The USA in the Time of James Madison
1809-1817
by Mike Donovan
One Federalist editor called him "Mad Dog Madison"
The Father of the Constitution - Democratic-Republican – “Little Jemmy” - Virginia planter-lawyer - Primary author of the Bill or Rights - Defeated Charles Pinckney the Federalist 122-47 in 1808 - In the election of 1812, Madison whipped De Witt Clinton by an electoral score of 128-89. - VP George Clinton 1809-1813 – Spoke fluent French, Spanish, and Russian –VP Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts 1813-1817 – Re-elected during the War of 1812
Jefferson and Franklin get more credit in American history for actions that together only equal what this guy did in the Revolutionary period. They didn’t make a fifth spot for him on Mount Rushmore because he presided as President over a difficult economy and an unjust war. If he had never been President he might have a greater place in American History.
Physically a small (short even for 1809) and frail man with a barely audible speaking voice, Madison, like Jefferson, sent his second Inaugural Address to the Congress in writing,
Madison was a powerful giant intellectually. His command of all the great political spiritual and intellectual ideas of his age was greatly responsible for the enlightened document that is the United States Constitution.
Contemporaries, especially critics, referred to The War of 1812 "Mr. Madison's War." His presidency is certainly best remembered for this unfortunate conflict in which both sides were at fault in its outbreak, a war whose end fortunately marked the beginning of a long gradual reconciliation with England. Few would have guessed in the aftermath of that war that this would be the last conflict with the old lion, and that out of the ashes of Madison’s war would arise the beginnings of a great friendship.
The War of 1812 marked the birth of American militarism, and an end to the national aversion to standing armies and navies, a paranoia derived from a bad memory of colonial times plus the idiotic pacifism of President Jefferson.
Madison's Cabinet
Secretary of State --- Robert Smith-1809-1811
James Monroe --- 1811-1817
Secretary of War -- William Eustis ---1809-1812
Jack Armstrong ---1812-1813
James Monroe ----1814-1815
W.H. Crawford--- 1815-1817
Secretary of Treasury -Albert Gallatin-1809-1813
G.W. Campbell-1814
A.J. Dallas -----1814-1815
W.H. Crawford-1815-1817
CABNOTES
Madison gave Bobby Smith the boot for disloyalty behind the scenes. In April of 1811 Madison gave the job at State to Monroe, who had once been an opponent.
The War of 1812 caused quite the shake-up at the office of Secretary of War. Secretary Bill Eustis had been a surgeon during the War of the Revolution. He resigned near the end of 1812 and Secretary of State James Monroe took over at War briefly without resigning his post at State, holding these two important posts in his strong little hands.
Armstrong performed poorly as Secretary of War. He told Madison not to worry, that the British could never invade Washington. Armstrong was also a political trouble-maker when he became too personally involved in the war, wanting to play Johnny Hero. Armstrong personally went to Canada and led American troops into battle at Sackett’s Harbor. From September till November we find the acting Secretary of War at the front running interference, commanding generals to do this and do that. Even the Duke of Marlborough wouldn't have done that (you're going to have to look up the Marlborough man to get that cross- reference.)
Secretary of State Monroe, having only recently relinquished his duties as Secretary of War to Armstrong was upset with the political implications of these inappropriate hand-on tactics of the new guy. He wrote to Madison that the lines defining the traditional and Constitutional control of the executive branch over the military were becoming blurred by the presence of Armstrong at the battlefront.
After the war, Madison gave Armstrong a personal censure for playing dangerous games with the office of Secretary of War.
The problem would arise again during the Civil War when a hundred politicians commanded divisions on the front lines incompetently.
BIO
James Madison was born on March 16 of 1751 at Point Conway Virginia. He was raised at Montpelier, the Tara of the family. JM was a highly skilled farmer by the time he was a teen-ager.
At 20 he graduated from the College of New Jersey at Princeton (Woodrow Wilson's Alma Mater).
When the Colonies declared Independence, Madison helped write the new Virginia State Constitution. Each state had won its independence in 1776, not a nation. Madison was elected to the first Virginia legislature. It was here that he met Jefferson and it was admiration at first sight. Jefferson’s pen was still drying from writing the Declaration of Independence The two men would be friends for life.
But Madison did not win re-election to the Virginia Legislature, supposedly because he refused to supply rum to voters at campaign pep rallies. That's what politicians were supposed to do back then. In any event, his new close friendship with Thomas Jefferson insured that he would always have a job in politics, whether elected or not.
In 1787 Jimmy was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. Madison was one of the main architects of the great Constitution. He more or less wrote the whole thing and then let others do some editing on it.
After the Constitutional Convention accepted the sacred scroll it had to be ratified by the states. It was a hard sell. Many were opposed to the new Constitution. Madison helped to sell it. He was one of three authors of the highly influential Federalist Papers. These were essays published in a New York newspaper explaining, defending and promoting the new Constitution. The other authors were Hamilton and Jay. The Fed Papers are considered great writing (I find them very slow going for pleasure reading. So slow, in fact that I'll give you 12 to 1 I'll never finish reading them.)
In 1794 James was introduced to the lovely widowed daughter of a wealthy ship-owner at a party in Philadelphia. He took one look at her and said flirtatiously, "Well hello dolly." Everyone laughed except Madison who looked confused. What James did not know was that the woman's name was actually Dolley Payne Todd and the joke was on him. [This perhaps apocryphal story is from Biographies of the Presidents, by Chester Chillingsworth, c) 1924 Morrow, London].
This was to be the future Mrs. Dolly Madison famous for her ice cream parties at the White House. It was Dolly who had to flee the city with dinner still warm on the table when the British burned Washington in 1813.
Madison retired from politics and went home to the farm but when John Adams became President and the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed he felt, properly, that his sacred work, the Bill of Rights was threatened. James went back into the arena to write the Virginia Resolutions which condemned the Alien and Sedition Acts.
When Thomas Jefferson became President he made his brilliant friend Madison his Secretary of State and the two of them worked closely together on the Louisiana Purchase and on several issues with Britain. Some believed that our foreign policy in Jefferson’s time was a true blending of their two sets of beliefs and that Madison was not just carrying out the designs of Jefferson.
Dolly often played hostess for the widower Thomas Jefferson when he was President and Madison was his Secretary of State. Dolly and James had no children but raised a son from her first marriage.
Madison's service as head of State from 1801 to 1809 provided excellent background for the job as President, but diplomatic experience apparently is not a guarantee of a peaceful presidency, (just ask GHW Bush) for Mr. Madison's era was not exactly the era of good feelings.
EVENTS
ELECTION OF 1808
REPEAL OF THE DUMBARGO
MACON’S BILL # 2
TIPPECANOE 1811
LITTLE BELT GETS BELTED 1811
THE 12TH CONGRESS
WAR OF 1812
ELECTION OF 1812
BATTLE OF HORSESHOE BEND 1814
TREATY OF GHENT
ELECTION OF 1808
President Jefferson declared that he would not be a candidate for a third-term in 1808. TJ was no FDR.
The Federalists had high hopes to get back in the saddle, especially since they had a clear issue on which to ride, that of course being the Dumbargo.
The Feds went into 1808 with the same ticket that Jefferson had thumped in 04, Pinckney and Rufus King.
Pinckney-King lost the 1808 election 124 to 47. Six electoral votes for President went to the sitting VP George Clinton. The Federalists did gain 24 seats in Congress, but the DRs still held majorities on the hill in spite of the moderate Federalist comeback from its recent decline.
The Fed revival was led by the presence of new blood, a new breed of Federalist that had no problem with campaigning. While the Democratic-Republicans had long tried to be men of the people, hosting cookouts and giving away booze for votes, the Federalists had been saddled with snobs like John Adams, men who would rather retire from politics than kiss babies for votes. The new and younger Federalist candidates were not so uppity.
1808 - Clinton was a Republican
INAUGURAL
His writing was genius but Mr. Madison was a poor orator. His voice was frail and his show biz skills were poor. As James delivered his inaugural address most of the crowd grew restless. They couldn’t hear him. One heckler up the back yelled, ‘Speak up ya little worm, we can’t hear ya!’ The leather-lung was escorted out of the area. The British press made much of the incident.
TRADE WARS CONTINUE
Madison is usually placed on the history shelf as part of the era of the ‘Jeffersonians in Power,’ but James differed from Tom in some important ways. For one thing he did not have an irrational hatred of all non-farming professions. Mr. Madison recognized that trade and commerce of all kinds were just as important as farming. He also understood that the idolized farmer was no good to anyone if they could not get their crops to buyers, both regionally and internationally, hence the need for roads and ships and international mindedness in trade.
But Madison shared Jefferson’s extravagant overestimation of the power of the United States to use the withholding of foreign trade as a weapon. Like Jefferson, Madison believed that Europe would grovel if we threatened to take our commercial ball and go home.
Congress repealed the Non-Importation Embargo on March 1, 1809. Oh happy day! But in its place came the Non-Intercourse Act. The NIA re-opened trade between the USA and every nation in the world with two little exceptions, France and England.
So the trade embargo was at last over, except for the two nations which provided most of our trade. Sigh. The NIA was almost as dumb as the dumbargo. At least the dumbargo didn't pretend to be anything but the self-strangulation that is obviously was.
MACON’S BILL #2 - MAY 1810
Nat Macon was an elderly North Carolina Congressman who came up with a bill which led to the War of 1812. Nice goin'.
It was a dumb idea. MB2 stipulated that if either Britain or France would rescind their laws against US commercial shipping, then the US boycott would apply only to the other nation. It was a convoluted scheme, very petty in tone and substance, not fit for mature diplomatic strategy, and it didn’t work. Macon’s Bill #2 led directly to the War of 1812. Madison, Macon, and the Congress are partly to blame for a war that could have been avoided. The French were every bit as offensive as the British, but the USA ended up unwittingly as allies of Napoleon. Uncle Sam was duped by his own strategy.
When Macon 2 was proffered Napoleon quickly responded to the bait and ate the fisherman. He took naive America up on the deal. Then he didn’t honor it. Nap officially agreed to Macon’s Bill terms and just continued to seize United States ships anyway.
When Napoleon merely agreed to the deal, never intending to honor it, the United States was committed to a belligerent posture against England, and a de facto alliance with France. We were tricked by Napoleon into fighting the wrong enemy in the War of 1812. And is was stupid Macon’s Bill #10 that did it.
Ironically, the Bill was so full of amendments that when it finally came up for the official vote, Macon read it over and decided that he didn’t like it. Representative Macon voted no on Macon’s Bill #10.
LITTLE BELT VS PRESIDENT 1811
A 44 gun warship of the US Navy defeated an 18 gun warship of the Royal Navy in 1811. The most noteworthy thing about the affair between President and Little Belt was that both nations were at peace. As usual, the issue was impressment, a fancy name for kidnapping innocent men at sea to force them into service into the crummy life of the Royal Navy.
Because life was so bad in the English Navy the Brits had to resort to kidnapping men from ships of foreign nations to fill up their own ranks. This was done on the premise that all of these men were deserters from the Royal Navy. One in ten times this was actually the case, but the evil of kidnapping, a crime close to murder in scale and horror, cannot be justified by the exception which proves the rule.
Back in 1807 the HMS Leopard, in search of a single deserter named Ratford, had shot up the USS Chesapeake to bits just outside of American waters, killing four Americans and humiliating the US flag to such an extent that US Naval historians today still write about it as if they are pacing the room in anger between paragraphs trying to calm down. The Chesapeake had refused to allow the British to stop and board the ship and inspect the crew looking for this one man. Chesapeake was heavily armed but totally unprepared for battle. All the cannon were inoperable because the USA as at peace and the first leg of her voyage was that of a stocked supply ship heading to the Mediterranean. Even the pacifist President Jefferson was steamed about the 1807 incident and started to take boxing lessons for a few weeks. The US Navy Secretary ordered all ships of the US Navy to be “completely prepared for battle at all times from now on.”
In the meantime the British warships kept bullying the merchant ship of the United States whenever it could find them alone without protection. Hundreds (some historians say thousands) of US men were kidnapped at sea and condemned to the life of the salty dog. The United States could only protest to Britain with all the hope for satisfaction as the poor man yelling at the tow-truck company that “You had no right to tow my car!”
So one summer day in 1811, one of the best battleships in the US Navy (and to be honest, in the world) the USS President, was patrolling off the coast of the Del-mar peninsula when it spotted a ship a few miles away. Prez took no action. It wasn't looking for trouble. But apparently the other ship was. It was one of the Brit bullies and it thought it had spotted a pigeon. Free sailors! The HMS Little Belt went racing after the USS President, thinking it was the USS County Clerk.
Wrong, Chadwick.
When it got close enough LB realized this was no chump merchant ship, but a champ battleship. Little Belt did a scared Curly Howard 'Nya-a-a' and spun around on a water-dime. Now the jackal was running from the lion it had mistaken for a lamb.
A 30 hour chase ended when the President caught up with Little Belt. The American ship did not know what ship it was or what it's intentions were. As it came alongside LB the bullhorn of the President demanded that the smaller warship identify herself. Little Belt answered back insolently that,
“We do not have to tell you anything!”
The commander of the American frigate then issued a Presidential proclamation in the form of two broadsides, ripping the 18 gun Little Belt to hell.
After the smoke had cleared, amidst the moans of the British wounded, the British captain got on the horn and shouted,
“We are the HMS Little Belt. Is there anything we can do for you today?”
The Americans responded,
“Tell the Queen that the Chesapeake has been avenged, and heave to while we come aboard.”
A rowboat took an American crew aboard the belted Belt. The Yanks offered to evacuate the wounded and take them to shore for treatment, but the British captain was mortally wounded in the pride and told the American officer to, “go to hell.” A very selfish egotistical gesture indeed. The captain wasn't wounded physically and he refused medical care for those on his own ship who were. If the wounded men had been asked they would have said, 'Yes. By all means, take us to Boston quickly. It has some of the best hospitals in the world, and we're bleeding.'
The Little Belt was a royal mess but was not going to sink, so it crawled back to England to tell its story to Prime Minister. This was one ship that wasn't going to kidnap any more innocent American sailors in the near future.
TIPPECANOE – INDIAN WARS AND HISTORY WARS - 1811
The governor of Indiana territory was future President William H. Harrison. In 1809 on behalf of the US Government he purchased most of western Indiana from the Delaware and Miami Indians for ten boxes of ziti ($10,000.) The Shawnees however refused to sign the treaty. This was tantamount to war as far as Harrison was concerned.
The Shawnees had two great leaders. The were Tecumseh and ‘The Prophet.’
In November 1811 the Shawnees attacked Harrison’s forces at the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. The Reds were routed and Harrison became a national hero.
WAS HARRISON A HERO? - MY TIRADE ABOUT THE INDIANS
Harrison is almost vilified in the modern US histories for winning at Tippecanoe. He was a history book hero until about 1970, but now history has flipped and made the Indians the heroes and Europeans the villains in every fight. When I was a kid I went to ‘cowboys and Indians’ movies and rooted against the Indians. Now every movie is asking the viewer to root for the Indians. As for books, since about 1970 there has been about 11 unkind word total said of an Indian individual or Indian behavior in any history textbook in the last 20 years. They were all saints and the whites were all devils.
It’s easy to write Euro-bashing takes from an air-conditioned room 200 years later. The true question is not how you feel about the Indians from the window of 2011, but how would you feel about them if you were raising a family on the frontier in 1811.
The liberals always spout how “we should give the land back to the Indians” and how they got skewered. But there isn’t a single lib lecturer that would turn over their house, garage, or swimming pool to a poor Indian to help make up for forked-tongue white-man crimes against them.
The virtues of Indian culture, and there were many, are always spotlighted in the history books. But the barbarian elements of their culture are overlooked as though they didn’t exist. The worst elements of European culture are spotlighted and contrasted unfavorably to the Indian. The virtues of European culture, and there were many, are overlooked as though they never existed and had nothing to do with the greatness of the USA. The secondary contributions of non-Europeans (not to say insignificant) are given top billing, but the majority culture isn’t credited for anything except trampling the rights of the others.
If Harrison wasn't a hero, than neither was Pershing or Patton. There were times when the Indians would have wiped out countless thousands of white men, women and children if they could have. They just were too divided to organize and prevail.
The young Indian man was a “brave” because his purpose in life was to make war. He was a warrior by trade as the default position of the male species. The Indians warred with one another for a thousand years and no one looked down on them for it. When the Euros hit the beach on the Atlantic and had this horrible habit of winning nine out of every ten battles, all of a sudden it is war and violence, and the white man’s tragic propensity for it, that is the issue. Suddenly the Indian represents Christ on the cross while General Harrison is the Roman soldier that spears him.
THE WAR OF 1812 – ORIGINS - IMPRESSMENT
Madison had just heard the good news from Tippecanoe when he addressed the Congress in late November 1811. But Harrison’s win may have led to more war. National confidence in US military forces increased and this grew into military conceit and contributed to the coming of the War of 1812.
The War of 1812 with Great Britain came about mostly because Great Britain had by far the strongest navy in the world and felt that it could therefore make its own special laws on the high seas whenever it saw fit. The British Navy could and did stop American ships by force and inspect them in search of illegal cargo. At the mouth of New York harbor British men of war would stand off, and the American ships would have to line up for on-board inspection in order to go out to sea. Doesn’t that make your blood boil? It does mine.
The illegal cargo the British were looking for was any sailor with an English accent.
The British behavior was arrogant and insulting but the Royal complaint was not unjust. British sailors did jump ship in American ports and then enlist in the American Navy or work on private American ships. Many fled into the interior forever. The British deserter problem was far larger than most US histories like to admit. Life in the British Navy was hell for many men. Floggings were common, the pay was two schillings a year, and many had been forced to enlist in the first place. They joyously jumped ship in US harbors by the thousands, not the hundreds. At one point in Norfolk harbor there were two large British merchant ships that could not depart for lack of a crew.
Some of the men the Royal Navy seized on US ships spoke with British accents but had lived in the United States for the required number of years to become full citizens. But the Brits were not ‘impressed.’ The British did not recognize American citizenship for men with English accents, no matter how long they claimed that had lived in Boston, New York or Richmond. 'Once and Englishman always an Englishman' was the British position.
The British were short on manpower and were engaged in a life or death struggle with Napoleon. We can appreciate their motives, but not their extreme tactics. The problem which led to the War of 1812 was that along with genuine deserters, the British were seizing American natural born citizens and then merely claiming that they had been British subjects.
The impressment issue had been a thorn in Uncle Sam's side since the mid-1790s. One of the reasons that Jays Treaty (1795) was condemned so vehemently in the USA when he came home with it was that it failed to settle the impressment controversy. Now, with a big war on, the British stepped up the impressments to a new level of insulting.
Professor Samuel Flagg Bemis argues that the actual provable number of clear-cut shanghaiing of native-born Americans was actually small, perhaps 20 incidents. Historians like Eddie Beach make it seem like it was more than a thousand. I don't know who to believe so I'll go with the redneck Beach's version of it. I say that the British Navy impressed 1,398 native born European-Americans between 1789 and 1815.
Even if myth-buster Bemis is right, the insult of a single seizure of this nature is a potential cause for war. The United States was completely justified in going to War with Great Britain over impressment. The US case for war in 1812 was certainly stronger than it was in 1917. In WWI the United States went to war on the high seas because American private citizens were dying on the ships of foreign belligerent nations, such as Lusitania. In 1812 the United States went to war because its merchant and warships were being stopped and boarded forcibly by a belligerent power in a time of peace.
The second cause of war was the western frontier. The USA wanted Britain out of the west and Spain out of the Southwest. By the terms of more than one treaty, the British had been required to evacuate the region and had not. They had some lame claim as to why they did not have to honor the agreement, but they at least did acknowledge that they were violating it. They, along with the Spanish, wanted the USA to stay boxed in on the west and south. The two old Euro-powers wanted the adolescent US to not get its drivers license or go to college. They did not want to see a coast-to-coast USA just as surely as visionary Americans were dreaming of that very thing.
The British occupied forts deep inside US frontier territory and were continually inciting the Indians to attack Americans. These terror attacks were a constant tale throughout early US history and by the time the impressment issue came to boil, so did the western terror issue. The US had had enough.
Great Britain worked closely with the Indians and was always there to buy the scalps. England would prefer a neutral Indian empire in the west to a rival American one. The Indians were not a threat to build a great merchant marine or begin undercutting cloth prices in Manchester. But the USA if it kept growing, held that threat. Some recent liberal history textbooks say flatly that the British had nothing to do with the Indian attacks on our western frontier. The charge that the British incited the Indians is ‘groundless but plausible,’ says one apologist turkey.
The third cause of the War of 1812 was shameful jingoistic American greed for the annexation of Canada. The ‘War Hawks’ thirsted to conquer Canada, whether Canada wanted to be conquered or not. It is perhaps just that all of the that American conquistador efforts in the War of 1812 sent off against Canada were total failures.
The only defensible reason that was offered for the attack north was that winning Canada would end the ability of the English Canadians to incite the Indians against Americans.
Many of the hawks were naïve enough to believe that the Canadians would embrace an invasion, and would want to become part of the United States. This was foolish on religious and patriotic grounds. Most Canadians were Catholic and the USA was almost wholly Protestant. Going back as far as the Quebec Act of 1774, the United States condemned Canadian Catholicism as a source of Popery and a potential threat to the religious institutions of America. The Catholics in France had a long standing resentment towards their southern neighbors for this hostile paranoia, and were not about to happily join up with the invaders.
In a spirit of derision, liberal John Randolph of Virginia gave the right wing militarist expansionists the nickname “War Hawks.” The term stuck and was adopted by the War Hawks with pleasure. The term ‘war hawk’ is still used today as a pejorative term against people like Rice and Rumsfeld who are accused of wanting the war of 2003 for avaricious reasons. There aren’t any war hawks in the Obama cabinet.
THE HAWKS
The original Hawks were young Congressmen, mostly elected in 1810 and mostly from the west and southwest. These two areas were feeling the pinch from the policies of France and England, especially England.
The 12th Congress convened in December of 1811. The hawks took their perches. Henry Clay (“Hawk One”) ran for Speaker of the House and this dynamic new Congressman won the post easily. Clay was a 34-year-old Kentuckian who will be a major player in American history from this point until his death in 1850.
Clay was joined by Hawk like John Calhoun and Langdon Cheeves of South Carolina, Kenneth Harrelson of Ohio, Felix Grundy of Kentucky, Dick Johnson, (a man who was no chicken-hawk but that rare politician who actually went out and fought in the war he promoted,) and William King. The last three would become Vice-Presidents. The War Hawks even lived in the same D.C. rooming house, a place that got the nickname ‘the war mess’ from the locals in the know.
Other Hawks included Pete Porter, who wanted some of lower Canada added to upper New York state; Billy Bibb, a Georgian who coveted the Spanish and Indian lands to the southwest; Jack Harper of New Hampshire, a graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover where the Bush presidents later enrolled; and John Sevier, the soldier of the Revolution and Governor of Tennessee.
Clay would go on to a sort of shame-fame as a three-time loser as the nominee of his party for President. Only W. J. Bryan would equal this Buffalo Billian mark for repeatedly coming up short in the big game.
Clay Hawk would later be famous as the great conciliator, author of great compromises. But at this young stage of his career he was no compromiser. When HC became Speaker of the House, the drift towards war was on.
John Calhoun, a man even less friendly than his stern portraits indicate, would also be a major player in the theatre of US history for some time to come. Clay and Calhoun would later become sectionalists, but in 11-12 when a national war seemed appealing, they were flag waving nationalists.
So in the War of 1812, two of the US motives were just and the other was not. The British had been no more insulting than the French had been towards American national honor and trade, but Macon’s Bill Number 2 had boxed Madison into a diplomatic corner where he had to declare war on Great Britain, just because France had given lip service to one trade demand.
In fact the Senate tried to add a declaration of War against France to the declaration of war against Great Britain and it failed to pass by only four votes! This was known as a proposal for ‘triangular war’ and would probably have changed history, and not in a good way for the United States.
EMBARGO HURTING ENGLAND
Many unfair historians have ripped Jefferson for his “Dumbargo” of 1807-8. But conditions in England in the winter of 1811-1812 would indicate that maybe it hadn’t been so dumb after all. The British people were hurting badly. They wanted the Orders in Council repealed and wanted reconciliation with the old colonies. ‘How else are we supposed to make any money?’ the griped.
Foreign trade was important to the United States, but without it America could still tie a rope and hang on. England on the other hand was totally dependent on foreign trade for its economic survival, let alone its well being. The USA was a big continent. England was a small island.
In cities all over England, demonstrations against the crown and Parliament were growing and growing problematic. Some took the form of formal epistles to government leaders. Others took the form of mob rioting.
There were riots in Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Plymouth, Manchester and of course, London (the Leeds riots may not count as it was over Who tickets.)
The momentum was overwhelming the government. The USA was gearing for war while England was gearing for reconciliation. The two sides could not meet and work things out in time to stop the war.
PERCEVAL FALLS MAY 1812
The Englishman who wrote the controversial Orders in Council back on 1807 was Prime Minister Smedley Percival. The British economy was in distress and Percival was taking much of the blame. The House of Commons conducted a formal inquiry, a sort of blame game session, into the origins and results of the blockade of 1807.
One sunny London day in May 1812, Percival was on his way to the inquiry for verbal grilling. A lunatic approached and murdered the Prime Minister. Percival’s last words were “I’ve been murdered,” which of course is technically as impossible to say as “I am sleeping.”
This evil deed almost changed the course of history. The next Prime Minister was willing to rescind the Orders in Council and moved to do so soon after taking office. But the news of the withdrawal of the offending British policy did not reach the USA in time to stop the Congress from making its formal declaration of war. There were no telegraphs or wireless laptops in 1812 and the news of peace showed up too late. The real communications tragedy of the War of 1812 was over how it began, not how it ended.
MR MADISON’S WAR
On June 1 1812 Madison sent his recommendation for war to the Congress, which approved it. On June 23, unaware that war had been declared against them, the British rescinded the offensive Orders in Council. When news of the retraction reached the USA, there was a moment of opportunity for peaceful settlement. War could be undeclared as easily as declared. But the war hawks of the west and the Republicans of the middle states still wanted war for reasons over and above interference with our foreign trade.
The Congress and the administration were gung ho for war, but there was little matching sentiment among the common people. Most Americans were confined in their thinking to their local area and had little ginger for getting into it over international issues. This was a handicap to raising troops for a national war effort. Local American militia wanted to stay local and not march off to distant lands.
The previous administration of TJ had been so anti-military that the US Navy began operations in what was to be primarily a naval war war in fairly bad shape. The Navy had been reduced under lefty Jefferson to three frigates, three sloops, and a rowboat with a sword tied to the bow. Tom’s plan for a streamlined navy had included 170 small gunboats. These schooners with two cannon were his personal idea and they were incompetent. They could not hold anchor in deep water and sank easily in rough seas. One TJ warship illustrated the meaning of lightweight when it was caught in a storm and ended up on dry land eight miles in from the beach. This was the US Navy that Madison had to work with.
Fortunately the three frigates would perform excellently, winning famous clashes with British ships and giving glory to the flag. But the British dominated the open seas and the magnified wins the Bon Homme Richard, the Constitution and the Constellation did not make up for the consternation of facing the strategic reality of absolute British control of the high seas for the entire war.
CINEMAPLEX - 1812
There were four theatres of importance in the War of 1812.
One -The Naval High Seas Theatre in which the US won some great isolated victories and then crawled back helplessly into its harbors. Give that one to the bad guys.
Theatre two - The great lakes campaigns (including lake Champlain) in which the two sides slugged it out rather spectacularly at times. Eventually the United States won. But it was a close one and a great victory late in the game on Champlain by one James McDonough finally decided it. If McDonough had lost his fight, the US would have been successfully invaded from the north.
Theatre 3 - land campaigns against Canada, including such fights as Lundy's Lane and the Thames. The Canadians and the British regulars more than held their own and all invasion plans came to nothing.
Theatre 4 - The western frontier. In these battles with British and their Indian allies, we lost a few and won a few but had the momentum near the end.
The campaign in the Chesapeake was a large raid, and the Battle of New Orleans was an important strategic battle but not part of a general southern theatre of action.
NAPOLEON INVADES RUSSIA
The United States might have won the War of 1812 if Napoleon had not pulled a Hitler and invaded Russia against all military wisdom. By losing the Battle of Russia, Napoleon began his doom and this enabled Britain to send the bulk of its forces overseas to the American War.
The parallels between the Hitler and the Napoleon are many. In both cases, if they had elected to stay put in central Europe, who knows how long they might have maintained an empire there, but by trying for the big enchilada they ended up collapsing as a power.
In both cases the armies of each dictator thought it could engage the Russian armies in a massive battle to win it all. Then they could do some mop up operations and take the place over.
In both cases the Russians instead employed the tactic of the limitless rear. Russ just kept retreating into his limitless interior lines, sucking the invading armies deeper and deeper into unfriendly territory. The Russian fighting forces remained intact, but they avoided the battle week after week.
The limitless rear defense saves all giant countries. As the conquerers go further and further from home they extend their lines of communication to the breaking point. It is more expensive and voluminous to maintain the armies, it is easier for the enemy to conduct harassment and interdiction operations along those lines, battles in which they didn't have to win in order to win. Morale drops among enlisted men even if somehow they can still be supplied. The desire to conquer distant lands is not the spark that ignites most good soldiers. On the other hand the enemy morale grows stronger and stronger, even in retreat, for their home is being stolen.
The limitless rear is certainly is a deterrent for any power that wants to conquer the United States. In 1812-13 the British understood it and the French apparently did not. The UK tried to harry an punish the US with raids and probes to seek and engage US Armies. But the UK didn't foolishly try to actually conquer the vast United States of America in 1812.
Napoleon finally took Moscow on September 14, 1812. But the prize was useless. The city was abandoned and stripped of anything useful. Napoleon had dinner at the Kremlin, much as the Brits would dine at the White House in August of 1813. But unlike the Brits, his army was failing in its strategic mission while holding an empty capitol city.
A few days later a thousand non-accidental fires swept Moscow. The Russian capitol went up in flames. The defiant Muscovites burned down their own city in order to punish the French invaders. Napoleon was burned out.
Now began an inglorious French retreat all across Russia. The Russian Winter, backed by Russian armies (in that sequence or power) decimated the French. Actually “decimated” is putting it euphemistically. Reduced to one tenth isn't enough of a description for the level of this defeat. Out of half a million French soldiers that invaded Russia, less than 18,000 returned alive to France!
On November 27 at Borisov, on the Berezina River, a living hell took place. There was one bridge left to get back home across the Berezina River. It was last helicopter out of Vietnam as countless thousands of French military personnel plus civilians were all trying to cross one bridge at one time and with shooting war going on all around them. The next spring, when the ice melted the bodies of 32,000 French people sprang from the river. It was a horror movie. 2,260 Americans died in the War of 1812. 32,000 French died at the Berezina River. This was the price of national glory for France and personal glory for the Napster.
Napoleon would have one last stand at Waterloo, but from the time he was thrown out of Russia, he was no longer a threat to conquer the world.
A few thousand historians admire and respect Napoleon, some even love him. Not me. The guy tried to conquer the world and his name was synonymous with war. He can't possibly be all that great, especially in the light of the revisionism on war-loving that started after WWI and became especially prominent after Vietnam. If was now bad than Nap was now bad too. But a lot of 'history bufs' never got the memo.
Incidentally for about a hundred years after 1812 'berezina' became French slang for anything disastrous.
ELECTION OF 1812
When the Democratic-Republicans (most historians call them the Republicans) nominated Madison for re-election on May 18, the War of 1812 was only a few weeks away.
As the war opened up wide and large the Federalists thought they could win by tapping into Madman's political war problem. The Feds would court the anti-war vote in the northeast, then when they campaigned out west, they would denounce Madison for not doing enough to win the war.
The Federalists were on the decline and knew it. They couldn't come with a winning candidate and they knew it.
Meanwhile the New York faction of DR's did not care for Madison for their own reasons. They decided on May 28 to run their own candidate, De Witt Koch Clinton the ex-Mayor of New York. In theory this Battle of 1812 might have ended up a three way race with two candidates for the DR's and one for the Feds.
But the Federalists decided at their convention to swallow their unit pride and seek the winning horse wherever they could saddle one up. The Federalists nominated the Republican Clinton for President, and their VP Jared Ingersoll. It would not be the first time in US history that the opposition party would try to sneak in to the White House by endorsing the divisive branch of its enemy party. This sort of trick is part of the political history of many nations, and it seldom works. The “fusion ticket” didn't work in the USA 1812 any better than it is about to work in 2011 Libya after the death of Khadaffi.
Many prominent Federalist were offended by the two faced forked-tongue campaign themes of their own party. John Adams, Mr. Fed, led the Massachusetts campaign, not for Clinton, but for the DR Madison.
In any case the “Fusion ticket’ was made up of those opposed to the incumbent, and as such provided a lively scrap. The two ‘Federalist’ candidates polled a combined popular tally of just under 139,000 votes. Madison won just over 140,000 popular votes. Madison won the Election of 1812 by less than 2,000 popular votes.
1812 – Madison whips his dead Vice-President’s Nephew
The also-ran of 1812 was DeWitt Clinton, the acting Mayor of New York City. His uncle was the late Vice President George Clinton (Madison had no VP during the campaign.) Clinton went on to become three time governor of New York and the man who built the Erie Canal.
THE WAR OF 1812 IN 1812
The first thirst was for Canada.
The South wasn't quite as enthusiastically about taking Canada as the rest of the country was. The South feared that if the USA expanded to Canada, the result would be new free states to politically take control of the country and eventually legislate slavery out of existence.
Jefferson had long believed that Canada could be taken by the mere act of marching there. Madison inherited his friend’s naiveté.
General William Hull started the offensive quest for Canada. He led an army out of Fort Detroit into the land of ‘eh?’ Soon the warriors of Tecumseh, whom we have met earlier, cut him off from behind. Hull had little choice without a supply line. He had to retreat to Detroit. Now came one of the most controversial events in American military history, one that hung the goat horns on Hull from 1812 to this very day. Hull is the Bill Buckner of the War of 1812.
1,400 Indians and British troops invested Hull at Detroit. But Hull had the numbers and didn’t know it. He had 2,000 men inside the fort. On 8.16.12 just when the enemy was about to fall into a trap and lose a major battle, the 60-year-old Billy Hull surrendered his entire force to the British and the Indians!
An American military court later tried him for cowardice.
I would like to say a word or two about the poor fellow. He was given disinformation about the size of the force surrounding him. More importantly, he was given a clear warning that if the issue had to be settled by combat, the Indians would be sure to launch their trademark terror upon each and every person inside the fort. General Hull's own wife and children were there as well as his two infant granddaughters. Brock, the British commander more or less informed Hull that he could not control his Indians, and who knows what these crazy redskins will do if Hull did not surrender. Many men in the fort also had their families there with them. Hull had a nightmarish vision of women being raped and children murdered. His beloved men would be tortured and scalped. This was SOP for the American Indian, both against each other as well as whites. It can be easily argued that what Hull chose to do was courageous, not cowardly, that God would have been proud of him for his mistake.
Every time I read an armchair general (historian) bashing the name of William Hull I have to ask how they would have felt in his shoes? Would they really want all that blood on their conscience in the name of the flag? Condemning Hull is like saying that in every hostage situation we should come in with guns blaring and take the kidnappers out, no matter what the consequences, because national honor is always first. I think a religious man has a lot to debate in the shoes of 1812 Hull surrounded at Fort Detroit, especially with disinformation thrown in the mix. It must be recalled that William H. Harrison’s humiliating triumph over the Indians at Tippecanoe was only a year old. The Indians had incentive to make these rumors of an impending massacre come true. Tecumseh and his braves were already in the middle of an unfinished war with the United States when the War of 1812 began, and they had already proven themselves capable of Nanking like behavior. This was no idle threat.
Poor Billy Hull. He has gone down in American history as a yellow coward for wanting to spare human life. Do the historians think that this man, a soldier and a general made his decision because he was afraid for his own life? I don’t think this is likely. If Hull was a coward he was a coward on behalf of others.
US attacks Canada in 3 Spots and Tries to Shoot Lake Erie
The other two campaigns on the above map were also rejected by the Canadian defense, though the story wasn’t as sorry as that of Hulls.
WAR IS HELL – CONSTITUTION BEATS GUERRIERE
The French word for war is 'guerriere.' Before 1812 the British had captured a French homme de guerriere named the Guerriere. The Royal navy decided to keep the same name for the big 38 gun frigate because it insulted the French and it had a macho ring to it to begin with.
In July of 1812 the USS Constitution defeated the Guerriere in a one-on-one battle in the Atlantic about 700 miles east of Boston.
The commander of the Constitution was the nephew of the Hull who had so ignobly surrendered Detroit to the British just two weeks before the battle with the Guerriere. Hull took his hull to sea needed to save the family name that Uncle Hull had so thoroughly ruined.
Hull and his Constitution was in Boston in mid-July 1812 when he heard rumors that a letter was on the way to relieve him of command and turn the ship over to Billy Bainbridge, So Hull slipped out of Boston just a day ahead of the mailman.
On August 19 the Constitution spotted the Guerriere and the two prepared for a battle to the death. The Guerriere was commanded by Tony Dacre, who had boasted for many months that there wasn't an American ship on the water that could defeat any British frigate and that certainly included his own.
When Dacre got close enough to Constitution, he realized that he was up against a more powerful ship and this wasn't going to be as easy has he had been bragging it would be. The Constitution not only had 44 guns to his 38, it was a stronger and bigger ship in every way, and it was made out of wood so tough that it would emerge from the Battle not only with a win, but with a nickname, 'Old Ironsides.' Even if the Constitution had been only 38 guns, it still would have been a mismatch. The only chance that Dacre had was to pray that the American officer handled the battle with utter incompetence and maybe get in close enough to use grappling hooks to turn the contest into a hand to hand fight aboard the American frigate. In an artillery duel, he knew he was in trouble.
Guerriere didn't have an option to retreat for two reasons. Firstly, no British warship had ever been defeated by an American warship (John Paul Jones was a foreigner in service to America with a foreign ship manned by a foreign crew flying an US flag when he had defeated the HMS Serapis some years back.) Dacre considered it unthinkable to admit he was sinkable. He was not going to go back to England as the goat of 1812 at sea.
The second reason was that the Constitution was considerable faster than the Guerriere, so the French ship in the service of Great Britain couldn't have run away if it wanted to. There was nothing left to do but surrender or force a lot of men to die and get legs amputated needlessly, and then surrender. Naturally, as macho military men have to do, he chose the later. Uncle Hull had chosen the former and is still hated by historians today! If a guy twice your size wants a fight, you have to get beat up first and then say “I give up.” I learned that in the sixth grade.
The two ships got up close in scary silence. The Guerriere chose a staggered broadside. As Constitution lolled up to it, the first cannon at the back of the ship, the one at the Guerriere derriere fired away. Then the next one that came into range of Constitution shot next. One after another, the British cannon raked the Constitution which withheld fire for one big broadside. By the time the 17th cannon had fired the derriere gun had reloaded and fired again, so there was a sense of this continuous unanswered cannon fire at Constitution that seemed to last forever to those men who were killed and wounded. It was like Bunker Hill at sea. Don't fire till you see the whites with foam.
Finally Hull stood up with is baggy pants, raised his sword, and swung it down yelling “fire!” - As he yelled fire, his pants fell down! I wouldn't reach for a cheap story like that if was to make something up. This really happened. But people had other things to think about. No one laughed at the time, but months later the story got funny and became small talk in the US military for some time.
In any case, the Constitution unleashed a completely destructive broadside into Guerriere. The battle was on.
I've read some very long and tedious descriptions of this battle, full of 88 naval words I have to look up, so I don't want to go there. Some of these naval historians write about battles like they are having the time of their life at the keyboard. They are enjoying all the smoke and powder and blood and killing way too much for my reading taste. I will just tell you that stubborn Dacre refused to surrender until Constitution had used a series of broadsides from both sides of Ironsides until he had torn the British ship into a rudder-less bobbing bloody burning hulk filled with dead and dying men.
When all was finally lost and no one on the Guerriere knew his own name, the British captain surrendered. What's the French word for 'surrender'?
Hull thought about towing what was left of the proud “war” ship back to Boston but he knew there would be nowhere to park in that city so he set a long fuse to the magazine and then set it on fire. The men of both ships watched from the deck of the Constitution as the Guerriere blew up like a tactical nuke.
America celebrated the victory like it had won the war. What pride! What glory! We are great and you're not! The United States would have something to gloat over for 200 years. But one dogfight didn't mean that Britain didn't still have complete control of the sea. In the high-sea war of 1812 the USA had scored a single sock to the jaw in the middle of a 15 round beating at the hands of Union Jack.
It was however great for national morale and it a sense it helped the USA win a tie in the end. Without this and other singular naval victories, morale might have sunk too low and a negotiated peace might have been signed too soon leaving America on a shorter end of the stick than it ended up with in 1815.
THE WAR OF 1812 IN 1813
COCKBURN RAIDS - APRIL-JUNE 1813
A squadron of British ships under Sir George Cockburn, a ‘crusty old salt’ raided several US coastal towns and depots from April to June of 1813. The farms of Lynnhaven Bay were raided for food first. Then Cockburn bombarded Frenchtown, Maryland, set fire to the town of Havre de Grace, and then went 60 miles west on the great Susquehanna where his ships bombarded a factory.
Cockburn’s raiders then headed out of the Chesapeake and south to Virginia to participate in an attack on Norfolk. 3,000 British troops were taking part in the strategic attack. The British wanted to destroy the frigate USS Constellation, and the Portsmouth Naval Yard. The Constellation was hiding out at Portsmouth at the time.
Between the British sea and the American city of Norfolk lay little Craney Island. A land battle took place for Craney on June 20, 1813 and the British lost. Seventy-five Brits died and no Americans were KIA. In retaliation the British raided a defenseless town nearby, Hampden. Here they displayed their worst behavior of the war including incidents of rape and murder of American civilians. No one was punished.
The overall commander in the theatre for Great Britain, Mr. Warren, said that these atrocities were committed by French irregulars serving in the British Army only to escape the gallows.
NORTHERN CAMPAIGN 1813
In the last week of April 1813 America sacked Toronto.
It was called York at the time and was an important provincial capitol, but much more important it was a Great lake naval base with a frigate under construction, dangerously close to completion.
There was a sharp fight for York, 1,600 Americans landed in the raid. After a battle for a fort that was won by the Americans, the British withdrew. In the middle of the fight, the magazine of the British ship under construction blew up in a terrible event. More than 100 men died from the blast, including many Canadian servicemen.
But the Yanks began to spread rumors that the explosion had been planned by the British-Canadians as a booby-trap of sorts. The charge was absurd since too many Canadians had died too, but the belief in the story spread and the Americans became surly. Then they had a few drinks, and well, you know. They got a little rowdy and burned down Toronto. Maybe not all of it but a lot. There was a lot of looting of private homes and virtually all of the government buildings were lit on fire.
The sacking of York was like a Pearl Harbor for Canadian morale, and it ended whatever tiny hope there ever was the Canada would want to become part of the United States. It led directly to the burning of Washington DC a year or so later.
Politically it was a disaster but militarily the raid was a success. The Americans got their hands on a good stock of desperately needed artillery pieces and they knocked out a powerful ship under construction that could have been a dominant force on the Great Lakes. The upcoming showdown on the lake might have been lost for the USA if not for the raid on Toronto.
Lakefront War Front
On the New York state front Henry Dearborn was ordered to lead an attack against Montreal via the lake Champlain route. The militia again would not leave New York and the attack never made it 20 miles past Plattsburgh. The plan went splattsburgh.
General William Harrison’s troops then tried a counter-strike against Fort Detroit. He failed several times. So much for Henry Clay’s boast that the Kentucky militia alone could conquer Canada. It was clear that the only way to win the war in the north was to win control of the Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie.
Oliver Hazard Perry constructed a fleet of small fighting ships for Erie action. The cannon on these vessels had been captured when American forces had raided Toronto (York.)
Perry’s fleet encountered a British squadron at a place called Put-in Bay (I'm not Put in u on) on 9-10-13. This lake fight was a clear victory for the Americans, and Perry reported the results back to Washington in his famous line, “We have met the enemy and they are ours, baby!”
Having lost the lake, the British felt it wise to abandon Detroit and retreat into the Canadian promontory of Ontario. Harrison pursued them into coldsville and the two forces clashed in the Battle of the Thames on October 5. This time the Redcoats Red allies could not make the difference. The fight went to the Americans, and the intrepid Tecumseh fell in battle. A Colonel named Dick Johnson took credit for personally slaying Tecumseh, and it helped him later become Vice President, even though DJ could never prove the brag.
The next move against Canada was even more embarrassing to the US flag than Hull’s choke.
The US Army and the NY militia marched north towards Niagara Falls. The Army men crossed into Canada but the militia would not cross. They claimed that they were in the militia to defend their homeland, not to invade someone else’s.1When Lee invaded Maryland in 1863, thousands of Rebel troops deserted because they had only signed on to defend the South, not to invade the North.
As always, the British had their terrifying Indian allies in camp. and they did their worst in battle. The entire land war in the north was going badly for the arrogant Yanks.
TACTICAL VICTORIES AT SEA
On the deep sea, the three frigates Constitution, United States, and President, gave an excellent accounting of themselves in singular engagements. The chump Guerriere we've covered. Let's look at the others.
The victories were good for the national morale and for future painters, but strategically they did not alter the central fact of the complete British dominance of the high seas. The Union Jack soon successfully enforced a complete blockade of the entire east coast from Maine to Carolina. Constitution, United States, and President all had to retreat into the safe harbors of Boston, New York, and New Haven, respectively, where they sat out the last year and a half of the war. If Constitution had left Boston Harbor at the end of 1813, she would have been Old Sunkensides.
The strategic situation improved for the Brits when the war with Napoleon finally came to a successful conclusion. Top-notch warm-beer-loving veteran troops were quickly transferred to the New World front. The Brits would no longer have to fight with one lobster claw tied behind their back.
CHAMPLAIN FOR EVERYBODY!
Expectations were high that the Canadians, British, and Indians could invade the USA from the Lake Champlain theatre.
But Captain Tommy MacDonough had constructed a sturdy little flotilla on Champlain and he defeated the British in a water-fight. The lake was secure and the invasion was thwarted.
MADISON SICK OF WAR
President Madison became quite ill during the summer of 1813. It may be that he would have been ill in any case, but those who believe in psycho-somatic illness may be forgiven if they speculate that Madison may have been literally sick of the war.
The War of 1812 was arguably the most unpopular war in all of American History, at least the most unpopular declared war. There had never been any united national sentiment to go to war. Only the war hawks in Congress, combined with regional selfish groups had been able to pressure the President to ask Congress for the declaration. Madison in 1812 had submitted his war message on June 1. It took 18 days for Congress to make up its mind and the vote had been very close in the Senate. The war never went very well for the USA until near the very end, so there was never a chance for the jingo juice of winning to create a mob psychology of support as happened in other wars when there was victory like in 1898 or in 1991. It seems odd that we get our national anthem from this war we should take little pride in.
HAIL COLUMBIA
The song Hail Columbia, a celebration of our fighting patriotism, was written during the War of 1812 and it became our unofficial national anthem for many decades before it was replaced officially by the Star Spangled Banner. They sing Hail Columbia in one of the John Adams HBO Episodes.
I liked the Star Spangled Banner the first 789,000 times I heard it, but at this point, I think we should let Bob Dylan write us a new one. (But if you're talking about letting John Williams or Lady Ga Ga write it, lets keep the old one.)
BURN DOWN THE HOUSE – THE WAR OF 1812 IN 1814
The British were high in morale. There was a lot of anger towards the aggressive Americans trying to invade royal Canada. The Americans had played victim in 1776. Now they were attacking the King of England, not fending him off. The King and Queen weren’t shouting for the annexation of the former colonies, but the Americans were doing this about Canada.
In April of 1813 American rebels sent a raiding party into Toronto (called York at the time) and several government buildings were burned to the ground.
In August of 1814 the British retaliated. They sent a large army of marines on big ships up the Chesapeake. The ships unloaded several battalions of crack troops at a spot just a few hours by foot from our nation’s capitol. The march on Washington began.
Dolly Madison and her husband were almost ready for dinner when they were informed that the British were coming. They split. British troops walked into D.C. unopposed and set fire to several government buildings. British officers sat down and dined on the dinner that Dolly had prepared for the President. Then they burned the Presidential Mansion. After the war the painters chose white to cover up the burns; from this it became ‘The White House.’
Only one government building was not burned. It was a hall of deeds. The curator convinced the commanding British officer that it would be morally wrong to burn such a place, and would serve no purpose. It was here that the government met for the next Congressional session. It was the only government building intact.
The entire city might have burned to the ground if not for a miraculous thunderstorm that plastered DC a short hour or so after the British departed.
The punitive attack on the capitol was more than just a terrorist message and a retaliation for York. British forces physically destroyed the national banks and caused severe disruption in US ability to financially carry on the war.
The British units then tried to capture Baltimore but the American resistance in and around Fort McHenry was sufficient. The expedition of terror went back to their ships. These modern Viking vandals had made their point.
The burning of Washington in 1813, the low point of American military history, was a punitive excursion, not a large theatre invasion with intent to annex or occupy. The USA started this uncivilized behavior when Sam burned all the government buildings in Toronto a year before. Most biased conservative history books omit this little detail. Although the USA managed to defend Baltimore and write the Star Spangled Banner over it, the Royal punitive excursion in the Chesapeake of August 14 was a strategic success. The nation was definitely chastised. You eat the President's dinner, then burn his house down; that sends a definite message.
JESSE BENTON FEUD WITH ANDREW JACKSON
Now a sidebar mid-war story involving a future President.
It started in Nashville where Andrew Jackson had a friend named Jimmy Carroll. Jimmy had an enemy named Jesse Benton who also happened to be the brother of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Jesse was always challenging Jimmy Carroll to a duel. Jimmy was a poor shot and didn't want to die, so when Jesse Benton said, “I offer you out,” Carroll said, “no.”
Finally he couldn't take getting called yellow, so Carroll agreed to the duel. For his second (dueling assistant) Carroll secured the services of Andrew Jackson.
The two men made the classic paces from back-to back and turned to face the reaper. Benton shot first and the musket-ball grazed Carroll's finger, causing a little blood, but no more.
Caroll aimed to fire. Benton knew he was going to die. So he had to think fast if he ever wanted to taste another Santoro's meatball sub ever again.
Benton went turtle. He turned, crouched and offered only his behind as a target! Carroll couldn't kill Jesse Benton now even with a free shot! So Jimmy Carroll took aim and shot Jesse Benton in the buttocks! And that was the end of the duel!
Needles to say, the incident bought shame on Jesse Benton. He became the laughing stock of the South. You can imagine the jokes.
Jesse Benton felt that Andrew Jackson was partially responsible for the asinine humiliation on the dueling ground, so he complained to his wild old man. Thomas Hart Benton and his son together decided that they were going to track Andy Jackson down and kill, “that treacherous squid.”
There followed a showdown in Nashville on November 3, 1813. The two Bentons went to City Square in Nashville and booked themselves at the hotel diagonally across the one where Andrew Jackson was drinking with two friends.
The Bentons moseyed down the street and stood in a doorway, biding their time. Jackson and a friend took a walk, and noticed the Bentons staring them down as they returned to the bar.
A few moments later the door swung open and there was Jesse Benton. Jackson was carrying a whip and a pistol. He drew faster than Jesse and put his pistol in Benton's chest without firing.
“I've got you now, you dim-witted rascal,” said Jackson as he began backing Benton out of the bar. Just then Thomas Benton slipped up behind Jackson and shot him in the back in cold blood, up near the shoulder. That bullet went through Jackson. Dad Benton shot his second pistol too, right into poor Andy Jackson. This one lodged in his upper arm. A free for all with guns, knives and fists then broke out.
Later on, Jackson was being treated for his wounds at a nearby house. He had lost a great deal of blood. Outside the window the Bentons, father and son, chanted hatefully at the wounded man inside,
“We hope he dies! We Hope he dies!”
Jax never had the musket ball extracted and he lived with it's sting at the Battle of New Orleans and through his eight years as President.
Tom Benton and Jackson were enemies for a long time, but late in life became friends. Imagine fishing with a guy while carrying painfully the musket ball he put into you 30 years ago. I dream of smacking people around who only said something mean to me 30 years ago, and here's AJ drinking with the guy who shot him.
GHENT AND NEW ORLEANS 1814
On December 24, 1814 the two warring nations signed a treaty at Ghent, in Belgium (pronounced ‘gent’, not ‘jent’ - my mother in law corrected me on that one). Two weeks later a major battle was fought at New Orleans between top line British divisions and an American rainbow force of Army regulars, Indian scouts, pirates, and southern volunteer militia, all under the command of General Andrew Jackson.
The sun shone brightly as the British marched foolishly in super-slow motion in the open in formal European style wearing bright red uniforms they bought at Targets. The Americans were a bunch of frontier rascals who had fought Indians the last 20 years and had no qualms about forming up regiments in camouflage behind strict sniper cover. They mowed the British down in a one-hour turkey shoot. It was terrible glory. We lost a handful of men and the British lost a thousand KIA and another thousand wounded. It was a mass slaughter and the country rejoiced. Johnny Horton made a hit record in the 1950’s celebrating in song the bloody killing field.
Perhaps the greatest myth of American history, one bought into by many top-flight historians even today, is that the Battle of New Orleans need never have been fought. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed on Christmas Eve 1814 and the Battle (slaughter) of New Orleans took place on January 8, 1815. It took more than two weeks for the news of Ghent to reach America. If communications had not been so primitive, the fighting would supposedly never have taken place. So the standard story goes.
In fact the treaty did not contain an armistice. The Treaty of Ghent would have to be ratified by both the British Parliament, and by the United States Senate along with the President's signature before the state of war would end. This might have taken several weeks. It is quite possible that the battle would have been fought anyway. This point is stressed by Samuel Bemis, one of the best historians of all time.
LEGACY
Militarist US chauvinism was born in a war that America performed poorly in. US history forgets the pathetic run for your life performances of the US militia in a dozen crucial instances, and instead focuses only on the one tough stand outside of Baltimore at the back end of a humiliating fall-back campaign. The National Anthem is a celebration of US selective memory.
How bout an honest anthem based on the War of 1812 – First Stanza
Oh say can you see
All the cowards that flee
For our safety we run
At the twilight we're hiding
NEW ENGLAND TRAITORS! THE HARTFORD CONVENTION
The War of 1812 was a low point in New England's national status. The NE Federalists were completely against the war and held a convention at Hartford, Connecticut in December of 1813 in which a few men loosely discussed secession. Just then the war ended with a great victory. Good timing New England. Yankee smugglers on the northern border had also traded with the enemy. All of a sudden it wasn't a good time to be from New England. Southern citizens and writers and orators would rub in this disloyalty of 1813 until the turn of the century. It was still being used to argue against post Civil War Reconstruction in 1876, comparing Southern secession in 61 to NE threats to betray the country in 13. In fact it was at this time that a southern journalist first coined the derogatory term, "Mass-hole."[3]
Some history books call this convention secessionist. The truth is that only a small minority at the Hartford Convention favored secession, and no such proposal was ever seriously floated. When secession was suggested it was rejected. The New England states wanted only to express their grievances formally to the central government. They had suffered from the Dumbargo, and thought that a Virginia Dynasty was in the making. New England had lost influence through the Louisiana Purchase, lost income from tariffs, and thought the war a mistake. But there was no official disloyalty at the Hartford Convention. Nevertheless the myth arose and has persisted, especially among Southern white-wing historians, that the Convention was a secessionist plot. This makes the South a little less the bad guy for seceding in 1860. See, you guys were going to do it too!
The convention mostly asked for new amendments to the Constitution to prevent future unjust wars, including an amendment to make it illegal for two consecutive presidents to be elected from the same state. Monroe of Virginia would succeed Madison of Virginia in 1817. So much for that ideal.
RECONCILIATION WITH ENGLAND
"The more violent the storm, the sooner it subsides"
The bloodshed in the Chesapeake and at New Orleans may have sobered both nations into a new and permanent attitude of reason and reconciliation that would never have been realized without the conflict. Hopefully. Otherwise the war is a jingoistic stain on our history. The war marked the birth of American jingoism. It is from the fiery 1812 gang of Grundy, Clay and Calhoun that we derive the term "War Hawks."
The War of 1812 was neither victory nor defeat for either side. Some history books claim that Mr. Madison’s War was a great victory for the United States. Bernie Bailyn calls it “a great success.” How? By proving that our Army stunk and our Navy was useless, and that the only strong forces in the field were privateers on the sea and rag tag armies of frontier militia, sprinkled with rogue vaguely pro-American land pirates out for only themselves? Or was it successful by proving that our militia often did not even have the discipline to follow orders while their brothers were being gunned down in plain view? Perhaps it was a success by advertising our chauvinist militarism, as in the way we wanted to annex Canada for no truly good reason, or a glorious success that we could not stop a relatively small force from invading the Chesapeake and burning our President’s home to the ground. Maybe the success came with the Hartford Convention, when a section of the country put its complete non-support of the war into a formal setting.
The War of 1812 was not a success. The only winner was jingoism and Francis Scott Key who became an immortal celebrity with his song celebrating the fact that a completely successful punitive expedition against us had run out of logistical supply lines at the gates of Baltimore.
The only clear loser was the Indian. Tommy MacDonough’s victory on Champlain cost them dearly. When negotiations for peace began at Ghent, the British were insisting on an Indian nation to be created in what was then the American West. This would keep the rival American nation hemmed in, and would maintain an Indian state friendly to Britain, both in commerce and foreign policy. But when news of the victory on Lake Champlain reached Ghent, the British lost a lot of bargaining power. The Brits dropped the native-American buffer state idea, and the status quo before the war began became a new starting point for negotiations. The British deserted the Indians faster than Hull deserted Fort Detroit.
The super-scholastic collaborative history masterpiece The Great Republic claims that the War of 1812 was a feather in the cap of the anti-Federalist DR’s because it had been fought without standing armies, which is something the Federalists wanted and the Republicans were against.
They write; “The Republicans remarkable experiment in governing a huge country and fighting a war without the traditional instruments of power was thus vindicated.”
Are you serious? We almost lost the war because we lacked sufficient military institutions. We would have fared much better if we had instead possessed ‘the traditional instruments of power.’ Its absurd to suggest that going to war without an army or navy and barely surviving it, even though it was a home game, is something to be thrilled about. Some historians call it The Second War For Independence. True. Jefferson utopian Democratic-Republican liberal naiveté almost cost us our independence. Just because we ran through a sniper field without a helmet or vest and somehow came out the other side alive does not prove the wisdom of doing so. If it weren’t for one win on Lake Champlain and dum-dum British tactics at New Orleans we would have been forced to accept a punitive peace, and the War of 1812 would have had a clear cut loser.
ELBRIDGE GERRY THE GERRYMANDERER
It is in dishonor of Massachusetts pol Elbridge Gerry that the word "gerrymandering" became part of the lexicon of American politics. It means to restructure voting districts for partisan political purposes.
Gerry tried to get Congressional districts in Northeastern Massachusetts redrawn to enable him to win the next election. In a popular cartoon the odd geographical configuration of the district was lampooned as being shaped like a salamander and renamed a ‘Gerrymander.’
NATIONAL ROAD BEGUN
Young American commerce and trade ran north to south in the west. The rivers ran in that direction. There was little that anyone could do to stop the momentum of the Mississippi and the mo of the mighty Mo. The steamboat had been invented at this time but was not employed on any effective scale. The need for an east to west national road across the Appalachians was obvious. The canal system was another dream solution, but men like Jefferson had always discouraged the concept as ‘madness’ and only 100 miles of canal were built by the end of the Madison era. Jefferson apparently only believed in unusual things that he invented. In 1816 Congress authorized the construction of a great National Road, giving the USA a ‘westward-ho’ option. The National Road would make slow progress over the next decades with its crushed stone construction.
The NR was an extension of an already begun state road. The Federalists had long been pushing for the national government to pay for internal improvements and the DR’s had long been resisting on principle. But when the Hartford Convention and the Battle of New Orleans had annihilated the influence of the Federalist Party, it became all-right for the Democratic republicans to co-opt some of the best ideas of the Federalists such as public works projects paid for by federal funding.
The Democrats did to the Federalists in the early 19th century what they would later do to the Socialist Party in the early 20th. They denounced all their ideas until the opponent was demolished. Then they took their best ones and called them their own.
FORT ROSS 1816
The Russians around this time were beginning their expansion onto the west coast of North America. This would lead to considerable friction in the administrations of Monroe and Quincy Adams and led directly to the famous Monroe Doctrine which was the work of Quincy Adams when he worked for Monroe as his Secretary of State.
In 1816 the Russians established a trading post called Fort Ross (really Fort Rus as in Fort Russian – a Russian is a person of the Rus - but anglicized in American maps to Fort Ross) on the west coast of today's California. Old Fort Rus was on today's Bodega Bay, just north of San Francisco.
I told my wife just last week that if we ever take that long discussed trip to San Francisco I must go to see Bodega Bay. It's not because I love history so much, it's because Bodega Bay is where they filmed the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, The Birds. Maybe the reason the Rus people eventually evacuated Fort Ross is that they got tired to being attacked by angry crows.
AFTER OFFICE
Madison remained active in Virginia politics after leaving the Presidency. He even revised the Virginia state constitution fifty years after writing the original. He died on June 26, 1826. Upon his death the secret notes to the Constitutional Convention were turned over to the government. Previously there had been no written record of the proceedings of the deliberations in the heat wave of 1787 that produced the Philadelphia Constitution.
James Madison led the dream life of a writer. He not only wrote well, prolifically and successfully, but he wrote about things that mattered and was influencing the very things he was writing about just by writing about them! He was the main author of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, The Virginia Constitution, Washington's Farewell Address, and The Cat in the Hat. He wrote it all. This little guy's pen was mightier than his sword, and even his sword had bite when he took us to war in 1812.
SOURCES
America and its Peoples, A Mosaic in the Making - 5th Edition by
Randy Roberts, Steve Mintz, Linda O. MrMurray, James Kirby
Martin and Jim Jones - c) 2004 -
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford c) 1961 D.C. Heath
Bailey is unstoppable. I've read four of his books. And finished them. If you knew how many half-read books are lying around this room, and how few finished books are mixed in among them, you'd know that is high praise for the master 'man of the people' historian from the Bay.
This is the second edition. Liz Cohen of Harvard is revising this book and republishing it every few years even now.
A Country Made by War, by Geoffrey Perret, c) 1989, a study of American militarism, and one not as unkind to it as its title seems to be implying.
A Diplomatic History of the United States, by Samuel Flagg Bemis – c)1934 Henry Holt
Another great work, but not a page turner. I started reading this wonderful book more than 15 years ago and I still have 180 pages to go.
Empire for Liberty, by Malone and Rauch, c) 1960 - Great writers and scholars with a subtle pro-Southern bias. This might be blaming Rauch for the work of Malone, who is from the University of Virginia. Both have degrees from Columbia. I once parked my car near there.
Encyclopedia Britannica – 1985 bio on Madison – I paid $1,500 for these volumes in the age before computers. At the time, it was worth it. I made encyclo-payments.
The Great Republic, by Wood, Davis, Donald and others.
History of Free People, by Henry W. Bragdon (Phillips Exeter Academy) and Samuel P. McCutchen (NYU) – c) 1954 MacMillan
This is such a martinet of a book that it gives school itself a bad name. Here is one of the assignments demanded of the student at the end of the 9 pages on the War of 1812 and the Madison Administrations.
“Write a 'Life of Tecumseh' to accompany that of Pontiac in your Portraits of Indian Chiefs.”
Ya gots ta be kiddin me.
History of the People of the United States, From the Revolution to the Civil War, Vol V, by John Bach McMaster, c)1900 – Very detailed account of the War of 1812. A McMasterpiece.
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History of the United States of America, by Henry Elson, c) 1940 – Never a dull paragraph. A real man of the people.
The National Experience –Authors, Blum and Stampp – Kenny Stampp has long been one of my favorites, so I knew this college textbook wouldn't be bad. Its excellent and the authors are especially strong on economics.
On the Hill, A History of the American Congress, by Alvin M. Josephy Jr., c) 1979 (2nd edition) – General US histories tend to have a lopsided focus on the executive branch and tend to treat Congressional action as a peripheral player in support or rejection of the president’s policies. In reality Congress is (at least in theory) one of three equal branches of our national Government, so a history with Congressional center is a welcome change of perspective. There aren’t many available.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – This is the Bible of PC outrageous liberal pseudo-history, although they don’t really turn up the lefty heat until the chapters covering the 20th century.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
Is it possible for an historian to drop more inside naval terms in a general history that only a sailor knows? Just because Sam wrote the fabulous 13 volume history of the US Navy In WWII (the official US Gov. history) and he wrote the Maritime History of Massachusetts, and the most extensive biography of Christopher Columbus (Admiral of the Ocean Seas) of all time, doesn't mean you should sprinkle your general history of the United States with sailing terms. The reader didn't buy a naval history, just a history, you sailing snob.
Graphic Story of the American Presidents, By Davey Whitney
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty – c) 1966 - 2nd revised c) 1974
Garraty has an anti-US slant on the War of 1812 that is above and beyond the call of duty, even for a Columbia professor.
John nobly mentions that 110 of Ollie Perry's 400 men at Put-in-Bay (Don't give up the ship Put in Bay) were Negroes. You'd think that Garrity was fairly liberal to the cause of blacks in American history, but since I've read most of the book, I assure you he is not.
The United States to 1865, by Michael Kraus, c) 1959 – U-Mich Press
Part of the popular Michigan State history series. Mike is sometimes a bit too much of a chauvinist for my taste, and that's not a good sign for Kraus, since I'm one to begin with.
The United States: The History of a Republic by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University, William Miller co-author of The Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron of Smith College – c) 1957
They describe a US commander named Provost who failed to follow up a victory with a quick follow up attack as having “turned tail.” Easy for you rich pencil-pushers to say 150 years later from Smith College.
The Wars of America, by Robert Leckie – Includes a 98 page chapter on the War of 1812. - Leckie loves war and pretends he hates it. In spite of that, (or perhaps because of that,) he is one of the better war historians.
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