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Authors: George Daughan

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The emperor had convinced nearly everyone that he was unbeatable, and Madison, it would seem, believed he was—at least for the moment. To be sure, Napoleon had 250,000 troops stuck in Spain for four years, unable to defeat the guerrillas and their British allies. Of course, it was Joseph Bonaparte leading the French army there, not his brother. It was widely assumed that once Napoleon turned his full attention to the Iberian Peninsula, he would prevail. Eventually the French dictator would overreach, Madison thought, and that would be the end of him. But for now he was supreme and a useful lever against the British.
In the wake of the grand May ball, Napoleon traveled to the front and took personal command of the Grand Army, his confidence—like that of his generals— absolute. Ignoring the yearning of all Europeans, including his own people, for an end to the mass killing that had been going on for twenty years, he was determined to bring Russia to heel. Once he had done so, his dominance of the European mainland would be complete. Britain would then be in danger of seeing the French dictator, in the not too distant future, strutting in London.
It appeared likely that after subduing Russia, Bonaparte would force the small British army out of Spain and Portugal, while simultaneously building a fleet large enough to challenge the Royal Navy in preparation for an invasion of the British mainland. Of course, there were other possibilities. After throwing Wellington out of the Iberian Peninsula, the emperor might eject Britain from Gibraltar, sweep across North Africa into Egypt, and from there push east with the compliance of his new Russian ally and conquer India, which he had long dreamed of doing. Sooner or later, though, he would invade Britain; there could be no doubt about it. Madison was sure that, faced with this reality, the intractable Perceval would at last seek a rapprochement with the United States.
To bring added pressure on the prime minister, Madison planned to invade Canada in the summer of 1812. Once in possession of even part of Canada, he would have a powerful bargaining tool, particularly when a French victory in Russia would threaten British security as never before. In addition, American privateers would be attacking British commerce and disrupting the supply line moving troops, equipment, money, and food to Wellington’s army in Portugal and Spain. The president even hoped that faced with the prospect of having to fight both France and the United States, the stubborn prime minister might come to terms without the need for actual combat.
 
 
EMBARRASSED BY HIS dependence on as noxious a dictator as Napoleon, and stung by Federalist accusations that he was a French puppet, Madison consistently denied that he timed his call for war to coincide with Bonaparte’s plunge into Russia. The president was always careful to distance himself in public from the French dictator, insisting that no matter what critics claimed, he was not allied with Napoleon nor dependent on him in any way and never would be. “Our government will not under any circumstances that may occur, form a political connection with France,” Madison wrote in Washington’s semiofficial
National Intelligencer
. “It is not desirable to enter the lists with the two great belligerents at once; but if England acts with wisdom, and France perseveres in her career of injustice and folly, we should not be surprised to see the attitude of the United States change toward these powers.”
Indifferent to Madison’s warnings, Napoleon attacked American commerce—to the limited extent he could, given the strength of the Royal Navy—throughout 1812. The armada of Yankee merchantmen supplying food to British forces in Spain annoyed the emperor. The ports of Lisbon and Cadiz, it seemed, were always crowded with American vessels, protected by British licenses that permitted them to ship food to Wellington’s army. French privateer attacks on these licensed merchantmen embarrassed and frustrated the president, but he continued to focus his anger on Britain, while condemning Bonaparte and denying any dependence on him.
Secretary of State Monroe underscored the distance the administration was keeping from Bonaparte in public by writing anti-French editorials in the
National Intelligencer
, which Madison sent to Joel Barlow, the harried American ambassador in Paris, telling him, “in the event of a pacification with Great Britain, the full tide of indignation with which the public mind here is boiling will be directed against France, if not obviated by a due reparation of her wrongs. War will be called for by the nation almost
una voce
.”
Many years later, in 1827, Madison continued to insist that the American declaration of war and Napoleon’s invasion happening at the same time were a “fortuitous” coincidence. “The moment chosen for the war,” he said, “would, therefore, have been well chosen with a reference to the French expedition against Russia; and although not so chosen, the coincidence between the war and the expedition promised at the time to be as it was fortuitous.”
“Had the French emperor not been broken down,” Madison wrote in the same letter, “as he was to a degree at variance with all probability and which no human sagacity could anticipate, can it be doubted that Great Britain would have been constrained by her own situation and the demands of her allies to listen to our reasonable terms of reconciliation?”
No matter how much Madison protested, however, the fact remained that without Bonaparte, his war strategy was incomprehensible. The normal instruments a president used to fight a war, namely, an army and a navy, were not available to him. The pigmy American navy could not contend with Britain’s mighty fleet, and the U. S. Army was in even worse shape than the navy. Led by a group of elderly generals, the army had not engaged in combat (except against Native Americans) since the end of the Revolution. Legislation in April 1808—hastily passed in response to the
Chesapeake-Leopard
affair—had authorized an increase in the regular force from 3,000 to 10,000, but its actual size fluctuated between 5,000 and 7,000. Low pay and miserly enlistment bonuses, coupled with America’s deep political divisions, made recruitment excruciatingly difficult.
In June 1812 the army had men scattered in twenty-three locations around the nation’s periphery. The tiny War Department was not organized to fight a major European power, and fifty-nine-year-old Dr. William Eustis, the secretary of war, was incapable of leading it. Eustis’s experience of war was as a surgeon many years earlier. He had never commanded a fighting unit. A former medical student of Dr. Joseph Warren—the legendary patriot leader killed during the Battle of Bunker Hill—Eustis had bravely tended the wounded during that famous fight, placing his own life in danger, and for the rest of the war he served as a doctor in the Continental Army. Eventually he went into politics and became a powerful Republican ally of Jefferson and Madison. As good a man as Eustis was, however, he was utterly unqualified to lead the War Department.
By the same token, even a person of greater ability would have had enormous problems managing the department, raising an army in a country where the vast majority of men did not want to serve, or invading Canada when the congressmen who urged doing so did not dare raise taxes to fund it. Congress’s refusal to increase taxes was an accurate barometer of public support for the war.
Even if the public were behind the war, the secretary had a staff of only eight clerks, and they had to handle Indian affairs and pensions as well as army business. Furthermore, Eustis did not have a quartermaster branch until the end of March 1812. Until then, that critical function was performed in the Treasury Department. From uniforms to food to artillery, the army suffered from organizational chaos. Only in the matter of muskets and gunpowder did the troops have adequate supplies. A vibrant small arms industry supplied the muskets, and gunpowder was plentiful.
Despite the well-known deficiencies of the army and navy, Madison could not let pass the singular opportunity presented by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The time to act was now, he thought; to wait would be to lose his best chance of moving Spencer Perceval to change his American policy. The president had been threatening war for so long that he feared if he delayed any longer he would lose all credibility.
Lack of preparedness was not a reason to avoid war, Madison insisted. He thought that real preparations would begin only when war was actually declared. “It had become impossible to avoid or even delay war,” he wrote, “at a moment when we were not prepared for it and when it was certain that effective preparations would not take place whilst the question of war was undecided.” The president hoped the declaration would bring the country together and set in motion a real push to arm. He did not envision a long war. The sudden, unexpected declaration of one, he thought, might be enough to change Perceval’s mind and bring peace before Christmas.
 
EVEN WITH THE army in the disorganized, embryonic state it was, Madison assumed—as did most Republicans, including Jefferson—that Canada was there for the taking. With a diverse population of less than half a million scattered over a wide expanse of territory and tenuously ruled by a not-very-popular British minority, the colony appeared exceptionally vulnerable. In the spring of 1812, forcing Britain out of Canada looked particularly easy. The British were tied down in Portugal, Spain, Sicily, Ireland, India, and the West Indies, and they now had to contend with an apparent Napoleonic victory in Russia. Only a token army of perhaps 7,000 of His Majesty’s regulars was stationed in the Canadian provinces, and they were dispersed from Halifax to Quebec to Montreal, and farther west at Kingston, York, Detroit, and Lake Huron. Provincial troops supplemented the regulars, but their capacity and commitment were suspect. It had become an article of faith among Madison’s supporters that, if attacked, Canada would fall like a ripe apple. Jefferson famously declared, “The acquisition of Canada this year [1812], as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.” Jefferson told Revolutionary War hero General Thaddeus Kosciusko, “The partisans of England here [the Federalists] have endeavored much to goad us into the folly of choosing the ocean instead of the land.... That would be to meet their strength with our own weakness, instead of their weakness with our strength.”
Chasing the British out of North America had long been a cherished dream of both Madison and Jefferson. Although they repeatedly denied being anti-British, their anger, in fact, ran deep. They had no love for Napoleon, but they believed the danger he presented was far less than that posed by Britain. The French dictator would eventually go too far, they felt; his ambition far exceeded his capacity, and, in any event, his system would die with him, whereas the British impulse to control the oceans and expand their empire had been exhibited for centuries through the reigns of many monarchs. Imperialism was inherent in the country’s nature, they believed, and therefore a greater danger.
Conquering Canada would deprive hostile Indian nations of critical support from the British and cut off the supply of natural resources Britain required for her economy and defense. As Napoleon spread his dominion over Europe and shut down trade with Britain, the raw materials needed to sustain the Royal Navy came increasingly from Canada, making this vast territory, once considered of limited use to the fleet, critically important.
Madison planned to make a sudden thrust across the Canadian border as soon as Congress declared war, capitalizing on the eagerness of people in the western states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee and the territories of Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois to drive the British out of Canada. Along the entire American frontier, people were convinced that British agents operating out of Canada were inciting the Indian nations and supplying them with weapons. Feeling intensified when the charismatic chief Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (known as the Prophet) emerged as leaders of a movement to unite the tribes, north and south, and make them strong enough to secure their territory and their way of life. Tecumseh, who was part Shawnee and part Creek, adamantly opposed selling more Indian lands to the United States; he urged the tribes to remain true to their traditions and reject American attempts to turn them into docile farmers.
Tecumseh’s power grew appreciably on September 30, 1809, when William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, concluded the lopsided Treaty of Fort Wayne with the Potawatomis, Miamis, Eel Rivers, Delawares, Lenape, Weas, and Kickapoos, dispossessing the tribes of over three million acres for an equivalent of $5,250. This was but one in a series of unequal treaties that Harrison had concluded with the Indians. Since becoming governor of the newly formed Indiana Territory in 1800, he had carried out President Jefferson’s policy of turning as many Indians as possible into farmers. Jefferson wanted those who resisted to be driven west beyond the Mississippi. His policy left no room for Native Americans to remain on the land and pursue their traditional way of life.
The American government’s tactics outraged Tecumseh. His movement, which had been strengthening since 1810, grew even stronger when the Treaty of Fort Wayne became fully understood. The contest between Tecumseh, the Prophet, and Harrison eventually led to the Battle of Tippecanoe on November 7, 1811, which was portrayed as a victory for Governor Harrison but led Tecumseh and his growing number of followers to draw ever closer to the British.
Governor Harrison was a great hero among settlers along the frontier, where people mindlessly placed all the blame for sour relations with the tribes on the British. In the western states and territories frontiersmen were convinced that, deprived of British aid, the Indians could easily be driven beyond the Mississippi, allowing Americans to appropriate their lands. A tidal wave of farmers and speculators awaited their opportunity.

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