Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (112 page)

The embargo was ended on March 4, 1809, on the day the new president, James Madison, took office. In its place Congress substituted non-intercourse with both Britain and France; that is, it retained the embargo with these two nations but now permitted trade with all other nations. At the same time, it authorized the incoming president to reopen trade with whichever nation ended its violations of America’s neutral rights. Three years later President Madison called for a declaration of war against Great Britain; yet because the Republicans were still in charge of the Congress and the presidency, it was to be a war like no other.

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The War of 1812

The War of 1812 is the strangest war in American history. It was a war in its own right but also a war within a war, a part of the larger war between Britain and France that had been going on since France’s National Convention declared war on Britain in February 1793. Although the total American casualties in the war were relatively light—6, 765—far fewer in the entire two and a half years of war than those killed and wounded in a single one of Napoleon’s many battles, it was nonetheless one of the most important wars in American history. It was, said Virginia’s John Taylor, the philosopher of agrarian Republicanism, a “metaphysical war, a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport,” but rather “a war for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy,” a war, however, that “may terminate in the destruction of the last experiment in . . . free government.”
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The United States told the world in 1812 that it declared war against Great Britain solely because of the British impressment of American sailors and the British violations of America’s maritime rights. Yet on the face of it, these grievances scarcely seemed to be sufficient justifications for a war, especially a war for which the United States was singularly unprepared. In 1812 the U.S. Army consisted of fewer than seven thousand regular troops. The navy comprised only sixteen vessels, not counting the dozens of gunboats. With this meager force the United States confronted an enemy that possessed a regular army of nearly a quarter of a million men and the most powerful navy in the world, with a thousand warships on the rolls and over six hundred of them in active service.

Yet President James Madison was supremely confident of success. Indeed, right after Congress declared war Madison personally visited all the departments of government, something never done before, said the controller of the treasury, Richard Rush, the young son of Benjamin Rush. The president, who presumably abhorred war, gave a pep talk to
everyone “in a manner,” said Rush, “worthy of a little commander-in-chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade.”
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From beginning to end the war seemed as ludicrous as its diminutive commander-in-chief with his oversized cockade, the symbol of martial spirit. The British against whom the United States declared war in June 1812 did not expect war and did not want it. In fact, just as America was declaring war in June 1812, the British government repealed the orders-in-council authorizing the seizure of American ships and the impressment of American sailors that presumably had been a major cause of the war—too late, however, for the Americans to learn of the British action and reverse their decisions already taken. It turns out that many Americans did not want to go to war either; indeed, the leaders of the governing Republican party were devoted to the idea of creating a universal peace and had spent the previous decade desperately trying to avoid war. Nevertheless, it was the Republican party, which most loathed war and all that war entailed in taxes, debt, and executive power, that took the country into the war, and some Republicans did it with enthusiasm.

The vote for war in the Congress (in the House of Representatives seventy-nine to forty-nine and in the Senate nineteen to thirteen, the closest vote for a declaration of war in American history) was especially puzzling. The congressmen who voted for the war were overwhelmingly from the sections of the country, the South and West, that were farthest removed from ocean traffic and least involved in shipping and thus least affected by the violations of maritime rights and the impressments that were the professed reasons for declaring war. At the same time, the congressmen most opposed to the war were from the section of the country, New England, that was most hurt by the British impressment of American sailors and British violations of America’s maritime rights.

Perhaps the infusion of new members helps explain Congress’s decision to go to war.
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In 1810 sixty-three new congressmen were elected to a
142-seat House of Representatives. The Twelfth Congress contained a number of young “War Hawks,” such as Henry Clay of Kentucky, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who were eager to take strong measures against Great Britain. Since many of the War Hawks were from the West, however, it is not at all clear why they should have been so concerned for the nation’s maritime rights. Representatives from Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee cast more votes for the war (nine) than did those from the New England states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In fact, New England congressmen voted twenty to twelve against the war, and most of the twelve votes in New England for the war came from congressmen representing the frontier areas of New Hampshire and Vermont.

This paradox of Western support for a war that was ostensibly about maritime rights led historians at the beginning of the twentieth century to dig beneath the professed war aims in search of some hidden Western interests. They argued that the West supported the war because it was land hungry and had its eyes on the annexation of Canada. Others refined this interpretation by contending that the West was less interested in land than it was in removing the British influence over the Indians in the Northwest. Still others argued that low grain prices aroused Western resentment against British blockades of America’s Continental markets.

But since the West had only ten votes in the House of Representatives, it could not by itself have led the country into war. It was the South Atlantic states from Maryland to Georgia that supplied nearly half (thirty-nine) of the seventy-nine votes for war. This Southern support for war led other historians to posit an unspoken alliance between Westerners who wanted Canada and Southerners who had their eyes on Florida. Yet Pennsylvania, which presumably had little interest in the West or Florida, provided sixteen votes for the war, the most of any state.
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Although the vote for the war may remain something of a puzzle to some historians, one thing is clear: the war was very much a party issue,
with most Republicans being for the war and all the Federalists against it. In fact, the war became the logical consequence of the Republicans’ diplomacy since 1805. As early as February 1809 President-elect Madison said as much to the American minister in London, William Pinkney. If America repealed the embargo and the British orders-in-council remained in effect, said Madison, “war is inevitable.”
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He believed war was inevitable because impressment and neutral rights had come to symbolize what he and other Republicans wanted most from Britain—unequivocal recognition of the nation’s sovereignty and independence.

T
HE FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD
M
ADISON
was presumably as well prepared for the presidency as anyone in the country. He had been involved in public service in one way or another during his entire adult life. He had been a principal force behind the calling of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 and had composed the Virginia Plan that formed the working model for the Constitution. He was the co-author of the
Federalist
, surely the most important work of political theory in American history. He had been the leader and the most important member of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the new government in 1789. More than any other single person he was responsible for the congressional passage of the Bill of Rights. He was the co-founder of the Republican party and had been secretary of state for the entire eight years of Jefferson’s presidency.

Despite all of Madison’s experience, however, he seemed awed by the prospect of becoming president. When in his timidly delivered inaugural address he referred in a conventional manner to his “inadequacies” for the high office, he appeared to mean it. He was by far the most uncharismatic president the country had yet experienced. His three predecessors had fit the king-like office much better than he. They either had been virtual royalty, as in the case of Washington, or had tried to be royalty, as in the case of Adams, or had achieved dominance by being the anti-royal people’s president, as in the case of Jefferson. Madison was none of these; he was not made for command. He lacked both the presence and the stature of his illustrious predecessors; indeed, as one observer noted, during social gatherings in the White House, “being so low in stature, he was in danger of being confounded with the plebeian crowds and was pushed and jostled about like a common citizen.”
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Madison could be congenial in small groups of men, where he liked to tell smutty stories, but in large mixed groups he was shy, stiff, and
awkward—”the most unsociable creature in existence,” concluded one female observer. Consequently, his gregarious wife, Dolley—who was described by an ungallant English diplomat as having “an uncultivated mind and fond of gossiping”—tended to dominate their social gatherings.
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When Madison held official dinners as president, Dolley, a large woman who dwarfed her husband, seated herself at the head of the table with Madison’s private secretary seated at the foot. Madison himself sat in the middle and was thus relieved of having to look after his guests and control the flow of conversation. But so alarmed did Dolley become over what she felt was the lack of regard paid Madison that she arranged for “Hail to the Chief” to be played at state receptions to rouse people to proper respect when her husband entered the room. As a brilliant Washington hostess, Dolley Madison, the “presidentess,” as she was called, created a public persona that rivaled that of her husband, who was seventeen years her senior. Her social skills and energy encouraged dozens of congressmen to bring their wives with them to the capital—something they had not done during Jefferson’s presidency.

With his retiring personality and his constrained conception of the presidency, Madison was never able to control the Republican party to the extent Jefferson had. He fully accepted the Republican principle of executive deference to the people’s representatives in Congress but made none of the necessary efforts to manage the legislature as Jefferson had. He was unable, as one Pennsylvania Republican noted, to “hook men to his heart as his predecessor could.”
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Because by 1808 the congressional Republican caucus clearly controlled the nomination of the party’s candidate for the presidency, it concluded that the president was in some measure its creature. As Congress gathered up the power draining away from the executive, it sought to organize itself into committees in order to initiate and supervise policy. But the rise of the committee system only further fragmented the government into contending interest groups. Madison thus faced a raucous Congress and a bitterly divided Republican party, various factions of which were opposed to his presidency. In trying to promote unity among the Republicans, the president allowed his critics to deny him the selection of his trusted ally, Albert Gallatin, as secretary of state. Instead, he felt compelled to appoint to that important post Robert Smith, the undistinguished secretary of the navy in Jefferson’s cabinet and a person totally unfit to be secretary of state.

Madison ended up with a cabinet considerably weaker than that of any of his presidential predecessors. Madison’s cabinet, as John Randolph observed with his usual poisonous perceptivity, “presents a novel spectacle in the world, divided against itself, and the most deadly animosity raging between its principal members—what can come of it but confusion, mischief, and ruin?”
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T
HE NEW PRESIDENT
was immediately confronted with the ending of the embargo, which he wanted to continue. In its place Congress put the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, which opened trade with the rest of the world but prohibited it with both Britain and France; it also authorized the president to reopen trade with whichever belligerent repealed its trade restrictions and recognized American neutral rights. With trade to the rest of the world reopened, the opportunities for evading the prohibition on trading with the belligerents were great, and many American ships took off ostensibly for neutral ports only to end up in Great Britain. Since British control of the seas prevented many American merchants from sailing to France, the Non-Intercourse Act actually favored Britain over France, a circumstance that left Madison at a total loss: how could he coerce Britain with an act that actually benefited the former mother country? Britain reacted to the Non-Intercourse Act by issuing new orders-in-council in April 1809 that went some way toward meeting the Americans’ complaints, though the British government was always reluctant to admit that it was making any concessions whatsoever.

Unfortunately, the British minister in Washington, David M. Erskine, had already reached an agreement with the Madison government that was not in line with the thinking of the British ministry in London. Erskine ignored several key instructions from his government, which disavowed his agreement when it learned of it, including one instruction stating that, while opening up American trade with Britain, the United States should allow the British navy to enforce the continued American prohibition on trade with France—a humiliating neocolonial stipulation that Madison rejected outright. The two nations could not be farther apart. While America wanted free neutral trade with both belligerents, Britain wanted a neutral United States that would help it defeat Napoleon.
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