The Dawn of Innovation (2 page)

The United States emerged as a world economic powerhouse in the 1840s and 1850s, when the railroads finally linked the Northeast and the Midwest, as it was now called, into an integrated commercial and industrial unit. The heavy industry of the Midwest flowed from its resource endowment—coal and iron, food processing, a mechanized lumber industry—as well as derivatives from steamboat building, like engines, furniture, and glass. In the Northeast, its traditional industries like clocks, textiles, and shoes grew to global scale, along with big-ticket fabrication
businesses like Baldwin locomotives, Collins steamships, Hoe printing presses, and the giant Corliss engines.

The South, in the meantime, slipped into the position of an internal colony, exploiting its slaves and being exploited in turn by the Northeast and Midwest. Boston and New York controlled much of the shipping, insurance, and brokerage earnings from the cotton trade, while the earnings left over went for midwestern food, tools, and engines shipped down the Mississippi and its branches.

The British, who were habitually dismissive of “Brother Jonathan,” their bumpkin transatlantic cousin, discovered American manufacturing prowess at London's Great Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. They particularly focused on the machine-made guns of Sam Colt and the Vermont manufacturer Robbins and Lawrence. Colt's newest factories in both London and Hartford were the most advanced precision manufacturing plants in the world at the time. The British created a new armory plant at Enfield equipped entirely with American machinery. The plant was a great success, but with no impact in the wider economy. Few Britons even noticed, as one sharp-eyed civil servant put it, that in the United States, almost all industries were “carried on in the same way as the cotton manufacture of England, viz., in large factories, with machinery applied to every process, the extreme subdivision of labour and all reduced to an almost perfect system of manufacture.”

Destructive though it was, the Civil War broke the slaveocracy's power to obstruct an American development agenda. In one of the darkest years of the war, the Republican congress passed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act—no other country had conceived the possibility of educating its farmers and craftsmen—and the Transcontinental Railroad Act. The rise of a new world economic hyperpower was virtually assured.

The book closes with both epilogue and prologue. Chapter 8 is a compressed account of how America caught up to and finally surpassed Great Britain in the decades after the Civil War. That story highlights the great advantages possessed by a fast-growing, emerging power moving to supplant an older incumbent. To round out the story, therefore, the book
closes with an assessment of the new contest between an aging economic incumbent, now the United States, and China, the fast-surging potential usurper, and looks particularly at what is likely to be similar to and quite different from the story that began to unfold some two centuries ago.

T
HE WAR OF 1812 MAY BE THE LEAST REMEMBERED OF AMERICAN WARS. And buried in the historical fog is the strange tale of a naval arms race on Lake Ontario. Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes and virtually landlocked. Yet in the early winter of 1815, twenty formidable warships were scheduled to take to the water at the spring thaw. Four of them would be first-raters, two of them American, two of them British, each of them ranking among the largest and most heavily armed warships in the world.

Great Britain was the world's greatest-ever naval power. Of the 600 or so war vessels in the Admiralty's active fleet, about 110 were ships of the line, all big, powerful vessels designed to overawe and overwhelm the enemy. Of the in-service ships of the line, however, only six were first-raters. They were one of the age's most complex machines, the behemoths of the ocean, two hundred feet long, displacing 2,500 tons, top masts soaring two hundred feet above waterline, carrying crews of eight hundred seamen and marines and disposing of at least 100 heavy guns in three tiers along their sides. Building a first-rater consumed 4,000 large trees; hundreds of tons of iron for fittings, cannon, and ballast; miles of rigging; an acre and a half of sail; some 1,400 ship pulley-blocks, some of them almost as tall as a man. Nelson at Trafalgar led the charge against the Napoleonic armada in his first-rater, HMS
Victory
.
¹

During the first year of the war, it became clear to both sides that winning control of Lake Ontario was the key to winning the war, and both poured money and resources into the effort. Both sides expected that an early naval battle would decide the issue, but inherent asymmetries in armaments and naval tactics trapped them both within the grim logic of an escalating arms race. To the surprise of both participants, the Americans doggedly matched and raised the British step by step, until both were at the point of exhaustion.

The American declaration of war against Great Britain in June 1812 is a puzzlement for historians. The death struggle between the British and Napoleonic France indiscriminately inflicted damage on neutral countries. If anything, the French were the more disdainful of Americans and worked the greater destruction on American shipping. As Henry Adams pointed out, every charge in President Madison's war declaration was both factually correct and a sufficient cause for war. But the United States had patiently endured such behavior for five years, so why declare war in 1812, when the American government was close to insolvency and Great Britain was on the brink of making major trade concessions?
²

British and Canadian historians tend to see the war as an unsuccessful American war of conquest.
^a
Congressional war hawks, in fact, made no secret of their desire to annex parts of Canada, but they did not come close to commanding a legislative majority. Public outrage was more focused on the British impressment of American merchant seamen. In principle, the British had a right to take their own nationals, but naval captains were not overly scrupulous about trapping bona fide American citizens in their trawls. The Royal Navy was their Maginot Line against Napoleon, and years of warfare had created a terrible shortage of seamen. Even American
officials privately acknowledged that up to a quarter of US merchant seamen were deserted British nationals, and citizenship papers for British seamen were sold openly in most American ports.
³

Behind the headline issues, the old characterization of the war as the second war for American independence has considerable truth. The British still reflexively treated America as a component of its colonial/mercantile empire, high-handedly issuing detailed trade licenses while refusing a generalized trade treaty. Royal Navy captains felt free to sail into American ports and haughtily, and occasionally forcefully, sequester scarce provisions. The London
Times
sneered in 1807 that Americans could not “cross to Staten Island” without the Royal Navy's permission.
⁴

But national pride couldn't dispel the reality that the United States was in no shape to fight a war. Years of British and French blockades had devastated customs revenues. Its navy consisted of some coastal gunboats and a handful of frigates, all built in the 1790s. The army was small and scattered through frontier outposts, so the primary ground forces were state militias, which were inconsistently trained and armed, if at all, and often prevented by law from serving outside their home states. Governors in several federalist states, moreover, announced that they would not release their militias for federal service on constitutional grounds.
⁵
Few senior officials had significant recent military experience.

The war proceeded on several loosely connected fronts. In the first year of the war, the most spectacular encounters were a series of frigate-to-frigate ocean battles.
^b
The
Constitution
's half-hour destruction of the British
Guerrière
prompted unrestrained celebration in America and shocked laments in London. The Royal Navy finally put an end to such impertinences by imposing a suffocating blockade up and down the coast
that kept the frigates almost entirely port-bound for the duration of the war.

With the blockade in place, sea action shifted to an intense informal war between the Royal Navy and American privateers, especially the famous Chesapeake Schooners, or Baltimore Clippers. They were the leopards of the sea: up to a hundred feet long, mounting up to 18 guns, with vast expanses of sail, deep keels for rapid maneuverability, and superb hydrodynamics. They consistently outsailed and outwitted British warships, and by the later stages of the war, even prowled in the Thames.
⁶
In addition, throughout the war years Andrew Jackson led a sporadic Indian war in the Southeast, an early salvo in a two-decade-long ethnic-cleansing operation. He and other local commanders raised and equipped their troops and operated more or less independently of Washington.

The most important fighting, however, whether measured by casualties, commitment of resources, or persistence, was centered on the lakes, especially Ontario and Erie, reinforcing the contention that the war was about Canada, for whoever controlled the lakes would inevitably control Canada.

The British had only the lightest of colonial presences in Canada. There was a world-class Royal Navy port at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and just to the west the territory of Lower Canada, predominately French, included substantial commercial centers at Quebec and Montreal. Upper Canada stretched along the lakeshores: it was primitive and Anglophone, probably mostly settled by Americans who had straggled across the border. Both Upper and Lower Canada were under the direction of Governor-General George Prevost, an experienced British general officer based in Quebec.

The only practical access to Upper Canada was via the St. Lawrence. The river was navigable by ship as far as Montreal; from there, the 150-mile stretch to Lake Ontario was dominated by rapids and shallows traversed by towed bateaux and barges. The territory was barely self-sufficient in
food, with few roads and little in the way of industry, so a defense force would be completely dependent on river-borne supplies. Losing control of the St. Lawrence or of Lake Ontario virtually guaranteed the loss of Upper Canada and could put much of Lower Canada at risk.

The demographics of the lakes clearly favored the Americans, whose lakeshores were more populous, with better internal transportation, highly productive farmland, and budding iron industries that could support the war effort. But the British compensated by fashioning broad alliances with Indian tribes seeking to stop American settlement. Western settlers were in terror of the Indians, especially after the success of the great Indian leader Tecumseh in cobbling together a serious Indian confederacy. The battle with Tecumseh's forces at Tippecanoe, in November 1811, was officially celebrated as an American triumph, but cognoscenti knew it was a close-run thing, with Americans taking the heavier casualties. Even militias panicked and ran from Indian detachments in the early stages of the war.

The Americans took the early military initiatives in the summer of 1812, almost all on the ground, producing pratfalling, Marx Brothers–class fiascos, too costly and bloody to be comic. General William Hull made a timorous thrust up the Detroit River and surrendered to a much smaller force at almost the first shots, giving up his army, Ft. Detroit, a warship, and the entire Michigan territory. Henry Dearborn, another aging Revolutionary War general, launched a large, lethargic, but complex nighttime attack in the Niagara peninsula. Amid indiscipline and chaos, his ill-prepared troops took very heavy casualties. Dearborn later tried a second action directed at Montreal but retired to winter quarters after a brief skirmish near Plattsburgh. A wag called it a failure “without even the heroism of a disaster.”
⁷

If nothing else, the early failures demonstrated that naval control of the lakes was crucial for effective movement of troops and supplies. The Americans were the first to respond, naming Isaac Chauncey to a new post of naval commander of the lakes. Chauncey was an experienced, active, officer and, fortuitously, had most recently been commander of the New York Navy Yard. It took until the following spring for London to realize that Chauncey's vigor was putting Canada at risk. They responded in March 1813 by appointing Sir James Lucas Yeo to lead a naval expeditionary force to the lakes. Only thirty years old, Yeo was already a post-captain, with a long record as a fighting officer, and possessed by the same drive and force of personality as Chauncey. When Yeo arrived at Lake Ontario in May 1813, the shipbuilders' war was on.