Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (118 page)

Although some New England extremists called for making a separate peace with England and for secession from the Union, most Federalist leaders, as Madison correctly surmised, were more cautious. Federalists such as Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts came to realize that the calling of a convention of New England states to express their grievances against the national government and the Virginia Dynasty might be the best way of moderating the extremism in the region.
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By the time the convention of twenty-six delegates from the New England states met in Hartford in mid-December 1814 the embargo had been repealed, Bonaparte had fallen, and the earlier sense of crisis had passed.

In its report issued on January 5, 1815, the convention condemned the Republicans for their “visionary and superficial theory in regard to commerce” and their “ruinous perseverance in efforts to render it an instrument of coercion and war.” The report emphasized the paradoxes of the Republicans’ policy by pointing out the “fatal errors of a system which seeks revenge for commercial injuries in the sacrifices of commerce, and aggravates by needless wars, to an immeasurable extent, the injuries it professes to redress.” Revealing their anger and anxiety over what was happening socially all around them, the Federalists also condemned the Republicans both for “excluding from office men of unexceptionable merit” and for distributing offices “among men the least entitled to such distinction.” The report went on to lament the involvement of “this remote country, once so happy and so envied, . . . in a ruinous war, and excluded from intercourse with the rest of the world.” But the convention rejected secession and a separate peace with Britain. Sounding more Republican than the Republicans, the report reminded readers that the Madison administration had not been able to avoid “the embarrassments of old and rotten institutions.” It had lusted for power, abused executive patronage, taxed exorbitantly, and spent wastefully. Most important, said the convention, the Republicans seemed to have forgotten that “unjust and ruinous wars” were “the natural offspring of bad administrations, in all ages and countries.”
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The Federalist convention, held in secret, contented itself with proposing a series of amendments to the Constitution that summed up New England’s grievances over the previous decade and a half. These amendments called for eliminating the three-fifths representation of slaves in Congress; preventing the admission of new states, future embargoes, and declarations of war without a two-thirds majority of Congress; and ending Virginia’s dominance of the executive by prohibiting the president from serving more than one term and by preventing the same state from providing two presidents in succession. The New England Federalists hoped that these proposals would lessen the influence of the South and West in the country and restore sectional balance.

Unfortunately for the Federalists, their report arrived in Washington just as news came that a peace treaty between the United States and Great Britain had been signed. Since the declaration of war in 1812 had been in part a bluff to force Britain to take American demands seriously, Madison had begun pursuing peace almost from the beginning; but he
wanted it on American terms, namely, an end both to Britain’s commercial restrictions and, more important, to its policy of impressment.

When the Russian government made its offer of mediation in March 1813, Madison assigned two commissioners to join John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg—Albert Gallatin, who was tired of running the treasury, and James A. Bayard, a moderate Delaware Federalist. The British declined the Russian mediation but offered to open direct negotiations with the United States, which eventually took place in Ghent, Belgium, between August and December 1814. Madison added to the peace commission the War Hawk Henry Clay of Kentucky and Jonathan Russell of Rhode Island, who was minister to Sweden. It was a strong commission, composed of the best America had available; by contrast, Britain’s delegation was made up of second-raters, its top people being tied up with European affairs.

The American delegation was an odd mixture of personalities, with the flamboyant Clay coming home from a night of gambling just as the crusty Adams was rising to say his prayers. But they got along, thanks to Gallatin. The British began with very tough terms—a permanent Indian reservation in the Old Northwest, American but not British demilitarization on the Great Lakes, cession of northern Maine, and access to the Mississippi River. The Americans rejected these terms outright and, to the surprise of the British, seemed unfazed by the news of the burning of Washington. For their part the British kept delaying in hopes of an even more impressive British victory. But when they learned of their failures at Baltimore and Plattsburgh, the British gave way and agreed to a peace that simply restored the
status quo ante bellum
, without mentioning any of the issues of neutral rights and impressment that had caused the war. The opinion of the duke of Wellington, the future victor at Waterloo, that America could not be easily conquered and certainly not without naval superiority on the Great Lakes clinched the willingness of the British to settle without gaining any of their original terms. The treaty was signed on Christmas Eve 1814.

News of the peace treaty did not reach Washington until February 13, 1815. In the meantime, on January 8 at New Orleans, Andrew Jackson and a force of about 4, 700 achieved a smashing victory over five thousand British regulars, commanded by General Sir Edward Pakenham, the brother-in-law of the duke of Wellington. Jackson’s troops included regulars, militia, and volunteers, mostly from Tennessee and Kentucky; he also had the help of the notorious Jean Lafitte and his hundreds of fellow smugglers and pirates who maintained a base at Barataria, forty miles south of New Orleans. The British columns surrounded by mist marched into withering American fire that went on for hours. Eventually the British
called for a truce to withdraw their wounded and then retreated to the fleet. Although the British persisted for several more weeks in trying to force a passage up the Mississippi and in attempting to take Mobile, they finally gave up when news of the peace treaty arrived.

The American victory at New Orleans was so overwhelming—the British suffered two thousand casualties, including the death of General Pakenham, to Jackson’s seventy—that the Americans came to believe that the United States had really won the war and dictated the peace terms, even though the peace treaty had already been signed. But Jackson’s victory did in fact clinch the treaty, and news of it thoroughly discredited the report of the Hartford Convention, which many thought was a treasonous act. The Federalists were scorned and ridiculed, and they never recovered politically.

The war had not weakened the Americans’ sense of responsibility for the enlightenment of the world; in fact, it strengthened it. In August 1815 David Low Dodge, a wealthy Connecticut merchant living in New York, organized the New York Peace Society. Dodge claimed that his society was “probably the first one that was ever formed in the world for that specific object.” In the meantime the Reverend Noah Worcester of Brighton, Massachusetts, had written the
Solemn Review of the Custom of War
, a searing indictment of war that called for the establishment of peace societies. The book was published in December 1814 and in the next fifteen months went through five editions, with many more in subsequent years. Worcester took his own advice and in December 1815, with the aid of William Ellery Channing, formed the Massachusetts Peace Society, which sought to turn “the attention of the community to the nature, spirit, causes, and effects of war.” In 1819 the London Peace Society gave credit to the Americans for creating the model for peace societies, which were made for “promoting the general amelioration of humanity.”
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A
LTHOUGH THE WAR WITH
B
RITAIN
was over, there was still fighting to be done, and, as a consequence of the war, Americans now had the ships to do the fighting. During the war, the Barbary States had taken advantage of America’s inability to retaliate, and once again they had captured American merchant ships and imprisoned their crews. With the ratification of the Peace Treaty of Ghent between the United States and Great Britain, however, the Americans were finally free to take action, and on March 3, 1815, Congress declared war on Algiers. The United States sent two squadrons, totaling seventeen warships, into the Mediterranean,
the largest naval fleet the country had ever assembled. After losing several vessels to the American forces, the Algerines capitulated and signed a treaty with the United States.

Threatened by the powerful American naval squadrons, Tunis and Tripoli soon followed the Algerian example. The Americans demanded the release of not only their own prisoners but the prisoners of other nations as well. “To see the stars and stripes holding forth the hand of retributive justice to the barbarians, and rescuing the unfortunate, even of distant but friendly European nations, from slavery” filled an American observer on the spot and Americans back home as well with pride. By ending the Barbary practices of tributes and ransoms, the Americans accomplished what no European nation had been willing or able to accomplish. John Quincy Adams, from his new post in London as minister to Great Britain, thought that America’s “naval campaign in the Mediterranean has been perhaps as splendid as anything that has occurred in our annals since our existence as a nation.”
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It is not surprising, therefore, that Americans came to believe that the Treaty of Ghent with Great Britain had been written on their terms. Although the treaty seemed to have settled none of the issues that had caused the War of 1812, it actually had settled everything. It was true that the treaty never mentioned the issues of impressment and neutral rights that were the ostensible causes of the war, but that did not matter. It was not merely the fact that the end of the European war rendered the issues of neutral rights moot; more important was the fact that the results of the war vindicated what those issues had come to symbolize—the nation’s independence and sovereignty. As President Madison declared during the war, not to have waged it would have announced to the world that “the Americans were not an independent people, but colonists and vassals.”
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Most important, the war ended without seriously jeopardizing the grand revolutionary experiment in limited republican government.

President Madison had appreciated this from the beginning and had behaved accordingly. Just before the war began, noted Richard Rush, Madison had suggested that “the difference between our government and others was happily this: that here the government had an anxious and difficult task at hand, the people stood at ease—not pressed upon, not driven, . . . whereas elsewhere
government
had an easy time, and
the people
[had] to bear and do everything, as mere
ambition
, will, or any immediate
impulse dictated.” Madison was not like other men, said Rush; his mind was “fertile and profound in these sorts of reflections.”
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To the consternation of both friends and enemies Madison remained remarkably sanguine during the disastrous events of the war. Better to allow the country to be invaded and the capital burned than to build up state power in a European monarchical manner. It was a Republican war that Madison sought to wage in a republican fashion. Even during the war the president continued to call for embargoes as the best means for fighting it. As his secretary of the navy William Jones came to appreciate, Madison’s republican principles were the source of his apparently weak executive leadership. “The President,” Jones observed in 1814, “is virtuous, able and patriotic, but . . . he finds difficulty in accommodating to the crisis some of those political axioms which he has so long indulged, because they have their foundation in virtue, but which form the vicious nature of the times and the absolute necessity of the case require some relaxation.”
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Madison resisted that relaxation of republican political axioms. He knew that a republican leader should not become a Napoleon or even a Hamilton. Although he had tried to lead the Congress, he had not badgered it, and he had not used executive patronage to win influence. With no wartime precedents to guide him, he knowingly accepted the administrative confusion and inefficiencies, the military failures, and the opposition of both the Federalists and even some members of his own party, calm in the conviction that in a republic strong executive leadership could only endanger the principles for which the war was fought.
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As the City of Washington declared in a formal tribute to the president, the sword of war had usually been wielded at the expense of “civil or political liberty.” But this was not the case with President Madison in the war against Britain. Not only had the president restrained the sword “within its proper limits,” but he also had directed “an armed force of fifty thousand men aided by an annual disbursement of many millions, without infringing a political, civil, or religious right.” As one admirer noted, Madison had withstood both a powerful foreign enemy and widespread domestic opposition “without one trial for treason, or even one prosecution for libel.”
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Although historians have had difficulty appreciating Madison’s achievement, many contemporaries certainly realized what he had done. It is not surprising, therefore, that fifty-seven towns and counties throughout the United States are named for Madison, more than for any other president.
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“Notwithstand[ing] a thousand Faults and blunders,” John Adams told Jefferson in 1817, Madison’s administration had “acquired more glory, and established more Union than all his three Predecessors, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, put together.”
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Although Adams with this statement may have been tweaking the pride of the man who had defeated him for the presidency in 1800, he was essentially correct. The War of 1812 did finally establish for Americans the independence and nationhood of the United States that so many had previously doubted. And everyone but the Federalists sensed it. The war, declared the “republican citizens of Baltimore” in April 1815 in what became a common refrain through much of the country,