Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (117 page)

On August 9, 1814, all the Creeks were forced to sign the harsh Treaty of Fort Jackson. Despite instructions from Washington to the contrary, Jackson sought to punish even those Indians who were allies of the United States. They had, he said, “forfeited all right to the Territory we have conquered.”
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The treaty gave to the whites over twenty-two million acres of land—more than half of the territory belonging to the Creeks. Although his superiors in Washington were furious, Westerners were elated. Jackson had broken the Creek nation and, as he himself boasted, had seized the “cream of the Creek country, opening up a communication from Georgia to Mobile.” Although victory in this Creek war did not strategically affect the war with Great Britain, it “could fairly be described,” concludes one historian, “as the most decisive and most significant victory won by the United States in the entire War of 1812.”
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D
ESPITE
A
MERICAN VICTORIES
in the Northwest and Southwest, however, the strategic center of the northern frontier along the Niagara and St. Lawrence rivers remained deadlocked. After two years of campaigning, the Americans had not been able to capture and hold any Canadian territory. Equally frustrating was the war at sea. By 1813 Britain’s great naval superiority was finally making itself felt. Needing American foodstuffs in the West Indies and the Iberian Peninsula, where the British army was busy fighting the French, Britain at first had left American trade essentially untouched. And always there were Americans eager to earn money supplying the British. But beginning in December 1812 Britain began blockading Delaware and the Chesapeake; and by mid-1813 it extended its naval blockade from Long Island to the Mississippi. New England was left open until 1814 to allow the New Englanders to continue to supply Halifax and the Royal Navy offshore and to encourage that section’s separatist peace movement.

By the end of 1813 nearly all of America’s warships were either destroyed or bottled up in their ports. With most of America’s merchant ships driven from the high seas, the country’s commerce was effectively stymied. Exports fell from a peak of $ 108 million in 1807 to $ 27 million in 1813 and $ 7 million in 1814. Imports plummeted from a high of $ 138 million in 1807 to less than $ 13 million by 1814. The government’s revenue fell as well, from over $ 13 million in 1811 to $ 6 million by 1814. Still, a great deal of illegal trade went on with Canada in the Northeast and with the Southeast through Amelia Island in Florida, just south of the Georgia border, and it was not easy to stop. As one enterprising American smuggler recalled, “Men will always run great risks—when great personal profits are expected to be realized.” In 1813 an American lieutenant and his soldiers attempted to arrest thirteen suspected smugglers operating out of a little New York town on the border with Canada. But they quickly discovered that the community was not at all supportive of their efforts. The smugglers were soon released from jail, and instead the lieutenant was arrested; his commander, General Pike, had to bail him out.
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Because of this excessive leakage, Madison at the end of 1813 made one final effort at an embargo. In December Congress passed the most restrictive measure it had ever enacted. The act forbade all American ships from leaving port, prohibited all exports, outlawed the coasting trade, and gave government officials broad powers of enforcement. The act was so draconian that Congress had to spend the next several months softening some of its effects. Finally, at the end of March 1814—less than four months after he had recommended the new commercial restrictions—Madison, under immense pressure to resume trade both for revenue and diplomatic reasons, called for the repeal of the embargo and the NonImportation Act.

Although there was severe fighting at Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane in the Niagara region in July 1814, it was inconclusive, and the British decided to take the war to the United States. They intended to invade New York at Lake Champlain and, taking advantage of New England’s sympathy for the British cause, possibly break up the Union. As a diversion to help the Champlain invasion, they planned on bombarding and raiding the Atlantic and Chesapeake coasts. Finally, they aimed to launch an attack on New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. With Napoleon’s abdication in April of 1814—a disaster in Republican eyes—more British soldiers and resources could now be directed at America. Up to now the American war had been an absurd sideshow for the British; indeed, the editor of the
Edinburgh Review
thought that half the people of Britain did not even realize that their country was at war with America.

The British invaded New York in the late summer of 1814 along the route General John Burgoyne had followed in 1777, with an imposing force of fifteen thousand men, many of them veterans of the Napoleonic War, perhaps, as one historian has said, “the finest army ever to campaign on American soil.”
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Yet the army’s success depended on British control of Lake Champlain, and that was not to be. On September 11, 1814, a thirty-year-old American naval commander, Thomas Macdonough, and his fleet of four ships and ten gunboats decisively defeated a British squadron of more or less equal size in Plattsburgh Bay. Macdonough had set multiple anchors with springs on their cables that allowed them to wind about, that is, rotate 180 degrees and bring fresh batteries to bear on the enemy. He showed brilliant seamanship that in the opinion of one historian entitles him to be remembered as “the best American naval officer” in the war.
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The British defeat, one of the most crucial in the struggle, compelled its invading army to withdraw to Canada.

The British were much more successful in their invasion of the Chesapeake. During the previous year the British navy had plundered the coastal towns of Chesapeake Bay. But now the British planned a more serious assault focusing on Baltimore and Washington, the American capital. American officials were slow to perceive the danger, believing that since Washington had no strategic significance the British were not likely to attack it. By mid-August 1814 the British admiral, Sir Alexander Cochrane, and General Robert Ross had arrived in the Chesapeake with two dozen warships and over four thousand British regulars. On August 24 the British soldiers easily overran a motley collection of American militia at Bladensburg, Maryland, just northeast of the District of Columbia. This rout allowed the British to invade Washington that night and burn the White House, the Capitol (which contained the Library of Congress), and other public buildings. When Rear Admiral George Cockburn, the British commander of the Royal Marines and the officer most insistent on attacking Washington, came upon the office of the
National Intelligencer
that night, he was determined to get revenge. The
Intelligencer
had been especially critical of Cockburn, portraying him as something of a barbarian. The British commander ordered the destruction of the
newspaper’s offices and its printer’s type. “Be sure that all the c’s are destroyed,” he told his men, “so the rascals can’t abuse my name any-more.”
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The British justified the burning of Washington as retaliation for the Americans’ burning of York in Canada the previous year. While President Madison was with the army outside the capital, his wife, Dolley, gathered up state papers and some White House treasures, including a Stuart portrait of George Washington, and escaped in the nick of time. The British forces led by Ross and Cockburn discovered a table set in the White House with forty covers. The officers dined on the food and wine, with Cockburn drinking a toast to “Jemmy” before he ordered the presidential mansion burned. The flames of the burning buildings in the capital could be seen nearly thirty miles away.
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After plundering Alexandria, the British moved on Baltimore. Admiral Cockburn and General Ross landed their forty-five hundred marines and soldiers on September 12, 1814, and defeated a force of thirty-two hundred American militiamen, but at the cost of Ross’s life. Meanwhile, Admiral Cochrane bombarded Fort McHenry, firing over fifteen hundred rounds in a twenty-five-hour period on September 13 and 14. A Georgetown Federalist lawyer, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the heavy British bombardment; when he saw the American flag still flying the next morning over the fort, he was inspired to write the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When set to the music of an English drinking song, Key’s creation, according to the recollection of Julia Anne Hieronymus Tevis, a young woman going to school in Washington, D.C., in 1814, became a stirring success. She thought “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ should be a consecrated song to every American heart,” not because of “any particular merit in the composition,” but because of “the recollection of something noble in the character of a young and heroic nation.”
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By mid-century the song was widely considered to be the country’s unofficial national anthem, a status the Congress made official in 1931.

D
ESPITE THE
A
MERICANS’ ABILITY
to hold Fort McHenry, which compelled the British to withdraw from the Chesapeake, they now faced a series of crises. Blamed for the burning of the capital, John Armstrong resigned as secretary of war and was replaced by James Monroe, who
continued as secretary of state as well. The government was having difficulty raising troops and keeping those it had recruited. Over 12 percent of American troops deserted during the war, almost half of them in 1814. Paying for the war was becoming almost impossible. The government’s attempts to borrow money failed miserably as potential lenders refused to buy American bonds, especially as the Federalists continued to discourage lending to the government. In the summer of 1814 many of the proliferating state banks were forced to suspend specie payments for the extraordinary amount of paper notes they had put in circulation since the demise of the Bank of the United States in 1811. Without a national bank the government was unable to transfer funds across the country or to pay its mounting bills. In the fall of 1814 Treasury Secretary George W. Campbell said the government needed $ 50 million, but he had no idea how to raise it. In October he resigned as secretary of the treasury, and in November the government defaulted on the national debt. For all intents and purposes the public credit was defunct, and the United States government was bankrupt.

Campbell was replaced by Alexander Dallas, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican. Dallas stunned his fellow Republicans with his recommendations for new internal taxes and a national bank that was an enlarged version of the bank the Republicans had only recently done away with. Although Congress reluctantly agreed to the new taxes, including a whiskey excise tax that was heavier than the one that had precipitated the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, it rejected Dallas’s proposed bank, at least for the time being. President Madison, reversing his earlier strict constructionist view of 1791 that a national bank was unconstitutional, now favored such a bank modeled on the Bank of England.

A
N EVEN MORE SERIOUS PROBLEM
for the Republicans was the opposition of the Federalists to the war—an opposition so intense that it perhaps made the war the most unpopular in American history. Federalists everywhere, but especially in New England where they were strongest, incessantly and passionately spoke out against the conflict, so clogging “the wheels of war,” said Madison, that its objective was undermined and the enemy was encouraged “to withhold any pacific advances otherwise likely to be made.”
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The Federalists believed that it was exclusively a partisan struggle that could only promote France and the Virginia Dynasty, and they were joined in opposition by the Standing Order of the Congregational and Presbyterian clergy, who secretly and sometimes
openly prayed for England’s victory over France and America.
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Most important, many of the Federalists did more than express orally and in writing their opposition to the war; indeed, they committed what today would probably be regarded as seditious if not treasonous acts. The zealous “Blue Light” Federalists, so called because they were thought to have alerted British warships of American sailings by flashing blue lights, discouraged enlistments in the army, thwarted subscriptions to the war loans, urged the withholding of federal taxes, and plotted secession from the Union. They bought British government bonds at a discount and sent specie to Canada to pay for smuggled goods. The Federalist governors in New England even refused to honor the War Department’s requisition of their state militias. The governor of Massachusetts actually entered into secret negotiations with the British, offering part of Maine in return for an end to the war.
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Although the president condemned this Federalist defiance as threatening the basis of the Union, he wisely did not press the issue. He had great confidence, as he politely and calmly told a rather frantic Mathew Carey, who was predicting “a bloody civil war” that would “crush republicanism for centuries,” that “the wicked project of destroying the Union of the states is defeating itself.” That deep and calm confidence in most people’s support for the Union and in the ultimate success of the United States in the war was the secret of Madison’s presidential leadership.
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