creeks of Alabama Tecumseh struck a chord.

As an entranced audience of Creeks listened earnestly by their campfires, Tecumseh urged them to join with all the other tribes and drive the white man out; to kill his hogs and cattle and burn his crops and houses; to throw away their own looms and plows, abandon their livestock, and rejoin the Indian traditions of their ancestors; to kill the white man and his wives and children and even to “kill the old chiefs, friends of peace!” He told them that after the whites had cut down all the trees to make farms and stained the rivers with silt, they would then force the Indians into slavery as they had the Africans. Before he left the Creeks, Tecumseh issued a warning to those who were unconvinced that his voice had come directly through the Great Spirit in the Sky. “When I return to Tippecanoe,” he is reported to have said, “I will stamp my foot, and the earth will tremble!”

For those disbelievers among the Creeks, their epiphany arrived less than a month later when, on December 16, 1811, the New Madrid fault near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, lurched apart in an earthquake so tremendous that it was said to have changed the course of the Mississippi River and caused it to flow backward for a while. It was the most severe quake America has ever experienced, and its terrible tremors were felt as far away as the Creek Nation’s encampments on Alabama’s Tallapoosa River, north of Montgomery.

Not all Creeks had been able to agree on Tecumseh’s proposals, but among the audience the night Tecumseh spoke was young William Weatherford—a “half-breed” who went by the name of Chief Red Eagle—the son of a Scottish-American Alabama trader and a one-quarter-Indian mother. He was impressed (though not completely convinced) by the notion of Tecumseh’s great Indian confederation, but the impression stuck, especially after the prophetic earthquake of 1811. In the not too distant future Weatherford’s actions would have a distinct bearing on the Battle of New Orleans.

Two

D
uring his terms in office (1801–1809), President Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republican majority in Congress had allowed the U.S. armed forces to deteriorate almost into oblivion. True to his pacific nature, Jefferson—along with most of his fellow party members—wished to avoid a large standing peacetime army, which, in addition to being an unnecessary government expense, they saw as a possible threat to the new republic itself. Therefore, the U.S. Army was cut by nearly one-third, to only 3,300 men, and, according to General Winfield Scott, later of Mexican War fame, was officered by “imbeciles and ignoramuses.”

The U.S. Navy was likewise neglected, due not only to concern over expenses but to Democratic Republican suspicions in those days that a large navy, roaming the world, would somehow always find a way to get a nation into war. Despite Jefferson’s temporary strengthening of the navy during his first term to fight the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, by the end of the decade the American sea arm consisted of only seven small frigates, a few sloops of war, and no ships of the line (which would correspond to modern-day battleships or aircraft carriers).

Proponents of these stingy military policies, Jefferson foremost among them, argued that in times of crisis America was better off relying on its citizen soldiers, that is, militias from the various states. So far as sea power was concerned, it was maintained by the largely Southern majority in Congress that Great Britain, with the world’s most powerful fleet, could simply overwhelm anything the United States might send against it and thus the expense of a large navy would be wasted. The theory went instead that so-called privateers—armed ships privately owned but operating under government sponsorship—would serve in place of a regular navy. Not everyone was happy with this; John Adams later wrote Jefferson that he wished more frigates had been built. “Without this our Union will be a brittle china vase,” he said.

That’s how things stood in 1809 when Jefferson’s Virginia colleague and fellow pacifist James Madison became the fourth U.S. president, but now war clouds were gathering as England continued its humiliating depredations at sea (some eight hundred American merchant vessels had been seized over five years) as well as agitating the western Indian tribes to strike against American settlers. By 1812 Tecumseh and his followers had scalped and tomahawked so many citizens in the Indiana Territory that Governor William Henry Harrison wrote the secretary of war that most of the people had fled their farms for collective safety in various forts and blockhouses.

Nothing seemed to be working in Madison’s diplomacy. It didn’t help matters when the prince regent, after assuming the responsibilities of his father, the now-gone-mad King George III, appointed as Britain’s minister to the United States a rabid, America-hating thirty-one-year-old junior diplomat named Augustus John Foster. In letters home to his mother (published more than eighty years afterward), Foster complained that “corruption, immorality and self-interest” on the part of most Americans had “corroded” the democracy he loathed, and then went on to evaluate American women as “spying, inquisitive, vulgar and ignorant.” Not surprisingly, Foster’s arrival in Washington would not bode well for amicable diplomatic relations between the two countries.

By 1812 the ruinous embargo had been lifted, and the Non-Importation Act repealed, but the seizings and searchings by British men-of-war went unabated and the Indian horrors continued. Congress, still dominated by the party of Jefferson and Madison, was now beginning to clamor for war against England. Party-affiliated newspapers and pamphlets were pushing for a showdown: American honor is at stake . . . The United States would never gain the respect of other nations by allowing itself to be humiliated by the British . . . Interruption of oceanic trade is ruining the economy . . . British ships are kidnapping American citizens . . . British-incited Indians are scalping helpless women and children. And so on.

Also by now Congress was led by a group headed by the redoubtable Henry Clay of Kentucky. These were the “war hawks,” who had an agenda of their own. They argued that because Britain was presently entangled on the European continent in the great war against Napoleonic France, she would be unable to send significant numbers of soldiers and ships to fight in America three thousand miles away. As the rationale went, the only troops the British were likely to employ would be those from her Canadian colony, which in turn would give the United States a perfect excuse to drive the British out of that vast territory and perhaps even to annex it to the new republic. Thus the war hawks were able to persuade Congress to authorize the recruitment of a standing army of 35,000 regulars plus a call for 50,000 volunteers, as well as the federalizing of 100,000 state militia.

This was a tremendous force on paper but a tall order in reality, since the American army at that time had barely been able to recruit 5,000 officers and men despite a bounty for enlistment of $31. Also in the months leading up to the declaration of war Congress authorized some $3 million for equipment, ordnance, and the building of fortifications to protect cities on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.*
 
⁵

When all these well-publicized measures failed to yield any concessions from the British Parliament, Congress produced a war bill that passed 79–49 in the House and 19–13 in the Senate—“the closest vote on any declaration of war in American history,” the historian Donald R. Hickey points out—which was signed into law by President Madison the following day, June 18. The panorama of what would become the War of 1812 had rolled forward on a tide of dark, irresistable forces: pride, greed, resentment, hauteur, insult, revenge, and some intangible notion that the Americans should be rid of the British once and for all. Yet now all the follies of the past three decades of isolationism, laxity, and unpreparedness would come home to roost.

A
t first the news of war with their old archenemy was greeted with enthusiasm by many Americans, but this did not last long. When the immensity of the undertaking began to sink in, a great many people started having second thoughts, which led to much domestic trouble. Especially distressed were the New England states, predominantly Federalist in their politics (and even pro-British, according to some), whose great seafaring trade would be seriously restricted (given that America had no navy to speak of) if not completely curtailed by a British blockade. Farmers began to realize that the crops—cotton, tobacco, sugar, grains, and wheat—they counted on for cash by selling them overseas would probably soon rot in barns or on wharves; men subject to the militia call worried that they would be snatched from their peaceful farms or jobs to fight seasoned British redcoats; even well-to-do women began to comprehend that the latest fashions from London or Paris would no longer be arriving. It was in this atmosphere that the malignancy of war was again perceived to be visited upon the American homeland.

Federalist newspapers quickly decried the declaration of war as a dangerous and unnecessary measure—“President Madison’s War,” it was called—that had put the country’s future in jeopardy by inviting battle with the most powerful nation on earth. All over New England, state legislatures condemned the declaration as hazardous folly for a country so unprepared as the fledgling United States. As the conversation heated, the cry of
treason!
rang out from both sides, and people were beaten and tarred and feathered; naturally, in some instances duels were fought. In Baltimore, then the country’s third-largest city, ferocious riots erupted when a mob of Democratic Republicans attacked a local Federalist paper. Shots were fired, people killed, homes and businesses burned. Violence swept the city amid looting and talk of hangings.

Into that fray stepped old Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—father of future Confederate commander Robert E. Lee—who had fallen on hard times since his exemplary service in the Revolutionary War and was in Baltimore trying to peddle his memoirs to raise cash. At the outbreak of violence the aristocratic Lee offered his service as mediator and was in return stoned by a mob, suffering severe injuries from which he later died. All in all, the War of 1812 had not gotten off on a good footing.

Nor did things go any better on the military front. By midsummer of 1812 the United States had organized three major army expeditions against Canada, hoping to drive the British out of that country for good. The operations were conducted at points running from just below the Canadian border along the line of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, westward to Niagara on Lake Ontario, and thence farther west to Detroit on Lake Erie. All failed miserably.

The Detroit fiasco was conducted by Michigan governor William Hull, a fifty-nine-year-old relic of the Revolutionary War, who led some 2,000 U.S. Army regulars in an attempt to occupy Fort Detroit, in Canada, and force the retreat of British forces in the region. After numerous mishaps—including a savage attack by Tecumseh’s Indians—Hull reached Fort Detroit, but, after an abortive foray a few miles farther north, there he remained, horrified by a fraudulent document the British commander had let fall into his hands. This ruse claimed that a great swarm of uncontrollable, hostile Indians was descending upon him, setting visions of a horrible massacre dancing in the American commander’s head.

Then a British army—not nearly as strong as Hull’s—arrived and laid siege to Fort Detroit, occasionally lobbing an artillery shell at it. As the weeks passed Hull succumbed to increasing attacks of anxiety and worried publicly about the fate of a number of settlers’ families who also occupied the fort. It was said that he could frequently be seen skulking between the buildings, his mouth stuffed with large twists of chewing tobacco, brown spittle staining his clothes and beard. In any event, on August 16, still fearful of an Indian massacre and without a word to anybody, the wretched Hull suddenly surrendered the fort and his whole army along with it. British officials paroled him*
 
⁶
a few weeks later, but when Hull returned to the United States he was arrested, tried by court-martial, convicted of cowardice and neglect of duty, and sentenced to death.*
 
⁷
Thus ended Operation Detroit.

Next was the operation against Niagara, designed to drive the British from the southern end of Lake Ontario. In the autumn of 1812 a force of 6,000 Americans led by an inexperienced political appointee, forty-eight-year-old militia general Stephen Van Rensselaer, encountered an army of British redcoats and Indians about one-third its strength on the opposite bank of the Niagara River. Van Rensselaer’s plan for an amphibious operation to cross the river and attack them was foiled when for some reason an American officer vanished downriver toward the falls in a boat carrying all the oars for the expedition, and was not heard from again. (Theories yet abound as to whether this officer was a traitor or somehow got swept up in the current and went over the falls.) On October 13, however, a second try was successful, and some 1,000 American soldiers landed on the British side of the river, driving back the redcoats and Indians and in the process killing their commander, the very talented English general Isaac Brock.

Here was a perfect opportunity for Van Rensselaer to seize the initiative, to bring his entire force into Canada and drive the British armies back on themselves, but it was not to be. The army Van Rensselaer commanded was made up in large part not of regulars but of militia who became fainthearted when they saw the dead and wounded soldiers being returned in boats from the site of the battle. With no apparent shame, they piously invoked a clause in their original enlistment contracts with their various states, claiming that as militia they were not authorized to fight outside U.S. territory. Thus the campaign failed entirely, and the remainder of the American soldiers who had at least clawed their way to the British side of the river were captured.

Van Rensselaer resigned and his command was given over to General Alexander Smyth, who did no better, and probably worse. Instead of attacking immediately, he cravenly took a vote of his officers on the question of assaulting the British-held Fort Erie just to the south; when they demurred, Smyth canceled operations and slunk back to his native Virginia (taking “back roads,” according to one historian), where he was cashiered from the army. So concluded Operation Niagara.

Next came the assault against Montreal, which was planned as the prize pearl of U.S. military strategy. To lead this vital mission the secretary of war resurrected yet another Revolutionary War retread, Henry Dearborn, who himself had been secretary of war in the Jefferson administration. Old and fat at sixty-one, Dearborn was also agonizingly slow. He dithered away the summer fooling with coastal forts in New England and complaining to Washington that he couldn’t find enough troops for the invasion. Finally, in November, just before the Canadian winter set in, the War Department found it necessary to
order
the newly promoted major general to march his army north and strike at Montreal. With about 8,000 troops, Dearborn moved from Albany up to the shores of Lake Champlain and thence into Canada, where his army—or at least part of it, the militia again refusing to leave American soil—engaged in a desultory and unsatisfactory nighttime fight with a British force about half its size. After this puny effort Dearborn marched them back south again, his mission a failure and a disgrace. Ironically, Dearborn later sat on the court-martial board that sentenced the unfortunate General Hull to death for the Detroit fiasco.

The Federalist press naturally had a field day with all this bad news, especially in populous New England, where antiwar sentiments ran high and a movement was already afoot to end the fighting. Gloomy expressions were thrown about in the press: “degrading,” “dismal perfidy,” “ruin and death,” “abysmal misfortunes,” and the like—perhaps somewhat extreme, but in truth much of the criticism stuck. Results of the 1812 campaign along the Canadian border running from New York to Michigan had left the Americans with nothing to show but a cataract of inglorious defeats that rendered the British stronger than ever, not only still holding Canada but comfortably ensconced on United States soil. With that disgraceful situation to contemplate, the U.S. Army retired to winter quarters, praying for better fortunes in the spring of 1813.