A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (38 page)

On the high seas, the United States fared somewhat better. American privateers carried on the Revolutionary strategy of looting British shipping, but with little tactical impact. The U.S. Navy, with minimal forces, somehow won 80 percent of its initial sea battles. Although the strategic impact was insignificant, these actions yielded the most famous lines in American seafaring. Captain James Lawrence in 1807, for example, his ship the
Chesapeake
defeated by the
Leopard
and her veteran crew lying mortally wounded, shouted, “Don’t give up the ship. Fight her till she sinks.”
¹¹⁶
The war also produced the most notable one-on-one naval confrontation in the annals of the U.S. Navy when the
Constitution
engaged the British
Guerriere.
Marines boarded the British ship, and after blasting away her rigging, forced her to surrender. After the battle, the resiliency of the
Constitution
’s hull left her with the nickname, Old Ironsides. It was a single engagement, but the London
Times
noted its galling significance: “Never before in the history of the world did an English frigate strike to an American.”
¹¹⁷

Much of the war at sea did not go as well. Jefferson’s gunboats, thoroughly outclassed by British frigates, retreated to guard duty of ports. This constituted a demoralizing admission that Jefferson’s policies had failed, and was confirmed by a congressional vote in 1813 to fund six new frigates, essentially doubling the U.S. fleet in a single stroke!
¹¹⁸
There were also famous naval battles on inland waters. On Lake Erie in 1813, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry built a fleet from scratch, deployed it on the lake, and defeated the British in an impressive victory at Put-in-Bay. Not to be outclassed by Captain Lawrence, Perry declared afterward, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
¹¹⁹
Those few victories gave Americans hope that after the second full year of war, the tide was turning.

After the British defeated Napoleon at Leipzig in October 1813, they turned their attention to the North American war. Fortified by battle-hardened veterans of the European theater, England launched an ambitious three-pronged offensive in 1814 aimed at the Chesapeake Bay (and Washington, D.C.), Lake Champlain, and New Orleans. They planned to split America into thirds, crippling resistance once and for all.

Initially their plan worked well. On August 24, 1814, 7,000 American militiamen turned tail, allowing the British army to raid Washington, D.C., and burn government buildings, sending President Madison and his wife running to the countryside, literally yanking valuables off the White House walls as they ran to save them from the invaders. The British had not intended to burn the White House, preferring to ransom it, but when they could find no one to parlay with, they torched everything. This infamous loss of the nation’s capital, albeit temporary, ranks alongside Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Corregidor as low points in American military history, and the destruction of the White House marked the most traumatic foreign assault on mainland American soil until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the British withdrew, they unsuccessfully bombarded Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, inspiring patriot Francis Scott Key to compose “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Farther north, at Plattsburgh, New York, Sir George Prevosts’s 10,000–man army met defeat at the hands of an American force one-tenth its size at the Battle of Chippewa. There American regulars relieved the militia—with stunning results. At a distance of seventy yards, the British and American infantry blasted at each other until the British broke, and the Americans, clad in the gray cadet uniforms of the United States Military Academy, chased them off the field. The British commander, shocked that he had not come up against militia, blurted, “Those are Regulars, by God.”

On nearby Lake Champlain, a concurrent naval battle brought a spectacular American victory. Captain Thomas Macdonough, the thirty-year-old American commander, rallied his sailors, reminding them, “Impressed seamen call on every man to do his duty!” Although knocked unconscious by a soaring decapitated sailor’s head, Macdonough delivered so much firepower that he sent Prevost and the British running.

Despite these morale builders, there was more potential trouble in store. By late fall of 1814, a 3,000–man British army under General Edward Packenham was en route, via ocean vessel, to attack New Orleans. More than two years of warfare on land and sea had produced no clear victor.

Combat and stalemate had, however, inspired new opposition from New England’s Federalists. When war commenced, Federalists thwarted it in many ways, some bordering on treason. A planned invasion of Canada through lower Maine proved impossible because the Massachusetts and Connecticut militias refused to assist. Meanwhile, New Englanders maintained personal lines of communication with Britons, providing aid and comfort and thereby reducing the bargaining powers of American negotiators at Ghent. And they appeared to be rewarded at the polls with solid 1812 electoral gains in the presidential campaign and large 1814 victories for Federalists in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland.

Their dissent came to a head with the Hartford Convention of December 1814, which marked the height of Federalists’ intransigence and the last installment in their dark descent. Federalist delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island gathered in Hartford, Connecticut; discussed and debated administration foreign policy and other issues; and concluded by issuing a call for a separate peace between New England and Britain and constitutional amendments limiting the power of southern and western states. (This was the second time New Englanders had danced around the issue of secession, having hatched a plot in 1804 to leave the Union if Jefferson was reelected.)

Across the ocean at Ghent, in Belgium, British and American negotiators, including Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Albert Gallatin, parlayed well into the Christmas season. The days wore on, and Adams complained to his diary that the gregarious Clay kept him awake all night drinking and gambling with their British colleagues. At last, both sets of negotiators conceded they possessed no military advantage. Britain’s European victory over Napoléon, meanwhile, opened up a series of prospects and obligations they needed to immediately pursue. At long last, both nations agreed it was time to compromise and end the War of 1812.

On Christmas Eve the deal was struck. Americans withdrew their two major demands—that Britain stop impressing American seaman and officially acknowledge neutrals’ trade rights and freedom of the seas. Both sides knew that Britain’s European victory meant England would now honor those neutral rights de facto if not de jure. Other territorial disputes over fishing waters and the American-Canadian boundary near Maine were referred to commissions (where they languished for decades). The Treaty of Ghent thus signified that, officially at least, the war had changed nothing, and the terms of peace were such that conditions were now the same as they had been prior to the war—
status quo ante bellum.

Madison must have been apprehensive about presenting such a peace without victory for the approval of the U.S. Senate. Fortunately for Madison’s party, news of the Ghent Treaty arrived in Washington, D.C., at exactly the same time as news of an untimely, yet nevertheless glorious, American military victory. On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson’s odd coalition of American troops had pounded General Packenham’s British regulars and won the famed Battle of New Orleans.

Jackson’s victory was mythologized, once again with a David and Goliath twist in which outnumbered American sharpshooters defeated the disciplined redcoats.

The fact was that Jackson’s men were seasoned combat veterans of the Creek Indian theater of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend(1814). Now, at New Orleans, they were joined by a polyglot collection of local French (Creole and Cajun), Spanish, and free black troops, with a few Caribbean pirates under Jean Laffite thrown in for good measure. The nub of the army remained hard-core Jackson veterans, except for key Creole militia artillery units. Together they manned the breastworks of Chalmette (near New Orleans) and awaited Packenham’s force of 2,600.

Jackson had all the advantages. His men were dug in on both sides of the Mississippi protected by a thick breastwork, and the British had to either endure murderous enfilade fire or simultaneously attack both positions—always a tricky proposition. Most important, Jackson had plenty of artillery and had chosen the perfect ground—a dense swamp forest on his left, the canal on his right, and a huge expanse of open field over which the redcoats would have to cross. Merely getting to the battlefield had proven a disaster for the British because their troops had had to row through the lakes and marshes, and each British guardsman carried an eight-pound cannonball in his knapsack. When several of those boats tipped over, the soldiers sank like the lead they carried.
¹²⁰

Under the cover of a dawn fog, the British drew up for a bold frontal assault on the American position. Then, suddenly, the same fog that had concealed their formation on the field lifted, revealing them to Jackson’s guns. Sharp-shooting militiamen, using Kentucky long rifles—accurate at hundreds of yards—took their toll, but the British ranks were broken by the Louisiana artillerymen. Packenham himself was shot several times and died on the field, alongside more than 2,000 British regulars, dramatically contrasting the 21 Americans killed. Adding insult to injury (or death in this case), the deceased Packenham suffered the indignity of having his body stuffed into a cask of rum for preservation en route to England.

Jackson emerged a hero, Madison pardoned pirate Jean Laffite as thanks for his contributions, and the Federalists looked like fools for their untimely opposition. It was a bloody affair, but not, as many historians suggest, a useless one—a “needless encounter in a needless war,” the refrain goes. One conclusion was inescapable after the war: the Americans were rapidly becoming the equals of any power in Europe.

A Nation Whose Spirit Was Everywhere

“Notwithstanding a thousand blunders,” John Adams wrote candidly (and jubilantly) to Jefferson in 1814, President James Madison had “acquired more glory and established more Union than all his three predecessors, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, put together.”
¹²¹
Perhaps Adams meant to rub salt in Jefferson’s wounds, but by any measure, the changes for America over a period of just a few months were, indeed, stunning.

America’s execution of the war had extracted a begrudging respect from Britain. In the future, Britain and all of Europe would resort to negotiation, not war, in disputing America; they had learned to fear and respect this new member in the family of nations. Americans’ subsequent reference to the War of 1812 as the Second War for Independence was well founded.

On the home front, the war produced important military and political changes, especially in the Ohio Valley, where the hostile Indian tribes were utterly defeated. But so too were the Creek of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. The War of 1812 set the stage for the first Seminole War (1818), Black Hawk’s War (1832), and the federal Indian Removal that would, in a mere twenty-five years, exile most remaining Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw Indians to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. In a sense, the War of 1812 was not so much a victory over England as over the Indians, smashing the power forever of all tribes east of the Mississippi.

Politically, the Federalist Party died, its last stalwarts slinking into the Republican opposition and forming a viable new National Republican caucus. They learned to practice the democratic politics the Jeffersonians had perfected—mingle with the crowds (and buy rounds of liquor), host campaign barbecues and fish fries, shake hands, and, perhaps, even kiss a few babies. In this way these nationalists were able to continue to expound Hamilton’s program of tariffs, banks, and subsidized industrialism, but do so in a new democratic rhetoric that appealed to the common man, soon seen in the programs championed by Henry Clay.
¹²²
Within the Republican Party, National Republicans continued to battle Old Republicans over the legacy of the American Revolution. Within a generation, these National Republicans would form the Whig Party. Jefferson’s ideologically pure Old (“democratic”) Republicans died, yielding to a newer, more aggressive political machine under the Jacksonians.

Tragically, the increasingly southern bent of the Old Republicans meant that the radical individualism, decentralism, and states’ rights tenets of Jeffersonianism would, under the southern Democrats, be perverted. Jefferson’s libertarian ideals—the ideals of the American Revolution—would, incongruously, be used to defend the enslavement of four million human beings.

Watershed Years

N
ortheastern Americans awoke one morning in 1816 to find a twenty-inch snowfall throughout their region, with some flakes reported as being two inches across. This might not seem unusual except that it was June sixth, and snow continued throughout July and August in what one diarist called “the most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen.”
¹
Little did he know that on the other side of the world, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Java had shot clouds of dust into the stratosphere, creating a temporary global cooling that left Kansas farmers to deal with a rash of ruined crops and a disorienting haze to match the economic malaise gripping the nation. Within just twenty years, the United States would suffer another depression blamed on the financial repercussions of Andrew Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States. Journalists of the day and generations of historians since—until well into the 1960s—agreed that government policies had brought on the recession. In fact, the root cause was outside our borders, in the case of the Panic of 1837, in Mexico, where the silver mines dried up.

In each case Americans experienced the effects at home of relatively normal and natural events (a volcano and the depletion of a silver vein) that had their origins abroad. And in each case, despite the desire of many citizens to quietly live isolated within the nation’s 1815 boundaries, the explosion of Mount Tambora and the silver depletion of Mexican mines revealed how integrated the young United States already was with the natural, financial, and political life of the entire world.

Having stood toe to toe with Britain for the second time in forty years, in the War of 1812, the young Republic had indeed attained a new position in world affairs and in international influence. Although hardly a dominant national state capable of forcing the Europeans to rethink most of their balance-of-power principles, the United States nevertheless had proven its mettle through a victory over the Barbary pirates, careful diplomacy with Napoleon’s France, and a faltering but eventually successful war with England.

At home the nation entered its most important era since the early constitutional period. James Madison, successor to Jefferson, and John Adams’s own son, John Quincy Adams, both referred to themselves as republicans. Consensus blended former foes into a single-party rule that yielded the Era of Good Feelings, a term first used by a Boston newspaper in 1817.

In a natural two-party system, such unanimity is not healthy and, at any rate, it began to mask a more substantial transformation occurring beneath the tranquil surface of uniparty politics. Change occurred at almost every level. States individually started to reduce, or waive entirely, property requirements to vote. New utopian movements and religious revivals sprang up to fill Americans with a new spiritual purpose. The issue of slavery, which so many of the Founders hoped would simply go away, thrust itself into daily life with an even greater malignant presence. How the generation who came to power during the Age of Jackson, as it is called, dealt with these issues has forever affected all Americans: to this day, we still maintain (and often struggle with reforming) the two-party political system Jacksonians established to defuse the explosive slavery issue. We also continue to have daily events explained by—and shaped by—a free journalistic elite that was born during the Jacksonian era. And modern Americans frequently revert to class demagoguery that characterized debates about the economic issues of the day, especially the second Bank of the United States.

The Second Bank of the United States

Contrary to the notion that war is good for business, the War of 1812 disrupted markets, threw the infant banking system into confusion, and interrupted a steady pattern of growth. Trade was restored to Britain and Canada quickly and, after Waterloo, markets to France opened as well. But the debts incurred by the war made hash of the Jeffersonians’ strict fiscal policies, sending the national debt from $45 million in 1812 to $127 million in 1815, despite the imposition of new taxes.
²
Since the nation borrowed most of that money, through short-term notes from private banks, and since Congress had refused to recharter the Bank of the United States in 1811, both the number of banks and the amount of money they issued soared. Banking practices of the day differed so sharply from modern commercial banking that it bears briefly examining the basics of finance as practiced in the early 1800s. First, at the time,
any
state-chartered bank could print money (notes) as long as the notes were backed by gold or silver specie in its vault. During the War of 1812, most state-chartered banks outside New England suspended specie payments, even though they continued to operate and print notes without the discipline of gold backing.

Second, state legislatures used the chartering process to exert some measure of discipline on the banks (a number of private banks operated outside the charter process, but they did not print notes). Nevertheless, it was the market, through the specie reserve system, that really regulated the banks’ inclination to print excessive numbers of notes. Most banks in normal times tended to keep a reserve of 5 to 20 percent specie in their vaults to deal with runs or panics. Pressures of war, however, had allowed the banks to suspend and then continue to print notes, generating inflation.

Rather than wait for the private banking system to sort things out—and with some support from the financiers themselves, who wanted a solution sooner rather than later—in 1816 Congress chartered a new national bank, the second Bank of the United States (BUS). Like its predecessor, the second BUS had several advantages over state-chartered private banks, most notably its authority to open branches in any state it chose. Its $35 million capitalization dwarfed that of any state-chartered private bank, but more important, its designation as the depository of federal funds gave the BUS a deposit base several times greater than its next largest competitor. “Special privilege” became an oft-repeated criticism of the BUS, especially the uncertain nature of who, exactly, enjoyed that special privilege. More than a few Americans of a conspiratorial bent suspected that foreigners, especially British investors, secretly controlled the bank. Combined with the bank’s substantial influence and pervasive presence throughout the nation, special privilege made the BUS an easy target for politicians, who immediately took aim at the institution when any serious economic dislocation occurred.

It should be restated that the BUS carried strong overtones of Hamilton’s Federalists, whose program, while dormant, was quietly transforming into the American system of the National Republicans (soon-to-be Whigs). Immediately after the War of 1812, the Federalist political identification with the BUS faded somewhat, even though important backers, such as Stephen Girard and Albert Gallatin, remained prominent. More important were the economic fluctuations the bank dealt with as it attempted to rein in the inflation that had followed the Treaty of Ghent. Calling in many of its outstanding loans, the BUS contracted the money supply, producing lower prices. That was both good news and bad news. Obviously, consumers with money thrived as prices for finished goods fell. At the level of the common man, in a still largely agrarian republic, falling farm prices and a widespread difficulty in obtaining new loans for agriculture or business caused no small degree of economic dislocation. Cotton prices crashed in January 1819, falling by half when British buyers started to import Indian cotton. Land prices followed. Although the BUS had only limited influence in all this, its size made it a predictable target. BUS president William Jones shouldered the blame for this panic, as depressions were called at the time. Bank directors replaced Jones with South Carolinian Langdon Cheves. To the directors’ horror, Cheves continued Jones’s policy of credit contraction, which left the bank with substantial lands taken as mortgage foreclosures, and added to complaints that the BUS existed for a privileged elite.

By that time, the depression had spread to the industrial sector. Philadelphia mills that employed more than 2,300 in 1816 retained only 149 in 1819, and John Quincy Adams warned that the collapse posed a “crisis which will shake the Union to its center.”
³
Cheves was not intimidated, however, by the necessity to purge the once-inflated bank paper or dump worthless land. Despite recriminations from Congress and complaints from monetary experts like William Gouge, who moaned that “the Bank was saved but the people were ruined,” Cheves kept the BUS open while continuing a tight money policy.
⁴
The economy revived before long, though its recovery was linked more to the influx of Mexican silver than to any central bank policies undertaken by Cheves. The episode convinced many Americans, however, that the bank wielded inordinate powers—for good or evil.

Marshall and Markets

In the meantime, the BUS was at the center of one of the more important cases in American law,
McCulloch v. Maryland.
The state of Maryland sought to levy a tax on the Baltimore branch of the BUS, which the cashier of the bank, James McCulloch, refused to pay, forcing a test of federal power. Two constitutional issues came before the Court. First, did states have the power to tax federal institutions within their borders? Second, since the BUS was not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was it even legal in the first place? Chief Justice Marshall, famous for his perception that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” led a unanimous Court in upholding the 1790s decision that no state could tax federal property. Marshall’s ruling was a reasonable and critical position on the primacy of the national government in a federal system.

When it came to the legality of the BUS, Marshall turned to Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which Hamilton had used to justify the first BUS: Congress has the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” Referred to as the “necessary and proper” clause, Section 8 essentially allowed Congress to do anything that either the United States Supreme Court by a ruling or the people through an amendment to the Constitution itself did not prohibit. In future generations that would include such questionable initiatives as Social Security, welfare, funding for the arts and humanities, establishing scientific and medical agencies, and creating the Departments of Energy, Education, and Commerce. Still, the essential power always rested with the people—regardless of Court decisions—because, as the old maxim goes, “The people generally get what they want.” If the public ever grew fearful or dissatisfied with any governmental agency, the voters could abolish it quickly through either the ballot box or an amendment process. Marshall well knew that every undertaking of the federal government could not be subject to specific constitutional scrutiny, a point reflected by his ruling in favor of the constitutionality of the BUS.
⁵
Marshall then turned the states’ rights arguments against the states themselves in 1821 with
Cohens v. Virginia
, wherein the Supreme Court, citing New Hampshire courts’ proclivity for judicial review of that state’s legislature, affirmed that the United States Supreme Court had judicial review authority over the states’ courts as well.

McCulloch
came the same year as the
Dartmouth College
decision and coincided with another ruling,
Sturgis v. Crowninshield
, in which Marshall’s Court upheld the Constitution’s provisions on contracts. That Marshall sided with greater centralized federal power is undeniable, but the conditions were such that in these cases the struggles were largely between private property and contract rights against government authority of any type. In that sense, Marshall stood with private property. In the
Dartmouth College
case, the state of New Hampshire had attempted to void the charter of Dartmouth College, which had been founded in 1769 by King George III, to make it a public school. Dartmouth employed the renowned orator and statesman Daniel Webster—and Dartmouth alumnus—to argue its case. Marshall’s Court ruled unanimously that a contract was a contract, regardless of the circumstances of its origination (save duress) and that New Hampshire was legally bound to observe the charter. The Marshall Court’s unanimous decision reinforced the 1810
Fletcher v. Peck
ruling in which the Court upheld a state legislature’s grant of land as a valid contract, even though a subsequent legislature repealed it.