What So Proudly We Hailed: Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812 0815724144, 9780815724148

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Inside Flap
Title Page
Copyright Information
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Some Explanatory Notes
Introduction
The "Party War" of 1812: Yesterday's Lessons for Today's Partisan Politics
The War of 1812 and the Rise of American Military Power
Dual Nationalisms: Legacies of the War of 1812
James Madison, Presidential Power, and Civil Liberties in the War of 1812
The War over Federalism: The Constitutional Battles in the War of 1812
Contributors
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

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Page 1

PETER J. KASTOR is Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and author of William Clark’s World (Yale, 2011).

Cover art: The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, circa 1913, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Jacket design by Larry Converse

What So Proudly We Hailed “In the end, the complex federal polity that the founders had pieced together proved resilient and endured. Citizens given to lamenting the state of present-day American politics, featuring a government that is supposedly ‘gridlocked’ and ‘dysfunctional,’ would do well to recall that the nation has weathered far greater crises in the past.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA (Brookings Institution) and PETER J. KASTOR (Washington University) “The concept of a robust regular army and navy represented to the Republicans of the time what the welfare state is to conservatives now: a budget-busting beast, insatiably devouring higher tax revenues, and potentially imperiling individual liberties.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA “For all that has changed in the technology of war and America’s place among the world’s great military powers, much about the War of 1812 remains strikingly modern with respect to the lessons that it holds for deterrence, preparedness, counterinsurgency strategy, and military professionalism.” STEPHEN BUDIANSKY (author of Perilous Fight) “Jefferson’s Republicans constructed a forceful critique of national power and a boisterous endorsement of state sovereignty and individual rights—positions that anticipated much contemporary rhetoric. Alas, by shrinking the national government, Jefferson and Madison hampered the ability of the United States to wage the War of 1812. Recounting that war offers a cautionary tale of national disaster narrowly averted.” ALAN TAYLOR (author of The Civil War of 1812) “Madison showed remarkable restraint in nearly all respects during the War of 1812, which took place in the country’s infancy, when there was still great conceptual space for robust claims of presidential power to restrain freedom. The war saw dramatically fewer intrusions on civil liberties than did later wars or even earlier episodes short of war in the country’s still-young history.” BENJAMIN WITTES and RITIKA SINGH (Brookings Institution)

What So Proudly We Hailed Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812

What So Proudly We Hailed

PIETRO S. NIVOLA is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the C. Douglas Dillon Chair in Governance Studies. He is coeditor (with David Brady) of Red and Blue America, vols. I–II (Brookings, 2006 and 2008).

Highlights from

Nivola / Kastor

Although the War of 1812 may have faded from modern memory, the conflict left important legacies, both in its immediate wake and in later years. In its own time, the war was transformative. To this day, however, some of the fundamental challenges that confronted U.S. policymakers two centuries ago still resonate. How much should a free society regularly invest in national defense? Should the expense be defrayed through new taxes? Is it possible for profound partisan disagreements to stop “at the water’s edge”? What are the constitutional limits of executive powers in wartime? How, exactly, should the government treat dissenters, especially when many are suspected of giving aid and comfort to an enemy? As Americans continue to reflect on their country and its role in the world, these questions remain as relevant now as they were then.

“Because the War of 1812 is characterized by irony . . . it makes sense that a system of federalism that seemed so ill-equipped for the successful prosecution of war would emerge both vindicated and celebrated by the conflict.” PETER J. KASTOR BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS Washington, D.C. www.brookings.edu

PIETRO S. NIVOLA and PETER J. KASTOR Editors

W

ith distrust between the political parties running deep and Congress divided, the government of the United States goes to war. The war is waged without adequately preparing the means to finance it or readying suitable contingency plans to contend with its unanticipated complications. The executive branch suffers from managerial confusion and in-fighting. The military invades a foreign country, expecting to be greeted as liberators, but encounters stiff, unwelcome resistance. The conflict drags on longer than predicted. It ends rather inconclusively—or so it seems in its aftermath. Sound familiar? This all happened two hundred years ago. What So Proudly We Hailed looks at the War of 1812 in part through the lens of today’s America. On the bicentennial of that formative yet largely forgotten period in U.S. history, this provocative book asks: What did Americans learn—and not learn—from the experience? What instructive parallels and distinctions can be drawn with more recent events? How did it shape the nation? Exploring issues ranging from party politics to sectional schisms, distant naval battles to the burning of Washington, and citizens’ civil liberties to the fate of Native Americans caught in the struggle, these essays speak to the complexity and unpredictability of a war that many assumed would be brief and straightforward. What emerges is a revealing perspective on a problematic “war of choice”—the nation’s first, but one with intriguing implications for others, including at least one in the present century. Continued on back flap

Nivola jckt:Nivola jckt

9/13/12

2:31 PM

Page 1

PETER J. KASTOR is Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and author of William Clark’s World (Yale, 2011).

Cover art: The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, circa 1913, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Jacket design by Larry Converse

What So Proudly We Hailed “In the end, the complex federal polity that the founders had pieced together proved resilient and endured. Citizens given to lamenting the state of present-day American politics, featuring a government that is supposedly ‘gridlocked’ and ‘dysfunctional,’ would do well to recall that the nation has weathered far greater crises in the past.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA (Brookings Institution) and PETER J. KASTOR (Washington University) “The concept of a robust regular army and navy represented to the Republicans of the time what the welfare state is to conservatives now: a budget-busting beast, insatiably devouring higher tax revenues, and potentially imperiling individual liberties.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA “For all that has changed in the technology of war and America’s place among the world’s great military powers, much about the War of 1812 remains strikingly modern with respect to the lessons that it holds for deterrence, preparedness, counterinsurgency strategy, and military professionalism.” STEPHEN BUDIANSKY (author of Perilous Fight) “Jefferson’s Republicans constructed a forceful critique of national power and a boisterous endorsement of state sovereignty and individual rights—positions that anticipated much contemporary rhetoric. Alas, by shrinking the national government, Jefferson and Madison hampered the ability of the United States to wage the War of 1812. Recounting that war offers a cautionary tale of national disaster narrowly averted.” ALAN TAYLOR (author of The Civil War of 1812) “Madison showed remarkable restraint in nearly all respects during the War of 1812, which took place in the country’s infancy, when there was still great conceptual space for robust claims of presidential power to restrain freedom. The war saw dramatically fewer intrusions on civil liberties than did later wars or even earlier episodes short of war in the country’s still-young history.” BENJAMIN WITTES and RITIKA SINGH (Brookings Institution)

What So Proudly We Hailed Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812

What So Proudly We Hailed

PIETRO S. NIVOLA is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the C. Douglas Dillon Chair in Governance Studies. He is coeditor (with David Brady) of Red and Blue America, vols. I–II (Brookings, 2006 and 2008).

Highlights from

Nivola / Kastor

Although the War of 1812 may have faded from modern memory, the conflict left important legacies, both in its immediate wake and in later years. In its own time, the war was transformative. To this day, however, some of the fundamental challenges that confronted U.S. policymakers two centuries ago still resonate. How much should a free society regularly invest in national defense? Should the expense be defrayed through new taxes? Is it possible for profound partisan disagreements to stop “at the water’s edge”? What are the constitutional limits of executive powers in wartime? How, exactly, should the government treat dissenters, especially when many are suspected of giving aid and comfort to an enemy? As Americans continue to reflect on their country and its role in the world, these questions remain as relevant now as they were then.

“Because the War of 1812 is characterized by irony . . . it makes sense that a system of federalism that seemed so ill-equipped for the successful prosecution of war would emerge both vindicated and celebrated by the conflict.” PETER J. KASTOR BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS Washington, D.C. www.brookings.edu

PIETRO S. NIVOLA and PETER J. KASTOR Editors

W

ith distrust between the political parties running deep and Congress divided, the government of the United States goes to war. The war is waged without adequately preparing the means to finance it or readying suitable contingency plans to contend with its unanticipated complications. The executive branch suffers from managerial confusion and in-fighting. The military invades a foreign country, expecting to be greeted as liberators, but encounters stiff, unwelcome resistance. The conflict drags on longer than predicted. It ends rather inconclusively—or so it seems in its aftermath. Sound familiar? This all happened two hundred years ago. What So Proudly We Hailed looks at the War of 1812 in part through the lens of today’s America. On the bicentennial of that formative yet largely forgotten period in U.S. history, this provocative book asks: What did Americans learn—and not learn—from the experience? What instructive parallels and distinctions can be drawn with more recent events? How did it shape the nation? Exploring issues ranging from party politics to sectional schisms, distant naval battles to the burning of Washington, and citizens’ civil liberties to the fate of Native Americans caught in the struggle, these essays speak to the complexity and unpredictability of a war that many assumed would be brief and straightforward. What emerges is a revealing perspective on a problematic “war of choice”—the nation’s first, but one with intriguing implications for others, including at least one in the present century. Continued on back flap

Nivola jckt:Nivola jckt

9/13/12

2:31 PM

Page 1

PETER J. KASTOR is Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and author of William Clark’s World (Yale, 2011).

Cover art: The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, circa 1913, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Jacket design by Larry Converse

What So Proudly We Hailed “In the end, the complex federal polity that the founders had pieced together proved resilient and endured. Citizens given to lamenting the state of present-day American politics, featuring a government that is supposedly ‘gridlocked’ and ‘dysfunctional,’ would do well to recall that the nation has weathered far greater crises in the past.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA (Brookings Institution) and PETER J. KASTOR (Washington University) “The concept of a robust regular army and navy represented to the Republicans of the time what the welfare state is to conservatives now: a budget-busting beast, insatiably devouring higher tax revenues, and potentially imperiling individual liberties.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA “For all that has changed in the technology of war and America’s place among the world’s great military powers, much about the War of 1812 remains strikingly modern with respect to the lessons that it holds for deterrence, preparedness, counterinsurgency strategy, and military professionalism.” STEPHEN BUDIANSKY (author of Perilous Fight) “Jefferson’s Republicans constructed a forceful critique of national power and a boisterous endorsement of state sovereignty and individual rights—positions that anticipated much contemporary rhetoric. Alas, by shrinking the national government, Jefferson and Madison hampered the ability of the United States to wage the War of 1812. Recounting that war offers a cautionary tale of national disaster narrowly averted.” ALAN TAYLOR (author of The Civil War of 1812) “Madison showed remarkable restraint in nearly all respects during the War of 1812, which took place in the country’s infancy, when there was still great conceptual space for robust claims of presidential power to restrain freedom. The war saw dramatically fewer intrusions on civil liberties than did later wars or even earlier episodes short of war in the country’s still-young history.” BENJAMIN WITTES and RITIKA SINGH (Brookings Institution)

What So Proudly We Hailed Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812

What So Proudly We Hailed

PIETRO S. NIVOLA is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the C. Douglas Dillon Chair in Governance Studies. He is coeditor (with David Brady) of Red and Blue America, vols. I–II (Brookings, 2006 and 2008).

Highlights from

Nivola / Kastor

Although the War of 1812 may have faded from modern memory, the conflict left important legacies, both in its immediate wake and in later years. In its own time, the war was transformative. To this day, however, some of the fundamental challenges that confronted U.S. policymakers two centuries ago still resonate. How much should a free society regularly invest in national defense? Should the expense be defrayed through new taxes? Is it possible for profound partisan disagreements to stop “at the water’s edge”? What are the constitutional limits of executive powers in wartime? How, exactly, should the government treat dissenters, especially when many are suspected of giving aid and comfort to an enemy? As Americans continue to reflect on their country and its role in the world, these questions remain as relevant now as they were then.

“Because the War of 1812 is characterized by irony . . . it makes sense that a system of federalism that seemed so ill-equipped for the successful prosecution of war would emerge both vindicated and celebrated by the conflict.” PETER J. KASTOR BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS Washington, D.C. www.brookings.edu

PIETRO S. NIVOLA and PETER J. KASTOR Editors

W

ith distrust between the political parties running deep and Congress divided, the government of the United States goes to war. The war is waged without adequately preparing the means to finance it or readying suitable contingency plans to contend with its unanticipated complications. The executive branch suffers from managerial confusion and in-fighting. The military invades a foreign country, expecting to be greeted as liberators, but encounters stiff, unwelcome resistance. The conflict drags on longer than predicted. It ends rather inconclusively—or so it seems in its aftermath. Sound familiar? This all happened two hundred years ago. What So Proudly We Hailed looks at the War of 1812 in part through the lens of today’s America. On the bicentennial of that formative yet largely forgotten period in U.S. history, this provocative book asks: What did Americans learn—and not learn—from the experience? What instructive parallels and distinctions can be drawn with more recent events? How did it shape the nation? Exploring issues ranging from party politics to sectional schisms, distant naval battles to the burning of Washington, and citizens’ civil liberties to the fate of Native Americans caught in the struggle, these essays speak to the complexity and unpredictability of a war that many assumed would be brief and straightforward. What emerges is a revealing perspective on a problematic “war of choice”—the nation’s first, but one with intriguing implications for others, including at least one in the present century. Continued on back flap

What So Proudly We Hailed

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What So Proudly We Hailed Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812 PIETRO S. NIVOLA PETER J. KASTOR Editors

brookings institution press Washington, D.C.

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Copyright © 2012

the brookings institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 www.brookings.edu All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data What so proudly we hailed : essays on the contemporary meaning of the War of 1812 / Pietro S. Nivola, Peter J. Kastor, editors.   p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8157-2414-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. United States—History—War of 1812—Political aspects.  2. United States— History—War of 1812—Influence.  3. United States—Politics and government— 1809–1817.  I. Nivola, Pietro S.  II. Kastor, Peter J.   E357.W53 2012  973.5'2—dc23 2012033985 987654321 Printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Minion Composition by Cynthia Stock Silver Spring, Maryland Printed by R. R. Donnelley Harrisonburg, Virginia

Contents



Foreword     vii



Acknowledgments    xi



Some Explanatory Notes: Places, People, and Politics during the War of 1812    xiii

Chapter One

Introduction    1



Pietro S. Nivola and Peter J. Kastor

Chapter Two

The “Party War” of 1812: Yesterday’s Lessons for Today’s Partisan Politics    8



Pietro S. Nivola

Chapter Three

The War of 1812 and the Rise of American Military Power    36



Stephen Budiansky

Chapter Four

Dual Nationalisms: Legacies of the War of 1812    67



Alan Taylor

Chapter Five

James Madison, Presidential Power, and Civil Liberties in the War of 1812    97



Benjamin Wittes and Ritika Singh

Chapter Six

The War over Federalism: The Constitutional Battles in the War of 1812    122



Peter J. Kastor



Contributors    153



Index    155

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Foreword

In his earliest thinking about American federal government, even before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison sought a system that would, as he put it, end “government by party”: end government by special interests (“factions”) that failed to discern and rule in the public good. As president, Madison had abundant and excruciating opportunities to defend and be faithful to his fundamental republican (respublica, “things of the public”) idealism—in particular during the War of 1812, a contest between Great Britain and its former colonies, by then an independent republic for nearly forty years. The chapters in this book reveal important parameters of that war, the first declared and fought under the new Constitution, and suggest intriguing implications for understanding wartime government in the centuries to come. Madison’s republican idealism guided his conduct of the war: fidelity to the checks and balances of the federal system built into the Constitution, the intention to put public spirit above party spirit, and an unwillingness to make the president a wartime proconsul. As “Commander and Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” but “of the Militia of the several States” only “when called into the actual service of the United States,” Madison sought the support of state authorities to preserve a vital federalism, a sharing of self-governing powers, rather than declaring martial law or taking powers away from state officers—or even “invading” a recalcitrant state with national forces, as a less republican ruler might have done. In the dark days after the burning of Washington, New England leaders opposed to the war gathered at Hartford, Connecticut, comforting the vii

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viii   /    Foreword

enemy and planning what Madison himself suspected were “traitorous designs.” Nonetheless, instead of sending in federal regiments to subdue them, he mustered a loyal militia under Colonel Thomas Jesup, “the hero of Lundy’s Lane,” to watch for and respond to “an armed uprising,” if that were to happen. Under such circumstances, Secretary of War James Monroe believed, “virtuous citizens . . . will separate from and punish” any traitors. Perhaps forewarned, the Hartford Convention ended innocuously. It set no military force in action; it merely hurled angry curses at the president, proposed amendments to the Constitution, sent its resolves to Washington, and called for another convention—all acceptable, republican measures of protest, similar in some ways to those Madison himself had taken in opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798–1800. When Madison simply received the Convention resolves silently, Jefferson explained the point: it “showed the placid nature of our Constitution. Under any other, their treasons would have been punished by the halter.” As the war began, Madison had in general strong political support in most of the country. In 1812, however, he faced what Henry Adams would call “the least creditable campaign” for the presidency in American history. Adams declared that Madison’s opponent, DeWitt Clinton of New York, told “war” Republicans that he favored “more vigorous prosecution of the war, asked the support of peace Republicans because Madison had plunged the country into war without preparation, bargained for Federalist votes as the price of bringing about peace, . . . coquetting with all parties in an atmosphere of bribery in bank charters, [as he] strove to make a majority which had no element of union but himself and money.” To Madison, Clinton’s campaign exhibited all that was factional and corrupt about American politics, diverting attention from the public good to partisan advantage. As the war concluded, however, Madison was pleased to learn that his former political opponent, ex-president John Adams (Henry Adams’s great-grandfather), had declared that the president’s conduct of the war, transcending and finally overcoming “government by party,” had, “not withstanding a thousand Faults and blunders, . . . acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all his three predecessors, Washington, Adams and Jefferson, put together.” Though Madison was well aware of the powerful and sometimes even useful role of party politics in the nation’s public life, he saw his electoral triumph over the cynically partisan Clinton and the eventual benign result of the war as validating what John Adams meant by

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Foreword   /   ix

Union: a federation of republican institutions able to defend itself, establish justice, and mobilize the energies of its people for the common good. That view of union was validated again, of course, by Abraham Lincoln in 1861–65. The president’s deepest intention throughout the war, however, was to show that the nation’s constitutional government—including its protection of personal liberties, its checks and balances, and its not-always-efficient processes of self-government—could in fact not only survive but be strengthened by the wartime demands made on it. As news of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and the signing of the Treaty of Ghent arrived, almost simultaneously, in Washington in February 1815, French Minister Louis Sururier, who had been in Washington throughout the war, often in close contact with Madison, reported simply to his government: “Three great attacks [by] Wellington’s best corps,” at Baltimore, Plattsburg, and New Orleans, had been defeated by American arms, showing that three years of warfare have been a trial of the capacity of their [republican] institutions to sustain a state of war, a question now resolved to their advantage. . . . Finally the war has given the Americans what they so essentially lacked, a national character founded on a glory common to all. The splendid chapters in this volume show how, despite “a thousand Faults and blunders,” the U.S. military finally rose to the occasion and the cumbersome federal system, untried in crisis, managed to conduct a respectable war against the world’s foremost military power. They reveal that despite sectional disputes and the growth of “different nationalisms” in North and South, the nation remained a union that generally preserved civil liberties throughout its domain in a long and divisive war. In suggesting how the War of 1812—the events and dilemmas, the defeats and victories, the failure and fulfillment of democratic government—illuminates later wars and crises of our history, these chapters are most welcome, for today the world continues to face and ponder the complexities, dangers, and aspirations of republican leadership and self-government in times of crisis, strife, and war. Ralph Ketcham Director Emeritus, the Montpelier Foundation Professor Emeritus, the Maxwell School, Syracuse University August 2012

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Acknowledgments

The editors of this volume gratefully acknowledge the assistance that their project received from several sources. Ralph Ketcham of Syracuse University provided valuable advice at a key stage and kindly agreed to add a foreword to the book. Sean O’Brien and Jen Howell, at James Madison’s Montpelier, organized two important conferences associated with the project. Christine Jacobs of Brookings handled additional outreach activities. Our work would not have been possible without the financial support of the late Robert H. Smith, who generously backed a series of joint initiatives between Brookings and Montpelier’s Center for the Constitution. Our work also was supported by the Brookings Institution/Washington University Academic Venture Fund; Ashley Bennett of Brookings helped coordinate that effort. At the Brookings Institution Press, Janet Walker admirably managed the editorial process and Eileen Hughes edited the manuscript.

xi

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Some Explanatory Notes: Places, People, and Politics during the War of 1812

North America in 1812 states of the union

—Connecticut (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Delaware (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Georgia (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Maryland (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Massachusetts (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —New Hampshire (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —New Jersey (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —New York (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —North Carolina (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Pennsylvania (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Rhode Island (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —South Carolina (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Virginia (British colony; declared independence in 1776). —Vermont (district of New York; declared independence from New York in 1777 and became an independent republic; entered the union in 1791). —Kentucky (western district of Virginia; ceded to the federal government and admitted to the union in 1792). —Tennessee (western district of North Carolina; ceded to the federal government in 1790 and admitted to the union in 1796). —Ohio (a portion of the Northwest Territory; admitted to the union in 1803). —Louisiana (acquired through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; admitted to the union in 1812). xiii

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xiv   /    Explanatory Notes

federal territories

—Indiana Territory (a portion of the Northwest Territory; created as its own territory in 1800, including most of the land that now constitutes Indiana and Illinois). —Michigan Territory (a portion of the Northwest Territory; created as its own territory in 1805, including most of the land that now constitutes Michigan and Wisconsin). —Mississippi Territory (acquired through treaty with Spain in 1795, constituted as a territory in 1798, and later enlarged through a land cession from Georgia, eventually including most of what is now Mississippi and Alabama but not the Gulf Coast, which remained Spanish territory). —Missouri Territory (acquired through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, it remained the largest federal territory, including all the land west of the Mississippi River, north of what is now the Louisiana-Arkansas border, south of what is now the U.S.-Canadian border, and east of the Rocky Mountains). regions of the united states

Many of the chapters in this volume refer to regions (the Northeast, the Southwest, and so forth). Americans applied some of these terms very differently in 1812 from the way that they do today. In addition, Americans in the era of the War of 1812 often described some states and territories as being in more than one region. —Northeast: Connecticut, Massachusetts (including the territory that now constitutes Maine), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Some people considered the Mid-Atlantic states to be part of a larger Northeast. —Mid-Atlantic: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. —South: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. —Northwest: Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Michigan Territory. —Southwest: Louisiana and Mississippi Territory. —Outliers: Kentucky and Tennessee were occasionally referred to as portions of the Southwest, but at the time of the war they were associated, along with the Missouri Territory, as part of the West; that is also how they are identified in this volume. —The West: All states and territories west of the thirteen original colonies and Vermont. When Americans referred to the West, they lumped together Northwestern states like Ohio and Southwestern states like Louisiana.

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Explanatory Notes     /   xv

—Trans-Mississippi West: The region, with the Mississippi Valley at its center, extending from the western fringe of the Appalachian Mountains to the eastern edge of the Great Plains. regions of canada

Great Britain had divided Canada into various administrative units. Two of them would become principal strategic objectives for the United States and, as a result, major theaters of military operations. —Lower Canada: The British colony where the United States hoped to launch operations during the War of 1812. Including most of what now constitutes the Canadian province of Quebec, the region took its name from its location on the downriver—or lower—end of the St. Lawrence River. Opposition from the governments of New England and New York (located across the St. Lawrence) eventually made a campaign in Lower Canada impossible in 1812 and 1813, leading the Madison administration to pursue a strategy through Upper Canada. —Upper Canada: The British colony surrounding the Great Lakes, consisting primarily of the present-day province of Ontario, located immediately to the west of Lower Canada. Although it is in fact south of Lower Canada, Upper Canada takes its name from being located on the upriver—or upper—end of the St. Lawrence River. Most of the army campaigns in the War of 1812 (as well as the naval operations on the Great Lakes) were fought in and around Upper Canada.

President and Cabinet —President of the United States James Madison (1809–17) —Vice President of the United States George Clinton (1809–12; office vacant following Clinton’s death, from April 1812 to March 1813) Elbridge Gerry (1813–14; office vacant following Gerry’s death, from November 1814 to March 1817) —Secretary of State James Monroe (1811–17) —Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1809–14) George W. Campbell (1814) Alexander J. Dallas (1814–16)

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xvi   /    Explanatory Notes

—Secretary of War William Eustis (1809–13) John Armstrong Jr. (1813–14) James Monroe (1814–15) —Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton (1809–13) William Jones (1813–14) Benjamin W. Crowninshield (1814–17) —Attorney General William Pinkney (1811–14) Richard Rush (1814–17)

Political Parties and Movements The chapters in this volume refer to a variety of political organizations and movements. Each of those organizations and movements shares certain connections to modern-day politics, but none of them coincides entirely with the ideas and policies of contemporary American politics. These organizations were products of a very different time, but they established a foundation to the American political order that was so deep that they remain with us to this day. political parties

The United States had two major political parties during the War of 1812— the Republicans and the Federalists—which had emerged from divisions over national policy during the 1790s. This was an era when many Americans considered formal parties to be a form of corruption and an unnecessary division within national politics; because of that, both groups initially rejected party labels. By the election of 1798, however, the parties were clearly established, and they would dominate the nation’s political system for the next thirty years. —The Republicans: Not to be confused with the modern Republican Party, this political organization had more direct historical ties to the Democratic Party. Originally known as the Democratic-Republicans, members of this party often were referred to in their own time (as they are in this volume) as simply “the Republicans.” The party began as an opposition movement within the federal government under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It had matured into a highly effective party organization by the time that Jefferson won the presidency in 1800. The next three presidents

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Explanatory Notes     /   xvii

(Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams) were Republicans. Adams’s victory in 1824 came as a split was emerging within the leadership of the Republicans. Adams’s supporters came to refer to themselves as National Republicans. His principal opponent, Andrew Jackson, led an insurgency within the party that was initially referred to simply as the Democracy and later became formalized as the Democratic Party. —The Federalists: As the Republicans organized to oppose the policies of the administrations of George Washington and John Adams, supporters of both presidents eventually called themselves Federalists. Federalist political fortunes declined rapidly after 1800, with Republicans controlling the administration, securing majorities in both houses of Congress, and winning control over a majority of state governments. Federalist appeal contracted geographically, with New England becoming the only stronghold of Federalist political power. The War of 1812 constituted the Federalists’ last moment of political significance. The party disintegrated in the years following the war. Some of its members defected to the Republicans. Older Federalists simply retired from politics. Younger Federalists drifted through the changes in party politics, most eventually joining the Whig Party, which formed in the 1830s. —The Democrats and the Republicans: In order to understand the parties that existed during the War of 1812, it is important to distinguish them from the two major political parties in the United States today. Although party members often were called “Republicans,” the party that Madison led during the war is not the same as the Republican Party today. After the Republicans fragmented in the 1820s, Jackson consolidated his political movement into the Democratic Party. The Republican Party did not take form until the 1850s, emerging primarily from the ashes of the Whig Party, which had drawn its membership initially from former Federalists and later from disaffected Democrats. political movements

—Federalism: Not to be confused with the Federalist Party, federalism as a political movement included primarily supporters of the U.S. Constitution (and the federal system) in the 1780s. As a result, men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were federalists in the 1780s and remained committed to the federal union for the rest of their lives, but they were not members of the Federalist Party. Conversely, John Adams, who was serving as a diplomat in Europe in the late 1780s and therefore was not directly involved in the

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xviii   /    Explanatory Notes

federalist effort to ratify the Constitution, emerged in the 1790s as a leader of the Federalist Party. —Jeffersonianism: This term applies not only to the formal political order that Thomas Jefferson helped lead (the Republicans) but also to the broader political philosophy embraced by Jefferson and his allies. The Jeffersonians were concerned in particular with guaranteeing that the institutions of government sustained the federal union without threatening individual liberties. To that end, they supported guarantees for individual political expression; a broad-based suffrage that would increase the number of elected offices and extend the suffrage to the greatest number of white men; and, because in this era land ownership was the foundation of individual independence, access to inexpensive land for white settlers. Drawing much of its political support from the South, Jeffersonianism also supported the preservation and in many cases the expansion of slavery. Likewise, Jeffersonians were equally clear in what they opposed: centralized political power in most forms; a large army or navy; direct federal taxation of individual citizens (as opposed to indirect taxes on imports or other excise charges); and a permanent federal debt (as opposed to temporary debts to fund important federal activities). Their beliefs were often in tension. For example, the Jeffersonians supported certain forms of states’ rights (primarily as a safeguard against excessive federal power and as a way to distribute the costs and responsibilities of government) but vigorously opposed state interference in certain forms of federal policymaking as well as separatist movements by individual states. —Hamiltonianism: This term applies to the political order espoused by Alexander Hamilton, whose vision carried considerable weight among the Federalists in the 1790s but quickly proved unpopular in the nation at large. Hamilton sought a sophisticated form of political economy that would support economic development through government support. As a result, Hamiltonianism had considerable support from the nation’s banking and merchant classes. Hamiltonians supported a large standing army and navy and believed that the United States should use military force as a regular tool of federal policymaking. Hamiltonians also emphasized the importance of building a strong relationship with Great Britain, in stark contrast to Jeffersonians, who remained deeply suspicious of Britain. Some Hamiltonians in particular and Federalists in general were among the first critics of slavery, focusing primarily on their concern that it granted inappropriate political and economic power to Southern slaveholders.

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Chapter One Introduction Pietro S. Nivola and Peter J. Kastor

With no consensus of the two political parties, the government of the United States decides to go to war. The war of choice is waged on the assumption that it will be brief and decisive. There is little advance planning for how to pay for—and prevail in—an unexpectedly protracted and complicated military operation. Moreover, the war aims are not stable. They become ambitious. When the main casus belli recedes, others move to the fore. An invasion of a foreign country is attempted, and it is presumed that American soldiers will be greeted as liberators. Nasty surprises abound. Not only does discord grow in Congress, the executive suffers from factionalism, infighting, and, in some bureaus, gross incompetence. The war drags on. The upshot is, in reality, a stalemate—or at least an anticlimax—even though the president declares the mission accomplished. Historians will continue to wonder whether it was necessary and exactly what it accomplished. That scenario may sound familiar. Iraq comes to mind. America’s intervention there was controversial, unpaid for (at least through additional taxes instead of debt), and beset by unintended developments. It slogged on much longer than predicted. The stated goal of the expedition was to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but when the existence of those weapons could not be confirmed, U.S. troops were ordered to invade the country anyway. Other objectives (first removing a regime, then stabilizing its replacement) now took precedence. Yet many Iraqis did not welcome their liberators, who were surprised by the anti-American reaction and 1

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2   /    Pietro S. Nivola and Peter J. Kastor

the tenacity of the insurgent movement that followed. It remains unclear whether the costly U.S. effort in Iraq will have paid off. But the general description in the opening sentences above is also a serviceable characterization of an earlier armed conflict—one that took place a couple of centuries ago and that most Americans now recall dimly, if at all: the War of 1812. Two centuries after it began, few Americans know much about the war; indeed, its bicentennial observance has gotten more attention in Canada than in the United States. Americans might recall that the national anthem was written during the War of 1812, or perhaps that the British invaded and burned much of the nation’s capital, or that Andrew Jackson led American troops to victory at New Orleans. But the causes and outcomes of the war have generally faded from memory. In its own time, however, the War of 1812, which followed nearly a generation of strife with foreign powers in North America, was a momentous event. It marked the first time that the United States made a formal declaration of war, and that dramatic step influenced the way that a generation of Americans conceived of their country and its role in the world. The War of 1812 had multiple roots, but first and foremost among them were the commercial disputes between the United States and Great Britain. In addition to imposing restrictions on American trade (a primary concern of U.S. policymakers), the British government, in a practice known as impressment, had continued to force sailors on American merchant ships to serve on warships of the Royal Navy. In 1812, the United States took up arms against Great Britain hoping that a military campaign on the Canadian border would force a change in British policy. In two years of bloody, mostly chaotic warfare, neither side triumphed. The conflict stretched far and wide, on both land and sea. American, British, and Indian forces clashed not only along the border with Canada but also in the Mississippi Valley, on the Gulf Coast, and in the Mid-Atlantic states. Meanwhile, the fledgling U.S. Navy sought to take the fight to the British on the Great Lakes, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and even the waters surrounding the British Isles. The British responded by deploying a large fleet to blockade the Eastern seaboard and eventually to launch the amphibious invasions near Washington and New Orleans. It was from one of those British ships that an American prisoner, Francis Scott Key, observed the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which guarded Baltimore’s harbor. Inspired by the tenacity of the U.S. defenders, Key wrote the poem that became the “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

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Introduction   /   3

When the fighting came to an end in 1815, both sides were exhausted, and it was hard to tell what, if anything, had been achieved. In time, however, it became evident that America’s place in the world had changed. Although Britain retained its hold on Canada, the British government gradually abandoned its most objectionable trade policies. During the war, the Indians in the North had formed an effective alliance with the British. The fight in parts of the South and in the West took a different turn. There, the Americans routed the Indians and promptly took over their lands. If the war had no clear winner in 1815, it nonetheless would reshape Anglo-American relations. Britain and the United States moved past the antagonisms that had gripped them since 1776. Meanwhile, American domestic politics also underwent a transformation. In sum, the war’s imprimatur was significant. For the bicentennial of that formative yet rather opaque episode in American history, the Brookings Institution, in collaboration with the Center for the Constitution at James Madison’s Montpelier and with Washington University in St. Louis, assembled a group of scholars to explore a basic question of continuing relevance: What, from a modern perspective, did the country learn—or perhaps not learn—from the experience of 1812–15? This book is the fruit of our commemorative research project. The book, including this introduction, has six chapters. Chapter 2, by Pietro S. Nivola, a senior fellow at Brookings, reviews the causes and the course of the War of 1812. The chapter pays particular attention to a curious parallel between American politics in the early nineteenth century and those today: the existence of a deep divide between the two major political parties and the tendency of each side to say, in effect, “My way or the highway.” The pro-war partisans in 1812—the Republicans, as they were called in that era—forged ahead on their own, mostly with contempt for the opposition, the Federalists. The opposing camps were poles apart ideologically. Much as the two major political parties do today, the parties then held “different visions for the country.” Those plain words happen to be those of House Speaker John Boehner, spoken not long ago, but the same words would befit just as easily the political rivals of two centuries ago.1 Not unlike the Republican Party of 2012, for example, the Republican Party two hundred years ago was determined to minimize the powers of the central government, especially its ability to collect new tax revenues. Then as now, partisan disagreements put the nation’s financial stability at risk—and

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4   /    Pietro S. Nivola and Peter J. Kastor

with it, the maintenance of essential public goods, such as armed forces that have the resources required to perform their assigned missions. In some ways, therefore, the United States could be said to have learned less over the long term than perhaps it should have from the ordeal of 1812– 1815. Be that as it may, the positions of the political parties were substantially upended following the war. Difficult as it may be for many observers of our polarized politics today to anticipate a transformative shift in the current political alignment, it could—indeed, in time, will—happen again. Revisiting the past circa 1812 serves as a useful reminder, even as reassurance, that the status quo is not permanent. The third chapter of the book, written by Stephen Budiansky, the author of Perilous Fight: America’s War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815, addresses the war’s consequences for the U.S. military, mainly in the immediate wake of the war but also, in a general way, over the longer haul. America had gone to war ill-prepared and paid a price for its negligence. Battlefield losses—6,765 casualties—were light in comparison with those in subsequent conflicts, such as the Civil War, but the seemingly modest figure does not tell the full story. An estimated 17,000 additional deaths resulted from disease, exposure, and other noncombat causes, a substantial share of which could be attributed to the fact that the campaign was badly organized.2 For a young country with a small population engaged in an altercation that only lasted two and a half years, the toll was significant. (The American casualty count in Iraq—4,409 troops killed and 31,928 wounded—was for a war that spanned eight years.) The harm, much of it quite unnecessary and humiliating, proved severe enough to alter attitudes about national defense, albeit in fits and starts. At least political resistance to a standing army and navy diminished. Gradually, both services became robust institutions, but the navy got a bigger boost from the war. For, as Budiansky shows, America’s little flotilla in 1812–15 had not only earned the public’s respect with feats in several valiant encounters with British warships but also had mounted effective raids on British merchant shipping, thereby at least marginally tipping the scales in an otherwise lopsided contest. To this day, the U.S. Navy owes some of its stature to how it proved its mettle during the War of 1812. Chapter 4, by Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, addresses a cultural legacy of the war. The war is widely thought to have roused a collective patriotic spirit and, in the end, created a sense of nationhood. In the immediate aftermath of the war, that did appear to be

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Introduction   /   5

one of its effects. At the conclusion of the struggle, James Monroe assured the Senate that “our Union has gained strength” and our nation built “character.” He was right, to a point. Symbols of the nation’s identity—including, as we have noted, verses of what was to become the country’s anthem— emerged from the lore of 1812. But beneath the surface, the war years also opened regional fissures that, in time, would cause disunity. Taylor delves into this less-noted implication. The postwar period, commonly known as the “era of good feelings,” harbored some enduring resentments. Taylor describes what he calls the emergence of competing nationalisms: a Southern variant and a Northern one. The war had left states such as Virginia embittered at New England’s wartime reluctance to enter the fray and especially to dispatch troops elsewhere for the common defense. Meanwhile, many Northerners chafed at being asked to join a war that they deemed unjust and unnecessary and that they suspected of serving as a pretext for achieving other aspirations, such as ousting Indians from coveted lands, preserving or expanding slave-holding territories, and shoring up political support for the Republicans at the expense of the Federalists. The War of 1812, in short, may have buoyed nationalistic sentiments for a brief while, but it then exposed fault lines that would disrupt the process of nation building for decades to come. A lesson that citizens today might take away from this history is quite simple: Beware of starting wars that can ultimately divide the country, for the damaging rifts that they create may take a long time to repair. In chapter 5, two Brookings scholars, Benjamin Wittes and Ritika Singh, take up an unexamined feature of the War of 1812: the president’s unique forbearance toward antiwar dissent, even when some of it became so vehement as to verge on treason. In striking contrast to virtually every subsequent commander in chief—and to John Adams, the Federalist signatory of the punitive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—James Madison declined to restrict civil liberties in wartime. The war was one of the most unpopular this country has ever fought.3 Although Madison was distressed by the intense opposition, he also was resigned to it. Unwilling or perhaps unable to repress the dissenters, he let their resistance grow—culminating in the antiwar movement’s notorious Hartford Convention, which called not only for an immediate halt to hostilities but also for far-reaching revisions of the Constitution. Juxtaposed with what happened in later wars, Madison’s remarkably restrained exercise of executive war powers can seem eccentric. Abraham

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6   /    Pietro S. Nivola and Peter J. Kastor

Lincoln would suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson cracked down harshly on dissidents during World War I. Franklin D, Roosevelt authorized the “internment” of tens of thousands of American citizens during World War II. Waging a war on terror, the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama reserved the option of detaining in military custody anyone, including U.S. nationals, who was suspected of being an enemy combatant. Madison took no such actions. Why? To an extent, Wittes and Singh conclude, Madison may have been motivated by pragmatic considerations. With the country already profoundly torn by the war, attempts to suppress his opponents may have seemed, if not infeasible, politically counterproductive. An added backlash might work to the advantage of his nemesis, the Federalist Party, thereby imperiling an important underlying purpose of his war policy—to rehabilitate the tenuous credibility and reputation of republicanism. But above all, the authors argue, the president simply held strong constitutional scruples regarding the limits of executive power. Ironically, looking back over two centuries of often imperious presidencies in national emergencies, Madison’s principled restraint during the War of 1812 may have been ahead of its time. Surely, aspects of his civil-­libertarian style now seem closer to today’s norms than, say, President Roosevelt’s draconian decision to forcibly relocate and incarcerate about 80,000 Japanese Americans in 1942. In chapter 6, the final chapter, Peter J. Kastor, a history professor at Washington University in St. Louis, considers the ways that the unique regime that emerged in 1789 informed the prosecution of the War of 1812. The constitutional order that James Madison had played a leading role in framing was a federated structure, vesting authority in a central government with separated powers and also in sovereign states. A political system with these two-tiered checks and balances was bound to tie the president’s hands, particularly in the regime’s formative years, long before the executive’s war-making capacity evolved into the potent presidential prerogative that it is now. National military plans, for example, were heavily dependent on the mobilization of state militias. Uncooperative state governors or legislatures would complicate military strategy. Throughout the war, some key state governments brazenly boycotted the Madison administration’s war plans. Others exerted influence less directly, through Congress, where local interests were extensively represented and where the president’s requests for essential resources

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Introduction   /   7

were frequently frustrated. Still, Kastor argues, in certain instances “federalism” (his preferred term for what political scientists refer to more broadly as the Madisonian system) measured up to the task. In the West, a combination of forces, some national, others local, enabled the United States to score several battlefield successes. Territorial governance, which placed large areas of land under direct federal control, meant that much of the West was less subject to the errant activities of the states, making it easier to conduct military operations there. At the same time, whereas state and local decisions often interfered with the Madison administration’s war effort elsewhere, they aided it in parts of the West, where state governments were especially eager to vanquish the region’s Indians. The important gains of Andrew Jackson in the Southwest, for instance, had less to do with military maneuvers orchestrated in Washington than with the initiative of state units like Jackson’s Tennessee volunteers. A diverse assortment of local folk, not just federal regulars, rallied to the defense of New Orleans. In sum, America’s decentralized government institutions encumbered the war effort but at important junctures also met some of its challenges. In the end, the complex federal polity that the founders had pieced together proved resilient and endured. Citizens given to lamenting the state of present-day American politics, featuring a government that is supposedly “gridlocked” and “dysfunctional,” would do well to recall that the nation has weathered far greater crises in the past.

Notes 1. Boehner was explaining the collapse of an historic bipartisan compromise that would have righted the nation’s fiscal imbalance. Quoted in Jackie Calmes and Carl Hulse, “Debt Ceiling Talks Collapse as Boehner Walks Out,” New York Times, July 22, 2011. 2. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 302–03. 3. Hickey, War of 1812, p. 255.

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Chapter Two The “Party War” of 1812: Yesterday’s Lessons for Today’s Partisan Politics Pietro S. Nivola

The most distinctive feature of American politics in recent decades has been the deepening polarization of the political parties.1 Democrats and Republicans have seemed unable to bridge their fundamental differences or to compromise, even on the country’s most urgent imperatives. Disagreements between the two sides intensified in the summer of 2011. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives squared off against the Democrats, who held the White House and Senate, in a tense showdown occasioned by the Treasury’s pressing need to borrow money. In the course of this row, the antagonists took the government to the brink of default. Not only that, but Congress, along with a president who appeared at least partly complicit, passed up an extraordinary opportunity to strike a “grand bargain” on fiscal policy, a deal that would have begun to correct the nation’s structural budget deficit and an alarming rise in sovereign debt.2 To many commentators, the degree of partisan discord these days appears “unprecedented.”3 When, if ever before, had our party politics degenerated to the point of gambling so recklessly with the future of the republic? As a matter of fact, two political parties were acrimoniously at odds in the United States a couple of centuries ago, and politicians in Washington, including some revered ones, acted no less hazardously. On the bicentennial of the War of 1812, that obscure, largely forgotten misadventure, it is worth revisiting what transpired. The events of that time have some important implications for the present. Probing them, this chapter discusses the motives and meaning of the War of 1812, with emphasis on the salience of partisanship. Then as now, the interests and ideological biases of political parties played a fateful role. 8

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The “Party War” of 1812   /   9

History, as Tolstoy stressed, can bring surprises, since it so often seems to chart its own unexpected course. For the rival political parties two hundred years ago, there was considerable irony in the eventual outcome. In the confrontation between them, one side had the better case, but it was destined to lose nonetheless. Then, in short order, the winners had the political equivalent of an out-of-body experience; they underwent something akin to a doctrinal metamorphosis. In the partisan drama of the present day, for good or ill, a similar sequel cannot necessarily be ruled out.

The War of 1812 Thirty years after the end of hostilities in the American Revolution, Congress declared a second war against Great Britain. The ostensible cause involved American maritime rights, which had been abridged by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. For years, the United States had complained about Britain’s harassment of neutral merchant shipping, the intrusive search and seizure of suspected contraband on American vessels that might make their way to the European continent, and the practice of “impressing,” or conscripting, thousands of members of their crews as a means of meeting manpower shortages in His Majesty’s far-flung fleet. The conventional chronicle has it that those provocations were unique and unrelenting, even gratuitous, and that by 1812 they had become intolerable. American endeavors to reach a negotiated end to the depredations had been futile, as had U.S. attempts to exert pressure through a series of experiments with economic sanctions, beginning with President Jefferson’s largely self-defeating trade embargo in 1807. Finally, according to the usual narrative, the patience of even a scrupulously reflective and reluctant American president, James Madison, who had taken office in 1809, just wore out. Exasperated, Madison presumably was left with only two possibilities: capitulate or fight back. In certain respects, the conventional account falls short. To begin with, Britain’s interference with open trade was anything but unique. The frequency of French seizures of American ships sometimes matched or exceeded Britain’s.4 At a critical point, France’s claim to have relaxed its own continental system of commercial restrictions was so transparently phony and deceptive as “to give sight to the blind,” in the words of John Quincy Adams.5 Yet, Madison deemed it expedient to act as if Napoleon had to be given the benefit of the doubt.6

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10   /   Pietro S. Nivola

Britain, which the Americans decided to confront instead, did not expect war with the United States and did not wish it. Preoccupied with a titanic struggle in Europe, the British preferred to avoid taking on another war within a war. Indeed, in a tragic twist, just as Congress was deciding to send Americans—however woefully unprepared—into battle in June 1812, the British government had tried to remove what was thought to be a principal bone of contention: the Admiralty’s so-called Orders in Council, which directed warships to lie off U.S. seaports and interrupt navigation. Suspension of the Orders in Council meant that, in no small part, America’s initial avowed war aims had been attained before the first shot was fired. Britain’s conciliatory step came at the eleventh hour. With no transatlantic hotline to the White House, no one on the U.S. side of the ocean could have known about it in time to alter Congress’s fateful decision. Still, at least prima facie, it seems strange that Congress and the president persisted with their war policy after they learned that the Orders in Council—a casus belli presumably so central to American grievances—had been repealed. The U.S. secretary of state, James Monroe, would later allow that if the orders had been lifted before war had been declared, there would have been no war.7 In his subsequent recollections, Madison himself said as much in 1827.8 These admissions are perplexing; they deepen the puzzle of why, once word eventually did reach American shores, the United States rebuffed British overtures to negotiate an early armistice or cease-fire.9 It was not always plain what the predominant American complaint was. The impressing of sailors had long been a preoccupation, though at times the other indignities suffered under the Orders in Council seemed uppermost.10 No doubt, British sea captains were commandeering large numbers of crewmen off American ships. And for those unfortunate souls, inducted involuntarily into the notoriously brutal service aboard the Royal Navy’s armada, impressment was tantamount to enslavement. At issue—or so it appeared— was a relatively straightforward matter of upholding U.S. sovereignty and human rights. But here, too, the story was more complicated. The British claimed to be recapturing deserters, of which there were indeed many, and to be calling up British subjects obligated to serve the king in time of war. Under British law, an Englishman or Irishman remained a “native-born subject” regardless of whether he had become a naturalized American citizen. Thousands of former British mariners were serving in America’s merchant fleet, which had been

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The “Party War” of 1812   /   11

growing rapidly and recruiting aggressively with attractive wages. A significant number of the hands that sailed the ships of the tiny U.S. Navy were ex-Britons. The Royal Navy’s dragnet was far from selective; a lot of American-born seamen were also caught in it, and obtaining their release was rarely easy. While the Napoleonic conflagration raged, however, impressment was not a tactic that Britain would renounce. That was a non-negotiable reality that could not have escaped a man of Madison’s acuity.11 The British viewed themselves as locked in an epic battle to rid mankind of Bonaparte the despot, and under the circumstances, they concluded that they could ill afford to lose seamen to the pesky navy and merchant marine of an upstart former colony. Lord Castlereagh was forthright on the subject: since “England was fighting the battles of the world, as well as for her own existence as an independent Nation, she required the services of all her subjects.”12 What British naval forces were doing to crews of neutral American boats on the high seas was infuriating. Certainly, to a modern sensibility, the corporal punishment meted out to enforce discipline on the king’s ships was little short of barbaric. Yet egregious as all that could be, it paled in scale next to another type of mass bondage practiced during the era—the monstrous African slave trade that, lest we forget, England largely ceased tolerating before America did.13

What Was It About? Although the issue of impressment surely loomed large, it is hard to imagine that impressment per se could have sufficed to sustain a state of war between America, a fragile nascent nation, and Great Britain, the nineteenth century’s colossus. And sure enough, as the conflict dragged on and U.S. officials grew eager to settle it, the issue dropped off the table.14 In June 1812, the votes for war in Congress (79 to 49 in the House; 19 to 13 in the Senate) were the narrowest of any declaration of war in U.S. history. They reflected the country’s deep divisions over the course of action. Examined by region, the congressional roll calls also suggest that there was implicitly more on the agenda than just the matter of “free trade and sailors’ rights,” the simplified slogan behind the call to arms. The pro-war votes came most solidly from the South and West, including inland sections of the country that were not involved in seafaring commerce and were least affected by the violations of maritime rights that were supposed to be the crux of the dispute.

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12   /   Pietro S. Nivola

Meanwhile, congressmen from New England, a region heavily dependent on open navigation, mostly stood in staunch opposition to the war. The voting patterns raise questions. Did some of the war’s enthusiasts regard it as, among other projects, a chance to annex Canadian territory or at least to weaken British support of the Indians who threatened American settlements and migration in the Northwest? Did some eye an opportunity to dislodge other Indian tribes in the Southwest and also expand into Florida?15 Historians have debated such intriguing hypotheses at length. Whatever else can be said about the root causes of the War of 1812, this much seems safe to infer: First, the motives were mixed and mobile. The Americans protested various British maritime abuses, but they also contested the Anglo-Shawnee alliance in the West and the nettlesome Creek Indians in the South. Particularly in the later stages, when the coast was blockaded and threatened with invasion and the country had to draw back into a defensive crouch, salvaging national honor seemed to become the war’s bottom line. It may be a stretch to call this story, in modern parlance, a case of mission creep and eventual contraction, but there is at least a partial kernel of truth to that characterization. Second, inasmuch as the affair had multiple causes, the principles and interests of political parties were very much in the mix. The proponents of the war were entirely members of the so-called Republican Party. When forced to vote on the question in June 1812, not a single representative or senator from the other party—the Federalists—went along. The Republican majority, however, was undeterred by the absence of national unity. Nor was the majority daunted by the fact that at the time the Royal Navy counted nearly 1,000 warships and the British army numbered about a quarter-­ million men while the U.S. army consisted of fewer than 7,000 men and the navy could claim a mere sixteen ships.16 Notwithstanding periodic pleas of the president and some of his Cabinet secretaries, congressional Republicans fundamentally had no plan for how to organize and finance a buildup. That consideration, too, did not dissuade them.

The Republican Perspective Although the Republicans were a diverse lot, collectively they deemed certain supposed truths to be self-evident. First and foremost, Republicans regarded themselves as guardians of the Revolution, and what they feared most for the

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United States from its inception was a counterrevolution. They perceived at least two sorts of mortal threats to the country’s new regime—or more precisely, to the particular regime that they envisioned. One was the reascendance of the Federalists, their partisan arch-rivals, whom they regarded as crypto-monarchists conspiring to subvert the Constitution and reintroduce, as under the British crown, an overweening central government. Another was the British crown itself. Still casting a long shadow in the hemisphere (from the vital West Indies and from Canada), the empire was perceived to be making trouble for the republic through its mercantilist schemes and machinations with hostile Indians. Those perceptions were understandable in the context of the time. As they do today, the opposing partisans distrusted one another, and not without reason. Alexander Hamilton, Federalism’s founding father, had openly taken a dim view of “republican government” and had praised the British system of king, lords, and commons as “the best in the world.”17 Candidly, he “doubted that anything short of it would do in America.” In charge between 1789 and 1801, the Federalists had in fact sought to consolidate greater power in the national government. George Washington had studiously maintained U.S. neutrality, but John Adams’s administration had explicitly allied with Britain against France, even offering to send troops to help defend Canada in the event of a French invasion. From the Federalist viewpoint at the end of eighteenth century, the Republican opposition was rife with Jacobins to be prosecuted, fined, and sometimes imprisoned for disloyalty and sedition, and Federalist courts had tried Republican newspaper editors whose sympathies lay with France. Federalists were contemptuous of Republican enthusiasm for popular rule. They embraced instead an essentially elitist conception of governance. Their paternalistic mistrust of the common man was anathema to Republicans, not least James Madison. He had famously feared the “mischiefs of faction,” by which he meant “the conflicts of rival parties.”18 Nevertheless, in caustic newspaper articles penned during the 1790s, he had rained partisan derision on his Federalist counterparts. The Federalists, he wrote caustically, regarded the “people as stupid, suspicious, licentious,” unable to “safely trust themselves,” and given to supinely “leaving the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers.”19 As for Britain’s navigation laws, they worked to the disadvantage of France, but they also suppressed economic competition generally. For America, an emerging presence in international trade, that had become a concern.20 And

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along North America’s amorphous borders, there were enough incidents involving Tory loyalists and British agents, as well as Indians from Canadian outposts who were armed and incited to fight by the British, to continue to fuel suspicions about Britain’s imperial designs at America’s doorstep. Yet some of the Republican perspective could seem strained. For example, it had been one thing for Republicans to align initially with revolutionary France, a sister republic, and to deplore Federalist affinities with the British monarchy, but quite another to deem France under the boot of Napoleon as, in essence, the Old World’s lesser evil. Although Madison acknowledged “the atrocity” of Napoleonic France enforcing its own commercial “predatory edicts,” he, like Jefferson, continued to insist “that the original sin” lay with Great Britain.21 On the home front, the intensity of the abiding animus toward the Federalists also remained disproportionate. The Jay Treaty, an Anglo-American commercial agreement reached in 1794, was decried by the Republican press as the “death-warrant to our neutral rights,” but it was accompanied by a stretch of prosperity in the ensuing years.22 For all the excesses of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, it was not as though they or any other actions of the Federalist Party had threatened a coup d’état—in the end, Jefferson succeeded John Adams peacefully. Nor is it easy to see how the Republican Party in particular could have gone to war primarily to defend commerce and secure national economic progress. Republicans, after all, had long been of two minds about the role of commercial enterprise in society—partial to its limited agrarian forms but uneasy with the realities of a more advanced economy such as Britain’s. Regarding trade with Britain, writes the historian Alan Taylor, the Republicans, if anything, “dreaded British commerce as corrupting,” whereas the “Federalists accepted that commercial dependence as mutually profitable.”23 An influential group of Republicans, Taylor writes, “hoped that war would purify the American character, which they feared had been softened by a long and peaceful indulgence in selfish commerce.” What seems to have provided greater impetus than a materialistic mission to boost commerce was the imperative of affirming in the face of traditional adversaries, foreign and domestic, the credibility and staying power of a revolutionary political vision—the republican experiment, especially as interpreted by the party’s distinctive public philosophy. What was that philosophy? Its core principle, interestingly, was similar to the one that America’s libertarian right currently says it yearns for: a

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minimalist federal government. As most Republicans then (as now) envisaged it, that would be a government that would borrow little money, impose few taxes, and lodge the bulk of public responsibilities with the states. According to Jefferson, only a polity with so limited a central authority would inspire passionate popular allegiance. In contrast to the Hamiltonian tradition of the Federalists, the Republican ideal was carried to such extremes at the start of the nineteenth century that even the bare essentials for ensuring the collective good—the requirements of national security, for instance—were starved of support or left to the states. The concept of a robust regular army and navy represented to the Republicans of the time what the welfare state is to conservatives now: a budget-busting beast, insatiably devouring higher tax revenues, and potentially imperiling individual liberties. Armies and navies, intoned Senator John Taylor of Virginia, only “squander money, and extend corruption.”24 A national military establishment, therefore, was to be all but dispensed with.25 A consequence of such orthodoxies was that, even by the standards of a fledgling country, the United States perforce forfeited leverage in international relations. Simply put, along with light taxation, the Republicans “placed debt reduction above national defense,” states Ralph Ketcham in his leading biography of Madison.26 Absent a credible military force, Republican policy relied more or less exclusively on trade sanctions. The trouble with that default was that it was hard to enforce, and if closely policed, it could prove mostly perverse, damaging American merchants and producers while scarcely seeming to alter the behavior of the targeted miscreants—not unlike today’s sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Fundamentally flawed, the Republican approach handed the Federalists a forceful political issue, enabling them to double their congressional representation and triple their presidential electoral votes in the election of 1808. With so little to show for their weapons of choice (various attempts at economic coercion) in dealing with foreign mischief and after having spent nearly a decade fuming about that of Britain in particular, politically the Republicans—not least, even the sober James Madison—could not easily have backed down in the ensuing four years. The stakes that the party had played so big a part in raising were now too high. Hence, following the mid-term balloting of 1810, the president along with a restive newly elected group of “War Hawks” in Congress grew persuaded that a different, additional sort of force had to be brought to bear.

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Otherwise, many reckoned, not only would America be humiliated, so would the Republican Party.27 Indeed, the two amounted to one and the same from the Republican point of view, for Republicans claimed to be the sole legitimate voice of the people: “the Republicans are the nation,” Jefferson had insisted.28 On the line, in short, was the party’s brand. Further discredit to it loomed as a peril deemed worse than the fog of war. But how could these partisans have fastened on a muscular posture without building up the necessary muscle? Was it not the greatest political risk of all to contemplate war without first accepting the investment and preparation required to succeed? Ideologically hidebound in their customary reluctance over the years to countenance more than a skeletal military, and to impose the internal taxes necessary to pay for a more respectable force, the Republicans, with a few exceptions, appeared hopelessly inconsistent to the Federalists. But what looked contradictory—indeed, singularly careless—to Federalists was not so illogical to most Republicans. In Republican eyes, the idea of a national mobilization to mount and maintain a European-style standing army or navy would come at too great a price. It implied centralizing power and forsaking the dearest of republican virtues, and such profoundly insidious means could not be justified to pursue even keenly desired ends. In any case, they were considered unnecessary. In Jefferson’s view, the republic’s loose union and limited ruling institutions had actually created the “strongest Government on earth”—a government that common men in state militias would spontaneously rush to defend precisely because it demanded so little of them.29 That, after all, was thought to be why the American revolutionaries, loosely led and not highly organized, nonetheless had won in 1776–83. To the majority of Republicans, history could repeat itself. The War of 1812 would become a kind of encore to the Revolution, a second war of independence. So it was that they sought to have things both ways: choosing renewed warfare but without mustering the resources to wage it decisively.

Sheer Folly? How careless were the war’s advocates? It can be argued that there was method in the madness. Great Britain’s armed forces, including its massive navy, were largely tied up battling a distant nemesis on the continent of Europe. The might of the British Empire notwithstanding, a two-front war

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would pose problems. North America’s geography, with its vast expanses and thousands of miles of coastline, complex terrain, and primitive internal modes of transport and communications, was inhospitable for even the most formidable of foreign land and naval powers. Moreover, Canada was sparsely populated and thinly defended. Canadian territories may have seemed ripe for the picking with minimal effort—“a mere matter of marching,” Jefferson had conjectured.30 A successful grab would presumably get Britain’s attention and possibly put a conclusive end to British meddling in America’s vicinity. Besides, although a military midget, the United States was not bereft of ability to fling a few stones at Goliath. As in the Revolutionary War, guerrilla tactics could be deployed effectively. At sea, for example, as Madison’s able secretary of the navy, William Jones, would demonstrate, a flotilla of daring privateers and a handful of well-skippered naval vessels could prey on vulnerable English merchant ships, conducting with some effect what now would be termed asymmetric warfare. All told, however, it is hard not to conclude that the profound misgivings voiced by the war’s opponents were well founded. Exposing a nation so disorganized and so early in its infancy to the uncertainties of war with a superpower was, if not irresponsible in every sense, still imprudent and bitterly divisive. “It exceeds human belief,” exclaimed Daniel Webster, “that a nation thus circumstanced should be plunged into sudden war. With no preparations appropriate” and “no means either of attack or resistance,” he warned, “we are to waste our spirit in empty vaporing and mutual recrimination.”31 And objectively, for the most part, events in the first couple of years vindicated critics who, like Webster, had feared the worst when the war began. The prediction by War Hawk John C. Calhoun that the conquest of Canada would be accomplished in a mere “four weeks” proved delusional.32 All attempted American incursions across the Canadian border were repulsed. Sometimes the incompetence of the American commanders was scandalous. Winfield Scott, who at the age of twenty-six had been appointed a lieutenant colonel, described most of the officers in 1812 as “utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever.”33 They were, he said, quite simply “imbeciles and ignoramuses.”34 The little navy acquitted itself better. Individual frigates won several isolated fights early on. Those encounters would become legendary, but they had little strategic impact. Later, as the war turned defensive, American forces managed to hold their own at certain more critical junctures—notably on Lake Erie and at

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Baltimore, Lake Champlain, and most consequentially, New Orleans, where invading British armies were turned back.35 Offshore, American privateers and sloops of war, an early irritant on British trade routes, became increasingly bold.36 Their exploits inflicted discernible pain on Britain’s commercial shipping and losses on insurance companies. The heroics, however, came amid increasingly dire circumstances. Once Napoleon’s Grand Armée had been defeated in Europe, Britain began tightening the noose in America. British troops occupied eastern Maine. Then, effectively blockading the main ports further south, the Royal Navy penned in America’s few sizable warships, which in any case were never a match for the collective firepower of the multiple enemy squadrons now steadily patrolling inside territorial waters. British ships and landing parties were mostly at liberty to raid towns up and down the Eastern seaboard, famously even torching the public buildings of Washington, D.C. The American economy was dealt a setback. Exports plunged. In 1807, even amid the embargo, they had stood at $131 million. Seven years later, they had shriveled to $7 million. Imports fell from $138 million in 1807 to less than $13 million by 1814. The collapse of trade emptied what was left of the government’s meager coffers. As revenue from duties shrank and expenses mounted, the public debt soared and soon became unsustainable. Forced to suspend interest payments on its bonds, the U.S. Treasury technically defaulted on November 9, 1814. “The summer and fall of 1814,” concludes historian Harry L. Coles, “marked the lowest ebb in the financial history of the United States.”37 So controversial became the war for a time that in some parts of the country local militias refused to cooperate and some states flirted with secession. In others, murderous mobs raged against suspected enemy sympathizers. The title of Taylor’s magisterial book—The Civil War of 1812—captures the mayhem that had been unleashed. The union’s future hung in the balance. “Before it was all over,” concludes another recent narrative, “the United States faced an existential crisis, one that was almost entirely of its own making.”38 To say “entirely of its own making” is an overstatement, but to describe the country’s crisis as little short of “existential” is fair. By the fall of 1814— with key New England states wanting out, the army gravely shorthanded, the navy’s largest ships disabled, Congress incapable of securing essential financial instruments and the government hence basically bankrupt, and, for good measure, the heart of the nation’s capital a smoldering wreck—the

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only rational course was to try to call a halt and to do so without great delay. In fact, to avoid an interminable impasse at the negotiating table, Madison publicly even offered to shelve the impressment issue, the very item that had figured as the sine qua non in U.S. war aims.39

End Game On its face, the war appeared to accomplish next to nothing. The peace treaty that was concluded at the Dutch city of Ghent at the end of 1814 and formally ratified the following February reclaimed the status quo ante bellum. The prewar boundary with Canada was restored. The British relinquished Maine, but with the exception of a portion of Spanish West Florida, the Americans annexed no new territory. The treaty addressed none of Madison’s announced reasons for going to war: the rights of neutrals, impressment, and so forth. Both sides simply agreed to disagree on everything except an end to hostilities—and even those did not cease entirely for some time. Occasional clashes on the oceans continued to occur for months in 1815. A kind of cold war persisted along the Detroit River for a couple of years.40 There and on Lake Erie, British naval officers continued to stop and scour American vessels for suspected deserters. Commercial frictions centering on Britain’s mercantilist system of preferences (for Canadian corn, flour, and lumber, at the expense of American commodities) and restrictions on U.S. access to West Indian trade continued to fester until 1830, when, to his credit, President Andrew Jackson finally accepted a compromise. It is often noted that the brawl with Britain promptly yielded at least one tangible result for the Americans: they succeeded in subduing Indian resistance to westward expansion. On the country’s Southwestern frontier, the war had supplied General Jackson with an excuse to attack the Creeks and then relieve them of more than 20 million acres of land.41 The Treaty of Ghent had committed the United States to returning Indian territories to their prewar status. In the end, the Creeks recovered none. Attributing the demise of the Indians to the war, however, oversimplifies, since they almost certainly would have been crushed and displaced anyway— if not at that point, then in due course. Put another way, it strains credulity to suppose that, were it not for the War of 1812, the growing country would have hesitated to push aside the natives who were in the way. Sooner or later, they would be doomed; the war only hastened the process. The ink on the

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Ghent treaty was barely dry when American settlers resumed pouring into Michigan. Within a couple of years, with President Monroe’s approval, Jackson took a run at the Seminoles in Florida. Later, as president, Old Hickory would stand by as the Cherokee were despoiled of their property, in flagrant derogation of a federal treaty. As is well-known, the subjugation of Indians in the West continued long into the rest of the century. The one military triumph that could be said to have had a catalytic effect not only on the conclusion of the war but its longer-term reverberations was the lopsided American victory in the battle of New Orleans. On January 8, 1815, while the Ghent treaty awaited ratification, 5,300 British infantry were foolishly ordered to make a frontal assault on a well-defended American parapet. The result: some 2,000 casualties, while the Americans suffered only 13 killed and 58 wounded. The rout did not put an immediate stop to further British thrusts in the region or quickly loosen Britain’s vise-grip elsewhere. Early the following month a detachment of British fusiliers overran Fort Bowyer in Alabama, enabling the Royal Navy to take control of Mobile Bay. Nor did the news from either Ghent or New Orleans arrive in time to save one of the last American frigates, U.S.S. President, which made a desperate attempt to sail out of New York harbor on January 15, only to be gunned down and captured by a huge enemy force cruising off Long Island.42 But in time what had transpired at New Orleans sank in. Back in ­England, it helped seal the Ghent deal by strengthening the position of those such as the Duke of Wellington, who had foreseen difficulties in reinvading America in the first place and who now unequivocally favored a truce. Subsequent generations of British officers and officials would not try again. As a result, American frontiersmen ultimately gained a freer hand to dispossess Indian inhabitants that Britain had earlier promised to protect.43 Beyond that, enduring consequences of the War of 1812 were harder to foretell.

Expect the Unexpected In terms of the immediate facts on the ground, what the Republicans attempted to do in 1812 had been precarious and, for the most part, mismanaged even to the point of seeming “ludicrous,” to borrow Gordon S. Wood’s blunt description.44 But viewed from a higher altitude and longer range, their endeavor had different implications, some of which proved quite surprising.

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One was that, paradoxically, the fractious Republican Party emerged intact, whereas the Federalists, for all their prescient and comparatively cohesive opposition, passed into oblivion. Venerable Federalists like Rufus King of New York had confidently predicted in 1813 that Mr. Madison’s War, as the critics called it, would “so disgust and degrade [the country] that the Federalists . . . would regain possession of the government, and with as great support by the people as Jefferson had when he succeeded Adams.”45 They turned out to be wrong. James Monroe easily won the election of 1816, and the Federalists lost a third of their congressional seats. How did that happen? There occurred a confluence of events serendipitous to the Republicans. Once the Armageddon in Europe wound down, following Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, the ostensible underlying causes of the war in North America became moot. The British navy’s need to abduct crewmen and inspect cargoes on neutral ships diminished. As those sources of strife abated, it became easier for pro-war partisans in America to claim that their policy had ultimately paid off. Bad news, too, wound up aiding the Republicans. Some states, primarily inland ones, profited during the war, but the United States generally had come under siege by 1814. The prospect—and increasingly, the reality—of hard war was now engulfing cities and towns far and wide, indiscriminately coming home to Federalist-leaning communities such as Alexandria, Virginia, as well as Republican strongholds like Baltimore. The growing threat served to stir patriotic sentiment in most places, for the country now was no longer just invoking maritime legalities but fighting for its survival. A number of stalwart Federalists began moderating their dissension. Regardless of party, declared none other than John Jay, “we cannot be too united in a determination to defend our country.”46 What had started as “a party war,” observed Alexander Hanson, a Federalist congressman from Maryland, “of necessity became national.”47 Daniel Webster agreed, in these famous words: “Even our party divisions, acrimonious as they are, cease at the water’s edge.”48 Not all Federalists were so politically supple or shrewd, however. Especially in parts of New England, the local reaction to the crisis of 1814 was not to close ranks in defense of the embattled nation in its hour of need but to intensify their resistance to the war—and to do so in ways that sometimes bordered on treason. The governor of Massachusetts went so far as to seek a separate peace with the enemy. In the fall, the antiwar movement convened

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at Hartford, Connecticut, to prepare a sweeping denunciation of the “unjust and ruinous” conflict. The Hartford Convention stopped short of calling for sectional separation, but it did insist on nothing less than “a radical reform of the national compact” and implied that if its terms were not met, additional steps would follow that might put the union in jeopardy.49 As fate would have it, the convention issued its report at an inopportune time: January 1815. Shortly, news of New Orleans would make its way East, and with it a surge of national pride. By about then, too, the elements of the Treaty of Ghent were becoming known. Much to the relief of most Americans, the treaty’s provisions, especially in regard to U.S. territorial integrity, turned out to be benign.50 The upshot of the war, at least as formally delineated at Ghent, suddenly looked less “ruinous” than the naysayers had emphatically anticipated.51 Because the news from Ghent did not reach the United States until after the news from New Orleans, initially many citizens imputed this turn of fortune to the resounding victory at New Orleans. America also had simply lucked out. Madison seemed to draw both inferences, citing the treaty’s “peculiar felicity” as well as the role of recent “brilliant” military successes.52 Quickly, the War of 1812 passed from a sorrowful stalemate to a glorious myth—a triumphant contest, faintly remembered in the main for a handful of storied naval duels and for the one truly telling blow dealt to the enemy on land.53 Never mind that six months before, the republic had been on the ropes.54 With the country celebrating Jackson’s feat and then rejoicing over the war’s end, the Republican Party’s earlier mistakes would soon fade from memory. The rapid rehabilitation was remarkable. Plausibly, an additional salve helped Republican wounds from the war heal quickly: the fact that Madison had exercised unique judgment in steadfastly refusing to approve executive orders or legislation reinstating sedition laws.55 Consequently, for all its faults, his party at least did not carry the moral and political taint of trampling on civil liberties in wartime, as had the punitive Federalists in 1798. In any event, now stigmatized as too dark a prophet of doom, the Federalist Party fell into disrepute. Many a Federalist became victim of a common vice in democratic politics—call it the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished syndrome. Even the principled patriots, who eventually rallied ’round the flag despite their healthy skepticism about the war’s rationale and prosecution, scarcely reaped the party any political reward.

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The unified Federalists had opposed nearly every war measure that the president proposed, but there were notable exceptions. With full knowledge that the Republican Congress would remain in the habit of underfunding almost every necessity, Federalists nevertheless lent support to the administration on particular occasions—as when it sought authorization to increase the size of the navy in late 1812.56 But such occasional displays of bipartisanship, backing popular measures like the navy bill, gained the legislators no cover. Federalists were ultimately damned if they didn’t and damned if they did. Then, too, some of them had pretended to welcome the outbreak of war. Cynically, they had calculated that the calamity would so embarrass the Republicans that it would ensure the Federalists’ political comeback. Hanson, among others, had scarcely disguised that calculus in the early going: “The only way to dislodge the prevailing party from the post of power is by saddling them with a war which they have neither the means [nor] the ability to conduct.”57 Such motives, at the end of the day, came off as more partisan than patriotic.58 For all these reasons, the Republicans prevailed in the end, despite their factional feuds, and the Federalists never recovered.59 A party loath to levy essential taxes—and, also like our latter-day Republicans, presumably preoccupied with lowering the national debt—managed to almost triple the nation’s torrent of red ink and still wind up on top.60 Not even a severe financial panic in 1819 (resulting from rampant land speculation in new territories that the war had left in play), which brought five years of deeper debt, deflation, and hard times, reversed the Republican ascent. As if that script were not sufficiently improbable, to it would be added this: In short order, the party of Jefferson jettisoned a good deal of its old dogma. The War of 1812 redounded to the benefit of the Republican Party, but it also exposed the inherent shortcomings at its philosophical roots: the inordinate distaste for centralized power—in the form of permanent armed forces, an executive bureaucracy, a national bank, and federal taxes—and a bias for agriculture over manufacturing and commerce. In his final message to Congress in December of 1815, Madison all but cast those traditional tenets of the Jeffersonian creed aside; he startled the country by advocating a broad national program that included adequate military strength, a national bank, a system of direct internal taxation, and a protective tariff.61 The Republican president seemingly took a page from Hamilton’s reports on

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credit and manufacturers, even calling for a “comprehensive system of roads and canals” and the establishment of a national university in Washington. Madison rejected insinuations that “the Republicans have abandoned their cause, and gone over to the policy of their opponents.”62 But insofar as he spoke for his party’s mainstream, its novel orientation was impossible to interpret as anything but a volte-face, and it left Federalists aghast. “The Administration have fought themselves completely on to [our] federal ground,” exclaimed a Federalist governor.63 Republicanism was largely morphing into Hamiltonian nationalism. The convergence naturally contributed to relieving the partisan animosities that had preceded the war, and in their place arrived the so-called “era of good feelings.” That label was somewhat misleading, since sectional and cultural schisms rumbled beneath the surface and would soon break through again, beginning with the clash in 1820 over whether to admit Missouri to the union as a slave-holding state. Yet the postwar years did witness considerable consensus on an agenda that House speaker Henry Clay christened the “American System”—that is, policies of protection and internal improvements basically reminiscent of Hamilton’s.

Subsequent Developments Writing to Thomas Jefferson in 1817, John Adams conceded that James Madison, a war president with “a thousand faults and blunders,” had nevertheless “established more union than all his three predecessors, Washington, Adams and Jefferson put together.”64 There is little question that the War of 1812, which began divisively, left in its wake a renewed spirit of national unity—even if tenuous and fleeting. The good mood ebbed by the time that Congress took up the Missouri question. Certainly, by 1828, regional rifts that may have been briefly muted returned with a vengeance. South Carolina, for one, now was arrantly challenging national law (in this instance, the socalled “tariff of abominations” that mostly favored Northern manufacturers, not Southern planters). South Carolina’s case was made by John C. Calhoun, the War Hawk of 1812 and former nationalist compatriot of Henry Clay. Having changed his stripes, Calhoun now deployed arguments that recalled the ones that prominent New England politicians had crafted in 1814: that the powers of the federal government were narrowly enumerated under the Constitution and that

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states could decide the constitutionality of controversial federal statutes (and hence, whether to obey or nullify them).65 Thus, the war years had laid precedents for the theory of nullification, if not for outright separatism, which would inspire Southern advocates of states’ rights for decades to come. The War of 1812 amplified some issues that would increasingly divide the nation through most of the nineteenth century. Chief among them, of course, was slavery. Jackson’s military exploits and expropriation of Indian lands had effectively facilitated migration not only to present-day Alabama but to the Western territory of the Louisiana Purchase. In the westward rush that followed the war, thousands of slave owners moved in. The trans-­ Mississippi West thereby turned into ground zero in the intensifying dispute over whether to admit to the union new jurisdictions as slave or free states— a dispute that the Missouri Compromise notoriously failed to put to rest.66 Fueling the flames was the fact that the African slave trade was not adequately choked off. The Treaty of Ghent had exhorted the contracting parties to “use their best endeavors” to abolish the human trafficking.67 And in 1820, Congress duly declared the slave trade to be piracy, punishable by death. The prohibition lacked teeth, however, for to enforce it the United States would have had to enter into an international agreement with the one country that possessed both the determination and the means to enforce it: Great Britain, with its big navy. Because neither the war nor the Treaty of Ghent had managed to put an official end to impressment and the practice remained raw in the memories of American policymakers, even John Quincy Adams, who despised slavery—and who reached the White House in 1825—refused to permit American ships to be searched for slaves by British men-of-war.68 Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy was too small to do the job. Did the war promptly lead to a fundamental correction of the country’s military weaknesses? Stephen Budiansky addresses that question in chapter 3 of this volume. On the one hand, the tribulations of 1812–14 did put an end to old debates about the importance of an established navy.69 And more broadly, an administrative reorganization occurred. A board of navy commissioners, as well as a general staff for the army, was created. No longer would the departments of the navy or the army, as in 1812, consist of just a secretary with a handful of clerks. On the other hand, manpower policy remained in many respects unchanged, and in some ways it was altered for the worse. On the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. Army still numbered only 16,000 men. As in 1812,

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most of the army during the Civil War would be composed of state volunteer regiments, whose colonels continued to receive their commissions from state governors. Though the navy became a permanent fixture, it proceeded to fall behind in adopting the technological innovations that were revolutionizing European fleets as the century progressed.70 The navy took some backward steps. An estimated 10 percent of the sailors that had fought against Britain, often with distinction, in 1812 had been black. The postwar navy, by contrast, became a segregated institution; blacks were effectively barred from serving except as messmen.71 To be sure, never again would America be as chaotically ill-prepared for armed conflict as it had been in 1812. That lesson, evidently, registered— but only to a point. In various future crises, the way that national defense was organized and readied continued to leave much to be desired. Alas, the nation would learn the hard way again in 1861 and 1917, then infamously on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001. The pattern invites us to muse: Could it be that, having miraculously pulled chestnuts out of the fire at an early, formative stage in its history, American society would periodically manifest a certain cultural complacency in matters of national security? Put another way (loosely paraphrasing Churchill’s observation), Americans may have developed a capacity to mobilize—but typically late in the game, after having tried everything else. The war left at least one other imprimatur of far-reaching significance: it had made Andrew Jackson a hero. Elected president in 1828, he would put his unique, impulsive stamp on the executive branch—and the country. Even a cursory discussion of Jackson’s presidency in these few pages would carry us far afield. For present purposes, suffice it to say that the mercurial political concoction that was Jacksonian Democracy reintroduced some of the same malfunctions of the original Republican paradigm, especially a flawed conception of how the nation ought to handle its financial affairs. Jackson’s objection to rechartering the Bank of the United States, for instance, and discordant policies bearing on a speculative land bubble that had been expanding for years, were among the factors that precipitated a disastrous financial panic in 1837, followed by years of depression.72 Jacksonian populism, writes Walter Russell Mead, “saddled the country with a crash-prone financial system for 80 years.”73 Indeed, quirky populist strains of that era would recur repeatedly in the history of the United States. In

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the past few years, they include, as Mead’s analysis suggests, some eccentric monetary notions adopted by elements of the Tea Party movement.

Final Reflections: 1812 and 2012 The turmoil of two centuries ago has been relegated for the most part to the far recesses of the national consciousness. It is important to remember, however, that the politics of that era had been partisan in the extreme. “The existence of two parties in Congress is apparent,” wrote John Taylor of Virginia in 1794. “Whether the subject be foreign or domestic—relative to war or peace—navigation or commerce—the magnetism of opposite views draws them wide as the poles asunder.”74 Over the course of the next couple of decades, the two sides continued to polarize. They distrusted and disdained each other to an extent far exceeding the antipathy between liberals and conservatives today. The camp that came to have Thomas Jefferson and later James Madison at its head—the Republicans—boasted of being the true heirs of the Revolution, “the Best Keepers of the People’s Liberties.”75 Their Federalist adversaries were caricatured as closet royalists consorting to oppress the people and deny their freedoms. The followers of Jefferson had accused President Adams and the federal courts dominated by his party of perpetrating nothing short of a “Federalist Reign of Terror.”76 Federalists replied that Jefferson was a “dangerous radical” who, in Hamilton’s words, exhibited a “womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment of Great Britain.”77 The insults and preposterous exaggerations that each side hurled at the other appeared routinely in the newspapers of the day, which were explicit organs of the parties. The leading Republican journal, The National Gazette, kept up a drumbeat of anti-Federalist propaganda. Through The Porcupine’s Gazette, the Federalists emitted their own venomous quills. In the chambers of Congress, tempers flared—to a pitch so fevered that members sometimes literally spat upon and caned one another.78 Such was the tumultuous political climate in the years that led to the War of 1812. However remote and bizarre the events of that time may seem, they had considerable bearing on the country’s political development, in ways often underappreciated. Indeed, some of the underlying political currents of that period would resurface, in different contexts, at later stages in American

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history. Glancing back, one cannot help but be struck by, for instance, certain similarities between the collisions of party ideologies in the run-up to the crisis of 1812–14 and the present partisan divide over government tax policy, budgetary priorities, and the national debt. In the arc of history, the contemporary dispute between our political parties about the balance that the government strikes on taxation, spending, and borrowing has an air of déjà vu. The 112th Congress put in jeopardy, at one point, the financial full faith and credit of the United States. The debacle was narrowly averted by a crude statutory contrivance, cobbled together at the eleventh hour. “Our country is not going to default for the first time in history,” the Senate minority leader was able to declare.79 But America came dangerously close, and if it had happened, it actually would have been the second time—the first having occurred in 1814, at the hands of the 13th Congress, which had been comparably conflicted about raising the requisite revenue to pay the nation’s unsustainable bills. Moreover, once again, the footing of national security is very much at stake in the current debate. The awkward deficit-reducing deal that was finally improvised in August 2011 threatens an automatic phased reduction of $1.2 trillion in overall spending, beginning in fiscal 2013, with roughly half of that stripped from defense. Experts will differ about exactly how much damage such a “sequester” would do the U.S. armed forces. It is hard to argue, however, that the consequences of increasingly austere military budgets are likely to be minimal. Probably, attainment of some announced objectives—such as still mounting a convincing naval presence to protect vital maritime trade routes in the Western Pacific—would become doubtful, if not utopian.80 Apparently paralyzed by partisan wrangling over whether additional taxes should be levied to reduce government fiscal imbalances, the United States seems poised to repeat an inclination to downsize defense sharply in a perilous world. And the penny-wise approach appears to persist, at least as of this writing, even while policymakers aspire to undertake missions that require enhanced resources. The configuration, in short, is somewhat reminiscent of the nation’s contradictory politics in the early nineteenth century. Granted, neither political party today has been willing to consider a broad-based tax increase. Democrats favor raising taxes only on “the rich.” The GOP’s stance, however, appears to be the more absolute; so far, most of the party’s base has yet to countenance substantial new levies of any kind. A major litmus

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test came in the budgetary battle of 2011. “When it came down to a choice between tax increases or defense spending cuts,” a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly concluded bluntly last year, “Republicans offered up the military.”81 More or less the same could be said of the Republicans of two hundred years ago. The party most partial to diminutive government and deficient revenue reassessed its credo when the chastening aspects of the 1812 experience sank in. The reassessment occurred because the party was not monolithic; pragmatists, led by James Madison, ultimately guided it in a different direction. Today’s Republican Party is no monolith, either. In due course, it, too, may be compelled to rethink key parts of its professed preference for governmental minimalism. One can only hope that the catalyst will not have to be another grave national trauma.

Notes 1. See Pietro S. Nivola and David W. Brady, Red and Blue Nation, vol. 1, Characteristics and Causes of America’s Polarized Politics (Brookings and Hoover, 2006). Also, Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2010). 2. The most detailed account of how the fiscal “grand bargain” fell apart is found in Matt Bai, “Who Killed the Debt Deal?” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2012. To make a long story short, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner had come tantalizing close to cutting a deal, albeit in broad terms, that would have combined hundreds of billions in spending reductions with some $800 billion in additional tax revenue over a ten-year period. Historians may long debate who was to blame for the collapse of the bargain. Speaker Boehner almost certainly would have run into stiff resistance to such an accord from his party’s caucus, and hence it seemed likely that he would have had to renege in the end. Nonetheless, as the talks between the two men unfolded, it also became apparent that the base of the president’s party was unhappy with a deal that would have raised “only” $800 billion in additional revenues—and therefore that the White House decided to up the ante at an especially sensitive stage in the negotiations. That, in turn, handed Boehner an excuse to walk away. A revealing passage in Bai’s account appears on page 36: “If you shake hands with a guy on the price of a car, and you agree to talk again after the car has been inspected and the loan has been approved, you don’t really expect to show up and find out the car now costs $5,000 more. This is essentially what happened to Boehner.” This much seems evident: Given the polar positions of their respective conferences, even if Boehner and Obama had adhered to the framework that they appeared to have agreed to on July 12, 2011, both faced long odds of delivering the necessary votes in Congress. 3. Asserting that the depth of the partisan divide is without historical precedent is now so common almost any random example will do here. In a recent newspaper article

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30   /   Pietro S. Nivola arguing that liberals and conservatives “think differently,” for instance, the writer stipulates that “at a time of unprecedented polarization in America,” the difference that he observes is a “convincing explanation” for what he calls “the staggering irrationality of our politics.” Chris Mooney, “Liberals and Conservatives Vote Differently Because They Think Differently,” Washington Post, April 15, 2012. 4. “The two [European] powers after 1807 harassed American commerce with equal ferocity. Secretary of State James Monroe estimated in July, 1812, that Britain had seized some 389 vessels since the Orders of November 1807, while Napoleon had been responsible for 469 seizures.” Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), p. 18. And Madison knew that. In fact, rather remarkably, as war approached he complained to the French minister in Washington that French attacks on American ships were “fully as pronounced as were those of England, against whom the Republic was at that moment taking up arms.” Quoted in Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 514 5. Quoted in J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 56. 6. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 22. The decision stupefied Madison’s critics, not least U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall. The notion that the restrictive French commercial degrees had been revoked, he declared, reflected “one of the most astonishing instances of national credulity . . . that is to be found in political history.” Quoted in James H. Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800–1816 (Louisiana State University, 1978) p. 136. 7. Brown, Republic in Peril, pp. 37–38. 8. Ibid., p. 39. 9. Harry L. Coles, The War of 1812 (University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 247. 10. Untangling the causal priorities, which has preoccupied historians for a long time, has not been easy. According to Roger Brown, in a sentence that raises more questions than it answers, “Impressment had been a major grievance in 1812, but the Orders in Council had held the key to war.” Brown, Republic in Peril, p. 39. 11. And, in fact, writes J. C. A. Stagg, the issue of impressment “had not been the subject of major negotiations between the United States and Great Britain since 1808.” Mr. Madison’s War, p. 295. As late as November 1811, when President Madison presented his message to Congress asking for military preparations, he did not stress the impressment issue. Brown, Republic in Peril, p. 35. 12. Quoted in Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), pp. 411–12. 13. Though the United States, like Britain, formally abolished the slave trade 1807, it did not end the practice of slavery until 1865. Great Britain not only abolished the trade but actually enforced the ban—and then abolished slavery itself in 1833 (throughout the Empire with the exception of “the territories in the possession of the East India Company”). The issue of slavery had a bearing on the attitudes of Republican War Hawks. Alan Taylor explains, for example, how, for them, British flogging of sailors impressed from American ships could represent an especially egregious affront because it meant, among other things, that whites were being treated in a manner that they deemed fit only for blacks. As one observer complained, impressed sailors “were stripped tied up, and most cruelly and disgracefully whipped like a negro slave.” Ibid., p. 136. Precious few of the main players in the nineteenth century’s dismal slavery saga could be entirely

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The “Party War” of 1812   /   31 absolved of hypocrisy. Britain, for instance, continued to permit slavery in some corners of the empire and did not dismiss out of hand the possibility of extending diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States of America at a critical juncture during the Civil War. 14. By the summer of 1814, U.S. negotiators at Ghent were no longer insisting that the impressment question be addressed. Coles, War of 1812, p. 249. 15. See, for instance, Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 137 16. The British navy included more than 100 ships of the line that mounted 74 guns each. The largest ships in the U.S. Navy were five 38-gun frigates. There was not a single ship of the line. 17. Quoted in Brown, Republic in Peril, p. 6. 18. Publius, The Federalist No. 10, in Classic Readings in American Politics, edited by Pietro S. Nivola and David H. Rosenbloom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 29–34. 19. Gaillard Hunt, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 4, 1790–1802 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), p. 120. 20. See Skaggs, Mr. Madison’s War, p. 510. 21. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, June 15, 1810, and June 22, 1810, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, vol. 3, 1804–1836, edited by James Morton Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 1636–37. In a recent biography of Madison, Richard Brookhiser simply concludes: “Madison was a Francophile going back to his days in the Continental Congress. He was also, and would remain all his days, an Anglophobe.” James Madison (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 93; on partiality toward Napoleon, see p. 154. 22. See Hickey, War of 1812, p. 6. 23. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, pp. 83, 128. According to Brookhiser, Madison basically held that “Country life was good, cities and manufacturing were bad.” James Madison, p. 103. 24. Quoted in Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson (Columbia University Press, 1965), p.109. 25. Thus, it was not until January 1812 that the Republican Congress made any provisions for increasing one-year enlistments. The commitment on paper to boost the regular army by 25,000 men continued to fall far short of that number in practice. As of November, when war was declared, fewer than 10,000 had signed up—hardly surprising since recruiters often lacked the funds to offer recruits even a pair of shoes, let alone a monthly paycheck and basic training. (When told that a war would cost money, a congressman from Maryland replied indignantly, “What is money?”) Meanwhile, Congress voted down a naval buildup and refused to bolster the War Department’s scant administrative structure. With no assistant secretaries, no general staff, and only a dozen inexperienced clerks, the secretary of war became the army’s quartermaster, dealing directly with generals in the field. It was not until June 1813 that the Republican lawmakers managed to close ranks behind a tax bill, but only on condition that it not take effect before the beginning of the next year. Through 1814, Congress continued to resist the idea of resurrecting the Bank of the United States, an essential instrument for borrowing money to finance the war. See Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 670, 673–674, 684, 692. It should be noted, however, that Madison himself did not share Congress’s insouciance regarding adequate war

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32   /   Pietro S. Nivola preparations. He was, in fact, unhappy with the way that several of his legislative proposals received short shrift from his own party. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, p. 152. 26. Ketcham, James Madison, p. 471. 27. I make no claim to originality in this thesis. It is convincingly exposited by Brown. “In political terms,” he writes, backing down from the confrontation with Great Britain would have “disgraced the Republican party and republicanism.” This consideration was “most important of all,” Brown concluded. Brown, Republic in Peril, p. 42 ( italics added). 28. Quoted in Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War. p. 61. 29. Quoted in Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 107. Likewise, Madison would later explain that he had known of “the unprepared state of the country” but felt that he could “throw forward the flag of the country” anyhow, since he was “sure that the people would press forward and defend it.” Quoted in Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812 (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 155. 30. Quoted in Pierre Berton, The Invasion of Canada, vol. 1, 1812–1813 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 15. 31. Daniel Webster, An Address Delivered before the Washington Benevolent Society, at Portsmouth, July 4, 1812 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Oracle Press, 1812), p. 23. 32. John C. Calhoun’s speech on May 6, 1812, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 1, edited by Robert C. Meriwether (University of South Carolina Press, 1959), p. 104. 33. Quoted in Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 56. 34. Quoted in Hickey, War of 1812, p. 8. 35. By contrast, the Niagara campaign of 1814 had mostly, to quote Taylor, “wasted the nation’s finest troops in futile battles.” Taylor, Civil War of 1812, p. 407. 36. Roaming the coast of Canada and in the West Indies, privateers seized 450 prizes in the first six months of the war. Later, 850 more would be captured. Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 682 37. Coles, War of 1812, p. 238. 38. David Hanna, Knights of the Sea: The True Story of the Boxer and the Enterprise and the War of 1812 (New York: NAL Caliber, 2012), p. 137. 39. Stephen Budiansky, Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 344. The Madison administration had decided to drop the impressment issue as early as June 1814. Hickey, The War of 1812, p. 289. The president went public with the overture the following October. 40. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, pp. 430, 434. 41. Ibid., p. 428. 42. Budiansky, Perilous Fight, pp. 348–49. 43. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, p. 421 44. Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 660. 45. King to Gore, September 19, 1812, in The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King: Comprising His Letters, Private and Official, His Public Documents, and His Speeches, vol. 5, 1807–1816, edited by Charles R. King (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), p. 278. 46. Quoted in Dixon Ryan Fox and Robert V. Remini, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York, 1801–1840 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 184. 47. Annals of the Congress of the United States, 13 Cong., 3 sess. (October 10, 1814), p. 382. 48. Annals of the Congress of the United States, 13 Cong., 2 sess. (January 14, 1814), p. 951.

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The “Party War” of 1812   /   33 49. Coles, War of 1812, p. 245. Thus, for a time, the mere mention of the phrase “Hartford Convention” became “a synonym for treason.” Hickey, War of 1812, p. 308. While the Hartford report did not press separatism, its parting words included a veiled warning: If the convention’s recommendations proved “unsuccessful,” a second conclave would have to be held with delegates appointed by the legislatures of the several states to meet “with such powers and instructions as the exigency of a crisis so momentous may require.” Some historians infer that that there was no mistaking what was implied between the lines: “The threat was obvious: give us what we want or we will secede.” Brookhiser, James Madison, p. 217. 50. “The actual terms of the peace treaty seemed unimportant,” writes George C. Daughan.“The country had been saved from the abyss, and that was enough. People would have willingly paid a much higher price for peace.” George C. Daughan, 1812: The Navy’s War (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 396. 51. Many Federalists were sure that, in the words of Christopher Gore of Massachusetts, the treaty would be “deemed disgraceful to the government who made the war and the peace.” Interestingly, some important Republicans also worried that that would be the case, not least Henry Clay, one of the negotiators at Ghent. He called the agreement “a damned bad treaty,” predicting that “we should all be subject to much reproach.” Both proved to be wrong. The peace was skillfully spun by the Republican press as a prize grasped by having “gloriously triumphed” and was celebrated across the land. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 297–99. 52. James Madison, Special Message to Congress on the Treaty of Ghent (February 18, 1815), Miller Center, University of Virginia (http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/ speeches/detail/3627). 53. Writing to his father in 1816, John Quincy Adams privately bemoaned the way “my country men . . . look too intently to their Triumphs & turn their eyes too lightly away from their disasters.” Quoted in Taylor, Civil War of 1812, p. 439. 54. Then, the government was in near-complete disarray. Having sacked his war secretary (after the Capitol and White House had gone up in flames), Madison had to call on Monroe to double as head of both the State and War departments. Scrambling to replenish the ranks of the army, the latter proposed conscription—which Congress promptly rejected, correctly fearing outright nullification by several New England states. Despairing of the lack of resources needed to step up the war at sea and personally in debt, William Jones, Madison’s talented navy secretary, resigned in frustration near the end of 1814. So did the secretary of the insolvent treasury. Ibid., pp. 416–17. 55. The president came under considerable pressure to take a harder line. Even members of the Supreme Court weighed in. Justice Story, for example, sent Attorney General Pinkney proposals for how to tighten what he called the “grossly and barbarously defective” criminal statutes against traitors. See Irving Bryant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, 1812–1836 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), p. 200. For further discussion of how Madison handled civil liberties and political dissent in wartime, see chapter 5, by Benjamin Wittes and Ritika Singh, in this volume. 56. So, in this case for instance, 31 Federalists joined 40 Republicans in the House, enabling the measure to pass by a vote of 71 to 56. 57. Alexander Hanson to F. J. Jackson, March 7, 1812, in Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812, edited by Bradford Perkins (University of California Press, 1963), p. 352.

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34   /   Pietro S. Nivola 58. Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts had warned this group in his party about a potential political boomerang: Instead of consistent “patriotic opposition to an oppressive government, they are in great danger of degenerating into a mere faction, ready to . . . adopt anything which will promote [their] party success.” Quoted in Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), p. 241. 59. Notably, the flamboyant John Randolph of Virginia had led a handful of traditionalists so consistently leery of the central government that they opposed its war-­making agenda. At the other end stood a group of Northern Republicans, led by New York’s DeWitt Clinton, who suspected that Madison would prove too weak a commander in chief. 60. The national debt had climbed from $45 million in 1812 to $127 million by the end of 1815. Hickey, War of 1812, p. 303. 61. Ralph Ketcham, “Party and Leadership in Madison’s Conception of the Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 37, no. 2 (Spring 1989), p. 255. On the need for military preparedness, Madison now sounded much like a Federalist: “Experience has taught us,” he said, “that a certain degree of preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters in the onset, but affords also the best security for the continuance of peace.” Quoted in Hickey, War of 1812, p. 304. 62. James Madison to William Eustis, May 22, 1823, in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 9, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), p. 135. 63. Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 172. 64. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 2, 1817, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, edited by Lester J. Cappon (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 508. 65. In October 1814, Monroe submitted to Congress his report recommending conscription. By a vote of 168 to 6, the Connecticut Assembly resolved to defy the proposed federal law on the grounds that it was deemed unconstitutional. James H. Ellis, A Ruinous and Unhappy War: New England and the War of 1812 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2009), p. 240. The proposal for a national draft was also too much for Daniel Webster, who advised New Englanders to nullify such a measure. The state governments, he argued, had a constitutional obligation “to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power.” Quoted in Hickey, War of 1812, p. 243. 66. “I take it for granted that the present question is a mere preamble—a title-page to a great, tragic volume,” wrote John Quincy Adams prophetically in his diary. Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenburg, A Concise History, p. 178. 67. Hickey, War of 1812, p. 296. 68. Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenburg, A Concise History, p. 179. 69. Budiansky, Perilous Fight, p. 362. 70. These included innovations in the areas of advanced steam propulsion, armored plating, rifled cannon, and explosive shells. Ibid., p. 364. 71. Ibid., p. 364. 72. Systematic Indian removal facilitated a land rush. Then, in a sudden attempt to slow the bubble, Jackson applied far too blunt an instrument: The Treasury was ordered to accept only payments in specie for land that the government sold off. 73. Walter Russell Mead, “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (March-April 2011), p. 33.

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The “Party War” of 1812   /   35 74. Quoted in Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenburg, A Concise History, p. 135. 75. Madison, in James Madison: Writings, edited by Jack N. Rakove (Library of America, 1999), pp. 532–33. 76. In Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenburg, A Concise History, p. 144. 77. Quoted in Smith, The Republic of Letters, vol. 2, p. 70. 78. In one notorious incident, Representative Mathew Lyon, a Republican from Vermont, took umbrage at a personal slur against him in a speech by Representative Roger Griswold, a Federalist from Connecticut, and spat in the latter’s face. Griswold returned the favor by cane-whipping Lyon on the House floor. During the late 1790s, the House of Representatives came to be dubbed the “assembly of gladiators.” See Philip Bigler and Annie Lorsbach, Liberty and Learning: The Essential James Madison (James Madison University, 2009), pp. 76–77. 79. Senator Mitch McConnell, quoted in Joseph J. Schatz, “Debt Deal Brings Relief, Frustration,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly, August 7, 2011. 80. See, for example, Craig Whitlock, “Asia Plans Give Navy Key Role, Fewer Ships,” Washington Post, February 16, 2012, p. A4. See, more generally, Michael O’Hanlon, The Wounded Giant: America’s Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity (New York: Penguin, 2011). 81. Frank Oliveri, “Cuts Reflect GOP’s Move beyond Reagan,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly, August 7, 2011.

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Chapter Three The War of 1812 and the Rise of American Military Power Stephen Budiansky

On June 15, 1812, three days before America’s declaration of war against Great Britain, former president John Adams sardonically assessed the young nation’s chances in its impending confrontation with the mightiest sea power in the world. Unlike most of his fellow New Englanders and Federalists, Adams saw war with Britain as inevitable and the cause just. But he despaired that America was woefully unprepared for the fight. “Our navy is so Lilliputian,” Adams wrote his grandson, “that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.”1 The War of 1812 would bring about a transformation in American conceptions of the role of a professional standing army and navy in national security and foreign affairs. It would also underscore some subsequently alltoo-often neglected truths about the ways that a vastly outnumbered fighting force can foil the plans of even the mightiest superpower. These are lessons that the U.S. military is still relearning as it faces twenty-first-century threats from unconventional military forces that exploit concepts of asymmetric warfare that America’s small but resourceful navy deftly employed two centuries ago in its own war against the superpower of that age. For all that has changed in the technology of war and America’s place among the world’s great military powers, much about the War of 1812 remains strikingly modern with respect to the lessons that it holds for deterrence, preparedness, counterinsurgency strategy, and military professionalism. The nation’s ill-preparedness for the war with Britain in 1812 was all the more astonishing given that the decision to go to war was entirely America’s, the timing of the commencement of hostilities in American hands alone. 36

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The Rise of American Military Power   /   37

This was not a war that Great Britain sought, desired, or even expected. For the better part of a year, Augustus Foster, Britain’s minister to Washington, had been assiduously working to avert a military clash between the two nations. All charm, tact, and goodwill, Foster courted President James Madison’s Republican backers in Congress with a lavish entertainment budget, earnest expressions of friendship, and soothing reassurances that his country understood that American talk of war was simply electoral politics or diplomatic saber-rattling. Foster confidently reported that 80 percent of Americans were opposed to war. Even after the declaration of war, he informed London that it was, in his view, largely just a bluff—that America had little or no intention of engaging in actual military action.2 When hostilities subsequently began on both land and sea, Britain for months gave the United States repeated opportunities to call it off without losing face—going so far as to unilaterally repeal the Orders in Council, whose revocation had been one of the two chief war aims announced by Madison, and avoiding military measures that might escalate the conflict throughout the fall of 1812. Nor were there any particular external circumstances that dictated the timing of Madison’s decision to seek congressional approval of a formal declaration of war in June 1812. America’s principal grievances against Britain were not new. The Orders in Council, through which Britain justified the seizure of some 1,000 American merchant vessels trading with France, had first been issued in 1807. The forcible impressment of thousands of American merchant seamen into the British Royal Navy had been going on since 1803. During that time there had been crises that had brought the United States, in the heat of anger, to the brink of war with Britain. In 1806 the British frigate Leander, stopping and searching American merchant ships just outside American territorial waters off New York harbor, had fired across the bow of an American vessel and the cannonball had struck a nearby merchant sloop, decapitating the unlucky helmsman; the news triggered convulsive anti-­British demonstrations in New York and prompted President Thomas Jefferson to issue an order closing American ports to the British warships involved in the incident and demanding the arrest of Leander’s captain if he were ever found within American jurisdiction.3 The following year the country was again brought to a war pitch when a British ship of the line, Leopard, pursued, halted, and fired three broadsides into the American navy frigate Chesapeake off Norfolk and forcibly removed four British deserters who had joined the Chesapeake’s crew. The four were

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38   /   Stephen Budiansky

taken in irons to Halifax, where one was hanged from the yardarm two months later. “Never since the battle of Lexington have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present,” Jefferson wrote immediately following the Chesapeake-Leopard incident.4 Troops were called out, and the president issued a proclamation ordering all British warships permanently barred from American waters. Moreover, any Royal Navy vessels henceforth appearing within American territory were to be treated as “enemies”; if any British soldiers were landed, they were to be killed or captured.5 But Britain swiftly disavowed the actions of the Leopard’s captain and the Royal Navy’s senior admiral on the North American station, both of whom were recalled to London, and the war fever abated. Madison’s move to war in 1812 seemed by contrast cold and calculated. By the time that Madison delivered his war message to Congress, he had been carefully laying the political groundwork for over a year, beginning with a deliberately planted story that he provided to the editor of an influential proadministration newspaper, the National Intelligencer, in April 1811. The story predicted that diplomatic efforts to resolve the differences between the two countries would fail and that war would eventually be the only option.6 If ever there was a war of choice, America’s war against Britain in 1812 was one. America’s military inadequacy to fight such a war was to be painfully evident throughout the next two and a half years. At the start of the conflict, the U.S. Navy had twenty warships, by extremely generous counting; the Royal Navy had nearly 1,000, including some ninety already on station in and around North American waters.7 The Royal Navy was in fact as large as all of the rest of the world’s navies combined. In 1812 it had 145,000 sailors and marines; it had nearly as many lieutenants (3,100) as the U.S. Navy had seamen altogether (3,600). The imbalance in land forces was, if anything, even more one-sided. At the start of the war, the U.S. Army had fewer than 7,000 soldiers to Britain’s quarter-million regulars under arms. The actual fighting of the War of 1812 was frequently disorganized, confused, inglorious, and desultory, and a conventional military analysis would be hard pressed to discover a victor—or even many clear victories. Yet, as the historian Gordon S. Wood notes, “it was nonetheless one of the most important wars in American history.”8 Madison’s ability to transform what was in many ways a military stalemate into a significant political victory had enduring consequences for the young republic. The war proved to the world that America was willing and able to defend its national honor and sovereignty.

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British naval commanders never again made an attempt to impress American seamen, and never again did any of the European powers seek to interfere with American neutral trade. Indeed, the principles of neutral maritime rights that America went to war to defend would become accepted international law four decades after the end of the conflict.9 At home, the war’s end brought a notable easing of the resistance to a standing military that had been a mainstay of Jeffersonian republicanism. The War of 1812 marked a fundamental transition in American military history from the short-lived era of military power as conceived by the framers of the Constitution—who thought armies and navies would be raised only when needed and promptly disbanded at the end of a war—to a more modern conception of military power as an inextricable component of national foreign policy even in peacetime. And while future wars would again find America unprepared, the nation avoided repeating the worst mistakes of 1812. Within the army, the War of 1812 set in train crucial reforms in readiness, command, education, training, and organization that would in time make the American armed forces the most capable and professional in the world. It was at sea, however, that the lessons of the war were brought home most dramatically, and it was the U.S. Navy that experienced the swiftest and most enduring consequences of the conflict. Arguably the single greatest effect of the War of 1812 on American military affairs was its forging of a powerful political consensus in favor of a permanent peacetime navy with the ability to project power around the world. The War of 1812 remains of enduring interest, too, for some of its military lessons that went unheeded. The quaintness to modern eyes of this age of muskets and sailing ships can obscure some strikingly modern consequences of the conflict that still merit examination. The War of 1812 underscored the often decisive effect in war of less tangible factors such as morale, public opinion, and expectations—especially when one side is fighting a far mightier enemy. America’s ability to skillfully employ what a later era would call “asymmetric warfare” was a crucial component of a naval strategy that repeatedly frustrated the efforts of the mighty Royal Navy and helped induce the British government to seek a mutually face-saving end to the conflict by the fall of 1814. These were lessons that an America subsequently accustomed to playing the part of a great world power sometimes forgot. The war likewise raised issues regarding inherent limitations in military power, civilian control of the military, and maintenance of popular support for war in

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a democracy that remain as important today as they were two centuries ago, quaint weaponry and all.

Adventurism and Tyranny The opposition to a standing army and navy by the Republican party of Madison and Jefferson did not reflect an objection to war or killing per se. The frontier West and slaveholding South, where the Republican Party drew its strongest support, were hardly nonviolent societies. Jefferson, not alone among the Revolutionary generation, was given to sanguinary glorifications of bloodshed in the defense of causes that he approved of: he justified the thousands of guillotinings in the French Revolution (“Rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated,” he said) and glibly remarked to Madison at the outset of the War of 1812 that domestic opponents of the war should be tarred and feathered—or hanged.10 It was rather the imagined threat that a permanently militarized state posed to domestic liberty that formed the crux of Republican anti-­militarist ideology. As Madison himself wrote in 1795: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”11 The fear was that a standing military would lead America down Great Britain’s path of adventurism abroad and crippling taxation at home and would become either a tool of unchecked executive power or an independent threat to constitutional government. Those dangers were the theme of countless speeches in Congress by the Republicans, who regularly denounced military appropriations in the two decades before the War of 1812.12 Although the Federalists succeeded in 1796 in winning the fight to preserve at least a small peacetime standing army, the U.S. Army up to the eve of the War of 1812 remained little more than a constabulary force, a few thousand soldiers garrisoned in forts along the Western frontier. It had no general staff, no professional military training of its officers, no ability to carry out extended field operations or maneuvers involving larger units, and only the most barebones logistics, ordnance, and supply systems. Not all of Jefferson’s party shared the uncompromising opposition to militarism espoused by the “Old Republicans,” such as Representative John Randolph of Roanoke, who unwaveringly denounced the exercise of national

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power and American commercial expansion abroad as a threat to the agrarian egalitarianism that they saw as the foundation of republican government. But the anti-militarist rhetoric and ideology of the purists tinged even their more moderate party colleagues who were open to some bolder expressions of American nationalism. Jefferson himself was committed to maintaining at least a small army and navy, but out of both personal belief and political necessity he proposed keeping both under tight constraints. Taking office in 1801, Jefferson proceeded to halve the army and navy budgets. The first task of his new secretary of the navy was to write to two-thirds of the officer corps to dismiss them from service as part of the sweeping reduction of the force that Jefferson oversaw. Jefferson at one point went so far as to propose mothballing the entire fleet. His Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, presented Congress with a calculation demonstrating that a navy would always cost more than the value of commerce that it saved, and he warned that once a nation started down the road of naval expansion, it would face endless demands for spending. Great Britain, he noted, had incurred a debt of over $1 billion in exactly that way. Gallatin argued that an American navy would be useless even in defending the nation’s own shores. Any foreign power that could mount a trans-­Atlantic seaborne invasion, he said, would of necessity possess such a mighty fleet that America could never hope to counter it.13 Jefferson drew up a plan for construction of a covered shed near the Navy Yard in southeast Washington in which the nation’s warships could be stored until needed.14 That idea died a quiet death, but another ill-conceived idea of Jefferson’s was carried out. Jefferson thought that small shallow-draft gunboats, manned by a kind of maritime citizen militia, would give the country all the navy that it needed. The president emphasized that the gunboats, confined to port defense and barely able to navigate in open waters, would never “become an excitement to engage in offensive maritime war.” Some 170 gunboats were eventually built, at a cost of $1.5 million. As weapons of modern naval warfare they were all but useless—and they were loathed by the officers and men forced to serve on them. Following the end of the Tripolitan War in 1805, the navy was left with a single frigate in active duty. The following year Congress voted to limit naval expenditures to harbor defense only and reduced the number of captains from fifteen to thirteen.15 Class and regional enmities intensified Republican suspicions of a standing military, particularly when it came to the navy. The officer corps of the

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small American navy was dominated by Federalists, many of whom took a frankly aristocratic view of the social order and maintained the Old World attitude that military command was the special privilege of “gentlemen.” Strong support for the navy by the merchants and shippers of Federalistleaning areas of New England and the Tidewater South provoked the particular ire of Republican representatives from the frontier, who were quick to equate the merchant classes of the Eastern states with “Tory” aristocrats out to maintain their economic and social privilege at the expense of the common working man and honest farmer. George Washington Campbell, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, not only opposed the use of American naval power to protect the country’s seagoing commerce but even denounced that commerce itself as an evil: “It would have been well for us if the American flag had never floated on the ocean . . . to waft to this country the luxuries and vices of European nations, that effeminate and corrupt our people.”16 As a result, throughout Jefferson’s two administrations and Madison’s first three years in the White House, Congress repeatedly turned back even modest proposals to build new warships. So entrenched was Republican anti-militarism that even as Madison succeeded in amassing political support for a declaration of war against Britain, he was unable to budge the party’s traditional opposition to military spending and to naval expenditures in particular. In November 1811 Madison sent a “war message” to Congress emphasizing Britain’s violations of American maritime rights as the central fact propelling the country to a resort to arms, but he still cautiously ducked a political confrontation over naval appropriations. His entire message devoted only a single weak and vague sentence to the navy: “Your attention will of course be drawn to such provisions on the subject of our naval force as may be required for the services to which it may be best adapted.”17 Even that was too much for Treasury Secretary Gallatin, who sent Madison an outraged memorandum arguing that no mention of naval appropriations should be made to Congress at all; even keeping the navy’s budget at its current level of $2.5 million, he warned, would push interest rates on the money that the government needed to borrow to fight the war to unaffordable levels. Employing the navy in any fashion in the coming war, Gallatin concluded, would be “a substantial evil”; the best policy would be to confine all of America’s warships to port for the duration.18

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In the absence of strong leadership from the president, Congress unsurprisingly took the political course of least resistance. Denouncing British perfidy was easy; raising taxes and forgoing populist rhetoric was hard. Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton, sincere if mostly unqualified for his office (a South Carolina planter and former governor, he had no knowledge of naval matters and had been selected by Madison mostly for political reasons), proposed a bold $7 million naval construction program that would give the country a modern force of twelve large ships of the line and twenty new frigates. But when even a much-scaled back bill providing for half that number of frigates and no ships of the line reached the floor of the House in January 1812, it was denounced in all the familiar terms. A navy “would become a powerful engine in the hands of an ambitious Executive,” warned one Republican congressman. The “Navy mania” would lead to permanent internal taxes borne by the agricultural classes, said another. Throughout history since ancient times, said a third, all the great naval powers of the world had inexorably been drawn into adventurism, plunder, and piracy. Anecdotes of government extravagance were circulated by opponents of the bill to buttress their case: there were tales of navy yard workers frivolously traveling at government expense in stagecoaches, of timber purchased at inflated prices, of tens of thousands of dollars lost to waste and inefficiency.19 The bill was defeated, albeit narrowly, in both houses. Significantly, representatives from the frontier voted 12 to 1 against the naval construction bill; six months later they would vote 12 to 1 in favor of the declaration of war. In all, fifty-three of the seventy-nine House members who would vote for war voted against preparing the navy to fight one.20 The more nationalistic Republicans rationalized this inconsistent stance by maintaining that in any case, the only real fighting would take place on land. America’s best means to pressure Britain to accept America’s political terms, they suggested, was by invading sparsely defended British Canada. But the army too was ill-prepared when war came, largely because the Republicans had boxed themselves into a political corner by their own longstanding anti-tax, anti-debt, and anti-statist ideology and by their exaggerated faith in the militia, which was regularly extolled as the perfect expression of republican virtues. Although in early 1812 Congress authorized an expansion of the army to 35,000 regulars, supplemented by 50,000 volunteers and 100,000 militia, a decade of neglect was not about to be reversed overnight.

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Recruiting was slow and inefficient, supplies and pay were dismally late to arrive, and less than one-tenth of the authorized force was raised by the time that the war began.21 Jefferson’s attempts to “republicanize” the army’s officer corps a decade earlier had both politicized the process of officer selection and purged (or driven away in disgust) competent field-grade officers. The average age of general officers of the army in 1812 was sixty; many of the colonels and majors were not much younger. “The old officers had, very generally, sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking,” observed twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott, one of the young and capable exceptions. Few of the new officers appointed in 1812 were much better than the old guard. Scott noted that Madison relied mainly on the recommendations of Republican congressmen, “who unfortunately pressed upon the Executive their own particular friends & dependents, &, in some cases— menials.” Most, said Scott in disgust, were “imbeciles and ignoramuses.”22 The War Department was utterly ill equipped to handle the administrative burdens of a wartime force. The army still had no general staff, no commanding general. Its quartermaster and commissary departments had been abolished by Congress in 1802 as a cost-saving measure and only hastily restored in March 1812. The secretary of war had eleven clerks to run the entire department and was simply overwhelmed. (One senator observed that the secretary seemed to spend all of his time “reading advertisements of petty retailing merchants, to find where he may purchase 100 shoes, or 200 hats.”)23 Republican faith in the militia was quickly proving to be a particular disaster. The only competent militia units were those in the New England states, and their governors refused to call them out in response to Madison’s request. Noting that the Constitution permitted state militias to be called into the service of the United States only to repel invasions or suppress insurrections, they insisted that the militias could not serve outside the country at all—and thus could not be employed to invade Canada.24 In both the regular and volunteer forces, mutiny, desertion, lack of discipline, woefully inadequate training, meager and bad rations, poor equipment, and incompetence of every kind were rampant throughout the war. One in eight American soldiers deserted during the war and nearly 200 were executed for desertion, an appalling record that spoke volumes of how sorely the nation lacked an army possessing even minimal standards of professionalism and competent leadership.25

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Salvation at Sea The shortcomings of command, organization, training, and manpower in the American army nearly brought Madison’s war to an end almost as soon as it began. The opening months of the war brought a series of battlefield catastrophes. With virtually no overall strategic direction from Washington and no single commander in chief in the field, the generals in command of the three main forces in the West each planned his own separate and uncoordinated offensive against Canada. Had they advanced simultaneously, they might have overwhelmed the outnumbered British defenders. Instead, each attack was repulsed in turn, in humiliating fashion. Weak and hesitant generals, fractious militia units, and appalling errors of judgment compounded the overarching strategic failure. Brigadier General William Hull marched into Canadian territory from Detroit in midJuly, but he hesitantly pulled back to Detroit and a month later fell victim to a ruse by the British commander, Major General Sir Isaac Brock, that tricked him into surrendering his entire 2,500-man army without firing a shot. On the Niagara front, Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer, a political appointee with no prior military experience, advanced on Queenston in mid-October, but by then Brock had shifted his army to meet this new threat and successfully counterattacked the superior American force. In November, Major General Henry Dearborn—a veteran of the Revolution who had been Jefferson’s secretary of war but who now at age sixty-one had grown fat and lethargic (his own troops referred to him as “Granny”)—began a third thrust, this one toward Montreal. Dearborn too quickly withdrew in failure in the face of a counterattack by a smaller enemy force. It did not help that militia units serving under Dearborn and Van Rensselaer both refused to set foot on Canadian soil and simply halted at the border.26 The anti-war Federalist press greeted these developments with sarcastic commentary on Madison’s war policies and the incompetence of his democratized army. The editor of the especially inflammatory Federal Republican of Baltimore, whose offices were twice destroyed by rioting mobs of proletarian Republicans, lamented that in one of those attacks he had lost an engraving that he had planned to publish, “an excellent caricature of a democratic officer, making ‘A Rapid Descent upon Canada,’ mounted on a terrapin.”27 At the White House the mood was grim. “Day after day, like the tidings of Job’s disaster,” news of the battlefield setbacks reached the “thin and

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solemn” group of supporters who gathered in the president’s drawing room, wrote New York congressman Samuel Mitchill to his wife in late November 1812.28 Riding a wave of anti-war feeling, Madison’s challenger in the presidential election that fall, New York mayor DeWitt Clinton, carried four New England states plus New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and part of Maryland. But Madison held Pennsylvania and the entire South to secure a 128 to 89 electoral vote margin. What helped to keep Madison’s fortunes—and those of the war—alive through the winter of 1812–13 was salvation from an entirely unexpected quarter: the war at sea. At the start of the war, after weeks of vacillation, Secretary Hamilton had at the last possible moment ordered his warships to sail, sure that he was sending them on a hopeless mission. “In our Navy Men I have the utmost confidence, that in equal combat they will be superior in the event, but when I reflect on the overwhelming force of our enemy my heart swells almost to bursting, and all the consolation I have is, that in falling they will fall nobly,” he wrote his son-in-law soon after the start of the war.29 Instead, Hamilton’s captains had stunned Britain and elated their countrymen at home by defeating three of the Royal Navy’s frigates in single-ship actions in the first six months of the war. In strategic terms the loss was trivial to a force the size of Britain’s, but the wound to British pride was palpable. The Royal Navy had viewed itself as literally invincible, with good reason. In its long-running wars with France since 1793, Britain had lost 10 ships to the enemy’s 377.30 Against a small upstart such as the Americans (whom British naval commanders were wont to call “savages,” “animals,” and “reptiles”), the idea of losing even a single ship was, as the British semi-official Naval Chronicle editorialized after the third American victory, “too painful for us to dwell on.”31 British complacency contributed both to the surprising initial successes of the American navy and to the disproportionate psychological reaction that those victories engendered in both countries. Indeed, that reaction would underscore an enduring principle of warfare that America neglected to her own peril in future conflicts: in even minor engagements, a vastly outnumbered power can achieve what is perceived as a major victory simply by defying expectations. The Royal Navy’s tactics, training, and manpower also reflected its overconfidence in Britain’s inherent naval superiority. In battles with the French, Royal Navy captains had largely eschewed the subtleties of maneuvering and gunnery, favoring murderous close-quarters broadsides and boarding actions. “The best and only mode I have found of hitting the enemy afloat is to get so close that whether the gun is pointed upwards or

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downwards or forward or aft . . . it must strike its opponent,” Horatio Nelson said in 1801. Gunnery practice was therefore frequently neglected; to save powder and shot, a British warship was allowed to fire a total of ten or fewer practice rounds a month.32 To man its burgeoning fleet, the Royal Navy drew largely on forced recruits: impressed merchant sailors, common prisoners, and the destitute. Fewer than a quarter of the crewmen of a British warship were in any true sense volunteers. Discipline was harsh, desertion rates high. As a venerable institution with considerable patronage to dispense, the Royal Navy also was riddled with favoritism, corruption, and political influence. Many officers owed their command and rank less to their skills as seamen or military tacticians than to political patronage or personal and class ties. It was routine for captains and admirals to secure appointments and promotions for the sons of navy friends and family members.33 Small and new, the American navy was less burdened by those failings. All of the crews of American warships were genuine volunteers, many with experience at sea or in skilled trades, such as blacksmithing and carpentry, in which they had learned to exercise independent judgment and initiative. Jefferson’s cutbacks in the navy had driven away some capable officers; in fact, it had proved so difficult to find anyone with the ability and knowledge to serve as his secretary of the navy that Jefferson grimly joked that he would have to put an advertisement for the job in the newspaper. But even under those unpropitious circumstances the American navy enjoyed some marked advantages. Military historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski note that “unlike Army commanders, who had earned their reputations in the Revolution, ranking naval officers were generally in their thirties and had developed professional skills and attitudes during the Quasi- and Tripolitan Wars” against France and the Barbary states in the late 1790s and early 1800s.34 With far less of the class consciousness of their British counterparts, American officers were generally better versed in the practical skills of seamanship and ship handling, which to the British upper classes still carried the taint of “trade.” Even Jefferson’s frankly political secretary of the navy, Robert Smith (who had been the president’s fifth choice for the job), steadfastly resisted pressures to make appointments or promotions based on political favoritism. Smith’s files are full of copies of letters to parents, congressmen, and senators—even to President Jefferson himself—declining their requests to promote officers whom Smith believed unqualified. Smith insisted that it took a minimum

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of four or five years of sea duty for a midshipman to gain the experience required to command a ship. In rejecting the promotion to lieutenant that Jefferson sought for a midshipman who had served only two years, Smith replied, “He cannot possibly have acquired in this short time that knowledge of seamanship which would justify the placing him in a situation where a public vessel, with the lives of all on board, might depend upon his skill as a seaman.”35 Smith equally rejected the idea of promoting officers based on seniority alone—a system most naval officers would have preferred—and demanded regular evaluations and reports on all of his officers, which led him to pass over dozens of men of greater seniority to promote others whom he found to be better qualified. Finally, the Chesapeake-Leopard affair in 1807 had stirred the American navy’s captains with a determination never to suffer such humiliation again. All American ships from that point on conducted intensive gunnery practice as a matter of course.36 Despite British claims that the three American frigate victories were due principally to the larger size of the American vessels and their greater number of guns, in fact in every case it was both superior sailing and tactics and superior accuracy of fire that carried the day. Notably, in the victory of the American frigate United States over HMS Macedonian on October 25, 1812, each ship fired about 1,200 rounds; after the battle, five cannonballs were found to have struck the hull of the American ship while ninety-five hit the British ship.37 (Moreover, the disparity in firepower between the American and British frigates was much less than British apologists routinely asserted. The American ships mounted a broadside of twenty-seven guns to the British ships’ twenty-five. While the American guns were of heavier caliber, that advantage was considerably offset by the fact that the American solid iron shot was less dense by about 7 percent owing to defective casting. The total weight of metal in the broadside of the American ships was only about 10 to 20 percent greater than that of the smaller British ships.)38 Overall, one side had been too complacent; the other, with limited means, surprisingly skilled and resourceful.

Asymmetric Warfare The American naval victories bought Madison some political breathing room, abating at least for the moment the intensity of anti-war feeling in New

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England, where many Federalists could not help feeling pride in the success of the navy, which they had championed even as they opposed the war. The victories had also, ironically, burned the bridges that Britain had kept open to America in the hope of securing a quick and easy termination of hostilities. By the start of 1813 both countries were fully committed to prosecuting the war to a decisive end. Britain was committed to at least avenging its wounded honor at sea, America—in a statement issued by Secretary of State James Monroe that firmly closed the door to even a temporary armistice that fell short of full recognition of American demands—to forcing Britain to renounce unequivocally the practice of impressment of American seamen.39 With his reelection secured, Madison dismissed Paul Hamilton, his ineffectual if politically useful secretary of the navy, and brought in a far more practical choice to head the newly important navy. William Jones was an experienced mariner and soldier, almost the antithesis of the career politician Hamilton.40 Jones had served one term as a member of Congress and knew enough about politics to detest public life and the “lashing” and “calumny” that, he observed, a public man was always subject to.41 He had turned down Jefferson’s offer of the post of navy secretary back in 1801 and only reluctantly accepted Madison’s offer this time. But his friends implored him to serve his country in its time of need, and indeed one of Jones’s greatest strengths would prove to be his lack of political ambition, which freed him to make tough decisions. Jones recognized from the outset that although the American navy’s victories in single-ship actions against the Royal Navy had considerable psychological force—“They keep alive the national feeling and produce an effect infinitely beyond their intrinsic importance,” he wrote Madison—continuing to seek encounters with British warships was not a sustainable naval strategy, given the huge numerical disproportion of the two navies.42 One of his first acts was to issue an order to his captains setting forth a new strategic vision based on diversion and hit-and-run tactics that avoided direct confrontation: Our great inferiority in naval strength, does not permit us to meet them on his ground without hazarding the precious Germ of our national glory—we have however the means of creating a powerful diversion, and of turning the Scale of annoyance against the enemy. It is therefore intended, to dispatch all our public ships, now in Port, as soon as possible, in such positions as may be best adapted to destroy

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the Commerce of the enemy, from the Cape of Good Hope, to Cape Clear. . . . If any thing can draw, the attention of the enemy, from the annoyance of our coast, for the protection of his own, rich and exposed Commercial fleets, it will be a course of this nature, & if this effect can be produced, the two fold object of increasing the pressure upon the enemy and relieving ourselves, will be attained.43 One of Secretary Jones’s other early, decisive actions was to call for the quick construction of six new sloops of war to help implement his strategy of hit-and-run commerce raiding. These were small, eighteen-gun ships, half the length and a third the tonnage of the heavy forty-four-gun frigates like the Constitution. It is telling that from the start, Jones was keenly aware of the potential psychological and political effects of this strategy on British official and public opinion. In June 1813, as the sloop of war Argus was preparing to sail, Jones sent her captain, William Henry Allen, instructions that underscored this point: It is exceedingly desirable that the enemy should be made to feel the effect of our hostility . . . and in no way can we so effectually accomplish that object, as by annoying, and destroying his commerce, fisheries, and coasting trade. The latter is of the utmost importance, and is much more exposed to the attack of such a vessel as the Argus, than is generally understood. This would carry the war home to their direct feelings and interests, and produce an astonishing sensation.44 The cruise of the Argus was the first solid test of Jones’s plan to strike diversionary blows at Britain’s commerce with small, fast, solitary cruising vessels, and for four weeks, the Argus marauded almost unchecked through British home waters. At the mouth of the English Channel, Allen took three homebound British merchantmen; he then repainted his ship to resemble a British man-of-war, with a broad yellow stripe along the gunports, and shifted his ground to the west, off the coast of Ireland. There, unnoticed in the night, he slipped within musket shot past a British frigate that was escorting a ninety-ship homebound convoy and began picking off the stragglers. By the time a British warship finally caught up with the Argus in the early morning hours of August 14, 1813, the Argus had taken twenty prizes, twelve of them in just the previous three days.45

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During the same months, the frigate President, under Captain John Rodgers, was embarked on a sweeping commerce-raiding foray across the Atlantic. Rodgers sailed past the Azores to the northern tip of Norway and back along the Irish coast. Many historians have faulted Rodgers’s poor performance in this and his other cruises in the war, and indeed Rodgers himself wrote contritely to Jones upon his return of his chagrin at having taken only twelve enemy merchantmen during five months at sea. But Jones was full of praise when he replied to Rodgers, again underscoring that the effects went far beyond the conventional material measures of success: The effects of your Cruize . . . is not the less felt by the enemy either in his Commercial or Military Marine, for while you have harassed and enhanced the dangers of the one, you provoked the pursuit & abstracted the attention of the other to an extent perhaps equal to the disproportion of our relative forces, and which will not cease until his astonishment shall be excited by the Account of your arrival.46 Indeed, as we now know from the dispatches of the British commander on the North American station, at one point twenty-five British warships, including six ships of the line and ten frigates, were patrolling the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the Virginia capes, all trying unsuccessfully to catch Rodgers and block his return to port.47 Captain Allen’s mistaken decision to engage the British warship that ended his cruise—and his life—solidified Madison’s conviction in the soundness of Jones’s thinking. The president wrote Jones lamenting Allen’s loss but adding that his cruise proves also the great capacity of that species of vessel to make the war an evil to [Great Britain] and particularly to the class of her subjects who promoted it. Would it be amiss to instruct such cruisers positively, never to fight when they can avoid it, and employ themselves entirely in destroying the commerce of the Enemy?48 Jones agreed. In what by the end of 1813 had become a typical order to his captains, the navy secretary stated: The Character of the American Navy stands upon a basis not to be shaken, and needs no sacrifices by unequal combat to sustain its reputation. You will therefore avoid all unnecessary contact with the

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Cruisers of the Enemy, even with an equal, unless under circumstances that may ensure your triumph without defeating the main object of your Cruise. He also emphasized that by burning enemy merchantmen rather than trying to bring them into port as prizes, a single raider acting on “the destructive plan” would have “the power perhaps, of twenty acting upon pecuniary views alone.”49 By the summer of 1814 the first of the new sloops were at sea and the effectiveness of Jones’s tactics became even clearer—as did the huge political impact that the raids generated. In July and August dozens of British merchant ships were captured and burned by two American navy sloops of war (the Peacock and Wasp) and by a few similarly sized American privateers (notably, the Chasseur of Baltimore) operating around the British Isles. Those events created an outcry among British merchants—the very class, Madison noted, that had been most responsible for the British government policies that had precipitated the conflict—and it became the source of the first sustained, major domestic opposition to the war. On August 17, 1814, the directors of two major British insurance companies petitioned the government requesting “most earnestly” that the Admiralty “prevent a repetition of these ruinous and unlooked-for losses to the Trade of this Country.” Large meetings of merchants, shipowners, and underwriters in Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, and other port cities followed with even more urgent appeals. They noted that insurance rates for just the passage from England to Ireland had quintupled and were now twice what they had been even during the height of the war with France. “The number, the audacity, and the success” of the American raiders, the merchants declared, “have proved injurious to the Commerce, are humbling to the pride, and discreditable to those who direct the great Naval Power of this Nation.”50 The 1,800 British merchant ships burned or taken as prizes by American warships and privateers struck a blow at British naval strategy and political will that went well beyond what probably could have been achieved by any other employment of the small American naval forces. (Although privateers accounted for perhaps 1,400 of those captures, the effectiveness of American privateers was far less per vessel than was that of the much more heavily armed and manned and far more professionally trained U.S. Navy warships. Many privateers failed to capture a single enemy ship before they

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were captured themselves by a British warship and their crews taken prisoner. Overall, the 500 or so American privateers commissioned during the war took about a third as many prizes each as did U.S. Navy vessels.) By contrast, the far more powerful British naval forces took 240 American merchant ships in 1812 and 600 ships in 1813, according to the records of the vice admiralty courts in Halifax, Bermuda, and the West Indies, where the captured ships were brought in as prizes. Exact records of British captures in 1814 and 1815 are available only for Halifax, but extrapolating from the previous periods (during which Halifax accounted for half the total) yields a reasonable estimate of 450 captures in this final period of the war, for a grand total of 1,300 captures for the entire war.51

Hearts, Minds, and Taxes By the summer of 1813 the land war on the Canadian frontier had reached an impasse. Each side scored some important tactical victories, but the overall strategic situation was deadlocked. The slow, positional warfare that ensued was exactly the kind of fighting that demanded the professional military experience and higher-echelon coordination that the American forces so notably lacked. Once again, major American offensives that sought to break through and capture Canadian territory fell apart because of disorganization, poor planning, and overconfidence. The lack of any higher command within the army that could coordinate overall strategy and operations was painfully underscored by an ongoing feud between the major generals in command of the two armies ordered to march on Montreal. In a vain attempt to get his two generals to cooperate, Secretary of War John Armstrong himself traveled to upstate New York to intercede on the scene, only to return to Washington in failure in the fall of 1813. An attendant and enervating naval construction arms race on the Great Lakes threatened to sap vital resources—manpower, supplies, and ordnance—from the more strategically potent war at sea. Secretary Jones assured Madison that he understood the importance of blocking a British offensive on the lakes but feared the loss of initiative that the bogged-down land war was imposing on American strategy. In contrast to the “fish-pond war” of the lakes, as Secretary of State Monroe aptly and derisively termed it, the oceans offered the one continuing opportunity to catch the British off guard, maintain initiative and surprise, and force the enemy to react and thereby

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tie up a disproportionate number of its superior naval force. “The difference between the Lake and the sea service,” Jones would observe in October 1814, “is that in the former we are compelled to fight them at least man to man and gun to gun whilst on the Ocean five British frigates cannot counteract the depredations of one Sloop of War.”52 Britain’s own efforts to influence American political support for the war reflected the heavy-handed tactics frequently employed by a strong conventional power facing a far less militarily potent but sometimes nimble opponent. In the summers of 1813 and 1814 a series of raids along the Chesapeake led by Rear Admiral George Cockburn made him probably the most hated man in America but did far less to weaken American resolve. The towns attacked were of questionable strategic significance, and Cockburn’s punitive policy of burning houses in towns that offered armed resistance stoked anger that may have increased rather than diminished American resolve. That was especially true of the British attack on Hampton, Virginia, in June 1813, when ill-disciplined troops recruited among French prisoners of war engaged in rape and pillage. The drain on manpower and ships that these raids entailed meanwhile undermined the larger British objective of maintaining a tight blockade of the American coast.53 There were also inevitable problems in coordinating land and sea forces in complex amphibious operations, which made these raids extremely costly for little gain. “We have done nothing but commit blunders,” lamented a British army lieutenant colonel frustrated by Cockburn’s uncoordinated efforts. “Nothing was done with method.” He went on to note: I have learned much on this expedition: how to embark and disembark large bodies in face of an enemy; how useless it is to have more than one commander; how necessary it is that the commanders by sea and land should agree and have one view: finally never to trust Admiral Cockburn.54 Even the British attacks on Baltimore and Washington the following summer failed to deliver the dramatic political blow that the British commanders expected. Dispatches between Cockburn and his superiors throughout 1814 reveal no clear or coherent strategic objective behind the raids or the choice of particular targets. British commanders and officials mentioned various rationales: “retributory justice” for American attacks in Canada; “crippling the Enemy’s naval Force”; punishing “the most democratic town” in America

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(Baltimore); responding in the only way available to the American war “against our Commerce” at sea; or even just carrying out a “demonstration.”55 In fact, targets were chosen as much for opportunity as for any wellthought-out or longer-range strategic purpose. Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, who became the British naval commander-in-chief on the North American station in April 1814, thought that once the Americans were “taught to know that they are at the mercy of an invading foe,” the pressure on the U.S. government to accede to terms would be inexorable; therefore, in his view, the actual choice of target did not matter that much. Cochrane was neither the first nor the last military commander of a mighty empire who was convinced that a show of force alone would be sufficient to convince a far weaker enemy to surrender. The abiding contempt for Americans that animated many top British officials only reinforced that belief. In 1814, complaining about a fellow officer who he believed was too lenient toward the Americans, Cochrane observed: “When he is better acquainted with the American Character he will possibly see as I do that like Spaniels they must be treated with great severity before you ever make them tractable.”56 The fundamental problem was that America was not, in the modern parlance, a target-rich environment; a century and a half later, the United States would encounter the same difficulty in its attempt to apply political pressure on North Vietnam in a series of bombing campaigns. When asked his opinion in the fall of 1814, the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s most prominent military commander, warned the government that the vast and “thinly peopled” continent of America was simply ill-suited to an extended military campaign to tip the strategic balance decisively: “I do not know where you could carry on such an operation which would be so injurious to the Americans as to force them to sue for peace,” he said.57 The Admiralty in London cautioned British commanders on the scene against advancing too far inland on any raid, lest their line of retreat be cut. By the same token, occupying and holding territory was not an option. The result—rather as one contemporary analyst pointed out with regard to the American bombing of Hanoi in the Vietnam War—was that the British raids did little real damage to their enemy’s capabilities while at the same time provoking considerable moral outrage.58 The local British naval commanders more than once made the related mistake of overestimating the breadth and depth of domestic American political opposition to the war. Many formed their views about American public opinion from the opposition (and anglophile) Federalist party

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newspapers, and many also leaped to the conclusion that rampant local collaboration with the British naval forces, seen particularly in the eagerness with which farmers along the coast sold their produce to the blockading fleet, was a sign of impending political upheaval that would knock America out of the war. But as one perceptive young British naval lieutenant stationed off Boston noted, most of those local “rascals” who eagerly filled the British squadron’s orders for cows, sheep, lobsters, vegetables, and firewood were merely opportunists, not allies. Even in strongly Federalist New England, they only “like the English as a spendthrift loves an old rich wife,” he wrote in his journal. “The sooner we are gone the better.”59 Although the British raids on the Chesapeake undeniably eroded confidence among the heavily Republican Virginians in the national government’s ability to protect their property—they were especially rattled by successful British efforts to encourage slaves to desert and take up arms, under British command, against their former masters—that loss of confidence never reached the point of undermining support for the war itself or fomenting serious political opposition to Madison’s administration among Republican strongholds. The most effective strategic measure employed by the British was the blockade. However, it was costly in ships and effort, it was repeatedly undermined by the diversion of British naval forces to other tasks (escorting convoys, conveying prizes to Halifax or Bermuda, supporting the amphibious operations on the Chesapeake), and it was compromised as an economic weapon by Britain’s own vast demand for American flour and wheat to supply Wellington’s large army on the Iberian Peninsula. (Throughout the war, the British government willingly supplied licenses to American traders carrying produce to the peninsula, exempting them from capture as prizes by British warships and privateers.) In the end, the blockade’s impact on the American government’s finances was not much greater than other effects of the war. Indeed, Madison’s ill-advised embargo in the early months of 1814, which halted all American trade even to neutral nations (and even briefly halted the American coasting trade, something the British blockade had never achieved), probably did as much or more to send America’s customs revenues plummeting at that crucial juncture of the war.60 Even more to blame for the near-bankruptcy of the American government by the fall of 1814 was the continuing failure of the Republicans to summon the political will to approve new revenues to pay for the mounting

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costs of the war. That failure laid bare a difficulty in democratic polities that in some ways remains unresolved to this day: there simply was little political cost to be paid for fiscal irresponsibility and feckless leadership when the alternative was the decidedly unpopular step of imposing additional taxes. Fearing a political backlash, Congress refused from the outset to institute a broad-based tax to cover the war’s cost. “It was admitted by the ruling party in debate,” said one Virginia Federalist in 1812, “that to impose them now would endanger their success at the next election.”61 Instead, duties on imported goods were increased and $5 million in Treasury notes was issued to make good the shortfall. The following year, having refused even to consider a tax bill, the 12th Congress adjourned in March 1813 with a resolution summoning the new 13th Congress to convene six months earlier than usual, at a special session in May, to take up the problem. The new Congress met well into the summer, unable to break the impasse. “Every one is for taxing every body except himself and his Constituents,” dryly observed John W. Eppes, Jefferson’s son-in-law, who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee.62 Finally passing a $5.5 million excise and property tax measure in July, the politicians pusillanimously added a proviso that the taxes would not go into effect until the following year and would last only twelve months. By the fall of 1814 the government was on the verge of bankruptcy. Treasury notes were circulating at a 20 percent discount. Banks outside of New England suspended specie payments. William Jones calculated that $60 million was needed to keep the war going another year, yet only a fraction of that could be raised from borrowing and only at usurious interest rates. “Something must be done and done speedily, or we shall have the opportunity of trying the experiment of maintaining an army and navy and carrying on a vigorous war without money,” Jones wrote the Treasury secretary.63 On November 9, 1814, the government suspended interest payments on its outstanding debt, effectively defaulting and declaring the United States insolvent. Stunned and still protesting, the Republican Congress approved some new internal taxes but remained adamant to the last in refusing to reestablish a national bank, as Jones and even Madison (reversing his past stance) now urged as the only means of placing the nation’s finances on a permanently stable footing. Facing up to the internal inconsistencies of its political posturing proved more unpalatable to Madison’s party than forcing the government into bankruptcy.

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“A War for Honor” By the fall of 1814 both Britain and America were wearying of the conflict and eager to bring it to a close. In October, Madison decided to make public the fact that he had instructed the American peace commissioners meeting with British envoys at Ghent to drop American demands for an end to impressment as a condition for peace. It was a risky gambit, allowing his domestic opponents to portray it as an admission that the war had been fought for no purpose whatsoever. But as Madison calculated, it also increased pressure on the British to come to terms, and British negotiators, facing growing protests at home and little prospect of achieving a decisive battlefield victory that would tip the balance at the negotiating table, indeed gave way on key points. They dropped their previously insistent demand for the cession to Britain of territory in northern Maine and the headlands of the Mississippi River held by British forces, and they even abandoned their “nonnegotiable” insistence on the establishment of a huge western buffer zone for the exclusive settlement of Britain’s Indian allies. Conceding the area—which encompassed 250,000 square miles, including a third of Ohio and all of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—would have required the expulsion of 100,000 white American settlers.64 The Federalists, when they read the terms of the treaty, were certain that it spelled the political doom of Madison’s party. The treaty offered nothing but a return to the status quo ante; it failed even to mention, much less resolve, any of the outstanding points of contention between the two countries. “The treaty must be deemed disgraceful to the Government who made the war and the peace, and will be so adjudged by all, after the first effusions of joy and relief have subsided,” opined Christopher Gore, a Federalist U.S. senator from Massachusetts.65 But the triumph that the Republicans proclaimed proved a more accurate reading not only of domestic politics but of global realpolitik. Holding off British power had been an accomplishment that commanded the attention and respect of the world in a way that the new nation had failed to do previously. The war, as John Taylor of Virginia observed, had been almost a “metaphysical war,” one fought “not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport” but “for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy.”66 Tellingly, some of the strongest praise for America and swiftest recognition of what the young republic had achieved for American honor, prestige,

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and power came from within British naval circles. In a remarkable editorial marking the war’s end, the British Naval Chronicle acknowledged that “an inglorious, unsuccessful, war must naturally end in such a peace as America chose to give; for assuredly we have now done our worst against this infant enemy, which has already shewn a giant’s power. Soon will the rising greatness of this distant empire . . . astonish the nations who have looked on with wonder, and seen the mightiest efforts of Britain, at the era of her greatest power, so easily parried, so completely foiled.”67 The failure of the Treaty of Ghent to mention the maritime rights that America went to war to vindicate flummoxed future generations of historians as much as it did Madison’s Federalist opponents. Yet, as Gordon Wood recently noted, “Although historians have had difficulty appreciating Madison’s achievements, many contemporaries certainly realized what he had done.”68 America made its point, de facto if not de jure, with the European powers, who would think twice before interfering again with America’s neutral rights on the seas. Most dramatically, the war’s outcome almost instantaneously forged a new consensus at home that embraced a standing army and navy as an essential expression of American national strength, prestige, and diplomatic influence in both the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Two decades earlier, Alexander Hamilton had promoted that characteristically Federalist view of military power, emphasizing that a standing navy would allow the United States even in peacetime to become the “arbiter” of European power in the Western Hemisphere and to deter any hostile moves by European powers toward America by maintaining an implicit threat to their possessions in the West Indies.69 That kind of thinking had always been anathema to Republicans. But now all of the speeches about militarist “adventurism” and “tyranny” evaporated almost overnight and Republican opposition to the navy was hardly to be heard. In a passage that Alexander Hamilton himself might have written, Madison acknowledged in his message to Congress announcing the end of the war that a chief lesson of the conflict was that “a certain degree of preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters in the onset, but affords also the best security for the continuance of peace.”70 In a powerful endorsement of the new consensus, in March 1815 Madison immediately sought and received from Congress authorization to send a naval force to the Mediterranean to put an end to the depredations against American

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commerce by Algerian cruisers. The vote in favor was 27-2 in the Senate, 94-32 in the House.71 By July the American naval force had routed the Algerian navy and extracted a treaty guaranteeing the United States full shipping rights in the Mediterranean and an end to Algerian demands for tribute—an outcome that had eluded American diplomatic and military efforts for the previous fifteen years. The following year Congress easily approved “an act for the gradual increase of the navy” that allocated $1 million a year over eight years for construction of a substantial fleet of nine ships of the line and twelve heavy frigates. A bill establishing what at that point would be the largest peacetime army in America’s history, 12,000 men, was also approved, along with major reforms creating an army general staff and a commanding general. Further reforms followed in 1818 that established permanent commissary, quartermaster, and medical bureaus in the army. In 1817 Madison’s successor, James Monroe, instituted a revival of the almost moribund Military Academy at West Point that substantially increased the professionalism of training for army officers, introducing the first courses in military strategy and theory (which were based mostly on translations of the writings on the Napoleonic art of war by the great French military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini).72 Where Madison and his contemporaries spoke of honor, today we would say “deterrence” with almost the same meaning with respect to military power as an instrument of foreign policy in peacetime. The concept of military preparedness and naval preparedness in particular—which would feature prominently in debates over American peacetime military appropriations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—was very much a product of the War of 1812. Although militia units acquitted themselves in a few battles during the War of 1812 (notably at Baltimore and New Orleans in the final year of the conflict), there was widespread recognition that the militia system was beyond rescue. However well the mythical image of amateur citizen-soldiers defending the nation with the natural martial vigor of the common man might fit Jeffersonian ideals of republicanism, the war had driven home the reality that there was no substitute for professionalism in time of war and that a regular army would always be needed to provide the first line of defense in an emergency while reserves were still being mobilized and trained. The common militia, in which all white men had been expected to serve, faded into dereliction; most states simply stopped filing militia returns

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with the War Department, and Congress made no real effort to resuscitate it.73 The professional army was here to stay. Likewise, the War of 1812 would see the last use of the constitutional authority granted Congress to issue letters of marque, or privateers’ commissions. For all of the rhetorical celebration by Jeffersonians of privateers as “the militia of the sea,” the distinctly mixed record of privateers in the War of 1812 drove home the reality that they were no substitute for a real navy, just as the militia was no substitute for the army. Though the crews of a few American privateers fought with incredible bravery in the War of 1812— two of the bloodiest actions of the naval war were waged by privateer crews that valiantly resisted boat attacks and boarding actions by regular Royal Navy forces—and privateers added substantially to the toll taken on British commerce, the ships were for the most part captained by incompetent commanders and manned by poorly disciplined crews. Nominally they operated under the orders of the Navy Department, but in practice it was impossible to subject their captains and crews to naval discipline or coordinated command, and their successes were offset by the thousands of crew members of captured American privateers who filled British prisons. Professionalism brought its own problems—careerism, bureaucratic conservatism, and red tape. Following the War of 1812, the navy instituted reforms similar to those of the army to create a permanent administrative structure, and the bureaus of the army and navy became fiefdoms unto themselves that often resisted technological and organizational innovations that threatened to undermine their authority. Nonetheless, the U.S. military would never again be so unprepared for war as it was in 1812. In future wars the nation had the benefit of a professional cadre of officers and noncommissioned officers and the administrative machinery to manage transportation, supplies, pay, food, and medical care, which greatly eased the difficulty of rapid mobilization. The great forgotten lesson of the War of 1812 was William Jones’s demonstration that even a greatly outnumbered force can bring resources to bear to alter the political-military calculus. Jones’s emphasis on the psychological and political dimension of war and on employing military force to disrupt and divert the enemy’s plans was ahead of its time. To his successors in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when America emerged as a great world power, there was something furtive or even unmanly about the idea of employing military force in such an indirect fashion. Alfred Thayer

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Mahan, the great late-nineteenth-century American theorist of sea power, maintained that America’s naval strategy in the War of 1812 had violated the cardinal military principle of concentration of force. In the eyes of sea power proponents of his era, who were trying to make the case for a vast blue-water fleet to project power around the globe, the paramount purpose of a navy was to threaten and if necessary destroy an opposing naval force, by sailing in a single, concentrated, and mighty squadron. Commerce raiding was in Mahan’s view a wasteful and slightly disreputable diversion of sea power from its true role and mission; cruises by solitary marauders were likewise a fatally flawed dispersion of force.74 Mahan was writing before the German U-boat offensives of two world wars demonstrated just how potent commerce raiding remained—both in diverting an enemy’s naval resources and in dealing a psychological blow to an adversary. He was also writing in an age when America had no thought of again playing the role of plucky underdog against a mightier foe. Yet the challenges of insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare of the twenty-first century would underscore just how enduring were Secretary Jones’s insights into the often decisive role in warfare of expectations, perceptions, psychology, and diversion that he so skillfully exploited.

Notes 1. Letter from John Adams to John Adams Smith, June 15, 1812, Microfilms of the Adams Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society: 1954–59), reel 118. 2. Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (University of California Press, 1968), pp. 274, 279, 353–54, 395–96. 3. A good contemporary account of the Leander affair and the reaction that it provoked in New York is found in the letters of the British consul: Thomas Barclay, Selections from the Correspondence of Thomas Barclay, Formerly British Consul-General at New York, edited by George Lockhart Rives (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), pp. 230–39. 4. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Pierre S. Dupont de Nemours, July 14, 1807, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington (memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/ jefferson_papers/). For a thorough and balanced examination of the Chesapeake–Leopard incident, see Spencer C. Tucker and Frank T. Reuter, Injured Honor: The Chesapeake– Leopard Affair, June 22, 1807 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1996). 5. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, August 25, 1807, Jefferson Papers. 6. “Our Relations with G. Britain,” National Intelligencer, April 16, 1811; J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 69. 7. Of Britain’s 1,000 warships, some 700 were in commission and just over 500 deployed at sea at the start of the war. The U.S. Navy had fourteen seagoing vessels in

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The Rise of American Military Power   /   63 commission as of June 1812; at least four were still undergoing repairs at the time of the declaration of war. 8. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 659. 9. The Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, ratified by all of the major European powers, accepted the long-standing American position that neutral noncontraband goods could not legally be seized even if carried by enemy merchant vessels and likewise that enemy noncontraband goods carried by neutral flag vessels were immune from capture. The United States refused to join the declaration largely because it was seeking to do away altogether with the anomaly between the laws of land and those of naval warfare, which permitted enemy private property to be captured at sea. 10. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793, Jefferson Papers; Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, June 29, 1812, Madison Papers, Library of Congress, Washington (memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/madison_papers/). 11. James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1865), pp. 491–92. 12. Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 263, 267; Ian S. Toll, Six Frigates (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 41–44; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1984), pp. 95–96. 13. Alexander Balinky, “Albert Gallatin, Naval Foe,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 82 (1958), pp. 294, 296–98, 301. 14. American State Papers: Naval Affairs, vol. 1, pp. 104–08. 15. William S. Dudley, The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, vol. 1, 1812 (Washington: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1985), pp. 12–15. 16. Annals of Congress, 9 Cong., 1 sess. (March 11, 1806), pp. 706–07. 17. Annals of Congress, 12 Cong., 1 sess. (November 5, 1811), pp. 11–15. 18. Memorandum from Albert Gallatin to James Madison, “Notes on the President’s Message,” n.d., Madison Papers. 19. Annals of Congress, 12 Cong., 1 sess. (January 18, 1812), pp. 825–26, 840, 842; (January 21, 1812), p. 878. 20. Annals of Congress, 12 Cong., 1 sess. (January 27, 1812), p. 999; (January 28, 1812), pp. 1002–04; Spencer C. Tucker, Stephen Decatur: A Life Most Bold and Daring (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005), p. 101. 21. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 33, 73–79; Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, p. 102. 22. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 8, 76; Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 674. 23. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 75–76. 24. Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, pp. 102–3. 25. Hickey, War of 1812, p. 222. 26. Ibid., pp. 80–90. 27. “Effects of the War,” Federal Republican, December 31, 1812. 28. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, p. 273. 29. Letter from Paul Hamilton to Morton A. Waring, July 25, 1812, Paul Hamilton Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, S.C. (www.sc.edu/library/digital/collections/ paulhamilton.html). 30. David F. Long, Ready to Hazard: A Biography of Commodore William Bainbridge, 1774–1833 (University Press of New England, 1981), p. 133.

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64   /   Stephen Budiansky 31. Letters from Philip Broke to Sarah Louisa Broke, LBK 58/2, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.; “Retrospective and Miscellaneous,” Naval Chronicle, vol. 29 (1813), p. 242. 32. Spencer C. Tucker, Arming the Fleet: U.S. Navy Ordnance in the Muzzle-Loading Era (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1989), p. 37. The worst debacle in the history of the U.S. Army—the American defeat at Kasserine Pass in World War II—stemmed at least in part from a similar sense of moral superiority and insufficient training: “We were very sure of ourselves—too sure,” recalled one American lieutenant, a forward observer in the artillery fresh out of Yale ROTC. “Nothing could stop us. We knew everything about how to smash the Nazis. Besides, we were Americans, which automatically gave us two strikes on every other gang in the world. That’s how most of us felt.” Edwin V. Westlake, Forward Observer (New York: Dutton, 1944), p. 30. 33. Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 2004), pp. 220–27. 34. Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, p. 106. 35. Christopher McKee, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991), pp. 285, 304. 36. Stephen Budiansky, Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815 (New York: Knopf, 2011), p. 66. 37. Tucker, Arming the Fleet:, p. 41. 38. Ibid., p. 93. 39. American State Papers: Foreign Relations, vol. 3, pp. 596–97. 40. As a fifteen-year-old militia volunteer, Jones had fought at Princeton and Trenton in the Revolution; he had served aboard an American privateer and in the Continental Navy later in the war and afterward had been captain of a militia artillery company in Charleston. Later, as a shipowner and merchant captain in Philadelphia, he had sailed to China and India. He had a broad practical knowledge of ships, oceangoing commerce, and how to run things in a businesslike manner. 41. Letter from William Jones to Eleanor Jones, January 23, 1813, William Jones Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 42. Letter from William Jones to James Madison, May 10, 1814, Madison Papers. 43. “Circular from William Jones to Commanders of Ships Now in Port Refitting,” February 22, 1813, in William S. Dudley, The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, vol. 2: 1813 (Washington: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1992), pp. 47–49. 44. Letter from William Jones to William Henry Allen, June 5, 1813, in Dudley, Naval War of 1812, vol. 2, pp. 139–41. 45. Ira Dye, The Fatal Cruise of the Argus: Two Captains in the War of 1812 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1994), pp. 264–75. 46. Letter from William Jones to John Rodgers, October 4, 1813, in Dudley, Naval War of 1812, vol. 2, pp. 254–55. 47. Letter from Admiral John B. Warren to John W. Croker, October 16, 1813, in Dudley, Naval War of 1812, vol. 2, pp. 260–61. 48. Letter from James Madison to William Jones, October 15, 1813, Jones Papers. 49. Letter from William Jones to George Parker, December 8, 1813, in Dudley, Naval War of 1812, vol. 2, pp. 294–96; letter from Jones to John O. Creighton, December 22, 1813, in ibid., pp. 296–97.

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The Rise of American Military Power   /   65 50. “II.—Further Papers Relating to the War with America,” CO 42/160, ff. 103–6, Public Record Office, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, U.K. 51. Although original records of the vice admiralty courts in Bermuda and the West Indies have been lost, a meticulous list of prizes brought into each of the courts, with a notation of the courts’ ruling and the valuation of each captured vessel, was kept by Admiral John Warren’s prize agent in Bermuda for the period that Warren was in command of the North American station (the outbreak of the war through March 1814); see “List of Vessels Brought into Bermuda,” HUL/18, George Redmond Hulbert Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.; and “Vessels Captured and Detained,” WAR/37, Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K. 52. Monroe quoted in Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, p. 467; letter from William Jones to James Madison, October 26, 1814, in Michael J. Crawford, The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, vol. 3, 1814­–1815: Chesapeake Bay, Northern Lakes, and Pacific Ocean (Washington: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 2002), pp. 631–36. 53. For a good discussion of the diversion of vessels from the blockade to other missions, including the Chesapeake operations, see Wade G. Dudley, Splintering the Wooden Wall: The British Blockade of the United States, 1812–1815 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003), pp. 157–60. 54. William Francis Patrick Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B. (London: John Murray, 1857), pp. 218, 221–22. 55. Letter from Alexander F. I. Cochrane to George Cockburn, April 28, 1814 in Crawford, Naval War of 1812, vol. 3, pp. 51–53; letter from Cochrane to Lord Melville, July 17, 1814, in ibid., pp. 132–35; order from Cochrane to Commanding Officers of the North American Station, July 18, 1814, in ibid., pp. 140–41; letter from John W. Croker to Cochrane, April 4, 1814, in ibid., pp. 115–17; letter from Cochrane to Croker, September 17, 1814, in ibid., pp. 286–88. 56. Letter from Alexander F. I. Cochrane to John W. Croker, September 17, 1814, in Crawford, Naval War of 1812, vol. 3, pp. 286–88; letter from Cochrane to Lord Melville, September 3, 1814, in ibid., pp. 269–70. 57. Wellington quoted in C. S. Forester, The Age of Fighting Sail (Sandwich, Mass.: Chapman Billies, 1995), p. 195. 58. Oleg Hoeffding, “Bombing North Vietnam: An Appraisal of Economic and Political Effects,” RAND Memorandum RM-5213, December 1966, p. 17. 59. Henry Edward Napier, New England Blockaded in 1814: The Journal of Henry Edward Napier, Lieutenant in the H.M.S. Nymphe, edited by Walter Whitehill (Salem, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1939), pp. 22–23. 60. Dudley, Splintering the Wooden Wall, pp. 112–13, 147. U.S. net customs revenues fell from $13.3 million in 1812 to $6.9 million in 1813 and $4.7 million in 1814; see American State Papers, Financial, vol. 3, p. 55. 61. Hickey, War of 1812, p. 50. 62. Ibid., p. 122. 63. Ibid., p. 222. 64. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 287–94. 65. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Second Administration of James Madison, vol. 3 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891), p. 59. 66. Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 659.

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66   /   Stephen Budiansky 67. Naval Chronicle, vol. 33 (1815), pp. 295–96. 68. Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 699. 69. Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, p. 95. 70. Annals of Congress, 13 Cong., 3 sess. (February 18, 1815), pp. 255–56. 71. Journal of the House of Representatives, vol. 9 (February 28, 1815), p. 787; Annals of Congress, 13 Cong., 3 sess., March 2, 1815, p. 291. 72. Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, pp. 118–20, 128; Steve R. Waddell, United States Army Logistics: From the American Revolution to 9/11 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2010), pp. 38–39. 73. Permanent “volunteer militia” companies continued to exist, and states were permitted to incorporate and officially recognize them. But after the War of 1812 army planners assumed that in wartime the real mobilization would henceforth come from newly raised volunteer army units, not the existing—and now mostly ceremonial—state militia companies. To raise needed troops for the Mexican-American War in 1846, for example, Congress authorized a call for 50,000 volunteers to serve for 12 months. See Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, pp. 129–30, 142. 74. Alfred T. Mahan, Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812, vol. 1 (Boston: Little Brown, 1905), pp. 315–22.

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Chapter Four Dual Nationalisms: Legacies of the War of 1812 Alan Taylor

On both the left and the right, American politicians and pundits frequently complain that the country has strayed from the original vision of our heroic national founders, the men who declared independence in 1776 and crafted the Constitution in 1787. According to Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.), for example, “There’s nothing that ails this country that couldn’t be fixed by paying more careful attention to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.”1 Like most myths about a nation’s origins, ours tend to gloss over the chaotic messiness of historical experience. In reality, save for seeking national independence and some version of popular sovereignty, the actual founders agreed on very little. Indeed, they collided throughout the Revolutionary War, the framing and ratifying of the Constitution, and the early years of the republic. If we must now follow the dictates of our founders, the question becomes this: Which ones? Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson? Thomas Paine or James Madison? John Adams or Samuel Adams? They did not speak with one voice and certainly did not anticipate the many dilemmas faced by a modern global power. Instead of endowing Americans with a fixed set of precepts, the founders gave us clashing principles, vigorous debates, and an especially brief and often ambiguous Constitution. Certainly, there was no single, unified set of canonical views that can now easily be deployed to resolve our contemporary Portions of this chapter appeared previously in Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

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dilemmas. On the contrary, the founders created some of those dilemmas by their inability to reconcile their views.2 The ideological divisions of the founding generation contributed to the American declaration of war against Britain in 1812 and to the many failures of the subsequent war effort. Indeed, the U.S. Congress and president declared the war as much for domestic political reasons as from foreign policy frustrations. By declaring and winning the war, the governing Republican party of Jefferson and Madison expected to vindicate its version of the republic. In particular, the Republicans sought to prove the capacity of a relatively weak federal government and a loose confederation of the states to defeat the coercive might of the more centralized British Empire. Republican leaders meant to mobilize the enthusiasm of the people for a crusade to vindicate their version of a republic. By winning such a war, the Republicans expected to discredit and ruin the Federalist opposition party, which regretted as reckless and foolish the attempt to wage war without a large and professional army and navy. They also recognized that the Republicans sought to destroy the future prospects of their party. Consequently, most of the Federalists did their best to frustrate a war effort that seemed ideologically driven to ruin them. In the War of 1812, we find the bitter fruits of the fundamental debate over the proper scale and reach of the federal government.

Partisans Commentators today often decry the nation’s partisanship as unique and supposedly at odds with the harmony achieved by our founders. Although they designed the Constitution to discourage organized partisanship, the founders promptly polarized into fiercely partisan camps, each of which claimed that it alone could defend the Constitution and uphold the liberty of the people. On the one hand, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton claimed the name of Federalists, while Jefferson and Madison organized an opposition known as the Republicans (not to be confused with the current Republican Party, which emerged during the 1850s). During the early decades of the nation, political partisanship became especially rancorous because the stakes were so high: the very survival of the republic and its tenuous union of fractious states. Although endowed with immense potential for economic and demographic growth, the United States

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was a new and weak country in a dangerous world of powerful empires, primarily the British and the French. Moreover, the American leaders had gambled their union on a republic, a form of government notoriously shortlived in the European past. The vast geographic scale of the United States also defied the conventional political wisdom that republics could survive only in small and rather homogeneous polities.3 Both Federalists and Republicans denounced political parties as selfish factions bent on perverting the common good. Paradoxically, that dread of parties drove each group to practice an especially bitter partisanship. Hostile to the concept of political parties, neither group accepted the legitimacy of the other. Each party claimed exclusively to speak for the people, casting its rivals as insidious conspirators bent on destroying freedom and the union. Referring to “the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided,” Jefferson insisted that “the republicans are the nation.” By comparison, our partisanship today seems relatively tepid—and our longing to return to the politics of the founders especially misguided.4 During the post-revolutionary generation the partisans disagreed fundamentally over whether the Constitution should be read narrowly or broadly. Federalists insisted that the constitution contained broad implicit powers that would enable the federal government to subordinate the states. But the Republicans insisted on a limited and literal interpretation that reserved to the states all of the powers not specifically assigned by the Constitution to the federal government.5 Their divergent constitutional views led the two parties to debate fiercely the sort of national economy needed to sustain liberty. Prior to the War of 1812, the Republicans sought to preserve the nation’s agricultural economy, convinced that it alone could sustain a relatively simple and equal class structure for white men. The Federalists, however, hoped to accelerate industrial development, which might enrich the nation as a whole but produce greater extremes of wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness. The Jeffersonian Republicans embraced a democratic vision of the republic, wherein the public opinion of common men guided their leaders. The Federalists, however, defended a more traditional republic, in which the common people deferred to the judgment of wealthier and better educated gentlemen. They asserted a subtle but important distinction between a republic, which they supported, and a democracy, which they feared. In the Federalists’ republic, the common men were supposed to vote for the right sort of people:

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the wealthy and well-born. Between elections, the people were supposed to keep quiet and stay at home, permitting their elected representatives to govern as they saw fit. Whereas Federalists spoke of themselves as “Fathers of the People,” the Republicans preferred a more egalitarian identity as the “Friends of the People.”6 But Jefferson’s Republicans cared primarily for the rights of free white men, who alone could vote in most of the states. Most Republicans catered to the desire of white men to preserve their legal rights over their wives and their slaves, and the Republicans promised to provide farms for the next generation by taking western land from the Indians. The paternalism of the Federalists led them to offer a little more protection for the rights of free blacks and a little more room for women to express themselves in politics. Because free blacks generally voted for the Federalists, they usually lost the franchise when Republicans rewrote state constitutions. The same happened to widows in New Jersey, the one state in which they could vote until the Republicans came to power there. And, although the Federalists shared the national goal of westward expansion, they proceeded more cautiously and slowly, treating the Indian nations with a little more diplomatic respect and generosity than did the Republicans.7 The two parties also divided over how to react to the renewed warfare between the two superpowers of the age: France and Great Britain. Following the creation in France of a radical republic during the French Revolution (1789–99), the Republicans favored France while the Federalists preferred the more conservative government of Britain. After 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France and created a despotic and imperialist regime, the Republican ardor cooled a bit and the Federalist animus increased. Indeed, the Federalists accused the Republicans of subordinating the nation’s foreign policy to Napoleon’s interests in order to ruin the British Empire. The Republicans, in turn, denounced the Federalists as pro-British traitors who allegedly longed to overthrow the republic and substitute a British mixed constitution, which included a king and aristocracy as well as a House of Commons. The American experiment in republican government on a large geographic scale seemed especially unstable because the states were so different. The commercial states of the North contrasted with the agricultural South, and the new settlements west of the Appalachians feared domination by the old Eastern communities of the Atlantic seaboard. Many observers expected

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that the union and republic would eventually collapse in some civil war, either between the North and South or between the East and West. Today we have largely forgotten the instability and fluid possibilities of the early republic, whose immediate survival, much less future greatness, was far from ensured, given the ideological and geographic divisions of the founders.8 Today the political right celebrates the Republicans who opposed the Federalist administrations of the 1790s. Jefferson’s Republicans constructed a forceful critique of national power and a boisterous endorsement of state sovereignty and individual rights—positions that anticipated much contemporary rhetoric. Alas, by shrinking the national government, Jefferson and Madison hampered the ability of the United States to wage the War of 1812. Recounting that war offers a cautionary tale of national disaster narrowly averted. To grasp the nation’s wartime peril, we need to examine the origins of the drive to restrict the power of the federal government.9

Power During the 1790s, the Federalists held national power, controlling Congress and the presidency under George Washington and his ambitious secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The Federalists insisted that the nation needed a central government invested with the power to act with energy. Adopting a flexible and broad interpretation of the Constitution, the Federalists established a national bank, consolidated a national debt, built an army and navy, and funded their expensive initiatives with internal as well as external taxes. That push for national power won strong support in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, where commercial interests prevailed and the citizens wanted the federal government to protect and promote international trade.10 The Federalists’ expansion of national power provoked the formation of an opposition party led by the Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who defected from the Federalist camp and claimed the name of Republicans. Distrusting the Federalists as a party of the North and of nationalism, most Southerners gravitated toward the Republicans as the party of states’ rights. Although the Federalists did not challenge slavery, many Southerners worried about the future uses of federal power if state sovereignty eroded.11 The Republican opposition favored a minimal federal government and a decentralized, consensual union in which most domestic power remained

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with the states. They insisted that dispersing power would frustrate America’s would-be aristocrats, who expected to dominate a national government. Equality and consent, not central authority, should unite the people. The Federalists, of course, rejected the Republican vision as dangerously naive and doomed to end in anarchy.12 The Federalist and Republican political struggle became entangled in the global and ideological war between France and Great Britain, the preeminent powers of the late eighteenth century. Each belligerent pressured the neutral United States for assistance against the other. The British played on the American economic dependence on British imports and on the vulnerability of American merchant ships to the might of the Royal Navy. While Federalists accepted that commercial dependence as mutually profitable, the Republicans dreaded British commerce as corrupting. The French Revolution also reignited the debate among Americans over the proper meaning of their own recent and still unsettled revolution. The Republicans identified with France as a sister republic assailed by the monarchies of Europe, but the Federalists denounced the French Revolution as dangerously radical and violent. With the Federalists tilting toward Britain, the Republicans equated their rivals with Loyalists bent on subverting republicanism in America as well as in France.13 In the national election of 1800, the Republicans exploited the popular backlash against the new federal taxes imposed to fund a military buildup by the Federalist administration of John Adams, who had succeeded George Washington as president in 1797. The Republicans won a majority in Congress and elected Jefferson as president and Aaron Burr as vice president. In early 1801, the lame-duck Federalist Congress toyed with overturning Jefferson’s election in favor of Burr, which provoked widespread talk of—and some preparations for—civil war. In mid-February, a moderate Federalist, James Bayard of Delaware, broke the tense stalemate by forsaking Burr to permit Jefferson’s election.14 The Republicans reversed the Federalist drive to build a powerful national government. The victors instead favored a decentralized union that entrusted all but foreign affairs and the post office to the states. By reducing the army and navy, the Republicans could abolish the unpopular excise and land taxes. Jefferson also sought to pay down and eventually eliminate the national debt created by the Federalists. Thanks to Jefferson’s budget cuts, in 1811 the United States spent only $1 per capita, a mere twenty-fifth of public expenditures in Great Britain.15

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Republicans insisted that less was more—that a minimal and cheap government inspired a commercial prosperity and a passionate popularity that no monarchy could match. Jefferson paradoxically claimed that the United States had the “strongest Government on earth,” because its institutional weakness secured popular support. Through their local militia, the common people would rush to defend a government that demanded so little of them. The War of 1812 would put that theory to the test.16 By British standards, the United States was a flimsy union of discordant states, a virtual nullity. A British spy, John Henry, dismissed the American nation as “that crazy coalition of heterogenous interests, opinions and prejudices.” Referring to the number of states in 1808 and their weak union, Henry concluded, “Seventeen staves and no hoop will not make a barrell that can last long.” According to Henry, the restive and diverse Americans lived in a fantasy republic that pandered to their illusion that they need not pay taxes for their government. As a result, the United States lacked the military means and “energy” to compel obedience within or to inspire respect abroad.17 The republic was ill-prepared for war because Jefferson’s administration and the Republican-dominated Congress cut the military to the bone. In addition to curtailing the navy, the Republicans had reduced the army to a mere 3,287 men, a paltry force for patrolling a frontier of 10,000 miles and a coastline at least twice that long.18 But the Republicans had to do something to protect American shipping from British harassment, which increased after 1803. Embroiled in a global war against Napoleon’s empire, the British built up the world’s largest navy, which they deployed to blockade Europe and conquer French colonies. British warships also seized American merchant ships that violated the blockade, and naval officers conscripted sailors from those merchant ships in a practice known as impressment. The British refused to recognize American naturalization of immigrants, so the officers claimed the sailors as runaway British subjects. And a captain with a short-handed crew often helped himself to any able-bodied seamen on a merchant ship, American-born as well as British-born.19 American diplomats protested, of course, but the British had little respect for a nation without a substantial navy. Given the Republican phobia about taxes, building a larger navy seemed too expensive to Jefferson and James Madison, his secretary of state, and they doubted that the United States could ever build a fleet sufficient to compete with the powerful British. However,

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the Republicans believed that economic pressure could bring the British to favorable terms. Factory workers in Britain and British slaves in the West Indies would starve, Jefferson reasoned, if the Americans stopped exporting their wheat, flour, fish, pork, and cattle. In December 1807, he proposed— and Congress enacted—an embargo on all maritime commerce: no ships carrying cargo could leave or enter American ports. Such an embargo would protect idled American merchant ships from French and British seizure and pressure the belligerents to accept the American position on neutral shipping and sailors. This draconian use of federal power marked a stunning reversal for the Republicans, who previously had championed a minimal national government. In vain, the Federalists protested the embargo, which they saw as a self-destructive measure to support a bad cause: retaining British subjects on American ships.20 The embargo failed because Jefferson overestimated British dependence on American trade and underestimated the importance of exports to the American economy. The British found alternative sources of food and a new market for their manufactures in Latin America. Meanwhile, British merchants could hardly believe their good fortune: the foolish Americans had withdrawn from the world’s oceans, leaving maritime commerce to British ships. Meanwhile, the American seaport economy withered, idling thousands of sailors, laborers, and artisans. Unable to export their produce, farmers glutted the domestic market with grains and suffered a great fall in prices.21 The unpopular embargo revived the Federalists in the Northeast, which relied on maritime commerce. The Federalists insisted that Jefferson’s supposed cure was far worse than the British disease of meddling with American ships and sailors. Because the trans-Atlantic trade had been so profitable, Federalist merchants had become resigned to writing off the loss of some vessels and seamen to British seizure, but the merchants reaped only losses when Jefferson locked up their vessels for over a year. Northeastern Federalists also charged that Jefferson’s Southern-dominated party designed the embargo to impoverish their region. Suspicious that Jefferson and Madison favored France, the Federalists celebrated Britain as the world’s champion of true liberty against Napoleon’s despotism and the Republicans’ hypocrisy.22 The Federalist revival fell short in the presidential election of 1808, when Madison won the right to succeed Jefferson. The Federalist candidate carried New England (save Vermont), but the Southern and Western states remained solidly Republican, as did Pennsylvania, the swing state in the election. By

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early 1809, however, most Northern Republicans had soured on a policy that had weakened them by reviving the Federalists. To hold their party together, the Republicans in Congress terminated the embargo on March 4, 1809, Jefferson’s last day in office.23

War Embarrassed by the failed embargo, President Madison sought to prepare the nation for war against the British, whom he accused of “trampling on rights which no Independent Nation can relinquish.” Madison insisted that they imperiled the nation’s sovereignty by impressing sailors and assisting the Indians who resisted America’s westward expansion. In 1812 Republicans dominated both houses of Congress, holding 75 percent of the seats in the House and 82 percent in the Senate, but they were divided into feuding factions that reflected regional tensions. Moderate Republicans, North and South, favored Madison, but John Randolph of Virginia led a few Southern traditionalists who adamantly opposed any measures that strengthened the federal government at the expense of the states. At the other extreme of the party, many Northeastern Republicans distrusted Madison as weak and indifferent to their commercial interests. A New York Republican, DeWitt Clinton, was preparing to challenge Madison’s reelection bid in the fall of 1812. By pushing for war, Madison hoped to unite the fractious Republicans.24 Despite the nation’s military weakness, most Republicans felt that they had to declare war or lose their credibility. Identifying their party with the nation, the Republicans feared that inaction would discredit the republic as impotent, which in turn would doom liberty by inviting the hated Federalists to resume power. Republican leaders desperately hoped that war would galvanize and unify a divided populace. By pushing for war without building a larger navy, however, the Republicans infuriated the Northeastern Federalists, who dreaded the exposure of their merchant ships and seaports to British attack. In revenge, they would do their best to frustrate the invasion of Canada pushed by the Madison administration.25 On June 5, the House voted for war, 79 to 49. After more prolonged debate, the Senate concurred two weeks later, by a narrower vote: 19 to 13. On June 18, Madison signed the declaration of war. In both houses of Congress, every Federalist opposed the war, while 81 percent of the Republicans (98 of 121) voted for the declaration. The greatest opposition came from

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New England, New Jersey, and New York, where the Federalists were strongest and where many Republicans felt alarmed by the inadequate preparations for war. Support for the war came primarily from the Republican strongholds in Pennsylvania, the South, and the new Western states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.26 Many Republican congressmen longed to oust the British from the continent by conquering Canada. These expansionists argued that annexing Canada would compensate Americans with land for their commercial losses at sea and for the military costs of invasion. Above all, the conquest would sever the British alliance with the Indians who resisted American expansion westward. Congressman Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky explained, I should not wish to extend the boundary of the United States by war if Great Britain would leave us to the quiet enjoyment of independence; but, considering her deadly and implacable enmity and her continued hostility, I shall never die contented until I see her expulsion from North America, and her territories incorporated with the United States.27 But many Southern Republicans worried that a northern expansion would render the union too large and the North too strong. A loose confederation of regions, the union of 1812 seemed too fragile to stand expansion in only one direction. They feared that annexing Canada would strengthen the North with new states and thereby weaken the South in the union’s precarious balance of regional power. In May 1812, James Bayard of Delaware reported, “No proposition could have been more frightful to the southern men, and it seems they had never thought of what they were to do with Canada before, in case they conquered the country.” On July 2, Senator William H. Crawford of Georgia proposed to link the annexation of Canada with the military seizure of Spanish Florida to give the South something to balance northern territorial gains. But declaring war on Spain as well as Britain seemed too much for most senators, who defeated the proposal 16 to 14.28 In the end, Congress punted on Canada. Indecision papered over Republican divisions and kept their options open. Should conquest prove easy and popular, many Republicans expected to keep at least Upper Canada (the region along the northern shores of the Great Lakes). In June 1812, the secretary of state, James Monroe, warned the British that a republic, driven by popular opinion, would find it “difficult to relinquish Territory which had been conquered.” But other Republicans expected to use the conquest as a

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bargaining chip in a peace treaty, restoring Canada to Britain in exchange for maritime concessions.29 By declaring war, the Republicans tried to overcome their own divisions and contradictions. They hoped to unite the country and discredit the Federalists for opposing a victorious and therefore popular war. But the Republicans’ aversion to taxes locked them into pursuing a land war, which they assumed would be cheaper than building a competitive navy. A land war, however, meant invading Canada, which revived sectional tensions among the Republicans. On the one hand, many longed to evict the British from the continent to guarantee the nation’s northern security and westward expansion. On the other, annexing Canada worried Southern Republicans as a threat to the balance of power among the union’s regions. Although uncertain what to do with Canada, the Americans invaded anyway, while failing to offer any clear reason for Canadians to welcome them. Why should Canadians risk their lives and property to help invaders who ultimately might return them to British rule in a peace settlement? Any collaborating Canadians would suffer as traitors if the Americans returned their province to the British. For want of clarity and unity, the Republicans undercut their appeal to the Canadians.30 The loose American union also worked against implementation of a sound military strategy that called for concentrating forces on Lake Champlain to strike north against Montreal. Along that relatively short route, invading troops could smite the vital heart of Canada, for by capturing Montreal they could make their way down the St. Lawrence River to besiege the great fortified city of Quebec. It made far less sense to strike upriver at peripheral Upper Canada, whose loss would do little harm to the British. Indeed, that colony would inevitably fall if the Americans captured Montreal, for Upper Canada relied on the narrow St. Lawrence corridor for trade and reinforcements.31 But the Madison administration rejected that logic, giving priority instead to an attack on western Upper Canada. Fearful of the Indians around the Great Lakes, the administration dared not concentrate its forces to the east on Lake Champlain. The great proponent of the western strategy, General William Hull, insisted that an invasion from Detroit would neutralize the Indians and, he predicted, “probably induce the Enemy to abandon the province of Upper Canada without Opposition.” Hull also vowed to seize the British naval squadron base at Amherstburg, sparing the United States the expense of

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building its own warships on Lake Erie. Delighted by that fantasy of war on the cheap, President Madison approved Hull’s plan.32 But Madison also authorized invasions on the Niagara and Lake Champlain fronts. Lacking enough men and supplies for one decent army, he divided the nation’s paltry force in three. Favoring consensus, Madison disliked choosing between conflicting advice and advisers, so he authorized three distinct invasions—a division of forces that also reflected the diffuse structure of the nation as governed by the Republicans. A loose alliance of disparate regions, the union lacked the central power (and the logistical means) to concentrate forces on one front. To maintain a fractious coalition of supporters, the Madison administration had to mollify key regional blocs. A Detroit army pleased the Ohio and Kentucky Republicans, especially Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House. A Niagara force soothed the western New Yorkers, particularly Peter B. Porter, another powerful congressman. And an advance down Lake Champlain to Montreal appealed to Northeastern Republicans, including Governor Daniel D. Tompkins of New York. Although a military folly, the multiple invasions were a political imperative in early 1812. The decentralized republic had to wage a dispersed war, for it was a very political war.33 As the first invasion force, Hull’s army of 2,500 raw recruits assumed critical political importance in a nation divided, especially in the Northern states. By winning a quick victory, Hull could thrill the people, galvanizing support among the wavering. But a defeat would demoralize the public, disgrace the Madison administration, and discredit the war. Unfortunately, Hull proved incompetent and cowardly. After briefly invading western Upper Canada, he pulled back and then surrendered Detroit on August 16, without firing a shot, to a smaller British counterattack force led by a far more resourceful and inspirational commander, General Isaac Brock. Hull’s humiliating defeat prolonged and deepened the political rancor and divisions within the United States that Madison had hoped to lull with an early victory.34 Instead of conquering Upper Canada, the Americans lost the Michigan Territory, which became the base from which the British and their Indian allies raided the frontier settlements of Ohio and Indiana. In the West, the American forces would have to spend more than a year, many lives, and an immense amount of money just to recover the ground lost in 1812. Meanwhile, the American forces had also suffered embarrassing defeats in their weak attempts to invade Canada through the Niagara corridor and via Lake

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Champlain. Underfunded and undermanned, the invasion forces faced effective resistance from a combination of British regulars, Canadian militia, and Indian allies. Waging war on the cheap had cost the United States dearly. The next year, 1813, American woes became compounded as a British naval force pushed into the Chesapeake Bay to seize ships and raid the shoreline. By March 6, the British had seventeen warships in the Chesapeake, more than the entire American navy then at sea. Within the bay, the Americans had only a few small gunboats and a single frigate, the USS Constellation, which took shelter behind the forts that guarded the entrance to Norfolk’s harbor.35 Virginians looked to the federal government to defend the state against external invasion, freeing them to guard against a rebellion by their “internal enemy,” as they referred to their African American slaves. What good was the union, the Virginians asked, if it would not bear the burden of defending every state? Unfortunately, in 1812, the Southern Republicans governed both the state of Virginia and the union, and as national leaders they had no greater stomach for taxes to fund a strong military than did their state counterparts. In 1812, Madison and his incompetent secretary of war, William Eustis, struggled hastily to rebuild an army that had withered during the penurious Jefferson administration. Low bounties and poor pay discouraged enlistments, which lagged far below expectations. Common men could make more on the farm or in their shops than by risking their lives to disease or bullets in the army.36 In putting a premium on invading Canada, the Madison administration lacked sufficient troops to defend the long American coastline. In July 1812, Eustis enraged Virginians by ordering most of their new federal recruits to march away to the northern front. Governor James Barbour of Virginia protested, citing “the great dangers to be apprehended from our black population if not from their violence at least great loss might occur by their desertion.” But the federal order to march stood, leaving the external defense of Virginia to a mere two companies of professional troops posted at Norfolk, the state’s premier seaport. To supplement them, Eustis did authorize Barbour to mobilize only 500 militia men for federal service. The rest of Virginia’s long coast lay undefended.37 Alarmed by the British invasion and dismayed by federal neglect, on February 13 the Virginia state legislature authorized a state force of 1,000 regular soldiers for local defense. Kept on duty and subject to discipline, the state regulars promised greater reliability at less expense than the chaotic militia

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amateurs. By reducing drafts on the militia, the legislators also hoped to appease citizens who dreaded being called away from their farms and plantations on short notice. And no longer would hinterland militia have to serve in disease-ridden Norfolk; instead, militiamen could stay in their own counties to watch the slaves.38 The Virginia legislators expected the federal government to pay for the new state force, but the Madison administration balked, insisting that the Constitution reserved to the nation the power to raise a standing army. Desperate for federal recruits, the president’s men rightly feared that few Virginians would enlist in the national service on the cold northern frontier if they could instead serve closer to home in a state force. Moreover, allowing Virginia to raise a regular force might provide a precedent for the Federalist state governments in New England to do the same. Opposed to the war, the Federalist governors defied national authority over their state militias, giving rise to reports of a plot to secede and form their own army. How could the Madison administration deny the New England states a regular force if it allowed Virginia to have one? As an alternative to a state force of regulars, Monroe promised to organize and enlist a national regiment dedicated to the defense of Norfolk; the regiment would be under the command of officers from Virginia commissioned by the president.39 Although Barbour stood by the Madison administration by suspending the state corps of regulars, he resented the federal failure to defend Virginia: “The inattention of the General Government to the defence of the State has been to me inexplicable”; unable “to protect our whole line of coast, . . . they have resolved to throw the defence upon the states.” One member of Virginia’s Council of State, John Campbell, added, “The General Government has left us to paddle our own Canoe.” Already dubious of the Constitution and the national union, Virginians grew more uneasy under the strains of external war and internal fear. They felt trapped in a contradiction: the federal government could not defend them but would not allow them to defend themselves efficiently with state regulars. Instead, Virginia had to rely on inefficient, expensive, restive, and sickly militiamen who longed to stay on their farms. They usually proved no match for the highly mobile and more professional British invaders, who blockaded or captured ships, ravaged exposed districts, and liberated runaway slaves. To cap it off, in August 1814, the British swept into Washington, D.C., where they plundered and burned public buildings, including the White House and Capitol.40

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The Republicans had declared the war to vindicate the republican form of government and to redeem the nation’s honor following Britain’s insults. They meant to prove that a republic could rally its people and resources in a common effort to defeat the empire. Instead, by late 1814 repeated defeats, mounting taxes, and growing internal discontent had cast doubt on the republic. John Campbell confessed to one of his brothers, “I begin to think James that the national character of this Republic is to be sunk, woefully sunk, by this war instead of being elevated.” After listening to the “babbling fools” in Congress, another brother, David Campbell, despaired of the federal government: “I can literally say that the nation is ruled by fools and the administration opposed by knaves.” In late August, the loss and partial burning of Washington and the capitulation of Alexandria to the British deepened the widespread gloom in Virginia. “You, no doubt, have heard of the disgraceful disasters that have overwhelmed our Country,” John Minor, a Virginia legislator, wrote to Jefferson.41 During the fall, the nation became financially bankrupt, and the union seemed on the verge of collapse as the Federalists in New England flirted with secession, which would provoke a civil war. The Virginia councilor Robert Quarles feared “the subjugation of our Country & the entire extermination of Republicanism.” Richard D. Bayly of Virginia expected secession to “climax a ruinous & disastrous war.” In January 1815, a militia officer, Henry St. George Tucker, warned: The prospects of the Country are melancholy beyond all former Example—a divided people—a feeble Congress—and an administration of very little efficiency! . . . If the war should not speedily be terminated, the Vandals of Great Britain will next Summer burn our seaports and ravage our coasts with almost unresisted fury. The Virginia adjutant general, Claiborne W. Gooch, predicted that, without a miracle: “This union is inevitably dissolved.”42 That miracle came in the form of the Treaty of Ghent, concluded on December 24, 1814, but unknown in the United States until mid-February of 1815. Weary of the war and eager to concentrate forces in Europe, the British diplomats had offered, and the Americans had eagerly accepted, surprisingly favorable terms in light of the deplorable condition of the United States. In 1812, the massive conflict in Europe had spilled over to spawn the War of 1812. In late 1814 the shifting geopolitics of Europe made possible a peace that extricated the United States from that dangerous war.43

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Americans were giddy with relief. Writing from Richmond, William H. Cabell, a former governor of Virginia, assured his brother Joseph that the “glorious peace for America . . . has come exactly when we least expected but when we most wanted it. . . . You cannot form too extravagant an idea of the real joy which it has diffused through every circle here.” A former U.S. senator, John Taylor, assured James Monroe: “A succession of lucky accidents enabled the administration to get the nation out of the war, for which no one rejoices more than myself. Had it lasted two years longer, the republican party and our form of government itself would have been blown up.” Virginia’s leading Federalist, Charles Fenton Mercer, agreed that the peace had saved the United States from “bankruptcy, disunion, and civil war, combined with foreign invasion; in fine, from national dishonor and ruin.” Because Americans had gone to war to appease their great anxiety over their republic’s prospects, they left the war with a powerful sense of relief that made possible a more boisterous nationalism.44 But the leading Republicans and their newspapers quickly spun the peace treaty as the conclusion of a triumphant war that exalted the United States. After failing to conquer Canada or compel British maritime concessions, the Republicans redefined national survival as victory. Monroe assured the Senate that “our Union has gained strength, our troops honor, and the nation character, by the contest.” He concluded, “By the war we have acquired a character and a rank among other nations, which we did not enjoy before.” The Richmond Enquirer agreed: “We have waged a War which has covered us with glory.” Americans had displayed “as much public spirit, as much heroic courage, as much devotion to country as ever distinguished any people.” Talk of disunion, national bankruptcy, and the failure of republicanism suddenly vanished.45 Along the Atlantic seaboard, the myth of the glorious war got a boost when the news of peace arrived from Europe at the same time as word of a sensational American victory near New Orleans. On January 8, in the war’s most lopsided battle, General Andrew Jackson’s army had routed 6,000 British regulars at a minimal American loss. Before dying in the battle, the overconfident British commander had marched his men across open ground in a frontal assault on entrenched Americans who merely had to blast away at the exposed attackers. The Battle of New Orleans nicely fit the cherished stereotype of bungling Britons unsuited for war in North America, so it became

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celebrated in American story and song. And Americans quickly repressed the memory of the many earlier defeats that they suffered while invading Canada, and they forgot how close to insolvency and disunion the nation had come in late 1814.46

Nationalisms Historians often note the surge in American nationalism that immediately followed the War of 1812. As never before, newspapers and prints celebrated patriotism, while displays of the flag and the eagle proliferated in engravings, paintings, and tavern signs. But that effusive nationalism was, ironically, highly sectional, strongest in the Mid-Atlantic and West and weaker in the South. Indeed, the war should be seen as generating competing nationalisms, for the Southern states developed a far stronger bond than before and a shared identity that maintained a greater distance from the nationalism to the North, which we often mistake for the sentiment of the entire nation. Rather than promoting a unifying nationalism, the experiences of war bred distinct regional variants.47 The competing postwar nationalisms emerged from a bitter ideological and regional debate within the United States during the war. No longer competing for national power, the New England Federalists became regionalists, which freed them to denounce Southern slavery as a menace to the North. They castigated the Virginians as arrogant bullies corrupted by their power over abject slaves and therefore eager to dominate the people of New England. In Congress, Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts warned that the next generation of New Englanders were “destined to be slaves, and yoked in with negroes, chained to the car of a Southern master.” The Federalists, however, developed this critique to score political points in New England rather than to free the slaves in Virginia. Quincy conceded, “My heart has always been much more affected by the slavery to which the Free States have been subjected, than that of the Negro.”48 During the war, Northern Federalists had predicted military disaster for a South weakened by the need to guard slaves as well as a long coastline, and they insisted that the slave South needed the protection of Northern troops, which they threatened to withhold to punish the Southern Republicans for declaring an unjust war. A Massachusetts minister preached, “Let

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the southern Heroes fight their own battles, and guard their slumbering pillows against the just vengeance of their lacerated slaves.”49 Prickly about their honor, Southerners took offense at the attacks on their character and resented the insinuation that they depended on the North’s protection. Proud of their sacrifices in the fight against Britain, the Virginians despised the many New Englanders who sympathized and traded with the enemy. Making much of their honor, Virginians denounced the Yankees as corrupted by greed. One Virginian boasted that the war would “prove to our Yankee brethren that Southern patriotism is not to be estimated by Dollars and cents.” Rigorously blockaded by the British, the Virginians seethed when the enemy initially exempted the New Englanders. Compelled to rally thousands of militiamen for federal service, the Virginians also resented that New England’s Federalist governors refused to mobilize their militia. Virginians blamed the American defeats in Canada on New England’s failure to assist the war effort. “If the New England men wou’d now do their duty, Canada to the works of Quebec wou’d be ours,” insisted Wilson Cary Nicholas, who became Virginia’s governor in late 1814. While New England largely dropped out of the war, Virginia suffered the full brunt of British animosity. James Barbour claimed that the British targeted Virginia for destruction from “a deadly and implacable hate, the result of the magnanimous and distinguished part acted by Virginia in resisting at all times British aggressions.”50 During the War of 1812, Southerners meant to save the union from secession—the reverse of the stand that they would take fifty years later. John Campbell assured the Yankees, “If you raise the standard of rebellion, your green fields will be wash’d with the blood of your people and your country laid desolate by the flames of civil discord! If you attempt to pull down the pillars of the Republic, you shall be crush’d into atoms.” The National Intelligencer warned “our brethren of the eastern states to cherish union as their true rampart against subjection. Independence would be, for them, short and nominal. They would fall beneath the sword of the south and west.”51 At war’s end in early 1815, Virginians exulted in Andrew Jackson’s great victory at New Orleans as a vindication of the South rather than of the nation. Philip Barraud of Norfolk, who in one letter to St. George Tucker recalled “the never-to-be-forgotten turpitude & traitorous conduct of the Eastern portion of our Nation,” later assured him that Jackson’s triumph

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established the claims & reputation of the Southern portion of this Empire. The people of the East shall hence forth no longer dare to charge on this section of the States the foul calumny of seeking wars without the spirit to maintain them with valor or with their Blood. . . . It fixes the power & ability of these states to protect their Firesides & to punish their Enemies without Yankee aid. . . . It teaches England that we are not weak, altho we have Slaves & rich Lands. It establishes beyond all doubt that the South is the soil for Generous, Loyal & valorous men. The war thus elevated the South by discrediting the North, which had done so little to wage the war.52 The Battle of New Orleans helped to reshape America’s political culture. Southerners interpreted the battle as their victory and proof of their superior honor and fighting ability, a stark contrast to the selfishness and corruption of the Northerners. By claiming martial superiority, Southerners refuted Northerners who charged that slavery rendered the South weak and dependent on the North. However, Southerners also worried about losing power in a union dominated by the unworthy but numerous Northerners. After the war, when some Virginians proposed establishing a national committee to raise funds to aid the families of dead or disabled militiamen, St. George Tucker, a judge, responded, “We are not enough one nation for such a plan to succeed.”53 During the War of 1812 Virginians concluded that the nation had failed them by neglecting their defense. The nation also proved powerless to compel cooperation from the New England states, which escaped the brunt of a war, which was borne by Virginia. If the union could not defend Virginia when Madison was president, what could the state expect from a Northern leader in the future? Virginians feared that some ambitious New Yorker, either DeWitt Clinton or Daniel Tompkins, might succeed in building a national coalition to govern the nation. While Virginians began the war as champions of the union, they ended it with grave new doubts.54

Disunion Although the War of 1812 did not condemn the nation to disunion, it did push the states closer to a deep divide by stirring competing strains of nationalism. The clash between the alternative nationalisms became unmistakable

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in Congress during the Missouri debates of 1819–21. The controversy began on February 13, 1819, when James Tallmadge Jr., of New York, introduced amendments to a bill to admit the Missouri Territory as a new state in the union. Although a Republican, Tallmadge divided his party along sectional lines by proposing to accept Missouri only if its residents adopted a constitution barring further slave imports and agreed to the gradual emancipation of slaves born after 1819. Most Northern Republicans and the last of the Northern Federalists supported Tallmadge’s amendments, for they believed that slavery contradicted and therefore threatened free government. By restricting the expansion of slavery, they sought to preserve the West for free white settlers, who alone, they believed, could sustain a true republic. A restrictionist asked, “Shall that territory, instead of happy hamlets and independent freemen, present alternately, the mansion of opulence, and the clustering huts of the miserable men of Africa[?]”55 In response, Southern congressmen asserted a limited construction of the Constitution to deny that Congress had any legitimate authority to impose restrictions on a new state. Southerners insisted that by opposing restriction, they defended not slavery but the Constitution and the rights of the states. They claimed that the North’s new doctrines of free-soil expansion and national power violated the Constitution as a sectional compromise that had preserved the South’s legal autonomy and political equality in the union— both seen as essential to the security and expansion of slavery. After a furious debate, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the Tallmadge amendment, with the vote breaking along sectional lines. But the bill died in the Senate, where some Northern senators supported their Southern colleagues. Missouri’s admission lay in limbo until the next session of Congress.56 In December 1819, when Congress returned for a new session, the Missouri issue grew more heated and divisive; Northern and Southern public opinion had galvanized and polarized, demanding a firm stand from regional representatives. Both sides spoke of defending their own freedom against domination by the other region, which each called slavery. On both sides, congressmen threatened dissolution and civil war. John Randolph of Virginia declared, “God has given us the Missouri and the devil shall not take it from us.”57 Many Northern representatives placed a priority on preserving the union and worried that a hard line would drive the South to secede. In February 1820, alarmed moderates worked out a compromise. Under the terms of the

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compromise, Maine (previously part of Massachusetts) entered as a free state to balance the Senate, while Missouri joined the union without any restriction on slavery. That maintained the balance in the Senate of eleven free states and eleven slave states. In addition, Congress also imposed a line—an extension of Missouri’s southern boundary—running west of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean and barred slavery to the north of the line, where most of the remaining federal territory lay. While the South got Missouri, it faced a future of many more free states entering the union, unless the union could acquire by purchase or conquest additional territories to the southwest.58 Although President James Monroe and Senator James Barbour supported the compromise as essential to save the union, most of Virginia’s congressmen and state leaders angrily opposed any Western restriction on slavery. The Virginia legislature voted 142 to 38 to instruct the state’s U.S. senators to oppose the compromise, and nineteen of the twenty-two Virginia congressmen voted against the restriction line; no state delegation provided more negative votes or more vociferously opposed any compromise.59 Virginians denounced restriction as a policy really meant to reduce the Southern states to poverty and dependence within a union dominated by the North. They dreaded the more rapid population growth in the North, which already had 20 percent more people than the South. The Southerners perceived restrictionism as a neo-Federalist plot to seize power by consolidating a solid North united against the minority South. If that political realignment took hold, the neo-Federalists could resume their efforts to consolidate a powerful national government. Rather than any sympathy for blacks or any solicitude for free government, the restrictionists manifested, in the words of Spencer Roane, a Virginia jurist, “their lust of dominion and power.” Roane insisted that the Missouri controversy was “forced upon us by the cruelty and injustice of northern intriguers.” Virginians felt locked into a sectional struggle for power, in which the North could only gain at the South’s expense. They expected relentless exploitation if the North gained the upper hand in the union by co-opting the western region. Behind the North’s anti-slavery rhetoric, the Southerners could discern only a raw grab for power.60 Southern congressmen also resented the postwar trend toward increasing national power at the expense of the states. The federal government adopted a higher tariff meant to protect new industries from the competition of foreign imports. That protection benefited the manufacturers of the Northeast at the expense of Southerners, who had to pay higher prices for manufactured

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goods and who lost export markets for their agricultural produce. In 1816 the nation also reestablished the Bank of the United States, which proceeded to regulate the many banks chartered by Southern state governments. To cap it all off, under the Federalist leadership of John Marshall, the Supreme Court made a series of provocative decisions that collectively claimed supremacy for Congress and the high court over the states and their courts. In early 1819, Virginia’s leaders protested angrily and nearly asserted a right to nullify any federal law that they deemed unconstitutional.61 Given the apparent growth in federal power and in the North’s population, the South could ill afford to become a minority region restricted within a geographic line. Restriction would also dishonor the South as being insufficiently republican for being tainted by slavery. Restriction also threatened to confine the South in a claustrophobic corner of growing misery and weakness within the union. Northerners and Southerners agreed that their dynamic, growing nation took shape through westward expansion. “It is indeed not a question of freedom or slavery, but a question [of] who shall inherit our rich possession to the west,” Isaac A. Coles of Virginia explained. The North could claim the nation’s future by preempting that vast and promising region for its own people and institutions. Dabney Carr warned that, once empowered by the West, the national North could “draw a cordon round us & when they had cooped us up on every side . . . then should we feel the full weight of their tender mercies!”62

Conclusion Contrary to popular mythology, invoked by both ends of the political spectrum, the early American republic lacked consensus over core political principles. Instead, diverse interests and opposing political ideologies struggled for supremacy. Prior to the Civil War, the United States remained a confederation of restive regions and of semi-sovereign states jockeying for advantage. During the early nineteenth century, people customarily used the word “United States” as a plural rather than a singular term—and with good reason, given the predominance of sovereign powers retained by the states and the state elites’ jealous guarding of those powers.63 Some founders, known as the High Federalists and led by Alexander Hamilton, did try to make a robust national government of the sort that modern liberals would like to impute to the entire founding generation. But

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the High Federalists soon lost out to the Republicans in the intense partisan rivalry of the country’s early years. The ascendant Jeffersonian Republicans, in turn, led the nation into a nearly disastrous war that fully revealed the weakness of the federal government and the tenuous nature of the union. Conservatives are partly right; many of the founders did favor a minimal national government as the best protection for state and individual rights. But that minimalism bore almost disastrous consequences when the government embarked on a war that nearly pulled the nation apart. The War of 1812 also spawned conflicting nationalisms, which eventually contributed to the Civil War. It then took a new, very different Republican Party—that of Abraham Lincoln—to rescue and rebuild the nearly shattered country.

Notes 1. Mike Pence, quoted in E. J. Dionne Jr., Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 129. My thanks to Mr. Dionne for providing an advance copy of his very helpful work. 2. Dionne, Our Divided Political Heart, pp. 54–56, 130–34, 152–54. 3. Richard Buel Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics: 1789– 1815 (Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. ix–xii, 91–92; John R. Howe Jr., “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” American Quarterly 19 (January 1967), pp. 147–51. 4. Buel, Securing the Revolution, pp. 91–92; Howe, “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,” pp. 147–65; Thomas Jefferson to William B. Giles, December 31, 1795 (“honest men and rogues”), and Jefferson to William Duane, March 28, 1811 (“the republicans are the nation”), quoted in Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 88, 97; Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2002). 5. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 3–29; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789–1815 (Oxford University Press, 2011). 6. Paul Gilje, The Making of the American Republic: 1763–1815 (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, 2006), pp. 122–51; Alan Taylor, “From Fathers to Friends of the People: Political Personas in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 11 (Winter 1991), pp. 465–91. 7. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, “Introduction: The Paradoxical Legacy of the Federalists,” and Rosemarie Zagarri, “Gender and the First Party System,” in Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), pp. 1–16, 118–34. 8. Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2006), pp. 219–77. 9. Dionne, Our Divided Political Heart, p. 50.

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90   /    Alan Taylor 10. Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, pp. 19–29; Joanne B. Freeman, “Corruption and Compromise in the Election of 1800: The Process of Politics on the National Stage,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, edited by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (University of Virginia Press, 2002), p. 91. 11. Donald R. Hickey, “America’s Response to the Slave Revolt in Haiti: 1791–1806,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982), pp. 365–68; Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788-1801 (University of Kentucky Press, 1972), xii-xiii. 12. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, pp. 53–56, 83, 95. 13. Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States: 1795– 1805 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955), pp. 12–14; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, pp. 303–30; Buel, Securing the Revolution, pp. 28–47; James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 69–91; Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union: 1774–1804 (University of Virginia Press, 2009), pp. 16–17. 14. James E. Lewis Jr., “‘What Is to Become of Our Government?’ The Revolutionary Potential of the Election of 1800,” and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “1800 as a Revolution in Political Culture: Newspapers, Celebrations, Voting, and Democratization in the Early Republic,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, edited by James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (University of Virginia Press, 2002), pp. 8–11, 14–20, 21, 122–23; Freeman, “Corruption and Compromise,” p. 91; Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, pp. 82, 100–102. 15. Lewis, “‘What Is to Become of Our Government?’” p. 3; Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, pp. 80–81, 85, 93; Pasley, “1800 as a Revolution in Political Culture,” pp. 122–25; David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp. 258–59; J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic: 1783–1830 (Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 125. For British and American national expenditures, see Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution, p. 1. 16. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, pp. 107–08, 117–21; Jefferson quote (“strongest Government”) on p. 107. 17. John Henry to Herman Witsius Ryland, November 16, 1807, and June 5, 1808, in E. A. Cruikshank, The Political Adventures of John Henry: The Record of an International Imbroglio (Toronto: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 9, 33; Jonathan Russell to James Monroe, February 3, 1812, in William R. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Canadian Relations, 1784–1860, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1940), pp. 609–10. 18. Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (University of California Press, 1963), pp. 50–51; Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 107–08; William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784–1861 (University Press of Kansas, 1992), pp. 7–8. 19. James Fulton Zimmerman, Impressment of American Seamen (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966), pp. 19–20; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, p. 30; Perkins, Prologue to War, p. 192. 20. Perkins, Prologue to War, pp. 148–56; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 20–22; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, 99; Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson,

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Dual Nationalisms   /   91 Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 19, 204–11. 21. Perkins, Prologue to War, pp. 26–30, 157–59, 166–70, 204–05; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, pp. 125–38; Spencer C. Tucker and Frank T. Reuter, Injured Honor: The Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, June 22, 1807 (Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 119–22. 22. Ray W. Irwin, Daniel D. Tompkins: Governor of New York and Vice-President of the United States (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1968), pp. 65–69; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 22–28. 23. Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, pp. 179, 212. 24. James Madison, “Message to Congress, November 5, 1811” (“trampling on rights”), in Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, vol. 4, edited by J. C. A. Stagg and others (University of Virginia Press, 1984), pp. 1–5; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 71–79, 84, 110–11; Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812 (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), pp. 42–50; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, pp. 179–82; Perkins, Prologue to War, pp. 46–49, 223, 241, 249–59, 266–67, 343–37, 350–51, 367, 435; Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 88; Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 26–30; Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America: 1790–1820 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 263–74. 25. Brown, Republic in Peril, pp. 76–82; Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 27, 47; James Monroe to John Taylor, June 13, 1812, in The Writings of James Monroe: Including a Collection of his Public and Private Papers and Correspondence, vol. 1, edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), pp. 205–06; Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, p. 155. 26. Perkins, Prologue to War, pp. 403–15; Brown, Republic in Peril, pp. 44-47, 131, and 143-45; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 110–14; Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812, p. 224. 27. Richard M. Johnson, speech, December 11, 1811 (“I should not wish”), Annals of Congress, 12 Cong., 1 sess., p. 456; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 30–40. 28. James A. Bayard to Andrew Bayard, May 2, 1812 (“No proposition could have been more frightful”), in “Papers of James A. Bayard: 1796–1815,” edited by Elizabeth Donnan, in American Historical Association, Annual Report for the Year 1913, 2 vols. (Washington: American Historical Association, 1915), pp. 196–97; Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, pp. 146–52; Brown, Republic in Peril, pp. 124–28; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 4–6; J. C. A. Stagg, “Between Black Rock and a Hard Place: Peter B. Porter’s Plan for an American Invasion of Canada in 1812,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Fall 1999), pp. 399, 421–22. 29. Brown, Republic in Peril, p. 125; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, p. 4; James Monroe (“difficult to relinquish Territory”) quoted in Perkins, Prologue to War, p. 416. 30. Elisha R. Potter, speech to Congress, January 21, 1814, Annals of Congress, 13 Cong., 2 sess., p. 1106. 31. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), pp. 153–57; Henry Dearborn to James Madison, April. 6, 1812, in Papers of James Madison; Presidential Series, vol. 4, edited by Stagg, pp. 298–99.

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92   /    Alan Taylor 32. William Hull to William Eustis, March 6, 1812 (“probably induce the Enemy to abandon”), in Documents Relating to the Invasion of Canada and the Surrender of Detroit: 1812, edited by E. A. Cruikshank (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1912), pp. 19–22; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 191–93 and 301n3; Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, pp. 168, 171. 33. Stagg, “Between Black Rock and a Hard Place,” pp. 397–98; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 506–07; Irwin, Daniel D. Tompkins, pp. 155–56; Charles P. Stacey, “An American Plan for a Canadian Campaign: Secretary James Monroe to Major General Jacob Brown, February 1815,” American Historical Review 46 (January 1941), pp. 348–59. 34. Jonathan Russell to James Monroe, February 3, 1812, in Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, vol. 1, edited by Manning, p. 609; William Pope to James Madison, July 30, 1812, in Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, vol. 5, edited by Stagg, p. 99. 35. William Sharp to James Barbour, February 4, 1813, and February 6, 1813, and Andrew J. McConnico to Barbour, March 6, 1813, in Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, vol. 10, edited by H. W. Flournoy ( Richmond: 1890; New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1968), pp. 184–86, 195; Richmond Enquirer, February 9, 1813; Charles Stewart to William Jones, March 17, 1813, in The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, vol. 2, edited by William S. Dudley (Washington: Department of the Navy, 1992), pp. 315–16. 36. Walter Jones to James Monroe, May 30, 1813, Monroe Papers, ser. 1, reel 5, Library of Congress; Thomas Cooper to Thomas Jefferson, August 17, 1814, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, vol. 7, edited by J. Jefferson Looney and others (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 558; A. Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, pp. 325–29. 37. James Barbour to William Eustis, April 17, 1812, and May 19, 1812; Barbour to James Monroe, June 23, 1812; Barbour to William Sharp, July 15, 1812 (“the great dangers to be apprehended from our black population”); and Barbour to James Madison, July 18, 1812, Executive Letterbook, pp. 237, 277, 349, 399, and 414, RG 3 (Office of the Governor), reel 3009, Library of Virginia, Richmond; Charles K. Mallory to Barbour, July 22, 1812; James Barbour Executive Papers, reel 5503, Library of Virginia; “To the Virginia Legislature,” Richmond Enquirer, December 15, 1812. 38. Joseph C. Cabell to St. George Tucker, February 6, 1813, Tucker Coleman Papers, box 32, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; Charles D. Lowrey, James Barbour: A Jeffersonian Republican (University of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 71–72; “Virginia Legislature,” Richmond Enquirer, January 28, 1813; Robert Quarles to James Barbour, February 11, 1813; Charles K. Mallory to Barbour, February 13 and 15, 1813; and Quarles to Barbour, February 17, 1813, in Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 10, edited by Flournoy, pp. 191–93; “Self Defence,” Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, February 20, 1813. 39. John Campbell to David Campbell, March 7, 1813, Campbell Family Papers, box 2, Special Collections, Duke University Library; James Barbour to Robert B. Taylor, March 9, 1813; Barbour to James Monroe, March 17, 1813, and March 24, 1813, Executive Letterbook, pp. 184, 198, and 208, RG 3 (Office of the Governor), reel 3010, Library of Virginia; Monroe to Barbour, March 21, 1813, in Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 10, edited by Flournoy, p. 212; James Barbour, statement, March 31, 1813 (“Moreover, allowing Virginia to raise a regular force might provide a precedent”), Council of State Journal for 1812–1813, pp. 139, RG 75, reel 2990, Library of Virginia.

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Dual Nationalisms   /   93 40. Council of State Journal for 1812–1813, pp. 174, 202, and 229, RG 75, reel 2990, Library of Virginia; James Barbour to Robert B. Taylor, March 23, 1813, Executive Letterbook, p. 202 RG 3 (Office of the Governor), reel 3010, Library of Virginia; John Campbell to David Campbell, July 14, 1813, and July 16, 1813 (“The General Government has left us to paddle our own Canoe.”), Campbell Family Papers, box 2, Special Collections, Duke University Library; “Propositions!” Richmond Enquirer, July 30, 1812. 41. Wilson J. Cary to John H. Cocke, January 12, 1814, John Hartwell Cocke Family Papers, box 15, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; David Campbell to Edward Campbell, January 30, 1814 (“babbling fools”), and John Campbell to James Campbell, April 6, 1814 (“that the national character of this Republic is to be sunk”), and June 16, 1814, Campbell Family Papers, box 3, Special Collections, Duke University Library; James W. Wallace to Thomas Jefferson, September 7, 1814, and John Minor to Jefferson, September 8, 1814 (“disgraceful disasters that have overwhelmed our Country”), in Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, vol. 7, edited by Looney and others, pp. 643, 644. 42. Mrs. Robertson to Blair Bolling, September 6, 1814, Bolling Family Papers (Mss 1 B6386 a 13-38), Virginia Historical Society; Richard D. Bayly to John Cropper, November 10, 1814 (“climax a ruinous & disastrous war”), Cropper Papers, sec. 1 (Mss 1 C8835 a 1-308), Virginia Historical Society; Claiborne W. Gooch to David Campbell, December 6, 1814, Campbell Family Papers, box 3, Special Collections, Duke University Library; Henry St. George Tucker to S. G. Tucker, January 23, 1815 (“The prospects of the Country are melancholy”), Tucker Coleman Papers, box 33, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; “The Prospect before Us,” Richmond Enquirer, January 3, 1815. 43. Brian Jenkins, Henry Goulburn, 1784–1856: A Political Biography (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), pp. 81–89; Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (University of California Press, 1964), pp. 95–109. 44. William H. Cabell to Joseph C. Cabell, February 22, 1815 (“glorious peace for America . . . has come exactly when we least expected”), Joseph C. Cabell and Cabell Family Papers (38-111), box 11, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; Charles Fenton Mercer to Wilson Cary Nicholas, April 14, 1815 (“bankruptcy, disunion, and civil war”), quoted in Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism, edited by Douglas R. Egerton (University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. 99; Hugh Mercer to James P. Preston, May 25, 1815, Preston Family Papers (Mss 1 P9267 d 144-64), sec. 4, folder 5, Virginia Historical Society; John Taylor to James Monroe, May 26, 1815 (“A succession of lucky accidents”), Monroe Papers, ser. 1, reel 6, Library of Congress. 45. James Monroe to Winfield Scott, February 21, 1815, RG 107, M 7, reel 1, U.S. National Archives, Washington; Monroe to the U.S. Senate, February 22, 1815 (“our Union has gained strength” and “By the war we have acquired”), in Writings of Monroe, vol. 5, edited by Hamilton, pp. 321–22; “Peace!” and “The Elections,” Richmond Enquirer, February 18, 1815, and March 11, 1815. For triumphalist views of the war, see George C. Daughan, 1812: The Navy’s War (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). For the nation’s true military failure, see Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 502–03 and Hickey, War of 1812, p. 299.

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94   /    Alan Taylor 46. Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 211–13; Robert S. Quimby, The U.S. Army in the War of 1812: An Operational and Command Study, vol. 2 (Michigan State University Press, 1997), pp. 897–919. 47. Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 6–7; Borneman, 1812: The War That Forged a Nation, pp. 294–304; Hickey, War of 1812, pp. 308–09. I was previously guilty of generalizing from the Mid-Atlantic states. See A. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, p. 438. 48. Josiah Quincy, quoted in Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 46 (“destined to be slaves”), and pp. 56–58 (“My heart has always been much more affected”). 49. Mason, Slavery and Politics, pp. 70, and 116; Reverend Elijah Parish quoted in Rachel Hope Cleves, “‘Hurtful to the State’: The Political Morality of Federalist Antislavery,” in Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation, edited by John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 217–18 (“Let the southern Heroes”); Reverend Samuel Spring to James Madison, August 26, 1812, in Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, vol. 5, edited by Stagg, pp. 208–09. 50. John M. Garnett to Archibald R. S. Hunter, November 29, 1813 (“prove to our Yankee brethren”), War of 1812 Collection, Box 3, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; “Ends and Means,” Richmond Enquirer, March 2, 1813; John Coalter to St. George Tucker, January 5, 1813, and Wilson Cary Nicholas to Tucker, September 22, 1814 (“If the New England men wou’d now do their duty”), Tucker Coleman Papers, box 33, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; James Barbour to the State Senate and House of Delegates, May 19, 1813 (“deadly and implacable hate”), Executive Letterbook, p. 261, RG 3, reel 3010, Library of Virginia; “Virginia and Massachusetts Compared,” Richmond Enquirer, October 28, 1814; James Madison to Nicholas, November 6, 1814, in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 8, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900–1910), pp. 319–20; Thomas Jefferson to David Bailie Warden, December 29, 1813, and Walter Jones to Jefferson, February 16, 1814, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, vol. 7, edited by Looney and others, pp. 91, 201; Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 84–92. 51. John Campbell to David Campbell, July 12, 1812 (“If you raise the standard of rebellion”), Campbell Family Papers, box 2, Special Collections, Duke University Library; “Federal Notions Examined,” National Intelligencer, May 7, 1813 (“our brethren of the eastern states”). 52. Philip Barraud to St. George Tucker, February 14, 1815 (“established the claims & reputation”), and February 22, 1814 (“the never-to-be-forgotten turpitude”), Tucker Coleman Papers, box 34, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; Phillip Hamilton, The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia, 1752–1830 (University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 134, 156. 53. Hamilton, The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family, pp. 134, 156, 161– 63; St. George Tucker to John Coalter, March 8, 1815 (“We are not enough one nation”), Grinnan Family Papers, box 3, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. 54. David Campbell to Edward Campbell, January 30, 1814, Campbell Family Papers, box 3, Special Collections, Duke University Library.

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Dual Nationalisms   /   95 55. Robert J. Evans to St. George Tucker, December 13, 1819 (“Shall that territory”), Tucker Coleman Papers, reel M-29, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; Mason, Slavery and Politics, p. 177; John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 154–63; George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (University of Chicago Press), pp. 231–33. 56. Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 449; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 145–46; Mason, Slavery and Politics, p. 195; Spencer Roane to James Monroe, February 16, 1820, in “Letters of Spencer Roane, 1788–1822,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 10 (March 1906), pp. 174–75; Lowrey, James Barbour, pp. 110-4. 57. John Randolph, quoted in Lowery, James Barbour, pp. 115–16; Spencer Roane to James Monroe, February 16, 1820, in “Letters of Spencer Roane,” p. 174; Ammon, James Monroe, pp. 450–51. 58. Thomas Ritchie, “Missouri Question—Settled!” Richmond Enquirer, March 7, 1820; Ammon, James Monroe, pp. 450–54; Mason, Slavery and Politics, p. 177; Freehling, Road to Disunion, pp. 152–53. 59. Joseph C. Cabell to St. George Tucker, February 10, 1820, Tucker Coleman Papers, reel M-29, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; Ammon, James Monroe, pp. 455–57; Lowery, James Barbour, pp. 116–20; Mason, Slavery and Politics, pp. 198–99; Anthony A. Iaccarino, “Virginia and the National Contest over Slavery in the Early Republic: 1780–1833” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1999), pp.159–60. 60. Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, pp. 229, and 241; Philip Hamilton, “Revolutionary Principles and Family Loyalties: Slavery’s Transformation in the St. George Tucker Household of Early National Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (October 1998), p. 554 ; Spencer Roane to James Monroe, February 16, 1820 (“lust” and “forced upon”), in [Anonymous], ed., “Letters of Spencer Roane,” 174–75; Roane to James Barbour, December 29, 1819, and John W. Eppes to Barbour, May 3, 1820, in [Anonymous], ed., “Missouri Compromise: Letters to James Barbour, Senator of Virginia in the Congress of the United States,” William and Mary Quarterly 10 (July 1901), pp. 7, 23; Mason, Slavery and Politics, pp. 193 and 199; Onuf, Mind of Thomas Jefferson, p. 214; Lowrey, James Barbour, p. 118; Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), pp. 175–78. 61. Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776–1840 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), p. 177; Jordan, Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia, pp. 19–20; Lowrey, James Barbour, p. 124. 62. Henry St. George Tucker to James Barbour, February 11, 1820, in [Anonymous], ed., “Missouri Compromise: Letters to James Barbour,” p. 11; St. George Tucker to Joseph C. Cabell, February 16, 1820, Cabell File, Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; Isaac A. Coles to Cabell, December 20, 1820 (“It is indeed not a question”), Wickham Family Papers, box 1, Virginia Historical Society; Dabney Carr to John Coalter, February 18, 1820 (“draw a cordon”), Grinnan Family Papers, sec. 4, Virginia Historical Society; St. George Tucker to Cabell, February 16, 1820, Cabell Letters,

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96   /    Alan Taylor Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, pp. 232–34. 63. For the diffuse nature of the original union, see David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (University Press of Kansas, 2003). For the Civil War as a watershed in the construction of the nation as we know it, see Eric Rauchway, Blessed among Nations: How the World Made America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), pp. 12–13.

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Chapter Five James Madison, Presidential Power, and Civil Liberties in the War of 1812 Benjamin Wittes and Ritika Singh

In November of 1814, the White House lay in ashes, burned to the ground by British troops. President James Madison was living in temporary quarters at the so-called Octagon House, having returned to Washington after fleeing the city. His government had seen division and humiliation, and it had not yet seen Andrew Jackson’s redemptive after-the-fact triumph in New Orleans, which would come a few months later. In a letter to Virginia governor Wilson Cary Nicholas on November 25, 1814, Madison reflected on the difficulties that the nation faced in prosecuting the war: You are not mistaken in viewing the conduct of the Eastern States as the source of our great difficulties in carrying on the war; as it certainly is the greatest, if not the sole, inducement with the enemy to persevere in it. The greater part of the people in that quarter have been brought by their leaders, aided by their priests, under a delusion scarcely exceeded by that recorded in the period of witchcraft; and the leaders are becoming daily more desperate in the use they make of it. Their object is power.1 It was not a stray comment on Madison’s part. In a letter to former president Thomas Jefferson more than two years earlier, he had complained that “the seditious opposition in Massachusetts and Connecticut, with the intrigues elsewhere insidiously co-operating with it, have so clogged the wheels of the war that I fear the campaign will not accomplish the object of it.”2 And in a letter to a New England sympathizer in September 6, 1812, he lamented: 97

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I will not conceal the surprise and the pain I feel at declarations from any portion of the American people that measures resulting from the National will constitutionally pronounced, and carrying with them the most solemn sanctions, are not to be pursued into effect, without the hazard of civil war. This is sure not . . . a course consistent with the duration or efficacy of any Government.3 Nor was Madison much, if at all, exaggerating the situation. The behavior of at least some of the Federalist opposition—which involved marshaling state resources to oppose federal policy, openly siding with the enemy against Washington, and frankly contemplating the dissolution of the union—looks as positively disloyal in retrospect as it did to Madison at the time. One might reasonably expect, given the scope and scale of the opposition to the war and the intensity of the president’s feelings about it, that he would have taken bold action against the opposition. It is an age-old maxim, after all, that “inter arma silent leges”—that the law, along with the liberty that it protects, falls by the wayside when a country is threatened. In the War of 1812, not only was the country threatened, the White House and the Capitol lay in ruins—and the president saw domestic political opposition as the main reason that the British persisted in their war effort. What’s more, this was the period immediately following the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the latter of which had criminalized criticism of the federal government and its policies. It had also been deployed barely a decade earlier against members of Madison’s political party by the very same Federalists who were now opposing the president’s policies. If ever a moment in American political history justified a measure of political repression, the War of 1812 was surely one. Yet the many books about the history of civil liberties in the United States in wartime all seem to have a chapter missing—and strangely, it is the chapter that would deal with this very period. For example, Geoffrey Stone’s book on the history of free speech in wartime jumps straight from the Sedition Act and the quasi-war with France in the late 1790s to the Civil War.4 The late chief justice William Rehnquist touches on the War of 1812 only glancingly in his famous book, All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime. He devotes a few paragraphs to Andrew Jackson’s repression of dissent in New Orleans, but as to Madison’s handling of civil liberties during the war more generally, he offers only two derisive sentences: “True, during the War of

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1812, the British sailed into Chesapeake Bay, burned the capital, and briefly invaded Maryland. But that was only an episode in a war that was quite unlike the Civil War, and the national government under President James Madison was too weak and inert to abridge anyone’s civil liberties.”5 There is a reason that the standard treatments of civil liberties in wartime omit this period, and Rehnquist’s barb suggests it: despite the dire threat that the nation faced, the War of 1812 did not see serious infringement of civil liberties. Particularly in comparison with presidents during other wars, Madison showed remarkable restraint in nearly all respects during the War of 1812, which took place in the country’s infancy, when there was still great conceptual space for robust claims of presidential power to restrain freedom. The war saw dramatically fewer intrusions on civil liberties than did later wars or even earlier episodes short of war in the country’s still-young history. Madison’s leading biographer, Ralph Ketcham, who described Madison as the “unimperial president,” wrote that Madison’s course [during the War of 1812] was consistent with his theory of republican government and especially of the use of executive power. Though in the last extremity he might have suspended civil liberties or even marched in the army, even to have had to do so would for him have been a stunning, profoundly sorrowful defeat—a “victory” in such an effort would have had only a bitter taste . . . to have acted as a tyrant within his own country would have been to default grievously and utterly. . . . To be imperious, or domineering, or grand was to him simply inappropriate in a president who was the agent of the people, the follower of Congress in matters of policy, and the creature of the Constitution in the definition of his powers. In this sense Madison’s conduct of the War of 1812, with all its difficulties, indecisiveness, and failures, was an ultimate triumph in that republican government emerged confirmed and strengthened.6 Irving Brant, in his book about Madison’s presidency during the war, similarly called Madison the bulwark of civil liberties in a passion-torn country wherein the spirit of treason ran rampant. He took this stand at a time when Jefferson was suggesting tar and feathers, hemp [nooses] and confiscation [for dissenters], when a justice of the Supreme Court was asking

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for prosecution under unwritten law, and when personal calumnies were being poured in a ceaseless stream upon his head by the very men whose liberties he was refusing to curtail.7 The story of civil liberties during the War of 1812 is often ignored because it is a story of a dog that didn’t bark—of repression that did not occur, of strong executive actions not taken, and of risks incurred and tolerated, not preempted. While a few ugly episodes caveat Madison’s record of restraint, the overall pattern contrasts sharply with the more familiar narrative of executive excess during times of peril. That fact, in turn, raises two vexing questions. First, why does Madison’s record diverge so dramatically from the conventional conduct of presidents in wartime? Was it, as Rehnquist suggests, a function of his being “weak and inert”—not quite enough of a president to violate civil liberties as a man of greater mettle surely would have done? Or was it, as Ketcham and Brant describe, a matter of principle, of commendable outlook and philosophy? Or was it, perhaps, something else? Second, to the extent that Madison’s restraint flowed from choice, not constraint, should we think of it as virtue or vice? In the modern era, we tend to fear excessive executive muscularity, even as we demand action of our presidents. But in Madison’s day, the contours of the presidency—and public expectations of it—were still very much contested. Madison’s handling of domestic opposition during the War of 1812 thus offers a rare opportunity to imagine executive crisis management in an America in which the executive had not evolved in such a relentlessly Hamiltonian direction as it did in later years. Instead of asking whether and how the president went too far—as we would of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and George W. Bush—we should ask whether Madison went far enough.

Unprecedented Dissent The War of 1812 saw the most concerted domestic opposition to any war that the United States has ever fought. Historian Donald R. Hickey describes it as “America’s most unpopular war,” noting that “it generated more intense opposition than any other war in the nation’s history, including the war in Vietnam.”8 Opposition to the war was immediate, ferocious, and highly

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regional—with the Federalists of the New England states, which had tight commercial ties to Britain, especially strident in their opposition. One distinctive feature of the opposition to the War of 1812 was that unlike opposition to the Vietnam War, it was not chiefly a citizens’ protest movement—an amalgamation of individuals who opposed federal policy. The chief actors were the most senior officials of state governments, exercising control over the actions of their states at a time when states had a dramatically greater role in the execution of policy than they do today. Particularly because the militias were run not by the federal but by the state governments and were key to any national mobilization, state officials were essential actors in any national military endeavor. President Obama does not need cooperation from the governors of Connecticut or Massachusetts to wage war in Afghanistan today. But a president in 1812 could not effectively wage war in Canada or along the New England coast with the governors of those states actively seeking to frustrate the war effort. To prosecute such a war, the still-nascent federal executive, particularly in the very modest nonHamiltonian form in which Madison conceived it, would need their active assistance. Instead, Madison got their active hostility. At the onset of the war, at least, outright obstruction of the war effort was minimal, and the Federalists largely limited themselves to criticizing the president, the war, and the president’s motives and purpose.9 The Federalists, conscious of the possibility of eroding the authority of government itself, initially urged only political protest. In New York and New Jersey, for example, they distanced themselves from those who opposed the war through what they termed “any irregular opposition—by violence, by menace, or illegal combinations.” Connecticut officials took a similar view, and the Massachusetts House of Representatives called for domestic order a few weeks after Congress declared war.10 That early commitment to patriotic dissent, however, did not last for long. Once the war began in earnest, Federalists did not limit themselves to the sort of antiwar rallies that they held throughout New England in the summer of 1812—rallies in which they denounced the war and Madison’s supposed alliance with France. Madison also faced concerted Federalist resistance, as Ketcham explains, to efforts to collect taxes, recruit military officers, mobilize militias, enforce court orders, regulate trade, and even deploy the army and navy. In July of 1812, Federalist members of Congress who voted

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against the war urged their constituents toward outright obstruction of the war effort. The obstruction went further, writes Ketcham: Massachusetts refused to send militia to meet a British invasion of Maine, Vermont smugglers drove herds of cattle into Canada to feed British troops, Connecticut Federalists talked of a New England army free from Federal control, and the Massachusetts legislature called for a convention to play regional “self-defense,” and to decide whether “to lay the foundation for a radical reform in the national compact.”11 Pamphleteer John Lowell III, who gave the war the moniker “Mr. Madison’s War,” urged militia members not to fight. And as Harvey Strum describes, opposition to the war among New York militia members was substantial enough that it meaningfully impeded military operations: When Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer proposed a sortie into Canada the militia refused to cross the border. Efforts to launch an attack . . . failed because only sixty-six of four hundred troops would cross into Canada. At the battle of Queenstown [Queenston Heights] in October [1812] more than 1,200 militiamen refused the pleadings of General Van Renssaeler to cross the Niagara River to relieve troops trapped by the British. When General Harry Dearborn tried to march on Montreal a month later the militia refused again to invade Canada. . . . [There were] frequent mutinies and mass desertion.12 Meanwhile, New England courts insisted that only their state governors, not federal officials, could muster the state militias. Madison faced outright disobedience from Federalist governors in readying militia recruits; the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut simply defied the commander in chief and prevented the use of their militias for national purposes, even to protect the coastline threatened by the Royal Navy. The New England state courts took what Brant calls the “seditious sophistry” of the governors even further. They found that the governors, not the president, had the power to declare the sort of emergency that would warrant mustering the militia. To make matters worse, they also found certain militia recruits to be debtors, ordered them arrested and bailed, but required them to stay home under court order—thus preventing them from serving in the militias.13 Smuggling of goods to the British was rampant on the land and sea frontiers.

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Some of the opposition was secessionist in nature. Former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, for example, insisted that “to my ears there is no magic in the sound of Union . . . let the Union be severed.”14 And ­Gouverneur Morris, who had been a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, talked openly of the New England states’ breaking off and forming a separate peace with Britain. Said Morris, “An Union of the commercial states to take care of themselves, leaving the War, its Expense and its Debt to those choice Spirits so ready to declare and so eager to carry it on, seems to be now the only rational Course.”15 As one Massachusetts reverend put it: “If at the present moment no symptoms of civil war appear, they certainly will soon.”16 These events culminated in the Hartford Convention in 1814, a gathering of some of the New England states behind closed doors to discuss reforms to—and even an end to—the national compact. Although the convention did not ultimately urge secession—its final report only proposed some constitutional amendments and expressed New England’s grievances against Republican government—the possibility of a more radical outcome loomed over the entire convention. Indeed, the convention’s proceedings were conducted in secret, and until January 5, 1815, the day that the report became public, it was unclear just how dramatic the recommendations would be. Madison himself did not know that the effort would peter out until the report was released, and as any president would in such circumstances, he harbored very real concerns that the convention would result in a public uprising or insurrection.17 Indeed, the extraordinary fact that several states would gather, in the middle of war, even to consider withdrawing from the union and forging a separate peace with the enemy has no analog in any subsequent American conflict.

What Madison Did Not Do Presidents facing a great deal less domestic opposition during wartime have often done a great deal more to suppress it than Madison did. The country has faced bigger crises than it faced during the War of 1812, but it has never faced such concerted, focused, and energetic opposition to national policy by formal constitutional actors at a time of crisis of comparable magnitude. Yet the list of dogs that did not bark here—the things that Madison did not do— is striking. Unlike John Adams and Woodrow Wilson, he did not repress dissent. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, he did not suspend habeas corpus. And unlike

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presidents in conflicts from the Civil War to World War II to the contemporary war on terror, he actually disclaimed the authority to hold American citizens in military custody. Each of those judgments warrants consideration. As a preliminary matter, Madison refused to embrace legislation like the Sedition Act, which had been enacted under President John Adams in 1798. The Sedition Act had made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President, with intent to defame, or bring either into contempt or disrepute.”18 Madison had been one of the primary opponents of the act. Indeed, he had been the secret author of the Virginia Resolution and had helped to write the Virginia House of Delegates Report of 1799, which assailed the act on the grounds that it was “leveled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”19 The report concluded “that the General Assembly . . . does hereby renew, its protest against ‘the alien and sedition-acts,’ as palpable and alarming infractions of the Constitution.” In his famous Commentaries on the Constitution, published much later in 1833, Justice Joseph Story, in an apparent nod to Madison and the other critics of the Alien and Sedition Acts, notes dryly that the constitutionality of the acts was “assailed with great earnestness and ability at the time.”20 By 1812, the Sedition Act had been repealed but not struck down, and it was Madison’s turn to be at the helm of government during a time of crisis and the Federalists’ turn to be an embittered out-party railing against the government. Story, then a young justice, was sufficiently alarmed by how “offenders, conspirators, and traitors [were] enabled to carry out their purposes almost without check” that he proposed, in effect, that Madison switch sides and learn to love the Sedition Act. He suggested that Congress once again “give the Judicial Courts of the United States power to punish all crimes and offences against the Government, as at common law.”21 As Brant describes Story’s proposal—made to the attorney general, who passed it on approvingly to Madison—“any act prejudicial or injurious to the United States, which would at the common law be a public offense, should be deemed an offense against the United States and punishable with a fine or imprisonment.”22 Vice President Elbridge Gerry proposed more far-reaching measures. According to Jan Ellen Lewis, he “recommended an array of measures to suppress the ‘internal foe’: loyalty lists, vigilance committees, federal

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legislation to punish ‘refractory governors,’ and a state law to punish seditious editors.”23 Story’s idea was not quite as illiberal as it probably seems to modern readers. Indeed, it took the Supreme Court until 1964—in the famous case of New York Times v. Sullivan—to decisively reject the constitutionality of seditious libel laws.24 At the time that Story offered his friendly suggestion, the case law actually supported the constitutionality of such a proposal; the Sedition Act, after all, had not been struck down, and prosecutions under it had taken place. So Story was really proposing that the president and Congress use power that the Constitution as then understood by the courts arguably granted them to deal with dissent. Madison, however, rejected the idea on principle, staying true to the position that he had taken toward dissent and criticism of public officials while the Federalists were in power. Indeed, Madison even tolerated the open talk about and movement toward secession. Not only did he not prosecute Federalist newspaper publishers, he made no effort to stop the Hartford Convention from taking place. The War Department sent a colonel to Hartford to keep an eye on the convention for signs of rebellion or treason, and when the officer sent lessthan-comforting accounts of what was happening, the administration made plans to send in troops if a rebellion materialized.25 But, as Ketcham notes, “all this watchful concern by the administration . . . occurred without whipping up the public against the dissenters, without attempting to interfere with the Hartford Convention, and without any special declarations of emergency or other measures that might have led to detentions, strictures of the press, threats to public meetings, or other curtailments of civil liberties.”26 Madison also showed a remarkable unwillingness to detain U.S. nationals in military custody or to subject them to military trials. In the modern age, the detention of U.S. citizens under military authorities has presented one of the great legal controversies of the war on terror. George W. Bush famously claimed the authority to order it. While the Supreme Court did not define the exact parameters of the authority, it did approve the general principle that the president has some authority to detain a U.S. citizen who becomes part of enemy forces and is captured abroad.27 Even President Obama, who has promised not to hold Americans outside the criminal justice system, has not disavowed the authority to do so. Prior wars have seen far broader assertions of domestic detention authority than President Bush’s, assertions that covered individuals well beyond

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those actively affiliated with enemy forces. Franklin Roosevelt, of course, interned Japanese American civilians in the absence of any suspicion of disloyalty on the part of any particular individual. And Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus permitted the detention of a great many Confederate sympathizers in border states—people who were not themselves members of the Confederate army. The War of 1812 saw some proposals for expanded military detention powers. According to one scholar, Congress beefed up the military’s power to punish disobedient members of the militia, and some Republican members sought to give military courts the power to try civilian as well as military spies, which the law then seemed to preclude. That proposal, writes Jan Ellen Lewis, was intended “to cover contingencies that seem eerily familiar from our current war on terror: American citizens caught aiding the enemy on foreign soil and apprehended traitors who successfully applied for writs of habeas corpus from civilian judges.” The plan, however, wilted under Federalist opposition and Republican lack of commitment to it. Republican support, Lewis writes, was soft, and while the debate offered an opportunity “to go on the record against treason,” the appetite for actually changing the law proved “half hearted.” 28 In fact, during the War of 1812, Madison deferred to habeas judgments not only by federal courts but by state courts ordering the release of U.S. citizens suspected of spying for the enemy. What’s more, he seems to have willingly accepted that the military lacked the authority to detain such people and try them before military tribunals except with congressional authorization—a position that in some respects anticipates the Supreme Court’s Civil War–era holding in Ex Parte Milligan.29 As legal scholar Ingrid Brunk Wuerth describes it, during the War of 1812, state courts issued habeas writs—and even awarded damages against military commanders—to U.S. citizens detained for allegedly aiding the enemy.30 Madison, Wuerth notes, concurred in those judgments.31 That period, she writes, demonstrates the “extraordinary caution with which the courts and President Madison viewed the detention of U.S. citizens even in a declared war, and even on evidence that the detainee traveled abroad, met with the enemy, and might divulge future intelligence information.”32 Wuerth offers two remarkable examples of this restrictive view of federal detention authority in practice. The first is the case of Samuel Stacy, arrested on July 1, 1813, as a spy and traitor for aiding the British in their near-capture of Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario. American Commodore Isaac Chauncey,

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naval operations overseer for Lakes Ontario and Erie, blamed Stacy for the attack on Sackets Harbor and “hop[ed] to see Stacy hung as a traitor to his country in part as an example to other ‘base’ and ‘degenerate’ Americans who might become spies and informers.” Stacy petitioned the Supreme Court of New York for a writ of habeas corpus, and the court issued the writ on the grounds that Stacy was a natural-born citizen of the United States. When Major General Morgan Lewis refused to hand Stacy over to the court and sought to try him by court martial, the chief judge held him in contempt for disregarding the writ. Madison agreed with the court that the military lacked the power to detain Stacy and try U.S. citizens in courts martial, and thus, Wuerth writes, on July 26, 1813, “Secretary of War Armstrong ordered Stacy released ‘on the ground that a citizen cannot be considered as a spy.’”33 Similarly, Elijah Clark, an American citizen living in Canada, was found guilty of spying by a court martial in August 1812 and was ordered to be hanged. At the insistence of President Madison, however, Major General Hall ordered that “as a citizen, Clark was ‘not liable to be tried by a court martial as a spy”’ and that unless Clark was arraigned for treason or another crime in civil court in New York, he had to be released from military custody.34 Put simply, during the War of 1812 Madison took a view of detention that has echoes in much later legal developments yet involved a degree of selfrestraint that no subsequent president has been willing to live with. His tolerance of the notion that U.S. nationals suspected of aiding the enemy could not be held in military custody but had to be tried in civilian courts foreshadows the Supreme Court’s later holding in Ex Parte Milligan that citizens cannot be tried by military commissions if the civilian courts are open for business. His understanding that the only means of detaining an American citizen was by civilian trial for treason anticipates the dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia in Hamdi, in which Scalia wrote that “where the Government accuses a citizen of waging war against it, our constitutional tradition has been to prosecute him in federal court for treason or some other crime. Where the exigencies of war prevent that, the Constitution’s Suspension Clause . . . allows Congress to relax the protections temporarily. Absent suspension, however, the Executive’s assertion of military exigency has not been thought sufficient to permit detention without charge.”35 Madison’s willingness to submit to judicial review of military detention judgments far exceeded that of the early Bush administration, which argued that courts should not look into government evidence supporting a detention. No president since Madison has put

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these threads of legal thought together in quite the same way during an active conflict so as to render the military powerless to act against citizens that the president believes are spying for the enemy. More generally, no president since Madison has taken such a tolerant approach to those that he believes are colluding with the enemy against the war effort through their speech, their office, or their arts. Even modern presidents, constrained by modern First Amendment law, have a variety of legal tools at their disposal for dealing with at least some of the conduct that Madison tolerated. For example, someone who aided the enemy today the way that the 1812-era spies aided the British could be prosecuted under a variety of espionage laws, statutes forbidding giving aid to the enemy, and (depending on the nature of the enemy group) laws forbidding providing material support for terrorism. Nearly all presidents have neared the limit of their arguable legal powers during a time of conflict and pushed the limit to one degree or another—some presidents have even obliterated it, with varying degrees of grace or infamy. The most fundamental difference between them and Madison is that he did not even approach the limit.

Several Important Caveats There are at least five caveats to acknowledge in considering Madison’s restraint. The first is what one might term the extra-legal dimension of repression—both by unofficial actors and by executive branch actors beneath the presidential level. The slow pace of communications in the early nineteenth century and the resulting diffusion of notionally unitary executive power made the president less immediately accountable for all actions taken in the name of national policy than any president could be after transportation and communications began to speed up. As a result, commanders in the field had a great deal more autonomy than any field commander has today. Moreover, local communities often took care of local dissenters by sometimes quite brutal means that conveniently did not sully presidential hands. Although Madison does not seem to have directly encouraged either governmental or nongovernmental actors to repress dissent, he nevertheless reaped the benefit of those activities—for which he did not have to take responsibility. Consider, for example, the mob that rioted in Baltimore against local Federalist publishers. Madison may have declined to seek legislation like the Sedition Act, but that did not mean that dissenting voices necessarily

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enjoyed the robust protection of their right of free speech. The riots came about because the citizens of Baltimore, a majority Republican town, did not take kindly to the relentless attacks published by a Federalist newspaper, the Federal-Republican, on Madison’s decision to wage the war. After the declaration of war in June of 1812, a Republican mob systematically destroyed the newspaper’s printing office, and Republican city officials took only meager steps to stop the mob. The unruly population thus roamed the streets of Baltimore looking for the editors of the Federal-Republican and searching their houses until the newspaper’s publishers were ultimately driven from the city. The riots escalated when one of the editors decided to reestablish the paper in Baltimore. A large crowd gathered, shouting insults and throwing stones at a house in which there were a number of Federalists. The Federalists defended their position, and one of the rioters was killed and others badly injured. The Republican mob responded by arming itself and even brought cannon to the site. Again, the official reaction was slow. Conveniently, Mayor Edward Johnson just happened to have left for his country home that day, and the commander of the city’s militia, General John Stricker, made no haste in obtaining the signatures necessary to call in the militia. After a night-long standoff, he negotiated the arrest of the Federalists holed up in the house and put them in jail for safekeeping. After the militia dispersed, however, the mob outside the jail where the Federalists were being held threatened to attack the jail. And although Mayor Johnson, who had since returned, tried to calm the mob, the Republicans stormed the jail and beat anyone in their path. One Federalist—a Revolutionary war hero—was killed, and one was severely attacked and trampled almost to death. Several others were beaten and tortured.36 As reports about what had happened in Baltimore spread throughout the country, Federalists lost no time in insinuating that Madison had whipped up the fury of the mob. That certainly overstated the matter; Madison bore no responsibility for stoking or encouraging the riots. At the same time, he did nothing to quell them, though they went on for days and Baltimore is not far from Washington. Because the jail and post office were in the same building and the post office was a federal institution, he certainly knew about the protective jailing of the Federalists, but he did not consider an assault likely and seems to have regarded the whole affair as a local matter in any event.37 That attitude may seem bizarre today, given modern conceptions of an activist presidency that affirmatively protects people’s rights against

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abridgment, but conceptions of the presidency differed sharply then. Madison certainly did not imagine himself to be an activist president who served as the nation’s protector in chief. His intention was to limit his own powers to the maximum extent possible, not to relieve local authorities of their responsibility for keeping lawless mobs at bay. Concerns about mob violence—officially encouraged or not—also arose elsewhere, and the worry that mobs might have a degree of official backing was not altogether irrational. Indeed, attitudes about mobs during that era, like those about the presidency, differed from attitudes today; many people saw mobs as having a legitimate role in enforcing community norms. While Madison himself showed no interest in using mob violence for that purpose, his predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, saw them as a potentially useful instrument. Even as Joseph Story was suggesting legal action at the outset of the war to handle dissenters, Jefferson wrote to Madison that sending “a barrel of tar to each state south of the Potomac” would do the trick. In an approving reference to mob hangings of loyalists in Maryland in 1776, Jefferson suggested that in Northern states, “you may . . . have to apply the rougher drastics of . . . hemp and confiscation.”38 General Andrew Jackson, meanwhile, had his own strategy for dealing with dissent. Jackson declared martial law in New Orleans in December 1814 and did not lift it for months, despite the British withdrawal. Jackson harbored none of Madison’s scruples about silencing critics of government. When a Louisiana state senator published a letter in the Louisiana Courier complaining that Jackson did not have the authority to impose martial law and calling on all Frenchmen in the city to rally against the general, Jackson immediately ordered his arrest and trial by court martial. Federal judge Dominic A. Hall issued a writ of habeas corpus for the senator, but Jackson was undeterred—he arrested the judge too and had him escorted out of town with a warning not to come back. Jackson also warned the local federal marshal not to try to intervene. Although the senator was quickly cleared by the court martial, Jackson overruled the verdict and kept him in custody anyway. In addition, Jackson suspended the legislature and even threatened to blow it up during his period of rule in New Orleans. When Jackson sought retroactive approval from Madison for his actions in New Orleans, the president did not oblige; acting secretary of war Alexander J. Dallas repudiated Jackson’s claims that the War of 1812 necessitated the imposition of martial law.39 But if Madison did not give Jackson the cover

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that the general sought, he did not do anything about Jackson’s behavior either. Jackson was, after all, the war’s biggest hero, and his success represented to no small degree the administration’s vindication. What’s more, Louisiana itself was something of a special case—a new state with underdeveloped institutions and a substantial French population of mixed loyalties. There is at least some reason to think that Madison himself regarded Louisiana as a place where a different set of rules might apply—that he showed some tolerance of the idea that a commander in such a place might do as circumstances required. While he was not willing to give Jackson’s actions any gloss of legality, he does not appear to have been troubled by them. The second caveat is that certain wartime practices that we now regard as beyond the pale were, during the War of 1812, undertaken without apology. Congress, for example, encouraged civilian attacks on British warships, a practice that would be unthinkable today.40 Most prominent was the power to detain enemy civilians living in the territory of a belligerent country, which was then well-established in international law and remained common practice through World War II. One part of the Alien and Sedition Acts that was not repealed—indeed, it remains on the books to this day—was the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which authorizes the president to detain, relocate, or deport enemy aliens in times of war. Enacted in anticipation of war with France, it saw its first use against British aliens during the War of 1812. The Alien Enemies Act states: Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government . . . and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.41 Even as Madison had objected vigorously to other provisions of the Alien and Sedition Acts, he had expressly withheld complaint about the Alien Enemies Act. In the Virginia General Assembly Report of 1799, he had written: With respect to alien enemies, no doubt has been intimated as to the federal authority over them; the Constitution having expressly delegated to Congress the power to declare war against any nation, and of course to treat it and all its members as enemies.

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Consequently, there was no contradiction when on February 23, 1813, Secretary of State James Monroe issued an order by which “enemy aliens, residing or being within forty miles of tide water, were required . . . to retire . . . beyond that distance from the tide water” to a place designated by federal marshals, who were authorized to arrest enemy aliens who did not comply. That sort of action discomforts modern civil libertarian sensibilities, but similar proclamations were issued during both World War I and World War II. The War of 1812 also saw instances of reprisal against British prisoners in response to British mistreatment of American prisoners of war. While treatment of prisoners was generally humane and generous on both sides, the British decision during the winter of 1813–14 to try twenty-three Irish Americans for treason provoked a cycle of retaliation by the Americans. Normal treatment—whereby prisoners of war lived in barracks, were allowed to work in towns, and were either paroled or traded to freedom—gave way to close confinement on both sides and threats to kill prisoners of war until the British backed down from their threat to hold trials. Some reprisals and threats were ordered by Madison himself.42 Again, that seems terribly dissonant in an era in which the Third Geneva Convention defines state obligations with respect to prisoners, but prisoner treatment then was almost purely a function of reciprocity and of each state’s interest in protecting its own captured people. Reprisals were an uncomfortable fact of life. A third caveat is that Madison’s solicitude for the rights of Americans suspected of aiding the British most emphatically did not apply to slaves. John Fabian Witt describes the aid that British troops received from former slaves, who escaped by the thousands from their American owners. Urged on by the British—who even offered them a bounty to join the British armed forces— escaped slaves served as guides for the enemy and took up arms against their oppressors at home in large numbers. Fugitive slaves even returned to their plantations to secretly encourage fellow slaves to rise up and escape en masse, and many had a hand in the destruction of Washington in 1814. When slaves were captured, state court habeas corpus was not the order of the day. Rather, there were executions—and in large numbers. Witt writes that slave executions in Virginia, for example, doubled from 1812 to 1813 and increased sharply again the following year.43 The fourth caveat is that some of Madison’s forbearance may reflect, at least in part, a tactical concession to political weakness. The central government at that time simply did not have the power to fight the British

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and simultaneously coerce large numbers of New England Federalists with powerful state offices and patronage networks to bend to Washington’s will. Madison had to pick his battles. And while his tolerance surely reflected both his views on individual liberty and his views on the proper role of a republican executive, it also allowed him to make a virtue of necessity. Practical circumstances simply did not permit him to assert the sort of domestic control that other presidents have sought to exercise. Madison had to conserve scarce resources to fight the British; he could not afford to fight other Americans. In that respect, his philosophical position was convenient as well as sincere. The fifth caveat is that while Madison had a modest conception of the executive and a regard for civil liberties that was unusual in a wartime president, he also seems to have had a flair for what we now call covert actions—and their attendant deceit of the public, Congress, and international interlocutors. The issue of presidential power and civil liberties, on the one hand, and the issue of covert action and secrecy, on the other, are deeply connected in the minds of modern scholars and citizens—a result of the Watergate and Vietnam eras, during which presidents applied the tools of foreign covert action and espionage to handle domestic dissent. These eras, merged, to some degree, concerns about civil liberties during wartime with the more general problem of presidential accountability for covert actions and espionage. In Madison’s day, however, the two issues would have seemed altogether unrelated. Nonetheless, it bears notice that in his remarkable book on the history of American covert actions, Stephen F. Knott observes that Madison was far from a Boy Scout in his use of covert action. His efforts to acquire the Florida territories, in fact, involved unilateral executive exertions that do not square neatly with the hagiographic portraits of a man committed to a republican conception of executive power. Knott writes that [while] many chroniclers of Madison’s presidency view him as a model of restraint in his exercise of executive authority. . . . [An] examination of Madison’s presidency actually reveals that contemporary opponents of covert activity who invoke the legacy of the Founders are either deliberately disingenuous or simply unaware of the persuasive evidence that points to the endorsement of [the Florida] operations by this preeminent Founder. . . . James Madison believed covert operations were an essential part of America’s foreign-policy arsenal.44

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Knott describes in great detail how Madison sent secret agents to both East and West Florida to foment rebellions against Spain—rebellions under leaders who would then ask the United States to intervene and acquire the territories. The idea, a success in the case of West Florida and a failure in the case of East Florida, was that the United States should be seen not as having designs on the Floridas but merely as responding to the local population’s yearning for liberty. Knott also notes that Madison revealed his familiarity with the unseemly necessities of foreign relations by procuring, at public expense, a prostitute for a foreign envoy. He probably had this particular event in mind when he noted that “appropriations to foreign intercourse are terms of great latitude and may be drawn on by very urgent and unforeseen occurrences.” During Madison’s presidency, intelligence reports and other secret government documents were also given added protections by a formal system of classification (consisting of “secret,” “confidential,” and “private”).45 Madison’s major covert operations—at least those discussed by Knott— were directed against Spain, not Britain, and they predate the War of 1812, limiting their relevance to a discussion of Madison as a wartime president with respect to civil liberties. At the same time, Knott makes the important point that one should not romanticize Madison’s views of presidential power, at least not without factoring in the less public aspects of his actions.

Philosophy, Impotence, or Pragmatism? Virtue or Vice? The caveats discussed above, while important, do not individually or collectively render Madison’s conduct during the War of 1812 less extraordinary in its deviation from the historical or present-day norms of presidential conduct during wartime. It is too easy to conclude, with Rehnquist, that Madison was just a wimp—that surely had he been a real man, he would have violated at least someone’s civil liberties. While the weakness of the federal government during his administration—a weakness that itself reflected his philosophical commitments—no doubt played some role, it does not fully explain Madison’s approach. Another possible explanation for Madison’s conduct during the war that also has some merit is that he was being a pragmatic politician—one with an

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acute awareness of what he could and could not feasibly accomplish. Madison knew how divided the country was. He also knew that the procedural machinations in Congress that had preceded the declaration of war had given rise to a great sense of grievance among the Federalists. Repression would only fuel that grievance with legitimate complaints about Republican conduct. Incurring such political damage may be worth it if one expects real gain from the repressive actions in question, but in Madison’s case the possible gain was not huge. The Federalists, after all, were an entrenched political class in certain parts of the country, and the Republicans were not apt to dislodge them by means of repression. Restraint kept open the possibility of reconciliation and persuasion. Ultimately, however, Madison’s approach chiefly appears to have had its roots in principle, in Madison’s core beliefs about executive power in a republic. Many commentators today still profess similar views, but American expectations of the presidency have long since passed them by. Ketcham explains that Madison’s views of executive power were forged in reaction to Hamilton’s vision of the executive during the 1790s: Though Madison greatly admired Washington and had worked closely with Hamilton for many years, he was first amazed and then appalled at what the executive department became under Hamilton’s guidance. Madison’s sympathies for a vigorous executive, for an efficient civil service, and for a sound public credit led him to support many of Hamilton’s proposals taken by themselves, but it was the totality the Virginian opposed. . . . Far from an executive taking its lead in policy from the legislature and being the executor of its will, as republican theory required, Hamilton had created a machine to lead and dominate the nation.46 Madison saw virtue in a lot of what the modern eye would see as weakness in an executive. And specifically, Ketcham explains, he saw republican virtue in a conception of the executive as almost an agent of the legislature: To him, recognizing, even acceding to, congressional pressures seemed somehow republican in spirit; or to put it conversely, Madison saw danger in an executive so far from, so independent of congressional opinion as to find himself defying it. As all the world watched to see what the new republic would do as it faced Armageddon, Madison felt

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obliged to resist Caesarism, pro-consulism, or, more precisely, Hamiltonism of any kind. He was unable to envision how, in the manner of a Lincoln or a Churchill or a Roosevelt, the chief executive of a democratic nation might in emergencies necessarily move away from strictly republican modes and act with vigor, highhandedness, and even ruthlessness to defend the nation. . . . [R]ather than face the known and manifest threats to every principle of free government, Madison chose, deliberately, to accept the dangers of weak and divided, even compromised councils.47 Consistent with that view, as we have seen, Madison did notably less than prevailing constitutional law at the time would have tolerated—and less than his raw power would have permitted him to do. When state courts ordered the release of suspected spies, Madison did not have to comply with their judgments; he could have, as Andrew Jackson did in the same conflict, defied them. He could have argued for a broad interpretation of his powers to detain, try, and punish collaborators with the enemy. He could have sought legislation to empower himself. When his own attorney general and vice president and a sitting justice of the Supreme Court suggested that he seek legislation that would give him legal leverage against his political opponents and U.S. citizens aiding the enemy, he did not have to demur. Many presidents have taken strident constitutional positions before coming to power and have lived to enjoy the embarrassment of taking the opposite view when changed power arrangements counseled it. Madison probably could not have squelched all Federalist dissent, but he did not have to tolerate as much of it as he did with as little pushback as he offered, and he certainly did not have to tolerate conduct as openly traitorous as the Hartford Convention. We should, therefore, understand the gap between what Madison did and what he plausibly could have done as a function of his conviction. That marginal difference goes to the crux of the difference between Madison and the classic wartime president. Madison did somewhat less than he could have done; the typical wartime president, to one degree or another, does more—sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a lot more. Our image of the president in wartime is one of a president who pushes the envelope. Madison sealed his envelope without even filling it completely—let alone overstuffing it. The harder question is whether such restraint merits admiration or contempt. Clinton Rossiter once wrote that a president who is not “widely and

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persistently accused in his own time of ‘subverting the Constitution’ . . . may as well forget about being judged a truly eminent man by future generations.”48 Put another way, if the White House burns and the president has not arrested the people who are calling for dissolution of the country, has he perhaps shown too tender a solicitude for their civil liberties at the expense of the larger national interest—or, indeed, the nation itself? That question, of course, has no simple answer. Madison’s approach certainly diverges greatly from what the American public would expect of the president today. At least since Lincoln, presidents have operated on the assumption that the country will forgive them for excess in the honest service of the nation’s security but will never forgive them for not doing everything in their power to protect the country—whether by saving the union, defeating Nazism, or fighting terrorism. That presidential instinct reflects public expectations. We remember Lincoln and Roosevelt as among our greatest presidents because of their wartime leadership—leadership that is only a little besmirched in our memory by the liberties that they took with civil liberties. We hate Korematsu, but it does not diminish our love of Roosevelt. We celebrate Ex Parte Milligan, but it does not diminish our love of Lincoln. America loves winners in its presidents, and its historical memory shows them great forgiveness. This willingness to forgive reflects the total victory of the Hamiltonian vision of the executive over the one that Madison championed. Particularly in academic circles, people may fret in Madisonian language about executive power. We sometimes talk about how presidents should not push the line, how they should live within the constraints set by other branches and view themselves as agents of congressional will. But in practice, the country has voted with its feet. We are all Hamiltonians now. Today, a president who sought to do less than the Constitution allowed in pursuit of critical national security objectives would be accused of dereliction of his duty as commander in chief if those objectives were then not met and the country paid the price. Imagine, for a moment, that President Obama announced that he had to free everyone from Guantanamo Bay against whom he could not bring criminal charges in a federal court—a position that would roughly approximate for noncitizens the one that Madison took concerning U.S. citizens along the northern border during the War of 1812. Or imagine that President Bush had erred on the side of caution in interrogating Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for intelligence after his capture in 2003 and that a major attack had taken

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place that was even plausibly attributable to his restraint. Leaving any arguably lawful approach untried would damage a president’s standing in the public mind far more completely—and far less redeemably—than would a little extremism now and then in defense of security. Or, at least, so presidents seem to think—and the public certainly rewards that sort of thinking. One can plausibly argue that Madison might have prosecuted the war more effectively and to a better, faster conclusion had his tolerance of Federalist opposition not communicated division to the British and thus prolonged Britain’s willingness to fight. Yet, though perhaps only barely, Madison got away with it. In the end, the United States fought Britain to a standstill, and the Treaty of Ghent was largely seen at the time as some sort of victory. That has to ameliorate the judgment of Madison. The difference, after all, between a repressive wartime presidency and a tolerant one— between the Hamiltonian executive that we now expect and the republican one to which Madison was committed—did not result in the difference between victory and defeat. To be sure, Madison’s approach had considerable benefits too. By not using more repression than he needed to, he avoided a spate of tit-for-tat legal retaliations against his foes through which an expectation might have arisen that the party in power would stifle any criticism of itself. That was particularly important in the country’s infancy, when the political traditions of tolerance and free speech were still inchoate. The Sedition Act remained an anomaly. It did not, as it very well might have, become a norm. More fundamental is the fact that Madison demonstrated that a republic could fight a war without cannibalizing its own republican institutions. That had never been done before, and it was hardly a foregone conclusion that it was possible. Later presidents who pushed legal limits did so within an established tradition of democracies fighting wars and emerging from them still democratic. For Madison and his time, however, that was only a hypothesis—one that the War of 1812 proved viable but whose viability did require demonstration. In our view, at least, Madison’s conduct during the War of 1812 presents only one clear lesson for the modern wartime president: Less can sometimes be more. A president should not overestimate how much infringement on liberty wartime circumstances require, though Madison may have applied that principle to excess. Living in the gap between their notional power and the power that they are willing to exercise rightly terrifies modern presidents.

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But the questions that Madison asked are ones that any president should feel himself constrained by: Is this step necessary? Do I have the authority to take it? If I do, would it be consistent with the highest vision of the office of the presidency for me to do so? Life in that gap is not all costs, it turns out. Madison’s example—one to which the American presidency has never returned—suggests that there are benefits too.

Notes 1. Letter to W. C. Nicholas, November 25, 1814, published in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 8, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), pp. 318–20. Quoted in Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (New York: Macmillan Company, 1971), p. 593. 2. Letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 17, 1812, published in The Writings of James Madison, edited by Hunt, pp. 210–13. Quoted in Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, p. 537. 3. Letter to S. Spring, September 6, 1812, published in The Writings of James Madison, edited by Hunt, pp. 214–15. Quoted in Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, p. 538. 4. Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). 5. William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 170. 6. Ralph Ketcham, “James Madison: The Unimperial President,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1978), pp.116–36 (www.vqronline.org/articles/1978/winter/ ketcham-james-madison/). 7. Irving Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief: 1812–1836 (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1961), p. 32. 8. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 255. 9. Harvey Strum, “New York Federalists and Opposition to the War of 1812,” World Affairs 142, no. 3 (Winter 1980), pp. 169–87, 173; Lawrence D. Cress, “Cool and Serious Reflection: Federalist Attitudes toward War in 1812,” Journal of the Early Republic 7, no. 2 (Summer 1987), pp. 123–45, 141. 10. Cress, “Cool and Serious Reflection,” 139–40. 11. Ketcham, The Unimperial President. 12. Strum, “New York Federalists and Opposition to the War of 1812,” p. 172. 13. For an account of the machinations of the governors, see Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, p. 48. For an account of the behavior of the state courts, see Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, p. 537. 14. Letter from Timothy Pickering to E. Pennington, July 12, 1812. Quoted in Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, p. 537. 15. King memo of October 1814 meeting, October 18, 1814; letter from Morris to King, November 1, 1814. Quoted in Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, p. 592. 16. Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, p. 24.

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120   /    Benjamin Wittes and Ritika Singh 17. For an account of the Hartford Convention, see Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, pp. 255–80. 18. The text of the Sedition Act is available at http://constitution.org/rf/sedition_1798. htm. 19. The text of the Report of 1799 is available at http://constitution.org/rf/vr_1799. htm. 20. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1833), p. 464. 21. Letters from Joseph Story to Nathaniel Williams, October 8, 1812, and May 27, 1813. Quoted in Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, p. 70. 22. Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, p. 24. 23. Jan Ellen Lewis, “Defining the Nation: 1790 to 1898,” published in Security v. Liberty: Conflicts between Civil Liberties and National Security in American History, edited by Daniel Farber (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), p. 134. 24. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). 25. Hickey, The War of 1812, p. 274, and Ketcham, The Unimperial President. 26. Ketcham, The Unimperial President. 27. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004). 28. Lewis, “Defining the Nation,” in Security v. Liberty, edited by Farber, p. 134. 29. Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2 (1866). 30. Ingrid Brunk Wuerth, “The President’s Power to Detain ‘Enemy Combatants’: Modern Lessons from Mr. Madison’s Forgotten War,” Northwestern University Law Review 98, no. 4 (2003–04), pp. 1567–616, 1568. 31. Ibid., p. 1583. 32. Ibid., p. 1585. 33. Ibid., pp. 1580–83. 34. Ibid., pp.1583–84. See also George M. Dennison, “Martial Law: The Development of a Theory of Emergency Powers, 1776–1861,” American Journal of Legal History 18, no.1 (January 1974), pp. 52–79, 59–60. 35. See Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004). 36. Paul A. Gilje, “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the AngloAmerican Mob Tradition,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (summer 1980), pp. 547–64. 37. Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, pp. 30–31. 38. Letter from Thomas Jefferson, June 29, 1812, published in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 4, edited by J. C. A. Stagg (University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 519–20. Quoted in Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, p. 24. 39. For background on Jackson’s conduct of martial law in New Orleans, see Joseph G. Tregle Jr., “Andrew Jackson and the Continuing Battle of New Orleans,” Journal of the Early Republic 1, no. 4 (Winter 1981), pp. 373–93, 377–78. See also Dennison, “Martial Law,” pp. 61–64. 40. Stephen Budiansky, Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815 (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 247–48. 41. The Alien Enemies Act is currently codified at 50 U.S.C. § 21. 42. Budiansky, Perilous Fight, pp. 249–50. See also John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 69. 43. Witt, Lincoln’s Code, pp. 73–74.

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James Madison, Presidential Power, and Civil Liberties    /   121 44. Stephen F. Knott, Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 107. 45. Ibid., p. 104. For an account of the West Florida and East Florida operations, see pp. 87–104. 46. Ketcham, The Unimperial President. 47. Ibid. 48. Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 130.

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Chapter Six The War over Federalism: The Constitutional Battles in the War of 1812 Peter J. Kastor

The United States has declared war five times. It did so for the first time in 1812, and Americans immediately recognized that declaring war put them in an unprecedented constitutional no-man’s-land. They were right. The Constitution had provided the means for the United States to declare war, but how the United States would mobilize to wage war was far less certain. In more than two years of warfare, Americans saw the federal system pushed to the breaking point. Along the way, they repeatedly argued about the very meaning of the republic. Understanding just how challenging the War of 1812 would become begins with recapturing a definition of federalism that was, in certain key ways, very different from our own. In contemporary terms, federalism refers to a complex but highly specific set of relationships between the federal government, the states, and the federal courts. In the early republic, Americans invoked the notion of federalism more broadly. It was defined not only by the specifically enumerated powers of the states and the central government but by a set of relationships that connected states to one another and to a national leadership in which the presidency and Congress played very different roles from the roles that they play today. Within that context, the function of the federal court system remained ambiguous, but it was far less powerful than it is now. In addition, the United States included a half-dozen federal territories, polities that were on track for eventual incorporation as states but that were temporarily under the direct supervision of the central government in Washington. Finally, there was a more abstract, diffuse way that Americans used the term “federalism.” In addition to the relationships 122

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between government institutions, federalism was supposed to embody the relationship among American citizens, who were at once residents of a state and citizens of a nation.1 What follows is a story of federalism in the United States, a story that explains not only how Americans conceived of their country but also how its constitutional system shaped the outcome of the war. It is a story told through four men—James Madison, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and William Clark—and best understood not by looking at the beginning of the War of 1812 but by looking at the four very different endings to the war experienced by these four men. Most accounts of the War of 1812 describe the war as coming to an end on December 24, 1814, when negotiators from the United States and Great Britain, meeting on neutral ground in the Belgian town of Ghent, signed a treaty. Even if the treaty would not go into effect until ratified by the U.S. Senate, the negotiators saw its signing as the end of the conflict. Yet one of the most well-known facts of the War of 1812 is that the Battle of New Orleans, the greatest American battlefield victory of the conflict, came almost two weeks later. If the victory at New Orleans became a symbol of American military prowess, the timing of the battle and the Treaty of Ghent has become a symbol of everything that went wrong with the war, at least from an American perspective. The conflict was ill conceived and poorly executed from the start. Now that two centuries have passed and the trauma of warfare has faded from memory, the American effort to manage the war is, quite literally, laughable. But the timing of the treaty and Battle of New Orleans is hardly so telling a metaphor for the war as people might think. The fact that such a major battle came after the conclusion of peace negotiations was not unique. The War of 1812 was like most wars before modern communications, when violent conflict continued long after a peace treaty or cease-fire was signed. So if this is not to be simply a story of miscommunication, we need to look at the War of 1812 differently. The experiences of Madison, Clay, Jackson, and Clark provide the means to do so. Clay was one of the negotiators at Ghent. He also had played a key role in the declaration of war, only to learn from personal experience that the federal structure itself made conducting war extraordinarily difficult. Meanwhile, Jackson, the hero of New Orleans, had achieved his fame only by capitalizing on the very ambiguities of federalism that would prove so frustrating to men like Clay.

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If Clay and Jackson could claim to have witnessed the end of the war, so, too, could Clark. In September 1815, Clark attended a gathering at Portage des Sioux. Located near the banks of the Mississippi near present-day St. Charles, Missouri, Portage des Sioux was transformed into a place of grand diplomacy, where an American delegation under Clark’s leadership met with some of the most powerful Indians of the trans-Mississippi West. Together, they negotiated a series of agreements no less important than the Treaty of Ghent. But Clark’s wartime experience was the product of the parallel system of federalism that operated in the Western territories, a system that may seem entirely alien to contemporary Americans but one that quite literally shaped the United States. In December 1815, James Madison attempted to put a positive gloss on the outcome of the War of 1812. The White House was still in ruins after Washington was burned by the British in 1814, and Madison was living at the nearby Octagon House. The invasion had been humiliating for Madison, just as the British intended it to be. Yet there were no signs of that in his annual message (the term used to describe what is now known as the State of the Union address). Instead, Madison claimed that “we can rejoice in the proofs given that our political institutions, founded in human rights and framed for their preservation, are equal to the severest trials of war as well as adapted to the ordinary periods of repose.”2 Presidents are apt to make lemonade out of lemons, but that was quite a stretch for Madison, who repeatedly throughout the war was forced to face the reality that the political institutions of the United States were, in fact, not equal to the severest trials of war. The four endings to the War of 1812 experienced by these four men—at Ghent, at New Orleans, at Portage des Sioux, and in Washington, D.C.— offer powerful lessons about the federal system, not as an abstract concept but as a lived reality. Clay, Jackson, Clark, and Madison are all familiar names, but how we think about the men changes when we situate them squarely within the context of federalism during the War of 1812. Madison ceases to be the master constitutionalist of the 1780s and becomes instead a president frustrated by what he perceived as the limitations of the federal system. Clay and Jackson cease to be dueling antagonists seeking to dominate the national politics of the antebellum era and instead become subordinates who shared a commitment to the war. Clark ceases to be the explorer in the far West that he is known as today and becomes instead a federal administrator based squarely in the Mississippi Valley. Finally, the South that produced all

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four men ceases to be the source of resistance to federal power that it would become only a few decades later and stands out instead as the root of some of the most powerful arguments for centralized authority in time of war. These four men also serve as stand-ins for the four institutions of federalism that would play such a profound role in the war. Within the central government in Washington, Madison led the executive branch while Clay sought to control Congress. Jackson’s participation in the war showed how the states could shape the U.S. Army. Finally, Clark’s Western territories constituted a vital component of the federal system. These men—and the institutions that they represented—shaped not only the failures but also the successes of the War of 1812. My point is not simply to say, “Look, the war really wasn’t a disaster.” It certainly was a disaster. Instead, by thinking broadly, by looking at successes as well as failures, by looking beyond both the U.S.-British conflict and the U.S.-Canadian borderlands, we can see the War of 1812 not just as a military conflict with Great Britain but also as one campaign in a protracted war among Americans about the very meaning of the republic. The war was not simply about federalism; it was fought with federalism. The federal structure provided the protagonists with the weapons to engage one another. Federalism also would often serve as a justification for battle that had less to do with grand questions of constitutionality than with local interests or long-standing partisan disputes. As Clay, Jackson, Clark, and Madison reached the end of the war, they certainly understood the conflict as a struggle about federalism, and they were not alone. Americans believed that launching the war exemplified the government’s capacity under the Constitution to generate resources, organize action, and achieve goals that the states could not. But this collided with the belief, often held by the same Americans, that war required them to call on the Constitution to restrain centralized power and adopt a more participatory, distributed decisionmaking process. These issues were at the heart of the American war effort. They emerged in a time very different from our own, but they remain with us to this day.

James Madison’s Executive When James Madison delivered his annual message at the end of the war, it had been almost four years since he decided to begin the war. In 1811, Madison concluded that a military campaign focusing on a quick invasion

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of Canada’s Maritime Provinces was the only way to coerce a change in British policy. In 1812, Madison converted that conclusion into a declaration of war. How the United States prosecuted the war would depend on what he could extract from the federal system. The Madison administration repeatedly turned to two tasks: mobilizing an army and a navy that could achieve the nation’s military objectives and finding the funds to pay for mobilization. Madison himself approached these tasks confidently, after a decade in which he had come to believe that an active executive branch with expansive fiscal and administrative resources was necessary to secure the nation’s vital interests. It was a system that Madison, more than anyone else, had created, but it was a system that he could not control. By the time that Madison made his comments on the end of the war in 1815, he had learned not only that he overestimated what the federal government could do but that he underestimated the numerous forms of political opposition that he would encounter. Operating within the ambiguous, elastic, highly contested definition of federalism that prevailed during the early republic, Madison himself remained constantly concerned with the notion of balance. His goal, to achieve the proper balance between political institutions and political interests, arose from his fear that a system that lost balance could lead either to the concentrated power of tyranny or the diffuse power of chaos. In the midst of this balancing act, Madison believed that the United States needed a central government that could meet specific responsibilities that exceeded the capacity of the individual states.3 Madison first expressed his concerns at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, where he had been among the loudest proponents of a more powerful central government. He was no advocate of unrestrained centralized power, but during the 1780s he, like many other Americans, had come to conclude that the Articles of Confederation distributed so many powers to the states and so often required unanimity to make decisions on public matters that it had become impossible to conduct an effective national policy. In the end, it was Madison who was forced to compromise on the question of state constitutional prerogatives. The compromises of the Constitutional Convention and Madison’s own struggle for balance were readily apparent in the way that the Constitution approached the twin tasks of declaring war and funding war. The consensus of many at the convention was that the limited powers granted to Congress under the Articles of Confederation prevented both a cohesive foreign policy

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and an effective fiscal policy. They saw those policies as joined, because among the principal functions of fiscal policy was to raise the revenue that funded military institutions, in times of peace as well as war. However, they feared that the power to raise revenue and the power to create an army made for a deadly combination, since it would give the government the right to tax the property of individual citizens and the power to enforce that right.4 The members of the convention therefore embedded in the Constitution provisions that would enable the central government to pursue the legitimate goals of warfare and to raise public funding while safeguarding against both dangerous excesses and dictatorial powers. First, the Constitution designated the executive, in the person of the president, as commander in chief of the U.S. military, but it reserved to Congress the right to declare war and also designated Congress, not the president, as the entity responsible for maintaining both the army and navy. Second, the Constitution created a variety of mechanisms for raising the federal revenue needed to engage in warfare. But once again, the powers were divided, with Congress possessing the power to initiate “All Bills for raising Revenue” and the executive controlling the agencies that would spend the revenue. Third, the Constitution gave Congress the power to “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” and extended the president’s role as commander in chief to “the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” However, militias were state military units. States had to voluntarily cede their control to the central government, and that process would become the subject of intense dispute during the War of 1812. As Americans debated ratification of the Constitution, they repeatedly returned to these issues. Advocates of the Constitution claimed that only a centralized government could provide for adequate military policy and that only a centralized fiscal administration could fund the military.5 Madison himself put the argument in stark terms in Federalist No. 41: [W]as it necessary to give an INDEFINITE POWER of raising TROOPS, as well as providing fleets; and of maintaining both in PEACE, as well as in war? The answer to these questions has been too far anticipated in another place to admit an extensive discussion of them in this place. The answer indeed seems to be so obvious and conclusive as scarcely to justify such a discussion in any place.

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In the same document, Madison celebrated the Constitution’s provisions for both generating public revenue and preventing the federal government from imposing onerous taxes.6 In 1789, Madison joined the first federal Congress as a representative from the Fifth District of Virginia, and he immediately took on the challenge of putting the provisions of the Constitution into practice. During Madison’s eight years in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Army was the single largest expense in a national budget that operated within specific fiscal boundaries. The principal source of federal revenue was the duty on foreign imports; the sale of federal lands, primarily in the West, came in a distant second, producing regular, albeit disappointing, supplemental funds. In sharp contrast to the federal government, most states funded their budgets through direct taxation of personal property. The assessed value of land, houses, other buildings, livestock, and slaves became the principal source of a state’s revenue. Neither states nor the federal government imposed what would now be considered an income tax, and only states imposed direct taxes on citizens.7 Despite Madison’s advocacy of a strong central government with powerful military and fiscal powers, he still feared a government that assumed too many powers for itself. Madison’s fear of excessive centralized power and his means to counter that danger were on display most clearly in 1798. With the United States and France on the brink of war as a result of various long-standing diplomatic disputes, the administration of John Adams had dispatched the fledgling U.S. Navy to sea and mobilized an enlarged federal army. Congress then passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized various forms of opposition to the federal government. In 1798, Madison collaborated with Thomas Jefferson on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which argued for powerful states’ rights within the federal system and strict construction of the Constitution. As Madison proclaimed in the Virginia Resolutions: This Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties; as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact; as no farther valid than they are authorised by the grants enumerated in that compact, and that in case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers

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not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them. Jefferson’s language in the Kentucky Resolutions was even stronger, declaring that states could nullify federal law that violated the Constitution.8 Madison and Jefferson believed that the Alien and Sedition Acts criminalized dissenting opinion and constituted the first step toward tyranny; under those circumstances, states were the only logical counterforce against a federal government that had exceeded its constitutional mandate. Madison and Jefferson claimed that a strict construction of the Constitution would bring the federal government back in line.9 The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were forceful arguments in favor of state power within the federal system, and they were eloquent statements on behalf of individual liberties. But they also exemplified the political realities of federalism that would loom large in the War of 1812. Madison opposed the Adams administration in partisan terms, and he opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts in philosophical terms. As he scrambled for a way to express his opposition, he found that federalism provided the ideal means to do so. Since he could not wield power in Congress (he had left office the previous year) or within the administration (his opposition made him a pariah among Adams and his advisers), Madison sought to mobilize the states in order to achieve specific political objectives. He was hardly the first to do so, and he would not be the last.10 Nowhere did the political dimensions of federalism become clearer than in the apparent about-face that Madison made in the years that followed. During his eight years as secretary of state during Jefferson’s two terms as president, from 1801 to 1809, Madison embraced an expansive vision of both the federal government in general and the executive branch in particular, not the restrictive vision articulated in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Madison and Jefferson together reaffirmed the federal government’s supremacy in foreign relations, Indian affairs, and general revenue collection. After initially reducing the military once the United States had settled its disputes with France, the Jefferson administration ordered its own forms of military expansion: deploying the navy from 1801 to 1805 in a futile attempt to defeat the Barbary Powers of North Africa; dispatching new army units to

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the West; and authorizing a substantial increase in the size of the army from 1807 to 1809, when war with Britain appeared likely, and later to support an embargo on foreign trade designed to coerce changes in British commercial policy. Likewise, Madison eagerly supported a massive increase in the federal government’s domestic responsibilities. The Louisiana Purchase, negotiated between the United States and France in 1803, doubled the territorial claims of the United States. All of that land fell under the territorial system, which reported to the State Department. Madison also took charge of constructing an enlarged civil administration and paramilitary constabulary. As secretary of state, Madison came to see both state and congressional intervention as a potential threat to the effective execution of national policy. During the debates over the Louisiana Purchase, he served as Jefferson’s constitutional adviser, dismissing Congress’s claims that negotiating a treaty increasing the national domain exceeded the executive’s constitutional mandate. During the embargo of 1807–09, he endorsed dispatching federal personnel to intercede on state territory, not just because he sought to enforce federal law but also because he doubted the capacity of state officials to govern their own territory. Finally, as a territorial administrator, Madison concluded that the federal regime had effectively converted the potential chaos of territorial expansion into an orderly process of new state creation.11 Throughout the Jefferson administration, the national budget seemed capable of meeting the demands created by a robust federal government with shifting responsibilities. The administration continued to use the old system of import duties and sale of Western lands to raise revenue. When the $15 million price tag of the Louisiana Purchase far exceeded federal resources, the administration negotiated a series of loans from foreign banks that it planned to pay back through the tried-and-true system of duties and land sales. Indeed, Madison’s experience as secretary of state seemed to prove that the federal government in general—and the executive branch in particular—could expand its policymaking capacity without exceeding its constitutional mandate. Madison also believed that it could also do so without breaking the bank. In other words, Madison concluded that the federal system provided a robust structure for policymaking. He carried that outlook with him into the presidency but almost immediately found his beliefs upended by the War of 1812. In November 1811, in his third annual message as president, Madison proclaimed:

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With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no Independent Nation can relinquish; Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armour, and an attitude demanded by the crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.12 That “armour” was supposed to consist of a combination of existing army regiments, thousands of new federal volunteers, and state militias placed on wartime duty. By the time that Madison requested a declaration of war in June 1812, it was already clear that the effort to mobilize troops exceeded the administrative capacities of the federal government. Madison decided to mobilize the U.S. Navy, which he hoped would initiate military operations while the army completed its preparations and before the British dispatched adequate naval forces either to destroy the American fleet or to keep it blockaded in harbor. But sending the fleet to sea placed further strains on federal revenue.13 These initial challenges marked the beginning of a long and arduous process that demonstrated not only the political impediments to the nation’s military operations but also the profound administrative limitations of the pre-modern state. Madison responded in various ways throughout the war. He fired both the secretary of war and the secretary of the navy in the winter of 1812–13 but was immediately disappointed when their successors could do little more to change the military trajectory of the war. He shuffled the army’s commanders in the field, also with little more success. Meanwhile, the war’s price tag continued to increase. With the British blockade eliminating the largest single source of federal revenue—import duties—and Western land sales remaining a small revenue producer, the administration took drastic measures. The federal government did what it had done before: it used debt funding with a long-term repayment plan to cover short-term necessities. In 1812, Congress released $5 million in Treasury notes; the following year, expenses ballooned and Congress authorized a total of $23.5 million in new debt. More dramatically, Congress authorized a direct tax to raise $3 million. Tax quotas were apportioned to individual states by population, but it was still a bitter pill to swallow, and state governments—even those that had supported the war—balked at raising the funds. The task then fell to hundreds of federal tax collectors. With the federal government inexperienced at collecting taxes and lacking support from local officials, funds from the direct tax trickled into Washington, the

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amount of money vastly exceeded by the ill will that it generated throughout the nation.14 New debt continued to accumulate throughout the war. Thomas Jefferson, who doggedly supported Madison even at the worst moments of the war, dispatched a letter to “sincerely congratulate you on the success of the loan.” Jefferson himself had long opposed a federal policy that rested on a permanent, revolving debt, but he shared Madison’s belief that debt was a vital instrument of policy to fund short-term or emergency requirements.15 All of that was little consolation for James Madison. When the war ended, Madison entered his last two years in office saddled with debt to cover the costs of a military that been unable to secure victory against the British on land or sea. The federal government’s administrative, military, and fiscal capacity, which had been so adequate in the two decades before the War of 1812, had clearly demonstrated its limits.

Henry Clay’s Congress How had a federal system that seemed sufficiently flexible to meet a diverse set of demands suddenly prove so incapable of meeting the demands of war? Madison began the war with deep experience as both a broad-thinking student of government and a detail-oriented administrator. For all his planning, for all his attempts to reshuffle the nation’s political and military leadership, for all his effort to think his way out of the problem, the constitutional structure that Madison had helped to create worked against him during the war. The problem was, in part, institutional. The U.S. military lacked the leadership, personnel, equipment, and administrative system to successfully prosecute a war across the U.S.-Canadian border. Madison himself focused on the institutional problems, and they help explain his focus on changing Cabinet members or generals, convinced that better leadership would make better use of existing resources. But the problem was as much constitutional as institutional. Madison had hoped to supervise a coordinated, focused strategy, with his Cabinet serving as principal architect of the military strategy and the economic system that would fund it; however, the federal system that Madison had created did not permit him to do so. Madison was forced to contend with both Congress and state governments that brought their own vision of federalism to the novel task of declaring and waging war. Within the federal system, Congress

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was part of the central government, but members of the House and Senate represented state interests, and they saw themselves as the voice of the states within the central government. It was in that context that Henry Clay would become one of Madison’s principal allies in Congress. Clay felt the squeeze personally, at one moment seeing himself as a partner in the administration’s efforts to develop the policymaking tools provided to the executive branch by the Constitution, at another celebrating the Constitution’s capacity to preserve the power of Congress and the states to question the actions of the executive branch. Clay had arrived in the House of Representatives from Kentucky only a few months before the United States declared war, but he had done so in grand fashion. Clay won election to Congress in 1811 and was chosen Speaker of the House on his first day in office. A deeply ambitious man in his own right, Clay was nonetheless a loyal Republican who, most important, shared the president’s attitude toward Great Britain.16 Clay also believed in a system founded on powerful government institutions, which he first sought to impose as a lawyer in Kentucky and which he intended to continue to work for at the federal level.17 At first glance, Clay appears the archetypal War Hawk, and historians have long described him that way. The War Hawk theory has maintained that a cohort in Congress, much of it Southern and/or Western, forced a war on the United States, motivated more by a bruised sense of national honor than by any realistic security concerns. That remains a popular interpretation because it is so appealing in its simple explanation of the war’s outcome: the War of 1812 was a mistake from the start, created by passion and pique rather than rational decisionmaking. Yet the War Hawk theory does not withstand close scrutiny. Many of the War Hawks were strong allies of the administration, and men like Clay were following the administration’s lead, whipping up support in Congress during an age when the executive branch rarely interfered with the legislature.18 For all its flaws, the theory provides a revealing example of the intersection of federalism and warmaking. The president might be commander in chief, but he remained dependent on Congress and the states to mobilize for war. On June 18, Clay proudly informed Jesse Bledsoe, Kentucky’s secretary of state, that “We Shall have War. . . . England has a running account with us, which with each passing moment swells with the most enormous items. . . . Let us give, in return for the insolence of British Cannon, the peals of

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American thunder.” An extract of the letter was published in a Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper, no doubt as Clay intended; he hoped to contribute to a public consensus in support of war that would reverberate throughout both state legislatures and Congress.19 In his effort to build support for the declaration of war, Clay deployed all the acumen that would make him a master of congressional politics. What he faced instead was a Congress that seemed hesitant to follow either his lead or Madison’s, a fact that was all the more remarkable because the Republicans enjoyed clear majorities in the House and the Senate. Part of the problem was Madison’s own political weakness. Unlike Jefferson, who had established himself as the unquestioned leader of the ­Republicans, Madison had struggled just to secure the nomination in 1808, and he had faced strong opposition within his own party in the years that followed.20 But something else was at work. Madison had inherited a congressional perspective—both constitutional and political—on federalism that he himself had helped to create in the 1790s. And just as Madison had done in the 1790s, the Federalists deployed federalism as a partisan tool throughout both the Jefferson and Madison administrations. The powers reserved to Congress by the Constitution provided the means for Federalists to express their opposition in the House and Senate. More striking was the way that the Republicans questioned the Jefferson and Madison administrations. They did so repeatedly, often in private correspondence with the president and occasionally in public statements in the House or Senate chamber. And in every case, their rationale was the same. It was the function of Congress within the federal system to question the administration’s foreign policy, especially on a matter as serious as war.21 Members of Congress often articulated their opposition not simply because it was the legislature’s responsibility to question the executive but also because they represented the interests of their home states. Once again, Madison himself had helped fuel this reaction, with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions standing as examples of how state governments interceded in foreign affairs by invoking constitutional principle. In this era, state legislatures still selected U.S. senators, and Northeastern state legislatures instructed their senators to oppose the administration’s plans. It was, in part, a partisan response. New England was not only a potential site of war but also the last significant holdout of the Federalist Party. Federalists opposed the declaration of war on ideological grounds, but they also

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recognized that a military disaster for the administration might well serve as a quixotic attempt to resuscitate the party’s fading electoral fortunes. But much like the challenges that Clay faced in Congress, the state-based opposition to the war, launched most effectively in New England, was an institutional battle within federalism. If Madison was frustrated by congressional inaction and state resistance to the wartime actions that he considered necessary and proper, members of Congress and state leaders were no less frustrated by executive action, which they deemed diplomatically unnecessary and constitutionally improper. It was a combination of constitutional and political concerns that led the New England Federalists to take more dramatic action in 1814. Meeting in Hartford, a cohort of Federalists from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont gathered to condemn the administration’s actions. The Hartford Convention, as the gathering became known, produced a report demanding a series of dramatic constitutional reforms, including a one-term limit for all presidents (the Constitution placed no limits on the office), a sixty-day limit on all embargoes (the Constitution said nothing about embargoes), the requirement of a two-thirds majority in Congress for a declaration of war (the Constitution implicitly required only a simple majority), the requirement that each president come from a state that was different from the state that his predecessor came from (the Constitution placed no such restriction), and the elimination of the three-fifths clause, which counted slaves toward apportionment for representation in both Congress and the Electoral College. All of the measures sought to roll back the Republican majority and the succession of presidents from Virginia. More important, however, was that the Hartford Convention constituted the latest in a series of events in which states, either individually or in groups, sought to reestablish what they considered the proper balance within federalism. The timing of the Harford Convention was, as so often was the case in the War of 1812, almost comically late. The meetings, which began on December 15, 1814, appeared all the more ridiculous since they occurred after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Ghent. More important than the timing, however, were the implications. Critics throughout the United States concluded that the convention must be a first step toward regional secession by New England. They were wrong in their conclusion, but it was an easy conclusion to reach. The fear of secession was inseparable from the goal of unity. After

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all, the Constitution itself had come into being in no small part because of the belief that the Articles of Confederation would lead to national disunion. Advocates of the Constitution—Madison included—played on those fears, proclaiming that failure to ratify the Constitution would guarantee disunion. In the years that followed, just about every domestic or international crisis led people to believe that one portion of the country or another might split away. Jefferson and Madison had raised the specter of Southern separatism in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Western settlers had repeatedly threatened to separate when they concluded that either the state or federal governments failed to meet pressing regional interests. New England was only the latest region to generate fears that domestic turmoil could lead to national disunion.22 By then, Henry Clay was gone. In 1814, Madison dispatched him to Ghent as part of the American team negotiating an end to the war. Clay returned from Europe in 1815 and immediately won reelection to the congressional seat that he had vacated barely a year before. When he ran for reelection in 1816, he gave a campaign speech defending the war and sneering at the New England Federalists who opposed it. “Ask the Hartford Convention—ask those, who denied us the means of prosecuting it, who braced every nerve to thwart and weaken the measures of government. . . . Had New England been as patriotic as Kentucky . . . Canada would now be ours.”23 Clay soon advocated a broad system of federal support for economic development, the so-called “American System.” It reflected one important lesson of the war: that the federal system was incapable of securing its goals without institutional development. But the American System also reflected another lesson, which Clay had failed to learn: critics immediately decried the system as an unconstitutional extension of federal power, and others condemned its hefty price tag. The American System died a quick death.24 In the decades following the War of 1812, both Congress and the states made claims that their function was to check inappropriate actions by the executive or even by each other. During the antebellum era, it would become the Southern states that, building on models created first by disgruntled Westerners and later New Englanders at the Hartford Convention, floated the threat of disunion. And unlike during the War of 1812, when Congress and the states both demonstrated opposition to the Madison administration, in the years that followed the states and Congress were increasingly at odds with each other.25

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Throughout the war, state leaders and members of Congress sought to impose what they considered the appropriate boundaries of the federal system. By and large, they were successful at establishing a far greater role for themselves in war making than the executive wanted. This is a simple fact, but because the War of 1812 is usually considered a story of failure rather than success, it is easy to overlook. Opponents to the administration’s war strategy had established a set of clear objectives, defended them effectively, and articulated them both within their states and through their representatives in Congress. The problem from a contemporary perspective is that the successful assertion of state power within the federal system came at the direct expense of the federal war effort. In other words, states’ rights undermined national security and cost Americans their lives. The great challenge is to interpret these events in another way, to see their actions as legitimate expressions of political dissent within a federal system that was specifically designed to provide the means to express that dissent.

Andrew Jackson’s States By the time that Andrew Jackson declared victory in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, he had been at war for almost two years—but for half of that time he was not serving in the U.S. Army. Jackson was a general in the Tennessee militia, and yet he took troops far and wide throughout what was then the Southwest, never actually fighting a battle in Tennessee. Jackson could have secured a general’s commission in the U.S. Army in 1813. That he did not seek one was no great act of modesty—and not just because Jackson rarely demonstrated modesty about anything. Instead, in making that simple decision, Jackson represented not only the structural problems within the U.S. military but also the fundamental tension between state and nation. Both the Constitution as written in 1787 and federalism as practiced in the subsequent quarter-century made army mobilization and coordination extraordinarily difficult during the War of 1812. States had effectively expressed their concerns politically through their representatives in Congress. States would also play a profound role in the military leadership of the war, once again in ways that would upset the Madison administration’s grand plans for war. As the hero of New Orleans, Jackson had come a long way from his humble beginnings, but he emerged as a political force of nature long before the war. He had helped write Tennessee’s constitution in 1796, before serving in

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Congress as both representative and senator. After a year in each house, he returned to Tennessee for a six-year term on the state’s Supreme Court. He then focused his energies on building his legal practice and his plantation. An unapologetic slaveholder, he had become fabulously wealthy by 1812. His rise from obscurity rivaled that of Henry Clay, a fellow slaveholder from the West whom Jackson immediately identified as a rival in the tight competition among men who sought to inherit national leadership from aging founding fathers like James Madison. Along the way, Jackson had become a general in the Tennessee militia, but that title hardly made him an experienced military leader. States like Tennessee maintained militias for various purposes. All states maintained militias for the social purposes of providing men with the opportunity to acquire public titles and distinction and to enjoy the status that came with those titles—in this case, military rank within the militia. Some states maintained militias for the purpose of racial control, whether they were Southern states, which saw militias as the primary safeguard against slave revolt, or Western states, in which militias served to threaten or punish Indians who refused to relinquish their sovereignty to either the states or the federal government. But no state government or state population took seriously the notion that their militias might be mobilized for warfare. One thing is certain: the militias that they maintained certainly were not ready for war in 1812.26 Nonetheless, the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, relying on a military structure that in turn relied on state militias. As Jackson explained things to his own Tennessee volunteers, referring to himself in the third person, “The State to which he [Jackson] belongs is now to act a part in the honorable contest of securing the rights and liberties of a great and rising Republic.”27 Jackson, like many other Americans, celebrated the way that state identities could contribute to national objectives. Militias were supposed to exemplify a system through which states both supported the central government and kept it in check. Militias enabled states to defend themselves but also contributed to the national defense. It was with this vision of federalism as a happy family that Jackson marched into battle on January 8, 1815, dealing the British a devastating loss at the Battle of New Orleans. But victories like that had been few and far between. Instead, the system that people celebrated at New Orleans had been more apt to undermine wartime strategy than to promote it. Throughout the war, the Constitution that was supposed to “provide for the common defense”

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was often at odds with the Constitution that conferred important military powers on the states. Contrary to common misconception, Americans did not oppose a standing military in the wake of the American Revolution, just a large, costly one or one that might threaten the liberties of white citizens. Americans believed that they could beat ploughshares into swords, translating skills from civilian life into military leadership. They assumed that at moments of national crisis, the United States could expand its core military units, create new ones, and supplement them with the citizen-­soldiers serving in the state militias. Since 1783, when Britain acknowledged American independence and the Revolutionary War came to an end, the United States had maintained a small army that underwent periodic mobilization and demobilization in response to specific diplomatic and military needs. The navy, which had been eliminated after the Revolution, was reconstituted in 1794; it also underwent intermittent periods of growth and reduction. Nonetheless, in both branches of the military the members of the officer corps quickly came to identify themselves in federal terms. It was not simply that they owed their paycheck to the United States or that they would loyally serve the federal government. It was that they had come to identify with the federal government and with the nation as a whole, rather than with the states in which they had been born or their state governments.28 Americans supported the existing system in large part because the military did not appear to threaten individual liberties, a fear that Americans had felt very deeply since the British imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, when British officials had either threatened to use or used military force to squash dissent in their American colonies. After independence, Americans struggled to create a military structure that could meet the nation’s security needs without threatening or offending white citizens. Not only were the army and navy small, but they were quite literally invisible, removed from the cities, towns, and rural countryside near the Eastern seaboard where most U.S. citizens lived. In particular, Americans supported the use of the navy to protect American merchantmen on the high seas and the army to safeguard the nation’s western borders. The navy might build and supply its vessels in the harbors of major cities and the army might recruit men in those same cities, but active military units were usually either at sea or in the West.29 As Americans soon learned, the system for wartime mobilization, which seemed great in theory, was unworkable in practice. The Northeastern states

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simply refused to mobilize their militias, let alone federalize them and make them subordinate to the army’s command. Other states that were more sympathetic to the administration were unable to get their citizens to mobilize for militia duty. The Tennessee militiamen that Andrew Jackson commanded were highly unusual in that they were willing to serve, but Jackson’s own demand for strategic independence from Washington was typical of the autonomy that states claimed for themselves. When Andrew Jackson joined the U.S. Army in 1814, he did so on his own terms. Frustrated with the existing military leadership, Madison was eager to bring Jackson into the federal fold. Aware of Jackson’s ego, Secretary of War John Armstrong respectfully wrote, “I cannot but hope that [the terms of your commission] will be acceptable & accepted and that it will not be inconvenient for you to assume this new command without loss of time.”30 Jackson accepted a commission as major general, the highest rank in the U.S. Army at the time, which gave him new authority as he led his troops through the Deep South in pursuit of both Indians and the massive force that Britain had dispatched to invade the lower Mississippi Valley. Jackson arrived in New Orleans just as the Hartford Convention finished its work. He confidently asserted unified command over federal troops, Louisiana militiamen, and his Tennessee volunteers. Despite his limited military experience, Jackson demonstrated a knack for strategic thinking. Few others were so talented. Worse still, relying on politicians-turned-generals like Jackson to serve alongside the existing U.S. Army leadership pitted the army’s federally oriented careerists against neophytes like Jackson, who arrived with both limited military experience and deep state loyalties. The Madison administration believed that awarding highranking commissions to leading state politicians might shore up support for the war at the state level. But men who had made their careers in the military were quick to criticize a system that put less experienced men in command while also creating impediments to their own advancement.31 In the end, the professionals claimed to have carried the day. Long-serving officers in the U.S. Navy commanded ships that scored a series of spectacular victories against the Royal Navy. After the chaotic and disastrous army campaigns of 1812, a group of young generals—Edmund Pendleton Gaines, Zebulon Pike, Winfield Scott—emerged from the army officer corps late in the War of 1812 to win the victories that the aging veterans of the Revolution and the politicians had been unable to achieve.32

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And yet Jackson overshadowed them all, in large part because Americans were eager to let the victory at New Orleans become the signature moment of the war. The story of the Battle of New Orleans that the American public chose to believe actually helped to sustain a notion of the military that conformed perfectly with Americans’ notion of federalism. In this story, militiamen from Tennessee and Louisiana had heard the call to arms, supporting the federal troops in New Orleans just as states were supposed to support the federal system. Using the battle as a metaphor for federalism was attractive for many reasons, not least of which was that it provided a way for Americans to celebrate their own system of government. Unfortunately, the more perfect union of the state and national military powers that they celebrated bore little relationship to the military reality in the War of 1812.33

William Clark’s Territories William Clark shared Andrew Jackson’s outlook, if not his style. Where Jackson was passionate, mercurial, and quick to demonize those who stood in the way of his pursuit of electoral victory, the reserved and predictable Clark, in a public career that lasted close to forty years, never held elected office. Yet Clark, like Jackson, believed that there was more at stake in the War of 1812 than either the conflict with Britain or the strategy on the U.S.-Canadian border that was supposed to bring about an American victory in that conflict. Instead, Clark situated the War of 1812 within a continental struggle for power that placed the federal government squarely at the center, without a single state government in sight. And that war extended far beyond the U.S.Canadian border, to include both regions where the Madison administration had never intended to fight and enemies that the Madison administration had never considered. Clark is now known best as the co-captain, with Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06). But that was only a brief excursion within a much longer career that was shaped by the realities of the federal struggle on the territorial frontier. During the 1790s, Clark had served as an officer in the U.S. Army (a federal institution created by the U.S. Constitution) as it sought to impose sovereignty in the Northwest Territory (federal land supervised by federal officials). In 1807, immediately after the Lewis and Clark Expedition, he returned to the West to serve as the principal Indian agent for the Louisiana Territory, a vast swath of land including everything

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that the United States had acquired through the Louisiana Purchase with the exception of what is now the state of Louisiana. When the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, the borderlands from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River were already in the middle of an ongoing struggle for control that had been under way for decades, pitting Indians against white settlers and the governments that supported them. Clark was one of several Western officials who immediately recognized that the war with Great Britain would inevitably become a broader conflict. Indians had been vital allies of one side or another in every European and European-American military conflict in North America, but by the 1810s they were looking for allies in their struggle with the United States. Most important, various Indian nations under the nominal leadership of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, Shawnee brothers, had formed a powerful confederacy that sought to restore Indian power throughout the trans-­Appalachian and trans-Mississippi West.34 Americans—policymakers and Western settlers alike—had long considered a pan-Indian revival to be one of the greatest threats facing the United States. Andrew Jackson certainly thought it was. When he went to war in 1812, it was not against the British but against the Creek Indians. A new cadre of chiefs among the Creeks had used force to resist white settlers’ encroachment on their land and then raised the ante by initiating negotiations with Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. It was the Indian threat, not the British threat, that motivated Jackson’s Tennessee volunteers to fight. Since the American Revolution, Western settlers had interpreted first American independence and later federalism as a guarantee of access to land, and they signed up by the thousands to serve under Jackson because they knew that he shared their outlook. Unlike the federal and militia forces in the North, which often broke at the sight of Indians, Jackson’s volunteers crushed the Creeks.35 The war against Indians was hardly limited to the jurisdictions of Jackson and Clark. Indians became vital allies of the British on the Great Lakes, and their mere presence was often sufficiently terrifying to send American troops running.36 But the war in the South and the West was different. It occurred as part of the War of 1812, and it certainly was understood as such by the federal leadership, but it spilled over into other areas that had nothing to do with the conflict between the United States and Great Britain. For example, when the Creeks sought refuge in the Spanish garrison town of Pensacola, Jackson demanded their eviction. When the Spanish governor

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refused, Jackson raided Pensacola, attacking the Creeks and destroying the Spanish outpost along the way. Moreover, Jackson’s victory in Pensacola was only the latest in a series of military ventures into the Gulf Coast during the War of 1812. By the time that the war ended, the United States had erased the last vestiges of Spanish power, securing a territorial claim that had eluded the federal government for two decades.37 Clark always understood the War of 1812 and the struggle between Indians and the United States as inseparable conflicts. As he informed Secretary of War John Armstrong in 1814, “[the British are] at this time raising a large Indian force. . . . I am not easily led into the belief of idle reports, but when the authority is respectable and from different sources; I feel myself Compelled to take Notice of them, And prepare to flusterate [frustrate] the hostile plans of the enemy.”38 Clark’s strategy throughout the war was to reinforce existing alliances with some Indians, threaten others, and launch limited military actions against the few Indians who directly threatened white settlers. In 1813 Madison rewarded Clark for his efforts by appointing him governor of the Missouri Territory, while preserving both his command of the militia and his post as Indian agent. Like all territorial governors, Clark complained about a militia that seemed inadequate to the task at hand. Yet in sharp contrast to militias in the Northeast, the Missouri militia, like the Tennessee volunteers, did mobilize. Most important, Clark unquestioningly ordered the militia to follow mandates from Washington. The reasons are simple, and they reside less in Clark’s politics or his personality than in the structure that he served. The war in the West and the war in the East were fought within entirely different constitutional structures. William Clark was, first and foremost, a federal appointee. He owed his career, his income, and his status to the administration’s largesse. Within the complex federalism of the early republic, the territorial government that he supervised was an extension of the government in Washington. Clark took his orders directly from the president, the secretary of state (who supervised the territorial governors), and the secretary of war (who supervised the Indian agents and commanders of the territorial militias). Neither Clark nor the territory in which he served was unique. Between 1787 and 1812, the United States created seven territories, all governed under the federal system, vastly extending both the geographic reach and the institutional power of the central government in Washington. After the army and the navy, they were also the greatest expense in the federal budget. However,

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that does not mean that the territorial frontier was a model of military effectiveness or leadership. Far from it. The Madison administration encountered numerous problems in trying to launch military campaigns from both the Indiana and the Michigan territories. Nonetheless, the territorial frontier remains remarkable as the only theater of war in which the United States enjoyed consistent military success, public support, and institutional collaboration. Those successes occurred because of, rather than despite, the fact that the war in the territories was fought far beyond the area where the administration hoped to contain it, against enemies that the administration had not even considered. The war that Americans fought against Indians, Spaniards, and slaves proved successful specifically because white residents considered those groups to be enemies. But the war also succeeded because of the peculiar federalism of the territorial system, one that eliminated so many of the political and institutional impediments facing the administration in launching the war from existing states. The War of 1812 was also a war that the United States could not easily conclude. When British and American negotiators signed the Treaty of Ghent, Indians were outraged, declaring that they were not bound by an agreement from which they had been excluded. Besides, they had long-standing grievances against each other and against the United States. In the spring of 1815, some Americans predicted the trans-Mississippi West would explode in renewed violence. What Americans did not understand was that the panIndian revival was falling apart. With the Indian nations suffering from a generation of conflicts with each other and conflicts with white settlers and the federal government, many Indians were eager for a resolution. Indians also knew that peace between the United States and Great Britain eliminated their ability to exploit white tensions to achieve their own goals. Those concerns brought representatives of various Indian nations to Portage des Sioux, where they met with an American delegation under Clark’s leadership. The negotiations at Portage des Sioux in September 1815 brought an end to the violence unleashed by the War of 1812. The gathering was also one of the last times that Indians negotiated en masse from a position of strength. Clark was already hard at work with the Madison administration to devise a system of subordinating Indian power to federal authority and removing Indians from the lands most coveted by white settlers.39 Clark might have been on the geographical periphery, but his experience was hardly peripheral to the war or to federalism. The absence of states proved vital to the

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war’s limited successes, just as the presence of states had played such a big role in its failures.

Federalism’s Future When the War of 1812 came to an end, Madison and Clay’s vision of the war was very different from that of Jackson and Clark. For Madison and Clay, the war had been a rude awakening suggesting that federalism limited the government’s capacity to achieve its goals. For Jackson and Clark, federalism had produced resounding victories, both personal and national. As all four men carried their experiences with them, the War of 1812 would continue to shape their public careers and their private lives. In much the same way, the end of the war provided a clear view of federalism’s future in the years that followed. Madison and Clay both had tried to ride herd on the competing interests within the central government as well as between the central government and the states, often with limited success. That remained the case after the war. Madison struggled to secure the policies that he wanted from Congress and the states, despite the fact that the Federalist Party had collapsed. Clay proved far more adept at political maneuvering, but he would spend the rest of his career stitching together compromises to preserve the union in the face of the mounting tension over slavery that divided North and South. Jackson and Clark had very different experiences. As president from 1829 to 1837, Jackson asserted an authority over both Congress and the states that Madison had never achieved and that Clay, his principal political rival during that era, could only observe with jealous frustration. Clark continued to serve as governor of the Missouri territory until it was granted statehood in 1821, and he remained an Indian agent and one of the leading public officials in the West until his death in 1838. The territorial system in which he had served would remain among the most important aspects of American federalism throughout the nineteenth century, orchestrating the incorporation of new territory in preparation for statehood. By the time that Alaska and Hawaii entered the union in 1959, the majority of the states—thirty-two in all—had undergone territorial governance. The system had enabled federalism to expand in an orderly manner. The four conclusions to the war—Clay’s participation at Ghent, Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, Clark’s negotiations at Portage des Sioux, and Madison’s annual message of 1815—encapsulated the mix of successes and failures

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in the War of 1812. The end of the war is usually described as a return to the status quo. In military and diplomatic terms, that is a questionable description. The Treaty of Ghent acknowledged the strategic reality that Britain had preserved its hold on Canada but in numerous other ways, diplomatic and military relations at war’s end were profoundly different. The French Revolution had unleashed a series of wars that had consumed European affairs for more than twenty years. Those wars had become global in scale, and among their effects would be some of the British commercial and military policies that led the United States to declare war in 1812. With the final collapse of the Napoleonic regime in 1815 and, perhaps more important, with the wars of the French Revolution finally over, Britain could eliminate both the discriminatory trade policies and the impressment that had been the principal reasons that the United States declared war in 1812. A transformation in Anglo-American relations was soon under way, finally ending a generation of antagonism that had begun with the American Revolution. Many Americans treated the Battle of New Orleans as a victory in what they called “the second American Revolution,” but in the future the United States and Britain would find diplomatic means to solve their disputes. American victories against Indians during the War of 1812 would likewise transform the balance of power in the trans-Missisippi West. Although the war’s military outcome had not preserved the status quo, American federalism remained much as it had been in 1812. That may go a long way toward explaining Madison’s claim in December 1815 that “our political institutions, founded in human rights and framed for their preservation, are equal to the severest trials of war.” The union had indeed survived. That was no small affair, because Americans had long worried that the stresses of war could rip the union apart or crush the liberties of republican government. Equally important, the structures of federalism—and even the relationship between federalism and warfare—were not that different from what had been in place before the war. Both branches of the military sought institutional reforms, achieving varying degrees of success, but the way that the United States went about waging war did not change. Americans remained committed to the notion of preserving a small peacetime army under direct control of the central government, a force that could be expanded in time of war with militia and volunteer forces that states mobilized at their own discretion. The federal government also continued to fund its army with import duties and Western land sales.

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In fact, for all of Madison’s and Clay’s frustrations during the war, the federal system had done what it was designed to do. It had provided the means for the various constituencies within the federal system—the executive, Congress, and the states—to participate in the process. That arrangement stood in marked contrast to other systems of government in the Western hemisphere and on the other side of the Atlantic. Most governments—whether long-standing European empires that predated the United States or the new independent polities of Latin America that declared independence soon after the War of 1812—were far more centralized than that of the United States, especially on matters of military planning. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, it was easy to cast state and congressional leaders as villains. On one hand, the War Hawk theory painted them as warmongers. On the other, opponents of the war appeared callous in their willingness to endanger national war aims and the lives of American soldiers in the pursuit of regional or partisan gain. And yet those critics of the war were fulfilling exactly the role that federalism expected of them, and they had legitimate reasons to be dubious of Madison’s plan for war in 1812 and his prosecution of the war in the years that followed. Madison and his allies among the Republicans had been monumentally foolish in launching the War of 1812, overestimating their ability to wage war, ignoring signs of British willingness to compromise, and misreading the impact of the European wars on British-American relations. A crucial function of the Constitution— something that Madison himself had celebrated—was to create a federal system in which various political institutions could challenge both the executive and the reigning political party. The next time that the United States declared war—against Mexico, in 1846—the military structure was very much the same as it had been in 1812, mirroring the federal system in its distribution of powers between the central government and the states. It quite literally took the collapse of the federal system to bring about a change in the way that war was waged. Southern secession in 1861 stands as the one moment when the federal system was unable to preserve itself as a peaceful union between the states and the central government. Nonetheless, during the Civil War the federal government developed both a financial system and a centralized administrative structure that could sustain a vast military structure through four long years of combat.40 By then, all four men were dead. But the Civil War looms so large in national consciousness that it threatens to overshadow the very different

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148   /   Peter J. Kastor

debates about federalism that preceded it. Consider the fact that Madison, Clay, and Clark were all staunch nationalists. Even Jackson, who sought to dismantle certain powers of the central government, rejected state efforts to challenge his authority as president to dictate the shape of federalism. Most important, all four were absolutely committed to the preservation of the union. Yet all four men were Southerners (Madison and Clark from Virginia, Clay from Kentucky, and Jackson from Tennessee), a simple fact that helps keep the War of 1812 in its proper historical context. The conclusion of the War of 1812 also helped mark the conclusion of the early American republic, in which Southerners had been the leading lights in forging the terms of federalism. The greatest threats that many Americans perceived at the time were the tensions between the original thirteen states in the East and newer states taking form in the West and the dangers presented by foreign powers like Great Britain. However, no sooner did the War of 1812 come to an end than a very different set of fissures emerged within the federal system that would redefine not only Southerners but all Americans. Yet the questions that the War of 1812 gave rise to remain remarkably familiar. How does the federal government organize and fund a military adequate to its security needs? How does the president secure necessary resources within the complexities of the American political system? How do members of Congress and state governments balance their duty to perform due diligence with the threat of being accused of undermining national policy? Those questions were certainly in play when the United States declared war again: in 1846 (against Mexico), 1898 (against Spain), 1917 (against the Central Powers in World War I), and finally in 1941 (against the Axis Powers in World War II). In every case, Madison’s successors in the presidency struggled to build both the institutional capacity to wage war and the fiscal capacity to pay for it. The federal system guaranteed that they were forced to rely on—and often contend with—congressional leaders who, like Henry Clay, responded to multiple pressures. Those questions were all on the table in 1815 as Americans sought to make sense of the War of 1812. They hardly reached consensus on the answers, except in one respect. Just as James Madison had done in his annual message of 1815, Americans would turn the War of 1812 into a celebration of the federal system itself. Certainly there were other heroes, first among them Andrew Jackson. But federalism itself became a hero of the war. And that seems only fitting. Because the War of 1812 is characterized

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by irony—victorious battles fought and separatist conventions held after the peace treaty was signed, peace negotiations conducted on the banks of the Mississippi in a war that was supposed to be fought in eastern Canada, a president whose wartime strategy was undone in part by the constitutional order that he had helped to create—it makes sense that a system of federalism that seemed so ill-equipped for the successful prosecution of war would emerge both vindicated and celebrated by the conflict.

Notes 1. The scholarship on federalism in the early American republic is both deep and rich. For examples of works suggesting the complex meaning of the concept, see Curtis Bradley, “The Treaty Power and American Federalism,” Michigan Law Review 97 (1998), pp. 390-461; Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Paul Finkleman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (University of North Carolina Press, 1981); David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (University Press of Kansas, 2003); William T. Hutchinson, “Unite to Divide; Divide to Unite: The Shaping of American Federalism,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 66 (1959), pp. 3–18; Alison L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press); Cornelis A. van Minnen, Sylvia L. Hilton, and Colin Bonwick, Federalism, Citizenship, and Collective Identities in U.S. History (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000); Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 53–107. 2. James Madison, “Seventh Annual Message, 5 December 1815,” in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 8, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900–1910), p. 343. 3. Like federalism itself, Madison’s constitutional vision has been the subject of numerous books and articles. See, for example, Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Cornell University Press, 1995); Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jack N. Rakove, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Higher Education, 1990); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969). 4. Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. Ibid. 6. Federalist No. 41, in The Federalist, 1st ed., edited by Jacob Ernest Cooke (Wesleyan University Press, 1961). 7. Robert A. Becker, Revolution, Reform, and the Politics of American Taxation, 1763– 1783 (Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Max M. Edling, “‘So Immense a Power in the Affairs of War’: Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit,” William

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150   /   Peter J. Kastor and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2007), pp. 287–326; Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Dall W. Forsythe, Taxation and Political Change in the Young Nation, 1781–1833 (Columbia University Press, 1977); H. James Henderson, “Taxation and Political Culture: Massachusetts and Virginia, 1760– 1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1990), pp. 90–114; Donald Stabile, The Origins of American Public Finance: Debates over Money, Debt, and Taxes in the Constitutional Era, 1776–1836 (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1998). 8. “Virginia Resolutions, 21 December 1798,” in The Papers of James Madison: Congressional Series, vol. 17, edited by William T. Hutchison and others (University Press of Virginia and the University of Chicago Press, 1962–91), p. 189. 9. Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty, pp. 387–94; Douglas Bradburn, “A Clamor in the Public Mind: Opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2008), pp. 569–600. 10. David Brian Robertson, Federalism and the Making of America (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 19–54. 11. Theodore J. Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809 (New York University Press, 1987); Peter J. Kastor, The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation (Washington: CQ Press, 2002), pp. 111–36; Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (University Press of Virginia, 1979); Reginald C. Stuart, “Special Interests and National Authority in Foreign Policy: American-British Provincial Links during the Embargo and the War of 1812,” Diplomatic History 8 (1984), pp. 311–28. 12. Madison, “Third Annual Message, 5 November 1811,” The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, vol. 4, edited by J. C. A. Stagg and others (University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 3. 13. Peter J. Kastor, “Toward ‘The Maritime War Only’: The Question of Naval Mobilization, 1811–1812,” Journal of Military History 61(1997), pp. 455–80; J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783– 1830 (Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 120–76. 14. Sheldon David Pollack, War, Revenue, and State Building: Financing the Development of the American State (Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 200–01; Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 151–55, 292–93. 15. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Madison, 17 May 1814, Thomas Jefferson Papers (Washington: Library of Congress Microfilm Collection); Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Oxford University Press, 1995). 16. The Republicans, as they were often referred to in their own time, were originally known as the Democratic-Republicans. 17. Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Maurice G. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). 18. Roger H. Brown, “The War Hawks of 1812: An Historical Myth,” Indiana Magazine of History 60, no. 2 (1964), pp. 137–51; Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “Party Unity and the Decision for War in the House of Representatives, 1812,” William and Mary Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1972), pp. 367–90; Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “The War Hawks and the Question of Congressional Leadership in 1812,” Pacific Historical Review 45, no. 1 (1976), pp. 1–22; Reginald Horsman, “Who Were the War Hawks?” Indiana Magazine of History

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Constitutional Battles    /   151 60, no. 2 (1964), pp. 121–36; J. C. A. Stagg, “James Madison and the Coercion of Great Britain: Canada, the West Indies, and the War of 1812,” William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981), pp. 3–34. 19. Letter from Henry Clay to Jesse Bledsoe, 18 June 1812, in The Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 1, edited by James F. Hopkins (University of Kentucky Press, 1959), p. 675 (emphasis in the original). 20. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1993), pp. 84–89, 99; J. C. A. Stagg, “James Madison and the ‘Malcontents’: The Political Origins of the War of 1812,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976), pp. 557–85. 21. Todd Estes, The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006); Peter J. Kastor, “‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?’: Inventing Expansion in the Early American Republic,” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2008), pp. 115–17. 22. Peter S. Onuf, “Federalism, Republicanism, and the Origins of American Sectionalism,” in Edward L. Ayers and others, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 11–37. 23. Clay, campaign speech, July 25, 1816, The Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 2, p. 220. 24. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System. 25. The story of antebellum sectional conflict is, of course, one of the most frequently told stories in American political history; citations on this matter would sprawl across pages. However, for a focused view of Clay’s role in this debate, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (Oxford University Press, 1987). 26. Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Don Higginbotham, “The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship,” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1998), pp. 39–58. 27. Andrew Jackson to the Tennessee Volunteers, 14 November 1812, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, vol. 2, edited by Sam B. Smith and others (University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 341. 28. Christopher McKee, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991); William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784–1815 (University Press of Kansas, 1992). 29. Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 194–200. 30. Letter from John Armstrong to Jackson, 22 May 1814, Jackson Papers, vol. 3, p. 76. 31. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, pp. 240–43; Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 32. William B. Skelton, “High Army Leadership in the Era of the War of 1812: The Making and Remaking of the Officer Corps,” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1994), pp. 253–74. 33. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 15–18; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, pp. 290–94. 34. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 503–22; Leonard J.

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152   /   Peter J. Kastor Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (University of Virginia Press, 2009). 35. Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975). 36. Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, pp. 162–72, 203–06. 37. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 156–59; Frank Lawrence Owsley Jr. and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821 (University of Alabama Press, 1997), pp. 82–102. 38. Letter from William Clark to Armstrong, 28 March 1814, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 14, edited by Clarence Edward Carter (Government Printing Office, 1934–75), p. 746. 39. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 159; Jay H. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), pp. 110–11. 40. Pollack, War, Revenue, and State Building.

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Contributors

Stephen Budiansky Independent scholar and author Peter J. Kastor Professor of History and American Culture Studies,   Washington University in St. Louis. Pietro S. Nivola Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution Ritika Singh Research Assistant, Brookings Institution Alan Taylor Professor of History, University of California at Davis Benjamin Wittes Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

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Index

Adams, Henry, viii Adams, John: federalism and, xvii–xviii; Federalist Party and, xvii–xviii, 68, 72; France and, 128; Great Britain and, 13; Madison, James and, viii, 24; meaning of Union and, viii–ix; as president, 103, 128; view of the War of 1812, 36 Adams, John Quincy, xvii, 9, 25 Alabama, 25 Alaska, 145 Alexandria (Virginia), 21, 81 Algeria, 59–60 Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), viii, 5, 14, 98, 104, 111, 129. See also Sedition Act Alien Enemies Act of 1798, 111, 120n42 Allen, William Henry, 50, 51 All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (Rehnquist), 98 American Revolution (1775–1783), 12–13, 16, 17, 139 American System, 24, 136 Amherstburg (Canada), 77–78 Armstrong, John, 53, 107, 140, 143 Articles of Confederation (1781), 126–27, 136 Asymmetric warfare. See Military issues

Baltimore (Maryland), 2, 17–18, 21, 54, 60, 108–10 Bank of the United States, 26, 31n25, 57, 88. See also Economic issues Barbary Powers of North Africa, 129–30 Barbour, James, 79, 80, 84, 87 Barraud, Philip, 84–85 Battle of New Orleans. See New Orleans Battle of Queenston Heights, 45, 102 Bayard, James, 72, 76 Bayly, Richard D., 81 Blacks, 26, 70, 87. See also Slavery Bledsoe, Jesse, 133 Boehner, John, 3, 29n2 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 11, 18, 21, 70 Brant, Irving, 99–100, 102, 104 Brock, Isaac, 45, 78 Budiansky, Stephen, 4, 25, 36–66 Burr, Aaron, 72 Bush (George H. W.) administration, 107 Bush, George W., 6, 105, 117–18 Cabell, William H., 82 Calhoun, John C., 17, 24–25 Campbell, David, 81 Campbell, George Washington, 42 Campbell, John, 80, 81, 84

155

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156    /    Index Canada, xv, 13, 125–26 Canada—War of 1812: American defeats and, 78–79; annexation of Canada, 76–77; British attacks and, 54; conquest of, 17; militias in, 44; observance of the war in, 2; political issues of, 75–77, 82, 101; privateers and, 32n36; state opposition to, 101, 102; as a strategic target, 43, 45, 53, 77–79, 125–26; Treaty of Ghent and, 146 Capitol Building (Washington, D.C.), 33n54, 80, 98 Carr, Dabney, 88 Castlereagh, Lord, 11 Chauncey, Isaac, 106–07 Cherokee. See Indians Chesapeake Bay, 54, 56, 79, 98–99 Chesapeake incident, 37–38, 48 Churchill, Winston, 116 Civil and individual liberties, 113, 117, 139 Civil War (U.S.; 1861–1865), 6, 25–26, 147–48 Civil War of 1812, The: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (Taylor), 18 Clark, Elijah, 107 Clark, William: background and personality of, 141; as a federal administrator, 124, 143; federalism and, 124, 145; as governor of Missouri territory, 143, 145; meeting at Portage des Sioux, 144; as a nationalist, 148; War of 1812 and, 141, 143, 145 Clay, Henry: American System and, 24; Congress and, 125, 134, 136, 145; as a nationalist, 148; as negotiator at Ghent, 33n51, 123, 136; War of 1812 and, 78, 124, 133–34, 145 Clinton, DeWitt, viii, 46, 75, 85 Cochrane, Alexander, 55 Cockburn, George, 54 Coles, Harry L., 18 Coles, Isaac A., 88

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Commentaries on the Constitution (Story), 104 Congress (U.S.): Constitutional powers of, 127, 134; foreign policy and, 134; partisanship in, 27, 35n78; as representatives of the states, 132–33, 136–37; U.S. Navy and, 42–43; War of 1812 and, 43. See also Government, federal Connecticut, 97, 101, 102, 135 Constitution (U.S.): Alien and Sedition Acts and, 104–05, 111, 129; constitutional structures of the War of 1812, 143; declaration of war and raising/ funding of military, 80, 126–27; detention and, 107; federalism and, xviixviii; Federalists and, 71; founders and, 67–68, 69; Hartford Convention and, 135; need for, 136; powers of Congress, 86, 127, 134; powers of the executive, 99, 116–17, 130; powers of the states, 86, 88; providing for political challenges, 147; providing for the common defense, 138–39; Suspension Clause of, 107; War of 1812 and, ix, 61, 122–49. See also Presidents and the presidency Constitutional Convention (1787), 126–27 Court system, federal, 122 Crawford, William H., 76 Creek Indians, 12, 19, 142–43. See also Indians Dallas, Alexander J., xv, 110 Dearborn, Henry (Harry), 45, 102 Deterrence. See Military issues Detroit (Michigan), 45, 77, 78 Detroit River, 19 East (U.S. region), 42, 70, 97, 143 Economic issues: commerce, 72; crisis of 1814, 21, 24–25, 33n54; effects of British navigation laws, 13; Hamiltonianism, xviii; Jacksonian Democracy, 26–27; Jeffersonianism, xviii; panic

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Index     /    157 of 1819, 23; panic of 1837, 26; partisanship and, 3–4; Republican Party and, 14, 15; trade embargo of 1807, 9; trade sanctions, 15 Economic issues—U.S.: U.S. financial default, 1814 and 2011, 8, 18, 28, 56–57, 81; U.S. fiscal “grand bargain,” 2, 29n2; U.S. national debt, 34n60. See also Bank of the United States; Taxation; United States Elections—specific: 1798, xvi, 72; 1800, 72; 1808, 15, 74; 1810, 15; 1816, 21; 1824, xvii; 1828, 26 England. See Great Britain Eppes, John W., 57 Era of good feelings, 24 Europe, 26, 30n4, 73. See also individual countries Eustis, William, 79 Ex Parte Milligan (1866), 106, 107, 117 Factions, vii, 1, 13, 23, 69, 75. See also Political parties Federalism. See Political movements—specific Federalist, The, 127 Federalist Party. See Political parties— Federalist Party Federal Republican, 45, 108–09 Florida, 113–14 Fort Bowyer (Mobile Bay, Alabama), 20 Fort McKenry (Baltimore, Maryland), 2 Foster, Augustus, 37 Founders and founding generation, 67–68 France: Great Britain and, 13, 46, 70, 72, 73; Louisiana Purchase and, 130; seizure of American ships by, 9; U.S. political parties and, 14, 70, 72 French Revolution (1789-1799), 40, 70, 72, 146 Gaines, Edmund Pendleton, 140 Gallatin, Albert, xv, 41, 42

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Geneva Convention (Third), 112 German U-boats, 62 Gerry, Elbridge, 104 Ghent. See Treaty of Ghent Gooch, Claiborne W., 81 Gore, Christopher, 33n51, 58 Government, federal: Civil War and, 147; federal detention authority, 105–08; Jefferson and, 129; Madison and, 126–32; Madison administration and, 114; powers of, 3–4, 15, 24, 71–75, 87–88, 129; Republican Party and, 23, 29, 71, 72, 73; states’ rights and, 137; taxation and revenue raising by, 128, 130, 131–32; War of 1812 and, 79–80. See also Taxation Government, state: Federalist Party and, 72; militias and, 101, 102, 139–40; powers of, 15, 24–25, 87–88; Republican Party and, 71–72; taxation by, 128, 131; War of 1812 and, 79–80, 101, 102, 131 Great Britain: Anglo-American relations, 146; France and, 13, 46, 72, 73; Jeffersonianism and, xviii; Jefferson’s embargo and, 74; Hamiltonianism and, xviii; Indians and, 13, 14, 142, 143; Orders in Council of, 10, 37; Royal Army of, 12, 18, 38; Royal Navy of, 10–11, 12, 18, 19, 31n16, 37–38, 41, 46–47, 51, 62n7, 73, 140; seizure of American ships by, 9, 52–53; U.S. Federalist Party and, 13, 14; U.S. naval strategy against, 49–50; U.S. political parties and, 14, 70, 72. See also Impressment; War of 1812 Great Lakes, xv, 2, 53, 76, 77, 142 Guantanamo Bay, 117 Gulf Coast, 142–43 Hall, Dominic A., 110 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), 107 Hamilton, Alexander: Federalism and, 13; Federalist Party and, 68, 71;

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158    /    Index Hamiltonianism and, xviii; High Federalists and, 88; as president, 115; view of republican government, 13; view of standing military, 59 Hamiltonianism. See Hamilton, Alexander; Political movements—specific Hamilton, Paul, 43, 46, 49 Hampton (Virginia), 54 Hanson, Alexander, 21, 23 Hartford Convention (1814–1815), viii, 5, 21–22, 33n49, 103, 105, 135–36 Hawaii, 145 Henry, John, 73 Hickey, Donald R., 100 HMS Leander incident, 37 HMS Leopard incident, 37, 38, 48 HMS Macedonian incident, 48 Hull, William, 45, 77–78 Hussein, Saddam, 1 Iberian Peninsula, 56 Impressment: British view of, 10–11, 47, 73; as a cause of the War of 1812, 2, 9, 10, 11, 21, 30n13, 37; French Revolution and, 146; Treaty of Ghent and, 25, 58 Indiana, 78 Indiana Territory, 144 Indians: Great Britain and, 13, 14, 142, 143; meeting at Portage des Sioux, 124, 144; political parties and, 70; Treaty of Ghent and, 19–20, 144; U.S. borderlands and, 142; war against, 142–43; War of 1812 and, 5, 12, 76, 77–78, 79. See also Creek Indians; Seminole Indians; Shawnee Indians Iran, 15 Iraq, 1–2 Jackson, Andrew (“Old Hickory”): as an army officer, 140; background and personality of, 137–38, 141; Congress and, 145; Democracy Party and, xvii;

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Democratic Party and, xvii; federalism and, 123, 138, 145, 148; gains in the Southwest, 7; as a hero, 148; Indian issues and, 19–20, 142; Madison, James and, 110–11; as a political force, 137–38; as president, 26, 145; repression of dissent in New Orleans by, 98, 110, 116; trade compromise of 1830 of, 19; victory at Pensacola and, 142–43; victory at New Orleans and, 2, 26, 82, 84–85, 137, 138, 141; War of 1812 and, 124, 145 Jacobins, 13 Japanese American internees, 106 Jay, John, 21 Jay Treaty (1794), 14 Jeffersonianism, 23. See also Jefferson, Thomas; Political movements—specific Jefferson, Thomas: economic and budget issues and, 72, 73, 79, 132; election of, 72; embargo proposal of, 74–75, 130; federal government and, 129; federalism and, xvii; glorification of bloodshed by, 40; Great Britain and, 14, 73, 74; Jeffersonianism and, xviii; naval and army incidents and, 37, 38, 129–30; political issues and, 134; Republican Party and, xvi, 16, 68, 69, 71; trade embargo of 1807 of, 9; U.S. military and, 41, 44, 47, 73, 79; view of mobs, 110; view of the central government, 15, 16, 73, 129; view of the Constitution, viii; view of the War of 1812, 40 Jefferson (Thomas) administration, 129, 130 Jesup, Thomas (Colonel), viii Johnson, Edward, 109 Johnson, Richard M., 76 Jomini, Antoine-Henri, 60 Jones, William, 17, 49–51, 53–54, 57, 61, 64n40

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Index     /    159 Kastor, Peter J., 1–7, 122–52 Kentucky, 78. See also Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions Ketcham, Ralph, vii–ix, 15, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 115 Key, Francis Scott, 2 King, Rufus (Federalist-N.Y.), 21 Knott, Stephen F., 113–14 Korematsu v. United States (1944), 117 Lake Champlain, 17–18, 77, 78–79 Lake Erie, 17–18, 19, 77–78, 106–07 Lake Ontario, 106–07 Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806), 141 Lewis, Jan Ellen, 104–05, 106 Lewis, Meriweather, 141 Lewis, Morgan, 107 Libertarianism. See Political movements—specific Lincoln, Abraham, 5–6, 103, 106, 116, 117 Louisiana, 111, 140, 141–42. See also New Orleans Louisiana Courier, 110 Louisiana Purchase (1803), 25, 130, 141–42 Louisiana Territory, 141–42 Lowell, John, III, 102 Madison, James: civil liberties during the War of 1812, 98–99; Clinton, DeWitt and, viii–ix; Congress and, 145; disobedience of state governors, 102; economic and budget issues and, 131–32; election of, 74; federal government and, 126–33, 145; federalism and, xvii, 125–33; Federalists and, 13, 24; France and, 14; Great Britain and, 14, 75; important caveats regarding, 108–14; Jackson, Andrew and, 110–11; message to Congress (1815), 23–24; political issues and, viii–ix, 13, 129, 134, 145, 148; on preparation for war,

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34n61, 59, 79; as president, 99–100, 103–19, 124, 126, 130; as representative from Virginia, 128; republican idealism of, vii; Republican Party and, xvi– xvii, 57, 68, 71; as secretary of state, 129–30; Sedition Act and, 104–05; use of covert action by, 113–14; view of mobs, 110; view of war and the ­military, 40, 73 Madison, James—War of 1812: civil liberties and sedition laws, 5–6, 22; difficulties of war and, 97–98; federalism and government and, ix, 145, 124; move to war and, 38, 75–76, 77–78, 125–26; political issues of, viii, 9, 42, 45–46, 48–49, 101; U.S. Navy and, 51; war aims and lessons learned and, 19, 37, 59 Madison (James) administration, 76–78, 79, 80, 126, 144 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 61–62 Maine, 87, 102 Marshall, John, 88 Maryland, 99 Maslowski, Peter, 47 Massachusetts, 21, 87, 97, 101, 102, 135 Mead, Walter Russell, 26–27 Media: press coverage of War of 1812, 45–46, 83; prosecution of the press, 105; riot against Federalist publishers, 108–09. See also Newspapers; individual newspapers Mediterranean Sea, 59–60 Mercer, Charles Fenton, 82 Mexican War (1846), 147, 148 Michigan Territory, 78, 144 Mid-Atlantic (U.S. region), 71, 83 Military issues: adventurism and tyranny, 40–44; American support of the military, 139, 146; asymmetric warfare, 48–53, 62; commerce raiding, 62; detention of U.S. citizens in military custody, 105–07; deterrence, 60;

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160    /    Index Hamiltonianism, xviii; Jeffersonianism, xviii; martial law, 110; military preparedness and mobilization, 60–61, 139–40, 146; officer corps, 139; psychological and political dimensions of war, 61–62; Republican Party, 15–16; salvation at sea, 45–48; show of force, 54–55; standing army and navy, 39, 40, 59, 139; theories of sea power, 61–62; War of 1812 and U.S. military, 4, 36–40, 43–44, 79–80, 146 Militias: Constitutional issues of, 127; federal and state governments and, 101; mobilization of, 60–61, 66n73, 143; in the War of 1812, 60, 138 Militias—specific: Connecticut, 102; Louisiana, 141; Maryland, 109; Massachusetts, 102; Missouri, 143; New York, 102; Tennessee, 137, 138, 141, 143; Virginia, 79–80 Millett, Allan, 47 Minor, John, 81 Missouri, 24, 87 Missouri Compromise (1820), 25, 86–87 Missouri debates (1819–1821), 86 Missouri Territory, 86–87, 143 Mitchell, Samuel, 46 Mobs and mob violence, 108–10 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 117 Monroe, James: election of 1816 and, 21; Missouri Compromise and, 87; Republican Party and, xvii; War of 1812 and, 5, 10, 49, 53, 76, 80, 82, 112; West Point Military Academy and, 60 Montreal (Canada), 45, 77, 102 Morris, Gouverneur, 103 “Mr. Madison’s War” (Lowell), 102. See also War of 1812 Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), 9, 11. See also Bonaparte, Napoleon National Gazette, The, 27 National Intelligencer, 38, 84

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Nationalism. See Political movements—specific National security. See United States Naval Chronicle (British publication), 46, 58 Nelson, Horatio, 46–47 New England: crisis of 1814 and, 21, 24–25, 81; election of Madison in 1808, 74; Federalists in, xvii, 71, 80, 81, 83, 101, 134; militias of, 44, 102; secessionist movements in, 103, 135–36; slavery and, 83; support for the U.S. Navy and, 42; War of 1812 and, 5, 34n65, 48–49, 56, 75–76, 80, 84, 85, 101, 135. See also individual states New Hampshire, 135 New Jersey, 70, 75–76, 101 New Orleans (Louisiana): defense of, 7, 17–18; militias in, 60, 141; as the second American Revolution, 146; Treaty of Ghent and, 22, 123; U.S. victory at, 20, 82–83, 84–85, 141. See also Jackson, Andrew Newspapers, 27. See also Media; individual newspapers New York (state), 75–76, 101 New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), 105 Niagara front, 45, 78–79 Niagara River, 102 Nicholas, Wilson Cary, 84, 97 Nivola, Pietro S., 1–7, 8–35 Norfolk (Virginia), 79, 80 North (U.S. region): commercial states of, 70; election of 1808 and, 74–75; expansion and, 76; Indians and, 142; nationalisms and disunion, 86–88; War of 1812 and, 75–76, 78, 83–85. See also individual states Northeast (U.S. region), 74, 78, 134, 139–40. See also individual states North Korea, 15 Northwest Territory, 141 Nullification (legal theory), 25, 88, 129

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Index     /    161 Obama, Barack, 6, 29n2, 105, 117 Octagon House (Washington, D.C.), 97, 124 Ohio, 75, 78 “Old Hickory”. See Jackson, Andrew Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law (1856), 63n9 Pence, Mike, 67 Pennsylvania, 74, 76 Pensacola (Florida), 142–43 Pickering, Timothy, 103 Pike, Zebulon, 140 Political issues: federal power, 71–75; partisanship, 3, 27–28, 29n3, 68–71; size of government, 71; state sovereignty, 71; U.S. Army and Navy, 42–44. See also Government, federal; Government, state; War of 1812 Political movements, xvii–xviii Political movements—federalism: Battle of New Orleans and, 141; contemporary federalism, 122; early federalism, 122–23; Federalists and, 134; Madison and, 125–32; territorial system and, 145; War of 1812 and, 125, 129, 135, 146, 147, 148–49; War Hawk theory and, 133, 147 Political movements—specific: Hamiltonianism, xviii, 15, 24, 117; Jacksonian Democracy, 26; Jeffersonianism, xviii, 39; libertarianism, 14–15; nationalism, 5, 24, 83–85, 148; Republicanism, 24, 39, 69; Tea Party movement, 27 Political parties, xvi-xvii, 4, 8–9, 69 Political parties—Federalist Party: Adams and, xviii, 5; background of, xvii; Constitution and, 69, 71; economic views of, 69, 72; federalism and, 134; founding of, 68; French Revolution and, 72; government and, 13; Great Britain and, 14, 55–56; High Federalists, 88–89; Jefferson’s embargo and,

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74; political views of, 15, 16, 21, 22, 24, 27, 69–70, 71–75; Republicans and, 13; slavery and, xviii, 86; social views of, 70; standing army and, 40–42, 59; Treaty of Ghent and, 33n51, 58; War of 1812 and, 12, 20–24, 45, 49, 68, 75–76, 81, 83, 101–02, 134–35 Political parties—Republican Party: background of, xvi-xvii, xviii, 3–4, 12–16; Canada and, 76–77; Constitution and, 69; economic views of, 69, 72; founding of, 68; French Revolution and, 72; High Federalists and, 89; Jeffersonian Republicans, 89; Jefferson’s embargo and, 74; Madison and, 75; political views of, 8, 27, 28–29, 43, 56–57, 69–70, 71–75; slavery and, 86; social views of, 70; standing army and, 40–42, 59; Treaty of Ghent and, 58–59; view of Great Britain, 73; view of taxation, 72, 73, 77, 79; War of 1812 and, 12–16, 20–24, 43, 68, 75–77, 79, 81, 82 Political parties—specific parties: Democratic Party, xvi, xvii, 8, 28; Democratic-Republican Party, xvi, 134; National Republicans, xvii; Whig Party, xvii Porcupine’s Gazette, The, 27 Portage des Sioux agreements, 124, 144 Porter, Peter B., 78 Presidents and the presidency, 109–10, 113, 115–19, 127. See also Constitution (U.S.); individual presidents Press. See Media Quarles, Robert, 81 Quebec (Canada), 77 Quincy, Josiah, 83 Randolph, John, 40–41, 75, 86 Rehnquist, William, 98–99, 100, 114 Republicanism. See Political movements—specific

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162    /    Index Republican Party. See Political parties— Republican Party Rhode Island, 135 Richmond Enquirer, 82 Roane, Spencer, 87 Rogers, John, 51 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 6, 106, 116, 117 Rossiter, Clinton, 116–17 Sackets Harbor (Lake Ontario), 106–07 St. Lawrence River, 77 Scalia, Antonin, 107 Scott, Winfield, 17, 44, 140 Secession and separatism, 84, 86, 103, 105, 135–36 Sedition Act (1798), 104, 118. See also Alien and Sedition Acts Segregation, 26 Seminole Indians, 20. See also Indians Separatism, 25 Shawnee Indians, 12, 142. See also Indians Singh, Ritika, 5, 6, 97–121 Slaves and slavery: admission of Missouri as a slave state, 24, 86–87; Federalists and, xviii, 71; Great Britain and, 11, 30n13; Hamiltonianism and, xviii; Jeffersonianism and, xviii; Northern views of, 83, 85; political parties and, 70; Treaty of Ghent and, 25; United States and, 30n13; War of 1812 and, 25, 79, 80, 112. See also Blacks Smith, Robert, 47–48 South (U.S. region): election of 1812, 46; Indian war in, 142; Jeffersonianism, xviii; Jefferson’s embargo and, 74; military issues, 42, 124–25; nationalism and disunion in, 5, 85–88, 136; political issues, 24, 25, 40, 70–71, 75, 124–25; Southerners as leaders of federalism, 148; Southern secession, 147; War of 1812 and, 3, 11, 12, 25, 76, 79, 83–85, 124–25 South Carolina, 24

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Spain, 76, 114, 142–43, 148 Stacy, Samuel, 106–07 Star-Spangled Banner, The, 2, 5 Stone, Geoffrey, 98 Story, Joseph, 104–05, 110 Strum, Harvey, 102 Sururier, Louis, ix Tallmadge, James, Jr., 86 Tariff of abominations, 24 Taxation: federal tariffs, 87–88; Jeffersonianism and, xviii; military buildup and, 72; Republican Party and, 3–4, 15, 16, 23, 56–57, 72; tax reforms, 28; War of 1812 and, 57, 131 Taylor, Alan, 4, 5, 14, 67–96 Taylor, John, 15, 27, 58, 82 Tecumseh (Shawnee Indian), 142. See also Indians; Shawnee Indians Tenskwatawa (Shawnee Indian), 142. See also Indians; Shawnee Indians Tennessee, 76, 137–38, 140. See also Jackson, Andrew Territories, federal, 122, 125, 143–44, 145 Tompkins, Daniel D., 78, 85 Tories, 14, 42 Treaty of Ghent (1814): diplomatic and military relations and, 146; effects of, ix, 22, 58–60, 81–83, 118; Indians and, 19–20, 144; political parties and, 33n51, 58, 59–60, 81; slave trade and, 25; timing of, 22, 123, 135. See also New Orleans; War of 1812 Tripolitan War (1801-1805), 41, 47 Tucker, Henry St. George, 81 Tucker, St. George, 84, 85 United States (U.S.): Anglo-American relations, 146; background of, 68–69, 70–71, 88–89; bankruptcy and default of, 28, 56–57, 81; federal territories in 1812, xiv; France and, 72, 130; Great Britain and, 72; Louisiana Purchase

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Index     /    163 and, 130; military issues, 15–16, 17–18, 26; national anthem of, 2, 5; national security of, 26, 28; president and cabinet in 1812, xv–xvi; regions of the U.S., xiv–xv; states of the union in 1812, xiii; success of the federal system in, 147, territories of, 122, 125, 143–44, 145. See also Economic issues; Bank of the United States; Political movements; Political parties; War of 1812; individual presidents, regions, and states; headings under U.S. and USS U.S. See United States U.S. Army: American support for, 139; during the Civil War, 25–26; early revenues for, 128, 146; Jefferson and, 40–41, 44; preparation of, 43, 44–45; reforms of, 60; size of, 12, 25, 38, 43–44; War of 1812 and, 17–18, 31n25, 79. See also Military issues; Militias U.S. Navy: American support for, 139; crews of, 11; growth and reduction of, 41–43, 139; Jefferson and, 40–41; political issues and, 41–42; size of, 12, 23, 31n16, 38, 62n7; slavery and, 25; standing navy and, 59–60; War of 1812 and, 2, 4, 17–18, 26, 31n25, 39, 46–48, 49–53, 61, 79, 131, 140. See also Military issues; headings under USS USS Argus, 50 USS Chasseur, 52 USS Constellation, 79 USS Constitution, 50 USS Peacock, 52 USS President, 19, 51 USS United States (U.S. frigate), 48 USS Wasp, 52 Van Rensselaer, Solomon, 102 Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 45 Vermont, 74, 102, 135 Vietnam, North, 55 Vietnam War (1959–1975), 55, 100, 101

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Virginia, 5, 56, 79–80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 112. See also Chesapeake Bay Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (1798), 104, 128, 129, 134, 136 Virginia General Assembly Report of 1799, 111 Virginia House of Delegates Report of 1799, 104 War, 100, 122, 123 War Department, 44, 105 “War Hawk of 1812.” See Calhoun, John C. War Hawk theory, 133 War of 1812 (1812­–1815): actual fighting of, 38; blockades and embargoes during, 56; burning of White House and Capitol, 80; casualties of, 4; civil liberties during, 98–100; conclusion of, 19–20, 81–83, 123, 145–46; constitutional issues and, 6; crisis of 1814 and, 21–22; cultural legacy of, 4–5; economic issues of, 131–32; Federalists and, xvii, 20–24; Great Britain and, 16–17, 37, 49, 52, 54–56, 78–79; important caveats regarding, 108–15; military issues and, 4, 6–7, 17, 40–53, 75–83, 131, 138; political and ideological issues and, 1, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12–16, 42–43, 68, 78, 114–19; regional fissures and, 5, 77–78; Republican Party and, 20–24; state governments and, 6–7, 144–45; support for, 11–12, 16; in the territories, 143–44; treatment of prisoners, 112; unprecedented dissent, 100–03; U.S. and, 36–37, 49, 53–57, 146; U.S. naval strategy in, 49–50, 53–54. See also Jackson, Andrew; Madison, James; Military issues; Treaty of Ghent; U.S. Army; U.S. Navy War of 1812 (1812–1815)—causes, circumstances, and effects: disunion and separatism, 25, 85–88, 98; end game of, 19–20; federalism and, 125, 147;

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164    /    Index nationalisms, 83–89; national unity, 24; nullification, theory of, 25; as a political victory, 3, 5, 38–39, 58–60, 124; prewar crises, 37–38; privateers’ commissions, 61; questions raised by, 148; scenarios of, 1, 9–12, 16–19, 22; slavery, 25; subsequent developments, 24–27; U.S. military, 25, 36–38, 39–40, 59, 60–61 War of 1812—opposition: effects of, 97–98; extent of, 100–103, 147; Great Britain and, 54–56; naval victories and, 48–49; In New England, 21–22, 48–49, 80, 134–35; postwar period, 5; reasons for, 12, 17, 52, 134–35. See also Hartford Convention; Political parties—Federalist Party War on terror (2001–present), 6, 105 Washington (D.C.), 2, 18, 54, 80, 81, 112, 124 Washington, George, vii, 13, 68, 71

Webster, Daniel, 17, 21 Wellington, Duke of, 20, 55 West (U.S. region): active military units and, 139; disunion and, 136; expansion of slavery in, 86; Indians in, 142; nationalism in, 83; political issues of, 74, 76, 88; trans-Mississippi West, xv, 25, 124, 142, 144; War of 1812 and, 76, 78, 143. See also headings under Missouri; individual states West Point Military Academy, 60 White House (Washington, D.C.), 33n54, 80, 97, 98, 124 Wilson, Woodrow, 6, 103 Wittes, Benjamin, 5, 6, 97–121 Witt, John Fabian, 112 Wood, Gordon S., 20, 38, 59 World War I, 6, 62, 112, 148 World War II, 6, 62, 64n32, 112, 148 Wuerth, Ingrid Brunk, 106, 107

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The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring the highest quality independent research and analysis to bear on current and emerging policy problems. The Institution was founded on December 8, 1927, to merge the activities of the Institute for Government Research, founded in 1916, the Institute of Economics, founded in 1922, and the Robert Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government, founded in 1924. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors. Board of Trustees John L. Thornton Chair Glenn Hutchins Vice Chair Suzanne Nora Johnson Vice Chair David M. Rubenstein Vice Chair Strobe Talbott President Liaquat Ahamed Dominic Barton Robert M. Bass Alan R. Batkin Crandall Bowles Hanzade Do˘gan Boyner Paul L. Cejas John S. Chen Abby Joseph Cohen

Howard E. Cox Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. Paul Desmarais Jr. Kenneth M. Duberstein Cheryl Cohen Effron Alfred B. Engelberg Bart Friedman Ann M. Fudge Ellen Futter Jeffrey W. Greenberg Brian L. Greenspun Shirley Ann Jackson Benjamin R. Jacobs Kenneth M. Jacobs Richard A. Kimball Jr. Nemir Kirdar Klaus Kleinfeld Philip H. Knight Rajan Bharti Mittal

Nigel Morris James Murren Thomas C. Ramey Edgar Rios James Rogers Victoria P. Sant Leonard D. Schaeffer Lynn Thoman Larry D. Thompson Michael L. Tipsord Andrew H. Tisch Antoine W. van Agtmael John H. White Jr. John W. Wilhelm Tracy R. Wolstencroft Daniel Yergin Daniel B. Zwirn

Mario Draghi Lawrence K. Fish Cyrus F. Freidheim Jr. David Friend Lee H. Hamilton William A. Haseltine Teresa Heinz Joel Z. Hyatt James A. Johnson Ann Dibble Jordan Vernon E. Jordan Jr. Herbert M. Kaplan Donald F. McHenry

Arjay Miller Mario M. Morino Samuel Pisar Charles W. Robinson James D. Robinson III Warren B. Rudman Haim Saban B. Francis Saul II Ralph S. Saul Michael P. Schulhof John C. Whitehead Stephen M. Wolf Ezra K. Zilkha

Honorary Trustees Robert J. Abernethy Elizabeth E. Bailey Zoë Baird Budinger Rex J. Bates Richard C. Blum Geoffrey T. Boisi Louis W. Cabot James W. Cicconi William T. Coleman Jr. Alan M. Dachs Kenneth W. Dam Steven A. Denning Vishakha N. Desai

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PETER J. KASTOR is Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and author of William Clark’s World (Yale, 2011).

Cover art: The Star Spangled Banner by Percy Moran, circa 1913, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Jacket design by Larry Converse

What So Proudly We Hailed “In the end, the complex federal polity that the founders had pieced together proved resilient and endured. Citizens given to lamenting the state of present-day American politics, featuring a government that is supposedly ‘gridlocked’ and ‘dysfunctional,’ would do well to recall that the nation has weathered far greater crises in the past.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA (Brookings Institution) and PETER J. KASTOR (Washington University) “The concept of a robust regular army and navy represented to the Republicans of the time what the welfare state is to conservatives now: a budget-busting beast, insatiably devouring higher tax revenues, and potentially imperiling individual liberties.” PIETRO S. NIVOLA “For all that has changed in the technology of war and America’s place among the world’s great military powers, much about the War of 1812 remains strikingly modern with respect to the lessons that it holds for deterrence, preparedness, counterinsurgency strategy, and military professionalism.” STEPHEN BUDIANSKY (author of Perilous Fight) “Jefferson’s Republicans constructed a forceful critique of national power and a boisterous endorsement of state sovereignty and individual rights—positions that anticipated much contemporary rhetoric. Alas, by shrinking the national government, Jefferson and Madison hampered the ability of the United States to wage the War of 1812. Recounting that war offers a cautionary tale of national disaster narrowly averted.” ALAN TAYLOR (author of The Civil War of 1812) “Madison showed remarkable restraint in nearly all respects during the War of 1812, which took place in the country’s infancy, when there was still great conceptual space for robust claims of presidential power to restrain freedom. The war saw dramatically fewer intrusions on civil liberties than did later wars or even earlier episodes short of war in the country’s still-young history.” BENJAMIN WITTES and RITIKA SINGH (Brookings Institution)

What So Proudly We Hailed Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812

What So Proudly We Hailed

PIETRO S. NIVOLA is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the C. Douglas Dillon Chair in Governance Studies. He is coeditor (with David Brady) of Red and Blue America, vols. I–II (Brookings, 2006 and 2008).

Highlights from

Nivola / Kastor

Although the War of 1812 may have faded from modern memory, the conflict left important legacies, both in its immediate wake and in later years. In its own time, the war was transformative. To this day, however, some of the fundamental challenges that confronted U.S. policymakers two centuries ago still resonate. How much should a free society regularly invest in national defense? Should the expense be defrayed through new taxes? Is it possible for profound partisan disagreements to stop “at the water’s edge”? What are the constitutional limits of executive powers in wartime? How, exactly, should the government treat dissenters, especially when many are suspected of giving aid and comfort to an enemy? As Americans continue to reflect on their country and its role in the world, these questions remain as relevant now as they were then.

“Because the War of 1812 is characterized by irony . . . it makes sense that a system of federalism that seemed so ill-equipped for the successful prosecution of war would emerge both vindicated and celebrated by the conflict.” PETER J. KASTOR BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS Washington, D.C. www.brookings.edu

PIETRO S. NIVOLA and PETER J. KASTOR Editors

W

ith distrust between the political parties running deep and Congress divided, the government of the United States goes to war. The war is waged without adequately preparing the means to finance it or readying suitable contingency plans to contend with its unanticipated complications. The executive branch suffers from managerial confusion and in-fighting. The military invades a foreign country, expecting to be greeted as liberators, but encounters stiff, unwelcome resistance. The conflict drags on longer than predicted. It ends rather inconclusively—or so it seems in its aftermath. Sound familiar? This all happened two hundred years ago. What So Proudly We Hailed looks at the War of 1812 in part through the lens of today’s America. On the bicentennial of that formative yet largely forgotten period in U.S. history, this provocative book asks: What did Americans learn—and not learn—from the experience? What instructive parallels and distinctions can be drawn with more recent events? How did it shape the nation? Exploring issues ranging from party politics to sectional schisms, distant naval battles to the burning of Washington, and citizens’ civil liberties to the fate of Native Americans caught in the struggle, these essays speak to the complexity and unpredictability of a war that many assumed would be brief and straightforward. What emerges is a revealing perspective on a problematic “war of choice”—the nation’s first, but one with intriguing implications for others, including at least one in the present century. Continued on back flap