by Harlow Unger
A few hours later, British troops entered Washington and began an all-night spree of destruction, burning all public buildings to punish the American government for having burned the public buildings in York. The British spared most private property in the city, although they set fire to four homes whose owners repeatedly shot at passing redcoats. They also spared the Patent Office, as it contained models of inventions and records, which the British commander deemed private property that might well belong to British as well as American patent holders.
A storm the following morning brought bursts of heavy winds that sent flames flying erratically in all directions and forced the British to withdraw to their boats on the Patuxent River.
As British troops burned Washington, British government negotiators sat down with their American counterparts in Ghent to negotiate an end to the war—unaware, of course, of the flames consuming Washington. Joining John Quincy was Kentucky congressman and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who, like John Quincy, was a fierce champion of manifest destiny. Virginia-born and self-educated, Clay believed in what he called the “American System,” with Americans settling the entire continent and the federal government underwriting a network of roads, canals, and bridges for a comprehensive transportation system. He also favored erecting a tariff wall to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition in domestic markets. He arrived in Ghent unprepared to yield to British pretensions to governance over the seas.
Also a champion of westward expansion was former Pennsylvania senator Albert Gallatin. Born and educated in Geneva, Switzerland, he and John Quincy had become good friends in the Senate, and Gallatin went on to become U.S. secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson for eight years. Delaware senator James Bayard, a Federalist, and career diplomat Jonathan Russell, the new American minister to Sweden, made up the rest of the delegation.
Although President Madison had purposely appointed members from all sections of the nation, they presented a united front at the negotiating table behind John Quincy, who was the most experienced diplomat in the group and America’s reigning authority on European affairs. And despite their cultural and regional differences, they meshed together magnificently, sharing a rented house, whose servants provided for their needs as efficiently as the staff of a hotel. Although John Quincy took umbrage at Clay’s all-night card parties, they found so much in common politically that they became good friends.
“There is on all sides a perfect good humor and understanding,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa in one of his weekly letters to her. “We dine all together at four and sit usually at table until six. We then disperse to our several amusements and avocations. Mine is a solitary walk of two or three hours—solitary because I find none of the other gentlemen disposed to join me at that hour. They frequent the coffee houses, reading rooms and the billiard tables. We are not troublesome to each other.”13
Both sides began negotiations from positions of strength and weakness. In North America, British coastal raids had pushed the Americans behind their borders, and the superior British army threatened to invade at a time when the American government was bankrupt, unable to pay or rearm its troops. Clearly, the Americans wanted—and needed—peace. Britain, however, was just as eager for peace. Her forces had just fought a brutal war in Europe, but with Napoléon alive in Elbe, the British government realized he might return to France and fire up his troops again. Britain also faced possible conflict with Russia, which, like the United States, was demanding freedom of the seas but, unlike the United States, had the oceangoing fire power to attack British ships. In short, Britain did not want to drain its resources in another long war in the American wilderness where it knew from experience it could never score a decisive victory.
The Americans sat down with demands for an end to impressment, which John Quincy termed nothing less than slavery, but before the talks even got under way, the end of the war in Europe left Britain with no need to expand its navy, and it voluntarily ended the practice. John Quincy’s other demands included an end to British blockades as well as British depredations on the high seas and recognition of freedom of the seas for neutral ships. John Quincy also demanded compensation for British depredations on American ships during the long Anglo-French war. British negotiators not only rejected his demands but countered with demands of their own, including a southward revision of the Canadian boundary with the United States by about 150 miles. The British also demanded that the United States cede most of Maine to Canada and agree to demilitarization of the Great Lakes and establishment of a huge Indian-controlled buffer zone across present-day Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. The British also wanted to end American fishing rights off the Canadian Atlantic coast unless Americans granted Britain an equivalent privilege, such as navigation rights on the Mississippi River. John Quincy rejected all the British demands, and as negotiations dragged on, each side backed away or increased its demands, according to news from American battlefields, with British negotiators stiffening after the burning of Washington.
In America itself, the press and public had unleashed a torrent of abuse on President Madison after the British burned the federal capital, but Secretary of State Monroe emerged as a hero, and the President appointed him acting secretary of war. Monroe mobilized the nation, calling in militia from other states, ordering and distributing supplies, and setting up an intelligence system and teams of riders to transmit intelligence to his headquarters. He acted to protect other parts of the country as well, sending a message to General Andrew Jackson in Mobile, Alabama, to take 1,000 troops to defend New Orleans against attack. He promised Jackson 10,000 additional men, then sent express messages to the governors of Tennessee and Kentucky to send militiamen and volunteers to New Orleans. Ignoring the Constitution, Monroe essentially seized the reins of government from the President and Congress, intimidating private banks and municipal corporations into lending him more than $5 million on his own signature to pay and arm more troops.
Secretary of State James Monroe named John Quincy Adams American minister to Russia, then lead peace commissioner at talks in Ghent, Belgium, to end the War of 1812 with Britain. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
By September 12, the troops that had burned Washington sailed out of the Patuxent River and up the Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore, landing about fourteen miles from the city. As British warships came within firing distance of Fort McHenry, troops on shore fought their way to the foot of the fort. The ships opened fire on the fort the next day, September 13, and continued the bombardment through the night. On a nearby ship, attorney Francis Scott Key watched “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” and, to his amazement, “by dawn’s early light . . . our flag was still there,” fluttering in tatters over the fort and inspiring his poem “Defense of Fort McHenry.” A newspaper published it a few days later and renamed it “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
On September 14, the British abandoned their fruitless assault on Fort McHenry, withdrew their troops, and sailed out of Chesapeake Bay for Jamaica in the British West Indies. Their flight weakened the British negotiating position in Ghent, where John Quincy rejected the British demand for an Indian buffer zone. The United States, he argued, would not cede territorial rights to “savages, whose known rule of warfare is the indiscriminate torture and butchery of women, children, and prisoners.”14
After a month of talks with no progress, John Quincy grew frustrated. “It appears to me to be the policy of the British government,” he wrote to Louisa in St. Petersburg, “to keep the American war as an object to continue or close, according to the events which may occur in Europe or America. If so they will neither make peace, nor break off the negotiation, and the circumstances may be such as to detain us here the whole winter.” 15 The British, he said in a subsequent letter, “have withdrawn just so much of their inadmissible demands as would avoid the immediate rupture of the negotiation. They have varied their terms . . . abandoned the claims which they had declared indispensable
preliminaries, only to bring them forward again whenever the circumstances of the war might encourage them to insolence and . . . are now delaying their reply to our last note . . . only to receive accounts of success from America . . . to dictate new terms to us.”16
As both sides realized they had reached an impasse, negotiators fixed on a solution that would relieve them of having to solve any problems. They would simply end the war and relegate all demands of both sides to an arbitration commission to be set up at a later date.
In the end, the Treaty of Ghent represented a stinging defeat for both sides, each of which accepted nothing more than a return to the status quo ante bellum after a costly two-year war. Nevertheless, John Quincy was jubilant at having ended the bloodletting.
“My DEAR AND HONORED MOTHER,” John Quincy exulted on Christmas Eve of 1814.
A treaty of peace between the United States and Great Britain has this day been signed by the British and American plenipotentiaries at this place. . . . You know doubtless that heretofore the President intended in case of peace to send me to England.
If the treaty should be ratified, I am uncertain whether he will still retain the same intention or not. I have requested to be recalled from the mission to Russia. I shall proceed from this place in a few days to Paris, to be there in readiness to receive the President’s orders, and I shall write immediately to my wife requesting her to come and join me there. If we go to England, I beg you to send my sons George and John there to me. . . . If any other person should be sent to England, I intend to return as soon as possible to America and shall hope before midsummer to see once more my beloved parents.17
The Treaty of Ghent called for release of all prisoners and restoration of all conquered territories except for West Florida, which now fell under American sovereignty. Negotiators did not include a word about the Great Lakes or disputed boundaries along the northern frontier with Canada—or about the issues that President Madison had deemed vital enough for the United States to declare war: ship seizures and impressment. On paper at least, the war had been a waste, leaving 1,877 Americans dead and 4,000 wounded and costing millions of dollars in war matériel. It had cost tens of millions of dollars in lost domestic and foreign trade and provoked the collapse of the economy—and the United States had failed to achieve any of the goals for which it went to war. The only triumph at Ghent—for either side—was an end to war and establishment of peace between the two nations—or so they hoped.
Agreement at Ghent. Admiral Lord Gambier, Britain’s chief negotiator, holds the treaty ending the Anglo-American War of 1812 and shakes hands with John Quincy Adams, America’s chief negotiator. Albert Gallatin stands to Adams’s immediate left, while Henry Clay is seated on the right at the rear. (FROM THE SIGNING OF THE TREATY OF GHENT, CHRISTMAS EVE, 1814, A PAINTING BY SIR AMÈDÉE FORESTIER, 1914; SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF THE SULGRAVE INSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN)
At the signing, John Quincy declared to the delegates of both countries, “I hope it will be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States.”18 At a farewell banquet, Adams stood to toast “His majesty the king of England,” after which an orchestra played “God Save the King”; then Lord Gambier, the chief British delegate, rose to toast “the United States of North America,” and the orchestra played “Hail, Columbia,” which was then the American national anthem.
“I consider the day on which I signed it [the Treaty of Ghent] as the happiest of my life,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa, “because it was the day on which I had my share in restoring peace to the world.”19
On December 24, 1814, as John Quincy and the other negotiators signed the Treaty of Ghent, a fleet of fifty British ships with 7,500 battle-hardened veterans approached the Louisiana shore and glided into Lake Borgne—a large bay on the southeastern coast of Louisiana near New Orleans. Landing forty miles east of the city, a British advance guard marched to within seven miles of the city where, to their shock, General Andrew Jackson awaited in ambush with more than 2,000 frontiersmen. The Americans opened fire and sent the British reeling back to their main force. Jackson then pulled back to a point five miles from the city and deployed 5,000 men in a dry canal that blocked the only route into the city. Compared with the trim-cut uniforms of advancing British troops, the Americans were a largely unwashed, unshaven mixture of militiamen, frontiersmen, woodsmen, hunters, and farmers—to a man, fiercely independent, loyal Jacksonians. Wild, willful, reckless, and often drunk, they were like Jackson himself: fighting cocks who gave no ground in battle.
After a spectacular but indecisive artillery battle on January 1, the British pulled back and waited a week to attack again. As the redcoats advanced in traditional linear style of European warfare, the Americans pressed against the forward wall of the canal and poised their long hunting rifles on the rim. A sudden explosion of high-pitched music startled soldiers on both sides as the British line moved forward. Jackson had ordered a band to sound out “Yankee Doodle,” then thundered a command to his troops: “Give it to ’em, boys. . . . Let’s finish it up today!”20 Tennessee and Kentucky woodsmen—all of them crack marksmen in the center of the big ditch—opened fire. The British troops stepped forward mechanically, suicidally pressing onward into the sprays of rifle fire, toppling one by one, each atop the other, then by the dozens. The bodies piled higher and higher until the “horror before them was too great to be withstood: and they turned away, dropping their weapons and running to the rear.”21 After only thirty minutes, the battle was over; the British commanding general and two other generals lay dead, along with more than 2,000 British troops. Jackson’s men suffered thirteen dead, thirty-nine wounded, and nineteen missing in action. British survivors limped back to their ships and, on January 27, sailed away from what proved to be the last battle of the war and the last hostile incursion by British troops on American soil.
A few days later, Secretary of State Monroe called members of Congress into the Patent Office building in Washington, the only public building the British had spared from flames. They unleashed a chorus of sustained cheers when he delivered the news of Jackson’s victory. Federalists, Republicans, hawks, and doves alike slapped each other on the back, exchanged handshakes, and adjourned to soak in the news with appropriate drinks. What they did not know, however, was the utter uselessness of Jackson’s victory. It had not changed the course of the war at all. Two weeks earlier, John Quincy Adams and his American negotiators had signed a treaty ending the war, but like the negotiations when the war began, news of the settlement did not arrive until weeks later, when a British sloop sailed into New York Harbor flying a flag of truce. The war the United States could have won without firing the first shot had ended before they had fired the last.
Nonetheless, Americans—almost unanimously—deluded themselves into calling the war a glorious triumph over the world’s most powerful nation—a “second war of independence.” The national delusion resulted from a series of coincidences—the United States had scored the victory at New Orleans just before news of peace arrived, and in the public mind, the chronology of the victory made it seem decisive in forcing the British to sue for peace and end depredations on American shipping. In fact, it was the defeat of Napoléon that allowed Britain to harbor her warships and ended her need to impress seamen and seize ships carrying contraband.
On January 7, 1815, John Quincy’s colleagues on the American peace commission left Ghent, with John Quincy, Henry Clay, and Albert Gallatin having grown especially close—socially as well as politically. One evening, when the three returned to their hotel after negotiations, the often hot-tempered Clay remarked that one of the British negotiators was “a man of much irritation.”
John Quincy corrected his colleague’s grammar:
“Irritability is the word, Mr. Clay,” said John Quincy. “Irritability.” And then fixing him with an earnest look and a tone of voice midway between seriousness and jest, he added, “Like somebody else I know
.”
Clay laughed and said, “Aye we do all know him—and none better than yourself.”
And Mr. Gallatin, fixing me exactly as I had done Mr. Clay, said emphatically, “That is your best friend.” “Agreed,” said I, “but one.”
And there was . . . truth in the joking on all sides. . . . I can scarcely express to you how much both he [Clay] and Mr. Gallatin have risen in my esteem since we have been here, living together. 22
Two weeks later, having put his papers in order and received word of his promotion to the London embassy, John Quincy set out for Paris to await Louisa and his seven-year-old son Charles Francis. His wife had left St. Petersburg on January 26, but as each day passed with no word of their whereabouts, John Quincy regretted not having gone to St. Petersburg to accompany them. Reports soon reached Paris of pillaging by renegade soldiers and savage attacks on travelers along Louisa’s route from Russia.
CHAPTER 10
Stepladder to the Presidency
As the War of 1812 faded from national memory, Americans began to enjoy the greatest peacetime prosperity they had ever experienced in the more than thirty-two years since Yorktown. Secretary of State James Monroe had taken advantage of General William Henry Harrison’s victories in the West to negotiate purchase of Indian lands east of the Mississippi, making the western territory between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River safe for American migration. Secure from attack by British troops and Indians, tens of thousands of Americans streamed westward to carve out farms from virgin plains, harvest furs and pelts from superabundant wildlife, cull timber from vast forests, and chisel ores from rich mountainsides. The land rush added six states and scores of villages and towns to the United States. It generated wealth for almost every free white man in the nation and engendered the greatest social and economic revolution in history. Never before had a sovereign state in the modern world transferred so much land to ordinary citizens, or “commoners.” The millions of acres of land they claimed lifted them into the category of “property owners”—the landed gentry—with rights to vote, serve in public office, and govern their communities, states, and nation. To facilitate economic recovery, Congress reestablished a central bank—the Second Bank of the United States—to issue federal currency and serve as a depository for government funds.
