AMERICAN NEUTRALITY LOST IN WAR
The United States, as a maritime nation, could scarcely expect to
escape the maelstrom of war induced by the task of suppressing the
French Revolution and Napoleon, a task which occupied the legitimists
of Europe for a quarter of a century, and involved every civilised
nation of the Old World. President Washington had early laid the course
of the ship of state on the medium way of neutrality. He maintained
the course, although at the penalty of such abuse as we gladly forget
at the present day. To continue that policy, President Adams wrecked
his party, cut himself off with one term, and became a vicarious
sacrifice when he chose negotiations with France instead of war.
President Jefferson spent eight unhappy years for the same object. He
endured national humiliation, was forced into coercive measures from
which his soul revolted, and brought his country to the verge of
commercial ruin to avoid war. President Madison, during his first four
years, was made the tool of British diplomatic equivocation and the
plaything of Napoleonic strategy to maintain the position chosen nearly
two decades before; so great was the task and so fearful the cost of
founding a neutral nation.
This delay of war proved most fortunate in the end. Those twenty years
allowed the American merchantmen to increase in numbers until they
were able to work such devastation on British commerce as marked the
course of the War of 1812. The period allowed the new nation to acquire
the strategic mouth of the Mississippi, and to make such inroads of
settlers in the debatable land of the Floridas that Britain was unable
to secure a permanent footing in them during hostilities. Twenty years
carried forward the Old World struggle to a point so near its close
that the Americans were able in the end to make surprisingly good terms
in the general European demand for a world-peace.
As if to put the strict constructionists to the test on every side,
the twenty years for which the Hamilton bank had been chartered expired
in the midst of a conviction that war was inevitable. The bank, as a
means of securing loans, would be indispensable during a war. The
liberal-minded Gallatin brought in a report to Congress advocating a
re-charter of the bank for another term of years. His arguments were
much like those of Hamilton twenty years before. Is it given to the
departed to know such a mortal pleasure as vindication?
Gallatin's recommendation evoked a storm of dissent from those members
of the party who adhered to early principles. They would not give a
new lease of life to this monopoly, unconstitutional in its origin and
abused in its administration. State banks, if given an opportunity,
could care for the United States money as well as an aristocratic,
exclusive institution, seven-tenths of whose stock was held in England.
This plea for the individual was the argument by which the opponents
of re-charter met the predictions of financial ruin with which the
advocates of Gallatin's suggestion filled the air. The withdrawal of
twenty-four million dollars from circulation would mean a national
panic, it was claimed. Arguments of expediency were heard where
constitutionality had held twenty years before.
The unionising process which the former individualists had undergone
in ten years of administration is illustrated by the speech of Crawford,
of Georgia, a lifelong adherent to the principles of Jefferson in the
main, but too liberal to be bound to a dead past. A rational analysis
of the Constitution, he thought, would show that it was not perfect
in language as commonly supposed, but that it occasionally gave a
general power followed by a specific power.
"This analysis," said he, "may excite unpleasant sensations, it may
assail honest prejudices; for there can be no doubt that honest
prejudices frequently exist and are many times perfectly innocent. But
when these prejudices tend to destroy even the object of their
affection, it is ostensibly necessary that they should be eradicated."
In pleading that the Constitution should not be held down to a
construction which would render it "wholly imbecile," he took as
advanced ground on the implied powers as had any Federalist in the
olden days. Ridiculing those who clung to the old restrictive theory,
he cited numerous actions of the party during the ten years it had
been in power which could be justified only by constitutional
implication. Among these, he said, were laws for the punishment of
counterfeiters, passed under the power to coin money; the erection of
lighthouses under the power to regulate commerce; the prohibition of
offences against the post-office department under the power to establish
post-offices and post-roads; and the acceptance of sites for arsenals,
forts, and dockyards under the power to control them. Even the
acceptance of the District of Columbia depended upon the implied instead
of the direct language of the Constitution. Nor did he fail to point
out that in 1802, when removing the judges of the circuit courts
established by the Federalists in their last hours, the party was
proceeding entirely upon the assumption that the expressed power to
create inferior courts contained the implied power to abolish them.
Petitions both for and against a re-charter of the Hamilton bank poured
in from merchants in various cities and from branches of the bank.
Instructions against the bank came from the State Legislatures of
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. So nearly was opinion divided
that a new lease of life for the bank was prevented in the House by
only one vote, and in the Senate by the deciding vote of Vice-President
Gerry, of Massachusetts, who chose to abide by party principles rather
than to listen to the voice of the majority of people in his own State.
The predicted extension of State banks and the disorder in the finances
of the country were alike experienced after the expiration of the
United States Bank in 1811. More than two hundred of these private
institutions were chartered in the various States to take the place
of the branches of the old bank. They were to be found especially in
the newer portions of the country, where banking facilities had been
previously unknown. Flooding the land with their bank-notes, they
speedily drove coin out of circulation. The latter was hoarded. When
the war began, banks found it impossible to secure this hoarded coin
to redeem their notes and were compelled to suspend specie payment
completely. The National Government, having made these banks
depositaries for the revenue collectors, according to the
individualistic demands, suffered loss and disarrangement of its funds.
The lesson was severe, especially in the face of an impending war.
In the final struggle of the giants, which began, near the close of
Madison's first term, with Napoleon's preparations for the invasion
of Russia, every offensive and defensive principle known to English
commercial history (and few are abandoned) was revived in the attempt
to starve out the French and prevent the long-anticipated invasion of
England. The seizure of American goods on the high seas had long been
a source of complaint from the commercial interests; but it never
affected the masses or so aroused them to the point of fury as did the
practice of taking seamen from American vessels. Britain was the worst
offender in both forms of reprisal, not alone because she was the
greatest maritime power, but also because a common speech characterised
the sailors of Britain and the United States. Yet it was largely a
matter of different views of citizenship. That a man should voluntarily
exile himself from British protection and citizenship was as offensive
to British pride as injurious to British strength. That an allegiance
could exist better than that of England was incomprehensible to the
British public; that a man deluded into so thinking should be set right
was a natural duty. "Once a subject, always a subject," gave the
sovereign a right to the services of every man born under the British
flag or having sworn fealty thereto. The subject could be taken by a
press-gang on shore or could be impressed from the deck of any vessel
on which he had taken refuge. Such doctrine was especially objectionable
to Americans, who depended largely upon aliens to people their vast
domain, and who placed so much stress upon individual freedom of motion.
Perpetual allegiance of the subject was as obnoxious as perpetual
ownership of the land to a people who were all aliens once, twice, or
thrice removed.
On the other hand, the British complained that their seamen were seduced
from their allegiance to fill up the American merchant marine. Formal
naturalisation papers were said to be given to men who sailed two years
from American ports. These deserters were engaged, for a large part,
in the neutral trade. Thus the enemies of Britain were being served
by British sailors. Not only was her trade injured and the enemy
strengthened, but this was being done by the loss of blood from her
own navy. Her writers called upon the Government to sacrifice even the
good-will of the Americans rather than to submit to the imposition of
neutrals on British trade and the loss of British sailors.
The Americans were forced by public sentiment to take a stand for
national citizenship. A broad patriotism was rallied which overcame
all scruples about the differences between national and State
citizenship. The matter manifestly belonged to the central rather than
the individual governments. When threatened by foreign powers, Federal
citizenship assumed a new value in the eyes of the Jeffersonians, much
akin to that which it had long borne in the opinion of the Federalists.
The party which ten years before was endeavouring to distinguish between
State and national citizenship was now compelled to take action to
protect sailors who were not residents of any State. Many of them had
no homes. They could look to no protector except the Union, under whose
flag they sailed.
It is questionable whether the Federalists, had they remained in power,
could have avoided a war with Britain when once the people had become
fully aroused by the continued attacks of Britain on American commerce
and American citizenship. Long-suffering and patient toward British
offence, that party had avoided war for at least ten years. Jefferson
and Madison, more devoted to maintaining neutrality than restrained
by love of Britain, postponed the inevitable war for twelve years more.
But Madison's was a gradually waning power. The end of his first
administration marks the termination of the one-man era. Hamilton and
Jefferson by turn had dominated national affairs. Perhaps no man could
have continued the monopoly. The day of many counsellors was at hand.
Revolutionary statesmen and warriors alike were to be cast aside by
a second generation, which knew not the horrors of war. The supremacy
of the Atlantic coast in national affairs had begun to wane. Political
power was moving westward with the people.
This war element, which practically took matters from Madison's hands,
was composed of men who were to measure their careers by decades instead
of years. Its constituents had been reared in the strenuous life of
the frontier. Separated from Old World influence by the Allegheny
barrier, they felt the first impulses of true Americanism. A
continuation of dominant foreign influence under them was impossible.
Instead of seceding to a foreign power, as their fathers had threatened,
these trans-Allegheny frontiersmen had now been absorbed by the Union
and were to secure their long-delayed rights by controlling their own
government, which had once been disposed to neglect them. They were,
for the most part, country-bred lawyers, belonging to the agricultural
and borrowing class rather than the bank-founding, lending Federalists.
In this respect, they would be in accord with Jefferson and Madison,
but totally at variance with them in their inland attitude toward ocean
commerce.
Like true Democrats, they breathed the air of the individual rather
than the masses. Clay was the son of a dissenting clergyman in
aristocratic Virginia, which was still under the spell of an
establishment of religion. By removing to Kentucky, he not only
exemplified the movement of national power, but freed himself from all
disadvantages of caste. The only aristocracy on the frontier was that
of worth. Calhoun came of equally humble birth and inherited his
individualistic principles. His father had been a country member of
the Virginia Convention and had opposed the adoption of the Federal
Constitution. Much of Calhoun's bias toward democracy was derived, as
he confessed, from an early conversation with the sage of Monticello.
Bred in the upland district of South Carolina, a region more akin to
Tennessee than to the seaboard, Calhoun may have had in mind the
massacre of his grandmother by the Indians as he arose in the war
session of Congress to make his report as chairman of the important
Committee of Foreign Affairs. He arraigned the British agents from
Canada circulating among the American Indians, and charged them with
the outrages committed on the American frontier. Members from the Ohio
valley did not hesitate to attribute the recent outbreak, culminating
in the battle of Tippecanoe, to intrigues of the British in Canada,
whereby the profitable fur trade would be diverted to their posts. "If
we are to be permanently free from this danger," said one speaker in
the debate which followed the report, "we must drive the British from
Canada. I, for one, am willing to receive the Canadians themselves as
adopted brothers." Grundy, of Tennessee, who, like Clay, had been born
on the Atlantic slope and had followed the advance of population across
the Alleghenies, arose to declare that the whole Western country was
eager to avenge their fallen heroes, and awaited but the word of
Congress to march into Canada.
The frontiersmen, never free from the hostility of the savage, sought
to explain it by every cause except the true one--their constant
invasion of the lands reserved to him by the National Government in
treaties made with him. Here lies at least one explanation of the long
endurance of British commercial wrongs by the United States before war
was declared. The West, with its grievance of Indian tampering, had
not yet come into control of national affairs. The frontiersmen, by
their conquests of nature, had come to despise the strength of all
enemies. With no commerce to be endangered by a foreign war, safe in
the almost roadless interior from the peril of invasion, the Western
representatives were able to carry by storm in Congress their
temporising, commercial brethren of the coast. When discussing the
embargo bill as a preliminary war measure in 1812, Clay, made Speaker
during his first session in the House, scorned the appeal of New York
for peace, in her defenceless condition, as her representatives
described her. "I do not wish to hear," said Clay, "of the opinion of
Brockholst Livingston or any other man. I consider this a war measure,
and approve of it because it is a direct precursor of war." Fourteen
Legislatures of the South and West, he said, had put themselves on
record as wishing to avenge the insults of Britain. The Legislature
of his own State had supported Jefferson's embargo four years previously
with such zeal that they almost passed a measure abolishing the English
common law in Kentucky courts.
Perhaps it was an accident that this twelfth Congress was composed
almost one-half of new members; but more likely it was the result of
popular impatience with the compromising foreign attitude of the
National Government. It was an incipient political revolution, without
involving a change of administration, a form of rebuke not infrequent
in the history of the Republic. The fact that these new and
inexperienced members, known as "war-hawks," were able to secure the
leadership may have been due to the accidental conjunction of natural
leaders; but a larger view would see in it a shifting of political
power with the advance of the people. The grievance of these Southern
and Western people against the Indians could neither be appreciated
nor believed by the New England and Middle Atlantic States, far removed
from the frontier and the savages. To their minds, the broader
accusation of preying upon American commerce was more real. Yet so
profitable had grown the monopoly of trade secured by them as neutrals
in the Napoleonic wars that they could well afford to lose occasionally
by foreign orders and decrees for the sake of the profit as a whole.
The War of 1812 from a sectional standpoint presents, therefore, the
unusual aspect of an inland, agricultural people forcing a war upon
the country for the protection of a marine, commercial people, who
were for the most part opposed to it. When Clay, in the lofty style
common to the time, declared the Americans unconquerable, and that if
the enemy should lay in ashes New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and
should devastate the whole Atlantic coast, the people would retreat
beyond the Alleghenies to live and flourish there, a member from New
Jersey protested that this was too high a price for him; that he had
no inclination to go beyond the Alleghenies; and that even the
Mississippi valley would be a poor consolation to him after everything
that was near and dear to him and his people had been destroyed.
The desire for commercial independence, which had been growing steadily
since political independence had been gained, was responsible for some
of this defiant attitude. Speaker after speaker described the spirit
of our forefathers who used only homespun in the rising Revolutionary
days. The career of the United States, if commercially independent of
Europe, was compared with her present situation, a victim of foreign
oppression on the highways of the world. One speaker thought we should
never be true Americans so long as we had to go to Europe for our
national airs. It was not admitted generally that England's restrictive
measures were due to her desire to starve out Napoleon, but as prompted
by jealousy of "her new commercial rival," the United States. "England
sickens at your prosperity," said Clay, "and beholds in your growth
the foundations of a power which at no distant day is to make her
tremble for her naval superiority." A foolish pride, characteristic
of youth, urged on the war spirit. It was said that a few years before
we had resolved for war, retaliation, or submission. The retaliatory
measures had been withdrawn; war or submission was the only choice
left.
Beneath the hostility arising from Britain's war measures lay, in the
American mind, the irritation caused by her patronising air. The
Americans had chafed under British social as well as commercial
intolerance ever since the birth of the Republic. In the British
thought, the Americans were still colonists in that they were not to
the manor born. The Declaration of Independence and the severance of
political ties had left them still dependent upon Britain in the higher
aspects of life.
"The Americans asserted their independence," said the _Edinburgh
Review_, "upon principles which they derived from us. They are
descended from our loins, they retain our usages and manners, they read
our books, they have copied our freedom, they rival our courage, and yet
they are less popular and esteemed among us than the base and bigoted
Portuguese and the ferocious and ignorant Russians."
When an English statesman suggested that his Government would do well
to cultivate the new Republic for the sake of trade if for no higher
motive, Lord Brougham ridiculed the proposition of paying heed to "a
people whose armies are as yet at the plough, or making awkward attempts
at the loom, whose assembled navies could not lay siege to an English
sloop of war." These sneers, although containing a large proportion
of truth, exasperated the young nation beyond control. The provincialism
of the day writhed under any suggestion that the New World was not the
rival of the Old in every intellectual particular. A broader spirit
would have confessed that time is required for the development of
genius and the surroundings which conduce to a high development of
intellectual and artistic life. Two decades later, Lowell satirised
this American tendency in the _Fable for Critics_ by saying that while
the Old World has produced barely eight poets, the New World begets
a whole crop each year.
"Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties,
That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,
Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles,
Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,
One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,
A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,--
In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,
He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain
Will be some very great person over again."
These extravagant claims incited fresh attacks. One British writer
insisted that Federal America had done nothing either to extend,
diversify, or embellish the sphere of human knowledge, and could produce
nothing to bring her intellectual efforts into any sort of comparison
with those of Europe. "Noah Webster, we are afraid," said he, "still
occupies the first place in criticism, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow
in poetry, and Mr. Justice Marshall in history." Another pronounced
the celebrated Philosophic Hall in Philadelphia a "meeting house" for
the society, where its transactions were "scooped together" in the
"genuine dialect of tradesmen." Not only the published papers of the
Philosophic Society were held up to ridicule, but also John Quincy
Adams's _Letters from Silesia_, Marshall's _Life of Washington_,
Barlow's _Columbiad_, Dwight's poetry, and Lewis and Clark's history
of their expedition.
"But why should the Americans write books," asked the _Edinburgh
Review_, "when a six weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads. Prairies,
steamboats, grist-mills are their natural objects for centuries to
come."
The crudity of American life and manners had been sarcastically
described by Ashe, Fearon, Davis, and other European travellers.
American writers countered these attacks by comparing the treatment
of the slaves in America with the condition of British paupers and
East Indians. Charges of negro kidnapping were contrasted with
child-stealing in England; our gouging the eyes in fisticuffs with
their prize-fighting; the harshness of our slave code with their
criminal laws; and the condition of our free clergy with the
circumscribed established clergymen. A dispute arose between writers
of the two countries over the responsibility of England for American
slavery by having fostered it in the American colonies.
This war of words, which continued even after the close of hostilities
with England, went so far as to involve discussions whether Godfrey
or Hadley had invented the quadrant; whether Hulls or Fulton was the
father of the steamboat; whether steamboats were first used in England
or America; and whether Fulton should have offered his invention of
the submarine torpedo to France as well as to England. One may easily
say at the present time that the national spirit should have risen
superior to such trivialities; but the national spirit was taking a
most provincial cast. Originality was claimed for everything;
inheritance counted as nothing.
A maritime war is peculiarly a commercial war in that it affects trade
and consequently becomes a sectional war, since all portions of the
land are not equally affected. The War of 1812 was a sectional war
which arrayed the former friends of consolidated government against
the Administration, and consequently made the former enemies of
consolidation its most devoted supporters. The early attitude of the
various sections toward the war, with due allowance for party
allegiance, may be studied in the vote of the two houses of Congress
on the measure entitled "An act declaring war between Great Britain
and her dependencies and the United States and their Territories,"
which passed the House on June 4th, and the Senate on June 17, 1812.
VOTE OF CONGRESS DECLARING THE WAR OF 1812
______________________________________________________
| | |
| HOUSE | SENATE |
STATES |_______________|_______________|
| For | Against | For | Against |
_____________________|_____|_________|_____|_________|
Vermont..............| 3 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
New Hampshire........| 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
Massachusetts........| 6 | 8 | 1 | 1 |
Rhode Island.........| 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
Connecticut..........| 0 | 7 | 0 | 2 |
New York.............| 3 | 11 | 1 | 1 |
New Jersey...........| 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
Pennsylvania.........| 16 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
Delaware.............| 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
Maryland.............| 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
Virginia.............| 14 | 5 | 2 | 0 |
North Carolina.......| 6 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
South Carolina.......| 8 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
Georgia..............| 3 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
Kentucky.............| 5 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
Tennessee............| 3 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Ohio.................| 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
______________________________________________________
The unanimity of the inland and non-commercial States, with the
exception of the party vote of the Ohio Senators, is manifest. They
were secure from the ravages of maritime war. Massachusetts showed a
stronger war sentiment than New York, although the course of the
Administration in these States during the war reversed this condition.
The Massachusetts House of Representatives had passed resolutions
against the proposed war. The New York opposition represented the
commercial interests. Fifty-eight business men of New York City, headed
by John Jacob Astor, protested against a war. Among these were sixteen
Republicans. The opposition in Rhode Island and Connecticut, which
assumed such a serious aspect during the war, is clearly indicated in
this vote. Regarding the sections as North and South, a distinction
most unfortunately emphasised during the progress of the war, the
popularity of the war in the South may be seen by a table:
House Senate
North of Mason and Dixon line /For........34........ 7
\Against....37........ 9
South of Mason and Dixon line /For........45........l3
\Against....11........ 2
Possibly the spectacle of a war favoured by the Southern and Western
people to protect Northern commerce and seamen, a kind of protection
not desired by the people who were being imposed on, no less than the
extraneous nature of these causes, has given rise to the saying current
in the United States that she went to war after the causes were removed
and did not secure anything for which she made war. The war message
of President Madison, sent to Congress on the 1st day of June, 1812,
cited a series of aggressive acts on the part of Great Britain dating
from 1802. The most prominent were the seizure of American seamen and
goods, and the pretended blockade under the orders in council. More
recent and less manifest impositions were described in the disavowal
of agreements made by an accredited minister, Erskine; in the attempt
to dismember the American Union through a secret British agent in the
United States; and the instigation of the Northwest Indians to hostility
by British traders. The message acknowledged that France had also been
guilty of some of these offensive acts, but intimated that they would
be abandoned through negotiations now in progress with that power.
Of these five charges, that concerning the Indians and that charging
intrigue were difficult to prove. Responsibility for Erskine's actions
was easily disavowed through the explanation that he had exceeded his
instructions. The blockades were really withdrawn before war was
declared, although the news had not reached this country. The freedom
of sailors and goods was finally guaranteed by the end of the Napoleonic
wars and consequently were not mentioned in the treaty which closed
the War of 1812. Thus the calendar was cleared, and the saying about
the causes and results of the war substantiated. Sometimes it is called
the "second war for independence." Undoubtedly the treatment which the
United States received from European powers before and after the war
formed a remarkable contrast. Yet the change was due to changed
conditions in Europe rather than to any compulsion wrought by the
hostilities. The most valuable independence gained in the war was in
the national feeling of the people, as will be shown later in this
story.
To the British mind, it must be confessed, this second war with the
United States presented a different aspect. Napoleon had absorbed
France and all her continental neighbours save Prussia, Austria, and
Russia. These with difficulty held back his land forces. To England
was left the duty of keeping him in check upon the sea. War was declared
by the United States just when Napoleon's invasion of Russia demanded
the strictest enforcement of the blockade. England would willingly
have avoided a war with the United States at this time, but felt that
she could surrender neither the blockade nor right of search so
essential to the conquest of Napoleon. It seemed to the English people
that they alone stood between this man and the freedom of the world.
They thought it extremely ungrateful that the Americans should resent
their Orders in Council and other measures considered essential to
their naval supremacy over the French. Granted that these blockades
cut off some of the trade which the Americans as neutrals had secured
during the two decades of European war; they should be willing to
suffer so much in the common cause of liberty against one-man
aggression.
[Illustration: BLANK COMMISSION FOR PRIVATEER IN WAR OF 1812. Under
these commissions, hundreds of private vessels armed themselves and
preyed on the enemy, atoning for the ill success of the American arms
on the land.]
Every resistance to England's coercive measures was considered by her
as a tacit aid to Napoleon. To the English mind, the hostile attitude
of the Americans was a return to the French-American alliance of the
Revolutionary days. The Americans were repaying their debt of
obligations, but with an important difference. Where a King of France
had aided colonists struggling for freedom, the colonists, now grown
to a nation, were aiding the greatest enemy to freedom the world had
yet seen. It was said that it would be simply a just retribution on
America if England should withdraw from the breach and allow Napoleon
to turn his ambitious designs upon the Western Republic. He would not
hesitate to retake Louisiana, according to British opinion, for his
revived American Empire.
Clay had not been the only speaker to indulge in braggadocio and
boasting. In all the debates in Congress, Canada was to be invaded on
the northern boundary and rolled up at each end. In vain the
conservatives showed the neglected condition of the national defences.
Jefferson's policy of economy had reduced the regular army to less
than seven thousand men and had scaled down the navy to fifteen vessels,
carrying a total of 352 guns, and 63 little gunboats, the offspring
of Jefferson's speculative genius. Nor were all these parts of "the
Liliputian navy" ready for commission. Six of the largest frigates,
mounting 170 of the guns, had been allowed to become useless for lack
of repairs. It would require six months' work and a half million dollars
to put them in fighting order. Of the little "mosquito fleet," as
Jefferson's gunboats were contemptuously styled by the Federalists,
102 were drawn up under sheds at the various navy-yards and few of
them seaworthy. Notwithstanding these cold facts, one of the few war
advocates in New England said we needed no regular army to take Canada;
that the militia of his section needed only authority to do the
business; simply give the word of command and the thing was done.
Another brushed aside even the fear of an invasion from Canada by
boasting that even the army of Napoleon which had conquered at
Austerlitz could not march through New England.
According to one speaker in the House, when the storm of war had been
poured on Canada and Halifax, it would sweep through with the resistless
impetuosity of Niagara. "The Author of Nature," cried another, "has
marked our limits in the South by the Gulf of Mexico and on the North
by the regions of eternal frost." This braggadocio, however deplorable
from a present view, may be pardoned as characteristic of young men
and a young nation. It may be charged to the account of European
aggression and British sneers. But it is also significant as marking
the dawn of a feeling of nationality. It showed an appreciation of the
probable effects of new-world isolation, inter-dependence, and destiny.
It was not a far cry from this position to "America for the Americans,"
a few years later.
The new nation terminated the war into which their enthusiasm plunged
them more fortunately than could have been hoped. On the land, it is
true, where the "war-hawks" had placed their boasted strength, little
was accomplished. Upon the high seas, where little dependence was
placed, wonders were accomplished by privateers. No less than 1607
British merchantmen were captured, in addition to sixteen British
war-ships. The Americans in turn lost heavily, a total of probably
1400 vessels of all kinds, but their financial loss was small compared
with that of the enemy. As in many later instances, the genius of the
American for individual initiative proved his salvation.
That an outburst of national pride should follow so many disasters by
land is explicable only through the battle of New Orleans, whose
crowning victory changed the aspect of prior engagements in the public
memory, while it placed a new value on the marksmanship of the American
soldiery. Charges made by veterans of Wellington and of Nelson were
resisted by unorganised American forces, dependent upon individual
initiative and upon skill in shooting. Jackson's motley army was
symbolic of the race composition of America and suggestive of the
recent acquisition of the land in which they were fighting. There were
free negroes, San Domingans, Louisiana Creoles, regular troops, old
French soldiers, and swarthy pirates, backed by the hunters of Tennessee
in their homespun hunting-shirts, and the Kentuckians with their long
knives. The latter boasted of their endurance of hardships and that
they were not of woman born, but were half horse and half alligator.
One stanza of a popular song, much used in a later campaign where the
hero of New Orleans was the main issue, runs:
"We raised a bank to hide our breasts,
Not that we thought of dying;
But then we always liked to rest,
Unless the game was flying.
Behind it stood our little force
None wished it to be greater,
For every man was half a horse,
And half an alligator."
Here were demonstrated again the difficulties under which trained
battalions fought in the American backwoods. The experience of Braddock
was repeated during the month consumed by Pakenham in getting his
troops into position. The farmers, who waited at Bunker Hill until the
whites of the enemy's eyes were visible in order to insure a good aim
against troops firing in volleys, lived again in the hunters of the
South at New Orleans. Small wonder that dwelling in memory on these
facts aroused an intense American confidence and even undue self-esteem.
If the stimulating effects of war upon nationality are to be noted in
all these details, the disintegrating effects on political parties are
no less evident. By a reversal of position, both Republicans and
Federalists were being drawn from extreme to medium grounds. Many
conservatives among the Republicans deplored this shifting to the
former views of their opponents. In the actual preparations for war,
the passing of acts for an embargo, for a loan, for increasing the
army and adding to the navy, John Randolph, the overtalented genius
of Roanoke, raised his voice in both derision and prophecy.
"If a writ were to issue," said he, with an eloquence too erratic to be
convincing, "against the Republican party of 1798, it would be
impossible for a constable with a search-warrant to find it. Death,
resignations, and desertions, have thinned its ranks. New men and new
measures have succeeded."
He predicted that a standing army, being created by the Republicans,
would be as fatal to them as it had been to their opponents in 1798.
In one of his frequent speeches, he summed up the principles of the
party in olden days when it was opposed to an army, to burdensome
taxation, and to excessive expenditures. "Such," said he, "were our
opinions in 1798. What has produced the change I do not know, unless
we were then _out_ and now we are _in_." The whole philosophy of the
compulsory force making for nationality through political parties is
expressed in that sentence.