American Experiment (39 page)

No voice expressed western feeling more eloquently than that of a thirty-four-year-old Kentuckian, Henry Clay. Born in Virginia and admitted to the bar there, he had traveled west through the Cumberland Gap to Lexington, where he soon prospered among the gambling, hard-drinking, land-speculating gentry of the bluegrass region. After serving two unexpired terms in the United States Senate—the first when he was barely thirty—he was elected a member of Congress in the summer of 1811 and chosen Speaker the very day he showed up in the House. As a senator he had become the leader of a young, militant, even martial group of legislators who were eager for a war against England. In their anger Westerners had
turned to him. “Will Congress give us war this winter?” Thomas Hart Benton had written Clay from Tennessee. “Or, will the majority…wait for chance or destiny to mend our condition?” And in contrast to the cautious Madison, Clay took the kind of cocky, pugnacious stance they liked.

“The conquest of Canada is in your power,” Clay had told the Senate. “I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.…” As Speaker, Clay renewed his pressure on the Administration to go to war.

But war against whom? Britain was the wrong enemy, Federalists were asserting; the French were preying on American commerce—especially ships bound for eastern ports of Europe with lucrative cargos of grain. Members of Congress were attacking both governments. “The Devil himself could not tell, which government, England or France, is the most wicked,” Nathaniel Macon exclaimed. For a time the Administration actually contemplated a triangular war. The whole “business is become more than ever puzzling,” Madison wrote Jefferson late in May 1812. “To go to war with Engd and not with France arms the federalists with new matter, and divides the Republicans some of whom with the Quids make a display of impartiality. To go to war agst both, presents a thousand difficulties, above all, that of shutting all the ports of the Continent of Europe agst our Cruisers who can do little without the use of them.” The Federalists, he feared, would exploit such difficulties. The only argument for “this triangular war as it is called” was that it might hasten a settlement with one of the two nations. But Madison was doubtful even of this. Jefferson and other cooler heads could hardly imagine war with both powers. Britain had been by far the more provocative, and the more recently provocative. And Britain was an old enemy, France an old ally.

So it would be war with Britain, and Britain alone. Madison was determined to act, and he was strongly backed by the Secretary of State. “Our wrongs have been great; our cause is just.…Let war therefore be forthwith proclaimed against England,” Monroe wrote anonymously in the Republican party’s newspaper, the Washington
National Intelligencer.
But Madison and Monroe knew that for such a drastic step the Administration must have the united support of Congress, and the Federalists were waiting for a ship to arrive from England with London’s final answer to America’s protests. But when H.M.S.
Hornet
sailed into New York Harbor, she brought few signs of British conciliation.

On June 1 Madison sent his war message to Congress. After a long statement of trade and impressment grievances he concluded: “Such is the
spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped on our country, and such the crisis which its unexampled forbearance and conciliatory efforts have not been able to avert.” Madison had prudently canvassed the Congress to be sure of a war measure, and young “war hawks” such as Clay and John C. Calhoun, the South Carolinian who headed the House Foreign Affairs Committee, guided the measure through Congress. Even so, the results betrayed deep division in the Congress, as the House voted for the war bill 79 to 49, and the Senate, after several days’ intensive debate, by only 19 to 13. The tally was strongly partisan, as about three-quarters of the Republicans present in the House voted for war, and the Federalists there voted against. The result had a sectional cast too, as Westerners voted almost solidly for the war bill, Southerners did so strongly, aside from John Randolph and a half dozen mountain Virginians and North Carolinians, and the central Atlantic states voted heavily for the bill. But the northern states—even the northern seaboard—were not solidly against the measure. Indeed, so many economic, xenophobic, expansionist, geographical, and particularist (land hunger, hostility toward Indians) factors seemed to be interwoven in the congressional vote that the pundits of the day, and historians ever since, have debated the causal forces.

Cutting through all these forces, and possibly the most powerful but certainly the least measurable of them all, was ideology. Almost all Americans were deeply angered by Britain’s maritime policies, and especially by impressment, and they were angered by impressment because it struck blatantly at the heart of a most solemn credo. Two astute observers of the day understood this. Said John Quincy Adams: “The State, by the social compact is bound to
protect
every one of its Citizens.…The principle for which we are now struggling is of a higher and more sacred nature than any question about taxation can involve. It is the principle of personal liberty, and of every social right.” Said John C. Calhoun: “This is the second struggle for our liberty.” Individual liberty from the slavery of impressment, and national honor and independence from Britain—these were fused in the public mind. A Fourth of July toast in Boston captured this feeling best: “The War—The second and last struggle for national freedom—A final effort to rescue from the deep the drowning honor of our country.”

By the summer of 1812 James Madison not only had a military struggle on his hands; he also had a political one. This was a presidential election year, and Madison, like his three predecessors, was running for a second term. In May, at the height of the fever for war, he had been unanimously
nominated by the congressional caucus, composed of Republican members of Congress. But later that month, New York Republican legislators, rebelling against the Virginia dynasty in their party, nominated De Witt Clinton for president. Nephew of Vice-President George Clinton, who had just died in office, De Witt was typical of the new breed of young, opportunistic politicos who were challenging Republicans and Federalists of the old school.

Clinton’s nomination put the Federalists into a dilemma. If they chose a true-blood Federalist of the John Marshall caliber—and Marshall was sounded out—they still could not hope to defeat an incumbent President at the polls (Marshall declined to swap a chief-justiceship in hand for a presidency in the bush). At a party convention in New York—the first “grass roots” nominating convention in America—the Federalists, amid much misgiving, left the way open for state Federalist parties to support Clinton. Soon Clinton’s supporters were appealing to antiwar New Engenders with such slogans as “Madison and War! or Clinton and Peace!” while promising voters farther south that the New Yorker as President would prosecute the war with vigor. Since electors would be chosen during the summer and fall, Madison was under constant pressure to provide military victories.

Rarely, however, have military pretensions and military resources diverged more sharply. The Administration’s strategy was aggressive: to strike north into Canada, to join hands with Canadians believed to be eager to throw off the British yoke, and to seize Montreal after isolating it from the west. To accomplish these aims, Madison could muster an assortment of army officers who had never commanded men under fire but who had won posts through connections in Washington or through election by troops in the field; a regular army of about 12,000 men scattered in outposts around the nation’s borders; a potentially large militia, but currently under state control and unavailable in most of New England because of hostility there to the war; a small but professional navy; all too few engineers and other experts; and an almost nonexistent command structure, so that each ship and every army in the field would have to operate virtually on its own. During the long months and years of deteriorating relations with Britain and France, Congress had never faced up to the need for a major defense program. Canada’s forces were small and scattered too, but they were well trained, with experienced officers.

Amid great expectations General William Hull led several regiments of regulars and volunteers north from Dayton through Ohio swamps and wilderness to Detroit. From Detroit he dispatched troops across the frontier into Canada, then issued a proclamation advising Canadians either to
come over to the American side or to stay at home; white men found fighting with Indians, he added, would not be taken prisoner but shot. Facing Hull on the Niagara frontier were Canadian troops and “Tecumseh’s revenge.” Biding his time after Tippecanoe, the Indian chief had mobilized over a thousand warriors to support the Canadians.

Tecumseh was to prove Hull’s undoing both militarily and psychologically. While the American dawdled, fast-moving Indian braves harassed his long communication line to the south. The British commander, having intercepted American dispatches, adroitly played on Hull’s mounting fear that he and his men would be cut off and turned over to the mercy of the redskins. More and more distraught over the plight of the civilians, who included his daughter and grandchildren, Hull lost his nerve. He surrendered without firing a shot. He was later court-martialed, sentenced to death for cowardice, and pardoned by Madison for earlier bravery.

A hard-riding horseman brought the shocking news to the President while he was en route to Montpelier for relief from the Washington heat. Madison immediately turned back to the capital and summoned a cabinet meeting. More bad news was arriving from the north. Hull had sent a young captain to Fort Dearborn (on the present site of Chicago) to evacuate the post. Several hundred Potawatomies fell upon the small band of soldiers and civilians and massacred over half of them. The Indians beheaded the youthful commander, cut out his heart, and ate it.

Gloom in Washington was relieved only by news from Boston. About 750 miles off the coast, the
Constitution
, under Captain Isaac Hull (a nephew of the disgraced general), had caught up with H.M.S.
Guerrière
, closed with her, poured in heavy broadsides of round and grape, and reduced her to such a gaping hulk that the British surrendered and the
Guerrière
, useless even as a prize, was put to the torch. This small but electrifying victory at sea, and the repulses all along the Canadian frontier, epitomized the course of the war during its first year.

Now under heavy criticism from Federalists and antiwar Republicans, Madison and his Cabinet laid their plans for 1813. A heavier effort would be mounted both in the North and on the Atlantic. Congress boosted soldiers’ pay, expanded the regular army, and authorized more warships. Madison decided to sack his Secretary of War, William Eustis, a Massachusetts physician and Republican politico with little war experience, as well as his Secretary of the Navy, who was reported often to be in his cups by midday. New secretaries, Madison hoped, would weed out the incompetents among the high command.

Would the commander in chief himself be sacked? By fall Madison’s foes were seizing on every blunder and mishap to fortify their arguments about
unpreparedness and Washington fumbling. They made much too of the congressional caucus as undemocratic, even aristocratic. “The current Elections,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “bring the popularity of the War or of the Administration, or both, to the Experimentum crucis.” With New England leaning toward Clinton and the South and West toward Madison, New York and Pennsylvania were the swing states. In New York, where electors were chosen by the state legislature, the Federalist floor manager, a young and inexperienced state senator from Kinderhook named Martin Van Buren, so brilliantly outmaneuvered the Republicans that he won a clear majority in the legislature—and hence all of New York’s 29 electoral votes—for Clinton. In Pennsylvania’s popular balloting for presidential electors, the Clinton men capitalized on dissatisfaction over the war effort in the western mountain country, but Madison swept the more populous areas. Pennsylvania’s 25 electoral votes for the President were decisive in the electoral college, which Madison carried by only 128 to 89. The President began his second term—and his stepped-up war effort—with a dubious vote of confidence.

The Administration planned to make 1813 a year of decision in the North by building up its land, water, and amphibious forces across the long frontier stretching from Detroit along Lakes Erie and Ontario and up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. Madison now had a new War Secretary in John Armstrong, a New York politician and diplomat, and a new Navy Secretary in William Jones, a Philadelphia merchant-politician, but his key appointment was General William Henry Harrison, of Tippecanoe fame, as senior officer in the Northwest. Harrison’s early efforts to retake Detroit, however, ended in one bloody defeat and one ambush by his old adversary, Tecumseh. Harrison prudently went on the defensive while Commodore Isaac Chauncey built warships on Lake Erie to control this crucial waterway. Chauncey had the help of a twenty-eight-year-old naval officer, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, a Rhode Islander who had gone to sea at eleven and had already fought the Barbary pirates. The British too were feverishly building up their fleet strength on the lakes, but vital supplies were slow in coming from a far-off motherland now in mortal conflict with France.

By summer’s end Perry’s ships were strong enough to risk engagement with the Royal Navy. The small fleets met off the island of Put-in-Bay in the bloodiest naval fight of the war. Earlier in the year, after the British frigate
Shannon
had crippled the
Chesapeake
off Boston, the dying American captain had murmured, “Don’t give up the ship.” Perry had this last order inscribed on the colors of his flagship, the
Lawrence
, but after the
Lawrence
was smashed almost to pieces, with 80 percent of her men casualties, Perry coolly shifted his flag to another ship and directed the demolition of the
British fleet. Then he sent to Harrison another memorable war cry, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”