Colonial_18th

The War of 1812: The Fighting Begins

     The War of 1812 has to rank as one of the most poorly planned and poorly fought wars in American history. Thanks to Jefferson's (and Madison's) policy of maintaining only a skeleton military force in both naval and land forces, the United States was in no shape to fight one of the best equipped armies in the world. Nevertheless, the U. S. hoped to "hide behind Napoleon"--that is, planned on having Britain so tied up fighting Napoleon in Europe that they wouldn't be able to spare too many forces for North America. It was a dangerous gamble.

     In the first year of the war, American experienced nothing except defeat on land, as an American attempt to invade Canada met defeat at the hands of a small British and Indian force. Another force under General William Henry Harrison had success at raiding undefended Indian villages, but could find none against British troops. The only success Americans could find was at sea.

     The American Navy possessed three frigates, the Constitution (popularly known as Old Ironsides), the President, and the United States--all dating back to the Adams administration. (Adams had been a great proponent of a strong navy--"walls of wood" he called its ships--and if it had not been for his efforts commissioning these ships, the U. S. would have almost certainly lost the War of 1812.) In mid-August 1812, the Constitution defeated one of the toughest ships in the British Navy, the H.M.S. Guèrriere. The United States, under the command of Stephen Decatur, also defeated a large British warship, the H.M.S. Macedonian. Enduring thirty broadsides fired by the Macedonian, Decatur's gunners splintered the British ship with seventy broadsides of their own. Though no stranger to the horrors of war, Decatur was shocked by what he found when he boarded the crippled vessel: "fragments of the dead scattered in every direction, the decks slippery with blood, and one continuous agonizing yell of the unhappy wounded." American privateers also enjoyed naval success. During the first six months of the war, privateering vessels captured 450 British merchant ships valued in the millions.

     American naval victories were all that kept America's morale alive in 1812. Former treasury secretary Albert Gallatin summarized the nation's humiliating efforts: "The series of misfortunes," he wrote Jefferson, "exceeds all anticipations made by even those who had the least confidence in our inexperienced officers and undisciplined men." The land war had been, as another politician would recall, a "miscarriage, without even the heroism of a disaster." Vowing to reverse the situation, Congress increased the size of the army to fifty-seven thousand men and offered a $16 bonus to encourage enlistments.

The Election of 1812

This was the situation when Madison stood for re-election in 1812. The nation's military and his own political fate appeared shaky at best. Although the majority or Republicans supported him for re-election, nearly a third of all Republican congressmen--most from New York and New England--rallied around New Yorker DeWitt Clinton, nephew and political ally of Madison's former challenger, George Clinton. Like his uncle, DeWitt Clinton was a Republican who favored Federalist economic policies and agreed with New England Federalists that the war was unnecessary. Most Federalists supported Clinton, and the party did not even field a candidate of its own.

When the campaign was over, the outcome was nearly the same as the congressional vote on the war bill earlier in the year. New York and New England rallied around Clinton, with the South and West supporting Madison. Madison won re-election, but was hardly in a position to gloat, with his share of the electoral vote falling from seventy-two percent to fifty-nine percent between 1808 and 1812. Likewise, Republican strength in the House dropped thirteen percent and in the Senate eight percent.

The Great Lakes Campaign

Oliver Hazzard Perry

The Battle of Lake Erie

When the military campaign resumed in the spring of 1813, it appeared the U. S. Army would fare as badly as it had the previous year. The problem on the Canadian front was that the British controlled the Great Lakes and so could depend on an uninterrupted supply line. In contrast, the Americans had to move their supplies along underdeveloped roads and were easy targets for British and Indian attackers. As soon as the Great Lakes thawed, the Americans moved to destroy Britain's advantage but met frustration as the raids and counter-raids by each side accomplished little.

Harrison's land campaign was not proceeding well, either. In the spring of 1813, the British general Henry Proctor and Tecumseh, with a joint force of nine hundred soldiers and twelve hundred Indians, laid siege to Harrison's command camped at Fort Meigis on the Maumee Rapids in Ohio. An army of twelve hundred Kentucky militiamen finally broke through and drove the enemy off, but they were so disorganized they lost nearly half their number in pursuing the British and Indian force. Having escaped virtually unscathed, Proctor and Tecumseh continued to harass the American forces throughout the summer. Then, with winter approaching, the British and Indians withdrew to Canada. Harrison, who had been busy raising additional troops, decided to pursue.

No doubt Harrison's new effort would have proved as fruitless as his first had it not been for the fortuitous turn of events at the hands of the U. S. Navy. Oliver Hazzard Perry, a young naval commander, led a small fleet of ships assigned to Lake Erie. After months of playing hide and seek among the shore islands, British and American ships met in battle at Put-in-Bay in September 1813. Two hours of canon fire left Perry's flagship, the Lawrence, nearly destroyed, and eighty percent of the crew lay dead of wounded. But Perry refused to surrender. He transferred his flag to another vessel and continued to fight. He sailed into the heart of the British force and after three hours of close combat subdued and captured six British ships. He immediately sent a note to Harrison stating: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours."

Buoyed by this news, Harrison's army closed in on Proctor and Tecumseh at the Thames River, fifty miles northeast of Detroit, on October 5. The British force faced a piercing cavalry charge and lacking naval support was soon forced to surrender. The Indians held out longer, but when word spread that Tecumseh had been killed, they melted into the woods, leaving the body of their fallen leader to be torn apart by the victorious Americans.

The Ft. Mims "Massacre"

Another war front began in 1813 in the Mississippi Valley. Although the Creek Confederation as a whole wished to remain neutral, one faction calling themselves the Red Sticks had allied with Tecumseh in 1812. In the summer of 1813, the leader of the Red Sticks, William Weatherford, led a force against Fort Mims (in present-day Alabama), killing all but thirty of the more than three hundred occupants. The so-called Fort Mims Massacre enraged whites in the Southeast. In Tennessee, twenty-five hundred militiamen rallied around Andrew Jackson, a young brawler and Indian fighter. Already called "Old Hickory" because of his toughness, Jackson promised to avenge the blood of children and women spilled at Fort Mims. In the course of that fall, Jackson's frontier ruffians fought multiple engagements against the Red Stick Creeks, driving them into hiding.

Meanwhile, the British, embarrassed by the success of Old Ironsides and other American frigates, imposed a blockade along the American coast, thereby bottling up America's military fleet and merchant marine.

The Politics of War

The Embargo of 1813

      Even American and British forces did battle on land and on sea, Madison and Congress still had to worry about the practical issues of troops and supplies, both of which were in critically short supply. In spite of increases in army pay and bonuses for new recruits, enlistments were falling off in 1813. Congressional Republicans responded by adding further enticements to new recruits, including grants of 160 acres of land in the western territories. Congress also authorized the president to extend the terms of enlistment for men already in service. By 1814, Congress had to increase the size of the army to more than sixty-two thousand men but had not figured out how to pay for the changes.

     Presenting the federal budget for 1814, Treasury Secretary William Jones announced the government's income would be approximately $16 million but its expenses would amount to over $45 million. Traditional enemies of internal taxes, the Republicans faced a dilemma. Shortly after convening, Congress had passed a new set of taxes and could not imagine explaining another increase to their constituents. So congressional Republicans decided to borrow instead, authorizing a $35 million deficit.

     Adding to the money problem was the fact that, to this point in the war, the United States had permitted neutral nations to trade freely in American ports, carrying American exports to England and Canada and English goods into eastern ports. As a result of this flourishing trade, American currency was flooding out of the United States at an alarming rate, weakening the nation's economy. At the same time, American food was rolling directly into British commissaries, strengthening the enemy's ability ability and will to fight.

     In a secret message to Congress, the president propose and absolute embargo on all America ships and goods--neither was to leave port--and a complete ban on imports that were customarily produced in Great Britain. Federalists, especially those from New England, screamed in protest.   They called the proposal an "engine of tyranny, an engine of oppression," no different, they said, from the Intolerable Acts imposed by Britain in 1774. But congressional Republicans passed the embargo eight days after Madison submitted it.

     The Embargo of 1813 was the most far-reaching trade restriction bill ever passed by Congress. It confined all trading ships to port, and even fishing vessels could only put to sea after their masters posted sizable bonds as security. Government officials charged with enforcing the new law had unprecedented discretionary powers. The impact was devastating; the embargo virtually shut down the New England and New York economies, and it severely crippled the economy of nearly every other state.

New British
Offensives

Burning of Washington

     While Congress debated matters of finance, events in Europe were changing the entire character of the war. On March 31, 1814, the British and their allies took Paris, forcing Napoleon to abdicate his throne. Now America stood alone against the full might of the British empire. Republican congressman Joseph Nicholson expressed a common lament when he observed: "We should have to fight hereafter not for `free trade and sailor's rights,' nor the Conquest of the Canadas, but for our national Existence."

     As Nicholson feared, a flood of combat-hardened British veterans began arriving in North America, and the survival of the United States as an independent nation was indeed at issue. By September 1814, British troop strength in Canada had risen to thirty thousand men. From this vantage point, the British planned a three-pronged offensive designed to bring the war to a quick end.

     In August 1814, a British fleet composed of twenty warships and several troops transports sailed up Chesapeake Bay toward Washington, D. C. The British arrived outside Washington on August 24. The troops defending the city could not withstand the force of hardened British veterans, but they delayed the invasion long enough to allow the government to escape. Angered at being foiled, the British sacked the city and torched most of the buildings. Then they moved on toward the key port city of Baltimore.

     At Baltimore, the British navy had to knock out Fort McHenry before the army could take the city. On September 13, British ships armed with heavy mortars and rockets attacked the fort. The British fired more than fifteen hundred rounds at the American post. Despite the pounding, when the sun rose on September 14, the American flag continued to wave over Fort McHenry. The sight moved a young Georgetown volunteer named Francis Scott Key, who had watched the shelling as a prisoner aboard one of the British ships, to record the event in a poem that was later set to music and became the national anthem of the United States.

The Battle of Plattsburgh, September 11, 1814

Click on map for larger image

While many other battles and military heroes gained greater notoriety in the War of 1812, none was so important as the American victory at Plattsburgh in upstate New York. In early September, Sir George Prevost, governor-general of Canada, massed ten thousand troops for an invasion of the United States along the traditional Lake Champlain-Hudson River route. On September 6, it would join up with another British fleet on Lake Champlain. However, a small American flotilla under the command of Lieutenant Thomas MacDonough outmaneuvered the larger British fleet and forced it to surrender on September 11.

The Battle of Plattsburgh was the turning point of the war, just as the Battle of Saratoga had been in the Revolutionary War, and for much the same reason. It turned back a British invasion force from Canada, and in so doing foiled British plans to drive a wedge between New England and the rest of the nation. (The British hoped that the restive Federalist stronghold would secede and sign a separate peace.) Likewise, the British loss helped speed along negotiations underway in Europe.

The Battle of New Orleans

Andrew Jackson

General Pakenham

     On yet another front, the British pressed an offensive against the Gulf Coast designed to take pressure off Canada and close transportation on the Mississippi River. The defense of the Gulf Coast fell to Andrew Jackson and his Tennesseans. Having spend the winter raising troops and collecting supplies, in March of 1814 Jackson and his army of four thousand militiamen and Cherokee volunteers resumed their mission to punish the Red Stick Creeks. Learning the Red Sticks had established a camp on the peninsula formed by a bend in the Tallapoosa River, Jackson led his men on a forced march to attack. On March 27 in what was misleadingly called the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson's force trapped the Creeks and slaughtered nearly eight hundred people, destroying Red Stick opposition and severely crippling Indian resistance in the South.

     After the massacre at Horseshoe Bend, Jackson moved his army toward the Gulf of Mexico, where a British offensive was in the making. Upon his arrival in New Orleans on December 1, Jackson found the city poorly defended. The local militia, composed of French and Spanish residents, refused to obey American commands. "Those who are not for us are against us, and will be dealt with accordingly," Jackson proclaimed. He turned increasingly to unconventional sources of support. Free blacks in the city formed a regular army corps, and Jackson created a special unit of black refugees from Santo Domingo under the command of Colonel Jean Baptiste Savary. White citizens protested Jackson's arming of runaway slaves, but he ignored their objections. "Legitimate citizens" protested, too, when Jackson accepted a company of river pirates under the command of Jean Laffite, awarding them a blanket pardon for all past crimes.

     Having pulled a ragtag force together, Jackson settled in to wait for the British to attack. On the morning of January 8, 1815, it came. The British forces commanded by General Edward Pakenham emerged from the fog at dawn, directly in front of Jackson's defenses. Waiting patiently behind heavily constructed barricades, Jackson's men began firing with rifles, cannon, and muskets as the British moved within range. According to one British veteran, it was "the most murderous fire I have ever beheld before or since." Pakenham tried to keep his men from running but he was cut in half by a cannonball.

     When it was all over, more than two thousand British troops had been killed or wounded at the Battle of New Orleans, while a mere seventy one Americans fell. This was by far the most successful battle fought by the Americans during the War of 1812.

     However, by the time the Battle of New Orleans was fought, the War of 1812 was over!

The Treaty of Ghent

     While the British were closing in on Washington, treaty negotiations designed to end the war were beginning in Ghent, Belgium. Confident that their three-pronged attach would soon knock the United States out of the war, the British delegates were in no hurry to end the war by diplomacy. They refused to discuss relevant issues, insisting that all the matters raised by Madison's peace commission were non-negotiable.

     However, domestic politics in England, together with the British defeat at Plattsburgh, soon turned things around. After nearly a generation of conflict, the British were tired of war. The failures at Plattsburgh and Baltimore made it appear that the war might drag on for yet another year, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of $44 million. Moreover, the American war was interfering with Britain's European diplomacy. Trying to arrive at a European peace settlement at the Congress of Vienna, the other European powers were anxious to end hostilities and were not likely to wait upon the British blockade to bring the Americans into submission.

     In the end, the Treaty of Ghent, completed on December 24, 1814, simply restored diplomatic relations between the United States and Great Britain. It did nothing to address the issued that had caused the war, such as impressment of American citizens or the trading rights of neutrals. Neither military action nor diplomatic finagling netted Canada for the War Hawks. And the treaty said nothing about the alleged conspiracies between the British and the Indians. Although the Americans called the War of 1812 a victory, they actually won none of the prizes Madison's war statement had declared the nation was fighting for.

"The Revolution of 1815"

Nevertheless, America changed tremendously as a result of the War of 1812. First, it gained respect on the world stage for its willingness to stand up and fight for its rights. Second, it had proven to the "old Mother Country" that the United States was and would remain truly independent. Third, it had, through the combined Indian defeats at Tippecanoe and Horseshoe Bend, ended any significant Indian resistance east of the Mississippi River and opened it to white settlement. Fourth, the war itself, as well as the embargo that preceded it, had transformed the economy of New England from one based on trade to one based on manufacturing. This would ultimately do more than anything to break the back of Federalism. And finally, the war produced a new generation of "heroes" like Andrew Jackson who would serve as models for the "new men" of the West.

The Hartford Convention

The Federalists had gained considerable strength since Jefferson engineered the passage of the Embargo Act of 1808. They claimed that the federal government had conducted economic warfare against its own citizens. They had opposed war with Great Britain, their traditional trading partner, and when war came, their support, lackluster at best, drained away after passage of the Embargo of 1813. Convinced that their differences with Washington called for drastic action, the Federalist called a convention to meet in Hartford, Connecticut, in mid-December, 1814, to discuss a petition of rights and grievances (after the model of the Stamp Act Congress) to present to the federal government. Never stated openly, but implied throughout, was the threat that if the government did not meet their demands, the New England states might secede from the union.

The Hartford Convention dismissed on January 5, 1815, and a delegation set out for Washington, D. C., with the convention's petition. By the time the delegation arrived, however, news of the great victory at New Orleans had reached the city, followed close thereon by news of the Treaty of Ghent. The Federalist delegates never presented their petition, but news of their actions leaked out, and, in the context of nationalist pride following the peace treaty, permanently damaged the reputation of the Federalist Party in America as "traitorous." The Federalist Party disintegrated forever, thereby ending the First Party System. Their demise, coupled with the euphoria of victory, ushered in a brief period of political harmony and unity labeled the "Era of Good Feelings." The man who would oversee this era from the White House would be the fourth Virginian elected to the presidency, James Monroe.

Conclusions

America emerged from the War of 1812 with renewed confidence and optimism. The nation had managed to survive all the early challenges in its "infancy"--a "peaceful revolution" that destroyed the Articles of Confederation and replaced it with the Constitution, internal conflicts, such as Shays' Rebellion, and the unforeseen political divisions between Federalists and Republicans, and finally a full-blown war with the greatest empire of the age--and managed to grow stronger. It seemed as if nothing could stand in the way of the New Nation and the brilliant promise of its future.

Sources

Portions of this lecture are derived directly from Chapter 9, "Increasing Conflict and War: 1805-1815," in Berkin et al., Making America: A History of the United States, Volume I.