by H. W. Brands
Jackson’s frustration over the war issue caused him to break with Jefferson regarding the president’s successor. Jefferson had been grooming James Madison, and such was his control over the Republicans that the party’s congressional caucus fell obediently into line in support of the secretary of state, despite the uproar over the Chesapeake shelling and the embargo. Jackson refused to follow the administration’s line. Instead he joined an insurgent wing of the party in putting forward James Monroe, who as minister to Britain had argued forcefully against impressment. Jackson stumped around Tennessee for Monroe, with modest effect. And even that effect often wore off as soon as he left. “The only two converts you made while here have retrograded,” an acquaintance in Carthage told Jackson. “They say that they only supported Monroe out of politeness to you. . . . I can assure you, sir, without you or some other friend of Monroe’s return to this quarter, he will have but few friends.”
Monroe’s candidacy stalled long before the general election, in which Madison easily defeated Federalist Charles Pinckney. Yet Madison’s victory, despite dealing a blow to Jackson and the insurgents, in fact left the discontented in a stronger position than previously. Jefferson was a giant of the revolutionary era, Madison a mere mortal. Jefferson could resist the complaints of his pro-war critics, Madison maybe not.
Jefferson did Madison the lame-duck favor of allowing repeal of the disastrous embargo, but he covered his retreat with a face-saving measure called the Nonintercourse Act, which maintained the embargo against Britain and France yet opened American trade to other countries. The law invited evasion, for once American vessels left port, ostensibly for Brazil or Russia or some other nonbanned country, they might head for whatever destination they chose. And it tied American policy in knots. French commanders captured American ships near Britain, claiming that they must actually be British since American ships weren’t allowed to trade with the British. (In fact British merchant vessels were known to fly the American flag to disguise their nationality.) Forced to acknowledge the failure of the nonintercourse policy, Madison substituted an even more convoluted piece of legislation called Macon’s Bill Number Two. This opened American trade with Britain and France but empowered the president to reimpose the embargo against either country should the other act decently toward the United States.
Madison’s problem was the same one every president since George Washington had faced. Britain and France were each more powerful than the United States, and each considered its war with the other more important than good relations with America. If strangling France required trampling on America’s rights, Britain would trample away. If repelling Britain necessitated treating American vessels as British, France would do so. America’s European troubles might not end when the European war ended, but they certainly wouldn’t end before that.
Especially in the early days of the American republic, the president didn’t make foreign policy by himself. Congress was the equal of the executive on most aspects of the subject, and it insisted on its prerogatives. Madison understood the situation, which contributed to his hesitance regarding war.
Jackson understood the situation, too, and he initially blamed Congress for the government’s failure to act against Britain. “The present Congress will not act with energy,” he declared several months into the Madison presidency. “Some of our old Republican friends have either lost their usual good judgment or their political principle. From all which I conclude that as a military man I shall have no amusement or business.”
The elections of 1810, however, brightened the outlook by infusing Congress with new blood. Henry Clay would become Jackson’s archrival, but when he first entered the political arena they had much in common. Clay was self-educated, ambitious, and a westerner who saw the legal profession as a springboard to public life. His successful defense of Aaron Burr in the celebrated treason trial won him a national reputation and inspired his Kentucky compatriots to send him to Washington as their congressman. Seniority in those days meant less than ability, and Clay’s ability was so obvious that his fellow congressmen made him their speaker within weeks of his arrival. The subject on which Clay spoke most loudly and consistently was the need for war against Britain, to vindicate the nation’s honor, safeguard its frontiers, and secure its future.
“No man in the nation desires peace more than I,” Clay asserted, unconvincingly. “But I prefer the troubled ocean of war, demanded by the honor and independence of the country, with all its calamities and desolations, to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.” Clay noted that both Britain and France had violated American rights. And he said that if America could accommodate only one of the European powers, he wished it were Britain. But honor prevented that, leaving the country no choice. “I am for war with Britain, because I believe her prior in aggression. . . . Britain stands preeminent in her outrage on us.” Skeptics asked how America could wage a war against such a mighty empire. America lacked the money, they said. Clay sneered. “Are we to be governed by the low, groveling parsimony of the counting room, and to cast up the actual pence in the drawer before we assert our inestimable rights?” Besides, the war would pay for itself. “The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”
John C. Calhoun entered the House a year after Clay, in part because the South Carolinian detoured north to attend Yale College and then the law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, directed by Tapping Reeve. But by 1807, when he was twenty-five, Calhoun had had enough of northern ways and northern winters, and he returned to South Carolina to start a legal practice and a political career. The two went forward simultaneously, both assisted by a marriage that won him allies among the planter class around Charleston. These allies sent him off to Washington in 1811, where he made friends with Henry Clay and won appointment to the influential committee on foreign affairs.
Calhoun’s committee seat afforded a pulpit for decrying the perfidy of Britain and the folly of thinking the perfidy would cease without the chastisement of war. Speaking for the committee, Calhoun declared a war against Britain nothing less than a second war for American independence.
Your Committee, believing that the freeborn sons of America are worthy to enjoy the liberty which their Fathers purchased at the price of so much blood and treasure, and seeing in the measures adopted by Great Britain a course commenced and persisted in which must lead to a loss of national character and independence, feel no hesitation in advising resistance by force. . . . Americans of the present day will prove to the enemy that we have not only inherited that liberty which our Fathers gave us, but also the will and power to maintain it. Relying on the patriotism of the Nation, and confidently trusting that the Lord of Hosts will go with us to battle in a righteous cause and crown our efforts with success, your Committee recommend an immediate appeal to arms.
While the “war hawks”—as their opponents called Clay, Calhoun, and the other advocates of armed resistance to Britain—demanded a declaration from Congress, Jackson prepared his troops. The Tennessee militia had been reorganized since Jackson’s election as major general. Population growth, combined with hostility toward Jackson among friends of John Sevier, caused the legislature to split the state into two divisions for militia purposes. Jackson received command of the western district. He might have been more upset at the partition had he not realized—with everyone else who pondered the matter—that the western division, the one abutting the frontier, was the more important of the two and the more likely to see action. Anyway, Jackson knew that when action came the initiative would go to whoever seized it.
He commenced the seizure right after the Chesapeake incident. Sevier was again governor of Tennessee and therefore Jackson’s superior. But Sevier moved too slowly for Jackson, who complained that he had waited “with anxious expectation for many weeks” to receive the governor’s or
der to ready the militia, and it had never come. So he was obliged to give the order himself. “Place your brigades in the best possible state to perfect the quota that may be requested from you,” he told his brigade commanders. “When there is a call to arms, there will be but one voice: Defend the liberties and independence of our country or die nobly in the cause.”
Jackson’s audacity forced Sevier to give the mobilization order. But by the time it arrived, Jackson had moved even farther toward war, and now he criticized the governor’s order as insufficient regarding troop numbers and supplies. “If he knows his duty as a military man he never performs it,” Jackson complained to James Winchester, one of his brigade generals.
Sevier retired shortly thereafter, to Jackson’s relief. The new governor was Willie Blount, whom Jackson at once began to educate as to the needs of the state and the nation. “Our independence and liberty was not obtained without expense,” he told Blount. “It was dearly bought both with blood and treasure. It must be preserved.” Jackson sent the governor an ambitious plan for strengthening the militia. The able-bodied men of the state would be placed into two classes, one comprising those aged eighteen to twenty-eight, the other twenty-nine to forty. The former would be the first called to duty; the latter would constitute the reserves. Every three years a new classification would be made. “This will always keep ready for duty the young and healthy part of our citizens who will be able to undergo any hardship or fatigue and keep our militia in a proper state of discipline. . . . Our state in a very few years could furnish an army sufficient to face any enemy that could be introduced by an invading foe.”
While Jackson girded for war, the Cumberland experienced another outbreak of the quotidian violence that made western life so uncertain. Patton Anderson was the brother of Jackson’s militia aide William Anderson. In October he was gunned down in the courthouse square in Shelbyville. Numerous witnesses identified the shooter as David Magness, who was arrested at once. The questions before the court that heard the case were the degree of his culpability—murder or manslaughter?—and the involvement of his father and brother—conspirators or merely supportive kin? The Andersons and Magnesses had long been enemies, and the trial attracted considerable attention. The Magnesses hired a phalanx of lawyers and summoned scores of witnesses to testify to their upstanding character and the extenuating circumstances of the shooting.
William Anderson was understandably upset at the death of his brother and the extraordinary efforts of the defense to secure acquittal. “If the trumpet of hell had been sounded and a general jubilee pervaded the whole infernal regions,” he told Jackson, “such a lot of murderers, thieves and scoundrels could not have appeared as the Magnesses have to swear for them.”
Jackson testified for the prosecution. He knew the events of the fatal hour only from hearsay but the deceased from personal experience. “My friend, Patton Anderson, was the natural enemy of scoundrels,” he asserted, leaving the jury to draw the appropriate inference regarding the Magnesses.
The jury convicted David Magness of manslaughter and ordered him imprisoned for eleven months and branded with the letter M—for manslaughter—on his hand. The other Magnesses were acquitted but charged court costs. When they couldn’t pay these or their attorneys’ fees they were jailed as deadbeats. It was a mark of contemporary American jurisprudence, or at least its Tennessee variant, that the deadbeats spent longer behind bars than the killer.
A small consequence of the Magness trial that grew into something larger was a meeting between Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton. Benton had seen Jackson once before, at a superior court trial over which Jackson presided. Benton was seventeen at the time and found Jackson most impressive. “He was then a remarkable man, and had the ascendant over all who approached him, not the effect of his high judicial station, nor of the senatorial rank which he had held and resigned; nor of military exploits, for he had not then been to war; but the effect of his personal qualities: cordial and graceful manners, hospitable temper, elevation of mind, undaunted spirit, generosity, and perfect integrity.” Benton first spoke to Jackson some years later. The younger man was beginning his legal career; the elder was major general of the Tennessee militia. Their paths crossed in a small town on the state’s southern frontier. “He smiled, and we began a conversation in which he very quickly revealed a leading trait of his character: that of encouraging young men in their laudable pursuits. Getting my name and parentage, and learning my intended profession, he manifested a regard for me, said he had received hospitality at my father’s house in North Carolina, gave me kind invitations to visit him, and expressed a belief that I would do well at the bar—generous words which had the effect of promoting what they undertook to foretell.” At the Magness trial they met again. Benton was a junior member of the prosecution and nervously opened the case for the state. Jackson again provided encouragement. “He found my effort to be better than it was. He complimented me greatly, and from that time our intimacy began.”
Benton shared Jackson’s belief in the necessity for war against Britain, and as the conflict drew near he offered his services in the patriotic cause. “I have always been resolved to quit the gown for the sword whenever the sword was to be used,” he told Jackson. He wanted to be an aide to the general, despite lacking obvious qualifications. “The truth is, I know of nothing that could recommend me to such a place. But the natural inclination which all young men feel, or ought to feel, to advance themselves in the world has induced me to say that if you should lack an officer of this kind, and should be able to find none better than myself, that I should deem myself honored by your approbation.” Jackson, encouraging Benton yet again, gave the young man the job.
The clouds of war appear to be hovering around us,” Jackson declared in May 1811, and they lowered with each passing month. The war hawks in Washington clamored more vigorously than ever for a declaration of belligerency, and some detected progress. “The Rubicon is passed,” Tennessee senator Felix Grundy told Jackson regarding the mood of the Senate foreign relations committee. To smooth the road to war, the committee recommended filling out the ranks of the army and mobilizing the militia in the states. Madison continued to resist a war declaration, yet he acknowledged the need to prepare and in early 1812 issued a call for fifty thousand volunteers.
Jackson wished Madison had gone all the way to war, but he accepted mobilization as the next best thing. “Citizens!” he declared in a summons to the militia of western Tennessee.
Your government has at last yielded to the impulse of the nation. Your impatience is no longer restrained. The hour of vengeance is now at hand. The eternal enemies of American prosperity are again to be taught to respect your rights. . . . War is on the point of breaking out between the United States and the King of Great Britain, and the martial hosts of America are summoned to the tented fields!
The other war hawks spoke of the struggle with Britain as a second war of independence; Jackson, who still bore scars from the first war of independence, held that view with special conviction. The approaching conflict was about violations of American rights, but it was also about vindication of American identity.
Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? . . . We are the free born sons of America, the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world, and the only people on Earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare to call their own. . . . We are going to fight for the reestablishment of our national character, misunderstood and vilified at home and abroad. . . . Will the people shrink from the support of their government—or, rather, will they shrink from the support of themselves? Will they abandon their great imprescriptable rights, and tamely surrender that illustrious national character which was purchased with so much blood in the war of the Revolution? No. Such infamy shall not fall upon us. The advocates of kingly power shall not enjoy the triumph of seeing a free people desert themselves and crouch before the slaves of a foreign tyrant.
In August 1811 Will
iam Henry Harrison encountered the most remarkable man he had ever met. Others were equally impressed, as Harrison observed.
The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstance bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder of an Empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him. His activity and industry supply the want of letters. For four years he has been in constant motion. You see him today on the Wabash and in a short time you hear of him on the shores of Lake Erie or Michigan, or on the banks of the Mississippi, and wherever he goes he makes an impression favorable to his purposes.
Harrison wasn’t indulging idle curiosity in describing the Shawnee leader. He went on to say: “There can be no doubt but his object is to excite the Southern Indians to war against us.”
