American Experiment (40 page)

Otherwise, 1813 did not turn out to be very decisive in the north. To be sure, Perry’s triumph allowed Harrison to move 4,500 men across Lake Erie to Fort Maiden, south of Detroit, and to force the British, over Tecumseh’s protest, to evacuate Detroit, and move east, where Harrison caught up with the British force on the north bank of the Thames, taking almost 500 prisoners and killing Tecumseh. But the crucial drive northeast to Montreal faltered in the face of powerful resistance. The Americans occupied York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and burned the Assembly houses and other public buildings, but this proved a Pyrrhic victory.

For two years the adversaries had looked like a couple of roustabouts fighting in a barnyard, each throwing wild haymakers at the other, drawing much blood but not coming close to knocking the other out. Would the third year be any different? The global balance of mobiles was swaying as Napoleon, after repeated defeats at the hands of the Prussian and Austrian and Russian troops he had once beaten so decisively, abdicated his throne and departed for Elba. For Americans this meant that crack British regiments would soon be shipping out of Bordeaux and other French ports for America. But the American Army was becoming more professionally led too, as Madison and Armstrong replaced older generals with men like Jacob Brown, George Izard, Andrew Jackson, and Winfield Scott. During 1814 combat in the north focused on the Niagara area between Lakes Erie and Ontario; fighting to the west dwindled into raids and skirmishes. Scott led well-drilled troops to a victory over the British at Chippewa, an engagement treasured ever since by West Pointers because of the English commander’s surprised cry: “Those are Regulars, by God!” Three weeks later, in the heaviest ground action of the war, Scott’s and Brown’s men were so badly mauled in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane that they fell back on Fort Erie, which the British promptly put under an unsuccessful siege.

Frustration and stalemate also characterized the action much farther east, on Lake Champlain. In a combined land-sea offensive for which they were becoming famous, British troops drove down the western shore of the lake, in coordination with a large fleet headed toward American warships and troops concentrated at Plattsburgh. Captain Thomas Macdonough was ready for the attack and after a furious engagement destroyed all the enemy vessels except for several gunboats. Their dream of an advance south along the Hudson shattered, the British pulled back to Canada.

For the Americans, sadder events were at hand to the south. Powerful British fleet units had been ranging for months up and down the Atlantic coast, blockading major ports, putting in landing parties to raid and burn small ports, bottling up a good part of the American fleet in well-protected harbors. Single American warships and privateers, cruising far across the Atlantic and even into the Pacific, won some glorious victories, but these were hardly more than pinpricks to the Royal Navy, augmented after Elba by reinforcements from European waters. During the early summer of 1814, rumors reached Washington that the Royal Navy planned a massive attack up the Chesapeake. Madison and his generals, doubting that enemy assault troops would move very far from their warships, and not sure just where the British would strike, took disorganized half-measures for defense.

In mid-August, news arrived that a mighty British armada of warships and transports had suddenly appeared at the mouth of the Patuxent River. Then came reports that several thousand enemy troops were marching toward Washington. In a nightmare of misjudgments as to enemy plans, poor communication among state militias intent mainly on protecting their own turf, and mediocre generalship, a large but separated collection of American defense forces was overcome one by one. The British assault at Bladensburg, a few miles east of Washington, sent the militias streaming back toward the capital. The President, who with Monroe had been closely reconnoitering the defense of Washington, escaped into the Virginia countryside. There he met up with Mrs. Madison, who had managed to send off documents, plate, and the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, hastily torn out of its frame, before she fled from the White House with dinner still set on the table. When the President and his party returned to Washington after the British withdrew, they found the White House and the Capitol building in smoking ruins. The British also had run a few warships up the Potomac and exacted a king’s ransom of vital military stores from the merchants of Alexandria as the price of leaving the city unburned.

Washington burned—the first family sent scurrying to safety—Alexandria humiliated: a wave of mortification and anger swept through the country, even into New England. Nonetheless, the British raid on Washington turned out to be more important psychologically than militarily. The American war effort by the end of 1814 was still so decentralized that the head could be cut off for a time without harming local efforts by mainly state militias: Indeed, when the British amphibious army moved on up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, it was bloodily repulsed by the militia. But these events in the heart of the country excited a patriotic nerve,
and it was perhaps this nerve that was touched when Francis Scott Key, after watching the bombardment of Baltimore forts through the night, strained to see whether the flag was still there—and, assured that it was, wrote a star-spangled anthem.

But this was also a time of disillusion and disenthrallment for the Americans. By the end of 1814 military prospects looked so bleak that the Administration was willing to settle for the status quo ante as the basis of a peace negotiation with Britain. In purely strategic terms, the war was a standoff at this time, but if one measures war achievements by war aims, the United States had lost, for there was little sign that Britain was prepared to yield any of its “rights.”

If American military aspirations were deflated, however, the American way of war was even more directly challenged. American leaders had not been pacifists; Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, were naïve neither about the bellicose tendencies of humankind nor about the likelihood of clashes among nations in a world of independent sovereign states. They recognized that national security was a prime responsibility of government. The Constitution listed the “common Defense” even before the “general welfare” as the power and duty of Congress; and in the
Federalist
John Jay wrote that, of all the people’s needs, “providing for their
safety
seems to be the first.”

The problem, especially in a republic, was how to maintain a military establishment strong enough to protect the people’s safety but controlled enough not to invade their liberties—in short, how to harness the war beast. No easy solution was possible in a world of shifting mobiles and in a young nation led by men who could not agree even on the definition of liberty, as the Alien and Sedition Acts had demonstrated. This dilemma left the nation ambivalent over both the theory and the practice of war. Ideologically, most Americans opposed heavy defense expenditures, large standing armies, centralized military decision making and administration, military professionalism in the form of a permanent officer class. In practice they knew the need for protection from predator nations on their borders. The upshot was reliance on defensive measures such as coastal fortifications, scatteration of the federal troops among many ports and posts, heavy dependence on state militias, the building of gunboats as the prime naval weapon, and acceptance of a small but professional navy as “safer” than a professional army. Such half-measures proved woefully inadequate in the War of 1812. Typically the state militias lacked—at least until they were well blooded—adequate discipline, professionalism, and soldierly skills; and commanders lacked the necessary generalship. The United States Military Academy had been founded at West Point in 1802,
but the nation still had no considered strategic doctrine or even a native military literature. The Royal Navy proved to be skillful in evading the coastal defenses, and the scores of gunboats, while occasionally useful in shallow water, could not begin to cope with the great British ships of the line. The nation did have a strong potential of military arms. During the 1790s Rhode Island and Maryland “furnaces” had begun casting and boring cannon for fortresses and frigates, and by the turn of the century the Springfield Armory, established by the government, could produce over 5,000 muskets a year. It was the government’s need for quantities of guns that enabled Eli Whitney in New Haven to finance and organize mass production through development of power tools, interchangeability of parts, and mass assembly.

Even so, the fact that the United States was a third-rate military power centrally affected its pretensions, whether in peace or war. While General Hull marched on Canada with 900 men, Napoleon was invading Russia with an army of half a million. Fourteen hundred sailors fought in the decisive battle for Lake Champlain, a mere tenth of the number present at Trafalgar. Napoleon’s taking of Moscow and his bitter, death-ridden retreat had far more to do with the future security of the United States than the British capture of Washington. Once Napoleon was defeated, the United States had little chance of victory.

The greatest lack in the American way of war was a leadership that could define and pursue a set of national ends that had some relation to the needs and aspirations of the people and the political and military capabilities of the nation. American involvements and interests abroad—most notably a world trade that brought American ships and sailors into dangerous waters—far outran American commitments and capabilities. The men who organized the governmental system so brilliantly for the effective but prudent conduct of domestic affairs did not shape an equivalent strategy for the conduct of military and other foreign affairs. Indeed, the genius of the former strategy—the dispersion of power—ran counter to the commanding military need for concentration of power and speed of deployment. And the military failure lay largely in the ideology of peace.

If Americans had been abjectly defeated in the War of 1812, out of desperation they might have shaped a new strategy of war, as other vanquished nations had done. But they were not so defeated. And then, in January 1815, came stunning news that left Americans in euphoria and put the whole war in a happier light. For some months a major general of the Tennessee militia, Andrew Jackson, had been warring against the Creek Indians—who earlier had been aroused by a visit from Tecumseh, encouraged by the British, and armed by the Spanish. After wiping out a Creek
force of 900 braves at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson turned to the defense of New Orleans, which the British were planning to capture in order to control the Mississippi. Jackson was ready for the redcoats when they marched against his breastworks on January 8. Within an hour American cannon and rustic sharpshooters cut down over 2,000 men. American casualties were reported to be twenty-one. The British retreated to their ships.

The Battle of New Orleans came too late to affect the terms of a treaty of peace that was being completed in far-off Europe even as the British advanced on Jackson’s redoubts. That treaty reflected the nation’s low military estate before Jackson’s victory. It also reflected the shifting balance of political forces in Britain and America—especially the rising opposition of English trading and manufacturing interests to the war, and the continuing criticism and foot dragging of a declining but still potent group of antiwar Federalists, mainly along the New England coast.

In mid-December 1815 a small group of genteel, prosperous-looking men filed into the tall and spacious council chamber of the Connecticut State House, a majestic building designed by Charles Bulfinch and located not far from the Connecticut River. This was a group of potential rebels, meeting amid great excitement. Angry over the British occupation of part of Maine, fearful that Washington would not protect the New England coast against the British, and resentful above all toward the Virginia dynasty and its embargoes and other interferences with New England commerce, this company of New England Federalists was meeting to consider drastic, though nonviolent, action against Washington. Federalist newspapers in Boston, including the respectable
Columbian Centinel
, were calling for actions that bordered on secession. In Washington, Secretary of War Monroe was concerned enough to send to Hartford a confidential agent, in the guise of an army recruiting officer, to report back intelligence on this dangerous group, but the officer was not able to get into the secret sessions. Monroe was alarmed enough to authorize federal troops in New York to take prompt action in the event of an uprising.

Monroe need not have worried. What was happening in Hartford was not a lunge for power by a fearsome party cabal. It was something far less portentous and far more poignant—a final convulsive effort, half protest, half death cry, of a movement slowly passing out of existence. The plight of the Federalists was doubly ironic. A political force that had been organized by men who were militantly anti-British and anti-Tory was now dying
in part because its leaders were considered American Tories and pro-British. And its leaders, seemingly reluctant to demand freedom of the seas for American shipping, were the political descendants of an earlier generation of men who had emerged from the port cities of America to assert their maritime rights against the British navy.

The waterside Yankees who survived as political forces after the Revolution had been a formidable crowd, even in their second ranks. George Cabot—born of a North Shore merchant, dropped from Harvard in his freshman year for rebelliousness and neglect of studies, and soon thereafter the master of a schooner in the transatlantic trade—believed in an ordered, hierarchical, deferential, inegalitarian society run by the best people, like himself. Timothy Pickering, born in Salem, was a cantankerous, outspoken elitist, so politically outrageous and personally unpopular that Federalist party leaders kept their distance from him. Theophilus Parsons, born in Byfield, a few miles southwest of Newburyport, practiced law in the latter city and then in Boston, opined that the whole government, not just the Senate, should be under elitist control, and later became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where he was dubbed “The awfullest Parsons” by young lawyers. Samuel Sewall, born in Boston, practiced law in Marblehead before moving to Maine, and later succeeded Parsons as chief justice. Stephen Higginson, born in Salem, later an import merchant in Boston and a naval officer, took an openly elitist position in his writings and frowned on the politicking of younger Federalists.