Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (116 page)

A series of successful single-ship engagements followed, including the victory of the
Constitution
, now captained by William Bainbridge, over HMS
Java
off the coast of Brazil in December 1812. During the war there were eight sloop and brig engagements, and in all but one the American ships were victorious. Losing these single-ship engagements was a new experience for British seamen. In twenty years of naval warfare and numerous single engagements between British and French frigates, only once, in 1807, had the British ever been beaten. “It is a cruel mortification,” said one British minister, “to be beat by these second-hand Englishmen upon our own element.” In all, the American navy in 1812 defeated or captured seven British warships, including three frigates, and fifty merchantmen and lost only three small warships, each with eighteen guns or less.
⁴⁸

But the real American threat to Britain on the high seas came from the country’s privateers, the naval equivalent of the militia and what one Republican called “our cheapest and best navy.”
⁴⁹
Most of the five hundred registered privateers were small vessels that made only a single cruise; only about two hundred of the five hundred were large enough to carry fifty men or more. Although there may have been only fifty privateers at sea at any one time, they were generally very profitable. Operating off the coast of Canada and in the West Indies, the American privateers captured 450 prizes in the first six months of the war. (Throughout the remainder of the war they would capture 850 more British merchant vessels.) The most successful privateers were James D’Wolf’s
Yankee
, sailing out of Bristol, Rhode Island, which captured eight British vessels valued at $300,000, and the
Rossie
, operating out of Baltimore, which seized eighteen ships worth nearly $1,500,000. American privateers did enough damage to British trade in the West Indies to temporarily force insurance rates up to 30 percent of the value of the cargo.
⁵⁰
Although America’s successes at sea in 1812 were of little strategic significance in determining the outcome of the war—the British navy soon recovered its dominance of the oceans—they did boost American morale and help to compensate for the disgraceful defeats on land.

I
N
1812 A
MERICA’S NAVAL SUCCESSES
may even have helped Madison win a second term as president. Although two-thirds of the
Republican congressmen supported Madison as the nominee of the party (with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts as the vice-presidential nominee), many of the Northern Republican congressmen, disillusioned with Madison’s leadership and the dominance of the Virginia Dynasty, wanted someone more sympathetic to Northern commerce. Consequently, Republican members of the New York state legislature selected DeWitt Clinton, the handsome and popular mayor of New York City, as their Republican nominee for the presidency. The Federalists decided to nominate no one but instead to support Clinton without formally endorsing him, for fear of undermining his Republican backing outside of New York.

In the November 1812 election Clinton carried all the seaboard states from New Hampshire through Delaware and part of Maryland. Madison won all the rest, including Pennsylvania, which further established its role as the keystone state in the Republican party. The revelation that the Federalists were supporting Clinton helped carry Pennsylvania for the president. Madison received 128 electoral votes to Clinton’s 89, a smaller margin of victory than the president had received in 1808. The Republicans lost seats in Congress, especially in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. The Federalists captured control of most of the states of New England as well as the states of New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. By taking advantage of the mismanagement of the war and the frightening news of the savage Baltimore riots in the summer of 1812, the Federalists made their most striking electoral gains since the 1790 s. The Federalists mistakenly thought the fortunes of the Republicans were dying and theirs were on the rise.

T
HE GOVERNMENT STRUGGLED
to recover from the failures of 1812. As long as Britain was holding American territory and winning the war, it was impossible to make the former mother country come to terms. Canada had to be successfully invaded, and that meant the United States’ military forces would have to be beefed up and reformed. In the winter of 1812–1813 Madison replaced Secretary of War William Eustis with John Armstrong, a New Yorker and the leader of the abortive Newburgh mutiny in 1783 (the attempt by some Continental Army officers to pressure the Congress), and Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton with William Jones, a Philadelphia merchant and former congressman. Congress finally agreed that the country needed a navy and in January 1813 voted to construct six additional frigates and four ships of the line. Prodded by Madison, Congress also provided for an additional twenty-two thousand regular troops and raised the pay of the soldiers in order to spur enlistments. It added staff officers and improved the ordering and distribution of supplies to the army. Under these wartime pressures Republican congressmen were being compelled to swallow many of their principles.

What they were not willing to give up, at least not easily, was their traditional opposition to any kind of internal taxation. But there were problems. If the Republicans were to avoid imposing internal taxes, they needed the revenue from customs duties on imports, most of which were British goods. Yet the Non-Intercourse Act, which was part of the war effort, presumably prohibited the importation of British goods. Nonimportation made no sense, declared Congressman Langdon Cheves, a War Hawk from South Carolina. “It puts out one eye of your enemy, it is true,” he said in December 1812, “but it puts out both your own. It exhausts the purse, it exhausts the spirit, and paralyses the sword of the nation.”
⁵¹

Although most Republicans disagreed with Cheves and refused to abandon the weapon of commercial discrimination, they were still reluctant to resort to the imposition of any internal taxes. Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin had urged internal taxes from the beginning, which had helped provoke the most radical Republicans into labeling him “the Rat—in the Treasury.”
⁵²
Now at the outset of 1813 Gallatin faced having to pay for the war by borrowing and by issuing treasury notes. But borrowing proved difficult, especially with the New England Federalists working to stymie all lending of money to the government. In March 1813 Gallatin informed the president that the government had scarcely enough funds to carry on for a month. But an offer of Russian mediation of the conflict, which the United States readily accepted, improved the prospects for peace, and Gallatin was able to extract enough money from creditors to see the government through the year 1813. Finally, in June 1813 the Republicans closed their severely divided ranks enough to pass a comprehensive tax bill, which included a direct tax on land, a duty on imported salt, and excise taxes on stills, retailers, auction sales, sugar, carriages, and negotiable paper. All these taxes, however, were not to go into effect until the beginning of 1814—revealing once again, as one Virginia congressman put it, that “everyone is for taxing every body, except himself and his Constituents.”
⁵³

T
HE GOVERNMENT’S PLAN
for the campaign of 1813 was to attack Kingston, Britain’s major naval base on Lake Ontario, York (present-day Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and then Fort George and Fort Erie, which controlled the Niagara River. Since America’s failures in 1812 had been due in large part to Britain’s control of the Great Lakes,
especially Ontario and Erie, the U.S. government was determined to reverse that situation. Believing that Kingston was too strongly garrisoned, General Dearborn and his naval opposite Commodore Isaac Chauncey decided to attack York instead and destroy the shipping there. In late April 1813 a detachment of sixteen hundred men under the command of Brigadier General Zebulon M. Pike, the explorer who had discovered Pike’s Peak in 1806, sailed out of Sackets Harbor, on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, and attacked York on the northwest corner of the lake. The Americans overwhelmed the defenders of York, which had only six hundred inhabitants, but suffered heavy casualties, including General Pike. They then proceeded to loot and burn the town, including its public buildings, aided by disgruntled British subjects who came from the countryside. When the Americans evacuated the town, they took with them provisions and military stores and £2, 500 from the public treasury; they even took some books from the subscription library, most of which were soon returned. (But the Canadians did not get the government’s mace back until 1934.) Commodore Chauncey made another destructive raid on York in July, taking what little public property that was left. The British remembered the burning of their Canadian capital when in the following year they burned Washington.
⁵⁴

The Americans had less success in the Niagara region. After taking Fort George in May 1813, the American forces failed to follow up their initial victory, and the British soon recovered. Fierce fighting went on through the rest of the year with the British eventually ousting the Americans from both Fort George and Fort Niagara. By December 1813 not only had the Americans lost control of the Niagara frontier, but General Dearborn had been relieved of his command, to be replaced by the notorious General James Wilkinson.
⁵⁵

Although the Americans were not able to gain control of Lake Ontario in 1813, their experience on Lake Erie was different. In the spring of 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry, a twenty-seven-year-old naval officer from Rhode Island, began assembling a fleet of nine vessels at Presque Isle (present-day Erie, Pennsylvania); and in the late summer he sailed for Put-in-Bay, off South Bass Island toward the western end of the lake. On September 10, 1813, Perry’s squadron traded broadsides with a smaller British squadron for over two terrible and bloody hours. When Perry’s flagship, the USS
William D
.
Lawrence
(twenty guns), was reduced to a battered hulk, he transferred to the USS
Niagara
(twenty guns) and carried on the fight for another hour, finally forcing the British ships to surrender. On the
back of an old letter Perry scribbled his famous message to General Harrison: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
⁵⁶
His victory could scarcely have been more significant, for it enabled the Americans to reverse all the defeats they had suffered in 1812.

With the loss of the British fleet on Lake Erie, Sir Henry Proctor, the British commander in charge of the newly acquired Michigan Territory, knew his situation had become untenable. He thus decided to withdraw from Malden and Detroit and, with his Indian allies led by Tecumseh, retreat northward to the Thames River. Following close on Proctor’s tail was General Harrison with three thousand men, mostly Kentucky volunteers commanded by Congressman Richard M. Johnson, on leave from his legislative duties. Harrison crossed into Canada and on October 5, 1813, caught up with Proctor at Moraviantown. With only 430 soldiers and about six hundred Indian warriors, Proctor’s bedraggled and demoralized force was quickly overrun. In this Battle of the Thames (known to Canadians as the Battle of Moraviantown) Johnson, or one of his troops, killed Tecumseh, shattering his Indian confederacy. When the Indians learned of Tecumseh’s death, recalled a member of the Kentucky militia, they “gave the loudest yells I ever heard from human beings and that ended the fight.” Johnson used his claim that he had killed the famous Indian chief to gain the vice-presidency in 1836.
⁵⁷

Earlier Tecumseh had helped inspire some Creek Indians, known as Red Sticks, into resisting the American encroachments on the Southern frontier. In 1810 the United States had annexed most of West Florida. Then in 1813, following the outbreak of the war, American troops occupied the last remaining piece of West Florida, the district of Mobile that reached to the Perdido River. (This turned out to be the only piece of conquered territory retained by the United States as a result of the war.) At the same time, clashes among the Creeks themselves, who occupied most of present-day Alabama, escalated into a larger war with the United States. In August 1813 a party of Creeks overran Fort Mims, a stockade located forty miles north of Mobile in southeastern Mississippi Territory, and massacred hundreds of Americans. Despite being warned, the commander of the fort had doubted the possibility of any Indian attack and had left the gates of the stockade open. The result was horrific. “Indians, Negroes, white men, women and children lay in one promiscuous ruin,” declared a member of an American burial party. “All were scalped, and the females of every age were butchered in a manner which neither decency nor language will permit me to describe.” Although the attacking
Creeks lost a hundred or so of their men, they killed nearly 250 whites and perhaps another 150 blacks and friendly Indians. This massacre sent shock waves throughout the Southwest.
⁵⁸

Andrew Jackson, a major general in the Tennessee militia, took charge and moved south with several thousand Tennessee volunteers, including a twenty-seven-year-old Davy Crockett and a twenty-year-old Sam Houston. Jackson fought a series of inconclusive engagements through the fall and winter of 1813–1814. Jackson was having problems holding his army together, but, believing that no army could exist “where order & Subordination are wholly disregarded,” and being a disciplinarian like none other, he knew what to do. Twice he raised his own gun to stop militiamen from leaving, and finally he had a young soldier who had refused to obey an order court-martialed and shot, the first such execution since the Revolution. The lesson took, and, as Jackson pointed out, “a strict obedience afterwards characterized the army.” With his militiamen now more frightened of him than the Indians, Jackson led his army against a band of a thousand or more Red Sticks and on March 27, 1814, at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River, wiped it out. With over eight hundred of the Creek warriors killed in the battle against a loss of only forty-five Americans, even tough-minded “Old Hickory” had to admit that the “carnage was dreadful.” “My people are no more!” cried a surviving chief, Red Eagle. “Their bones are bleaching on the plains of the Tallushatchee, Talladega, [and] Emuckfaw.”
⁵⁹