The Great Divide

by Thomas Fleming

  President Madison urged a larger army and navy to deal with the increasing probability of war. Congress, still clinging to the Jefferson gospel of reducing the federal debt to zero, slashed defense appropriations. Within a year, Gallatin would inform the President that the federal government did not have enough money to pay the salaries of the few dozen departmental clerks in Washington, D.C.

  Oblivious to this Democratic-Republican fiscal unrealism, a group of new congressmen, led by thirty-four-year-old Henry Clay of Kentucky, began calling for war with Britain. Newspapers soon dubbed these combative politicians the War Hawks. They had little or no interest in the main issue that had preoccupied Presidents Jefferson and Madison, America’s maritime rights. Most of the leading War Hawks were from the West. Their motive was Canada.

  Like ex-President Jefferson, they saw the colony’s vast, mostly unpopulated acres as another bonanza for future generations of Americans, almost rivaling Louisiana. Best of all, the British, still fighting for their survival against Emperor Bonaparte, had only a comparative handful of soldiers defending the border.4

  A secondary War Hawk motive was the Midwest’s dwindling number of Indians. The tribesmen were led by a Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and his half-blind prophet brother, Tenskwatawa, who preached independence from the white man and an end to drinking his destructive rum. These new leaders were not much of a threat. At best they could summon four thousand widely scattered warriors. There were at least one hundred thousand western white men of fighting age to oppose them.

  In Washington, D.C., and at Monticello, meanwhile, ex-President Jefferson and President Madison were travelling down another track to war. Their decade-and-a-half-long animosity to Great Britain was a powerful factor in their discussions. A sentimental attachment to a long vanished revolutionary France convinced them that the British, not the Emperor Napoleon, was America’s chief foe. For two years, they ignored a stream of reports about seizures of American vessels by Napoleon’s warships and privateers. President Madison repeatedly insisted, “The national faith was pledged to France.”5

  In a letter to Democratic-Republican William Duane, now editor of the Philadelphia Aurora (Benjamin Franklin Bache had died of yellow fever), Jefferson saw this decision for war with Britain uniting the nation into an irresistible force, like an ancient Roman phalanx. The triumph would not be a party victory. He dismissed that term as “false and degrading.” It would be a national victory because “The Republicans are the nation!”6

  Then came news that the French navy, hoping to cut off the flow of American grain to British regulars and Spanish guerillas still fighting Napoleon’s forces in Spain, were burning American merchant ships wherever they seized them. Congress began calling for war with both England and France. One Democratic-Republican leader cried that “the devil himself could not tell which government…is the most wicked.” President Madison ignored these waverers and urged Congress to vote for war with Britain before the legislators adjourned in the spring of 1812.

  In the House of Representatives, where War Hawk Henry Clay had become Speaker, there was a prompt vote for gunfire, 79–49. This was not the unanimity that a country needed to inspire men to risk their lives, but it was still a hefty majority. The Senate was a different matter. It took them four full days to report the President’s war message out of committee. After weeks of divisive debate, the solons finally approved an assault on Canada, 19–13. The votes of both houses revealed that the war had virtually no support in New England or the Middle States.7

  As this divisive vote for battle took charge of America, the British decided to abandon their Orders in Council and try to negotiate a new commercial treaty to replace the expired Jay agreement. This news did not reach the United States for another two months. If George Washington had been president, he probably would have suspended military operations and informed Congress that the war was over. But the hatred for the British that Madison shared with Jefferson combined with presidential submission to the will of Congress to ignore this conciliatory overture. Thus, America lurched into one of the more dubious wars she has ever fought.

  The regular army consisted of about seven thousand men scattered in twenty-three garrisons throughout the nation. The Navy had six frigates, three sloops of war, and seven smaller vessels plus 170 of Jefferson’s gunboats. These pseudo-warships cluttered harbors from Boston to Savannah, but no officer with any talent or ambition could be persuaded to command one. The British had a navy with six hundred men of war at sea and ready to fight. The pinchpenny Congress adjourned on July 6, 1812 without voting a cent to expand America’s matchbox fleet. Jefferson’s mindless hatred of a navy remained unchallenged.8

  Winning a war, Thomas Jefferson maintained, was merely a matter of finding good generals and colonels. There was no need for trained troops or that awful thing, a large regular (aka standing) army. “It is nonsense to talk about regulars,” he told James Monroe when the latter became Madison’s secretary of war. “They are not to be had among a people so easy and happy…as ours.” Militia, properly inspired by their leaders and the presumed patriotic fervor of all true Democratic-Republicans, could defeat Britain’s “mercenaries” anytime. President Madison followed this reversal of George Washington’s approach to war-making like the Jeffersonian true believer he had become.9

  Unfortunately, neither Madison nor his predecessor had a clue about the qualifications of a winning general. As his senior commander, Madison chose Jefferson’s former secretary of war, sixty-one-year-old Henry Dearborn, who had grown grossly overweight thanks to his cushy job as Collector of Customs in Boston. He had fought well at Bunker Hill and other Revolutionary War battles, but had never risen above second-in-command of a regiment.

  Other appointees were around the same age and had achieved similar middle-level ranks in the Revolution. Some were even more unhealthy than Dearborn. Brigadier General William Hull, who also served as governor of the Michigan territory, had not entirely recovered from a stroke.

  Overseeing these aging soldiers was Madison’s Secretary of War, William Eustis, a Massachusetts doctor who had also served in the Revolution but had no experience in supervising an army. Since Madison did not bother to appoint a commander in chief, Dr. Eustis was responsible for overseeing operations in nine different military districts, an obvious impossibility. As the war approached, he spent much of his time revising the army’s training manual, and reading ads in magazines to find where he could buy hats and shoes at bargain prices. As a whole-hearted Jeffersonian believer in militia, Dr. Eustis also hated West Point. He reduced appointments to a trickle, and transferred cadets all over the landscape, bringing the school to a complete stop for the better part of a year.10

  Madison’s Secretary of the Navy was a Southern planter named Paul Hamilton, who had seldom set foot on a warship and was much too fond of alcohol to think clearly most days. One congressman described him as “about as fit for his place as the Indian Prophet [Tenskwatawa] would be for Emperor of Europe.” Secretary Hamilton was a firm believer in Jeffersonian defensive naval tactics. He ordered America’s handful of frigates and sloops to remain in various harbors and join the ex-president’s gunboats in opposing enemy attempts to invade these home waters.11

  Most Democratic-Republican politicians were convinced that the Canadians were ready to switch sides at the first glimpse of an American flag. Ex-President Jefferson told one correspondent that victory would be “a mere matter of marching.” It was the same illusion that had produced the Continental Congress’s ruinous invasion of Canada in 1775. Jefferson and Madison, having no interest in military matters, were oblivious to this harsh lesson.12

  On land, the war was a series of military disasters. General William Hull led twenty-two hundred men in an attack on upper or western Canada. When a British general with even fewer men besieged him in Detroit, Hull surrendered lest his men be massacred by the Indians in the British ranks. The bemused British announced that the Michigan territory was now part of Canada, pu
shing America’s northern border back to the Ohio River.

  General Dearborn was supposed to be in charge of the attack on eastern Canada. But numerous minor illnesses prevented him from leaving the comforts of Boston. The impatient Democratic-Republican governor of New York launched another army at British-held Fort Niagara. About six hundred regulars crossed the Niagara River and seized high ground. The New York militia discovered scruples about leaving their home state and declined to support them. The regulars were forced to surrender.

  General Dearborn finally responded to desperate pleas from Secretary of War Eustis, and in November left the comforts of Boston to take command of a six thousand-man army at Plattsburgh, on Lake Champlain. When his militiamen realized they might spend a freezing winter in Canada, they, too, decided to stay home.

  Only on the ocean did America’s fighting men distinguish themselves in 1812. Someone persuaded Secretary of the Navy Hamilton to abandon the Jeffersonian strategy of keeping the frigates and other ships in ports. Sent to sea, the sailors amazed the British—and the Democratic-Republicans—by defeating British frigates in nine of ten encounters.

  These victories inspired Congress to junk Jefferson’s anti-Navy doctrine. In late November 1812, the House Committee on Naval Affairs voted to build four ships of the line and six heavy frigates. The Committee defended this decision in a labored statement that claimed it was “a bright attribute of the tar [sailor] that he has never destroyed the rights of the nation” (unlike that terrible Jeffersonian monster, a standing army.)13

  An obviously unhappy ex-President Jefferson sighed that “frigates and 74s [ships of the line] are a sacrifice we must make, heavy as it is, to the prejudices of a part of our citizens.” In other words, Congress, the supposed voice of the people, had just told him that on naval matters, he did not know what he was talking about. President Madison signed the bill without a comment.14

  The 1812 naval victories stirred widespread celebrations, but they had little or no impact on the war. By 1813, the British navy had so many warships in American waters, American men of war did not dare to venture from their harbors. Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia and a surge of hatred for the arrogant Bonapartes elsewhere in Europe had tilted the long war in Britain’s favor.

  In 1813, the American army’s attacks on Canada were a replay of 1812. President Madison gave Thomas Jefferson’s favorite general, James Wilkinson, command of eight thousand troops for a waterborne assault on Montreal via the St. Lawrence River. Spanish Agent 13 collided with French Canadian militia who stopped him seventy miles short of his objective in what most generals would consider a skirmish. Wilkinson ingloriously retreated. A smaller army, marching from Plattsburgh, also abandoned the fight after an equally minor defeat. The year ended with not a single American soldier in Canada.

  Further south, a British fleet sailed from Bermuda and ravaged towns along the Virginia coast and in Chesapeake Bay. From Monticello came a long disquisition on how gunboats could save the situation by defending the mouth of the great bay. Jefferson admitted that “ridicule had been cast on this instrument of defence.” He blamed the criticism on the “prejudices of the gentlemen of the Navy.” He was still convinced that in “shoaly” water, the gunboats could damage enemy warships and flee up rivers and creeks beyond the reach of larger men of war.15

  President Madison earnestly assured his predecessor that the new Secretary of the Navy, William Jones, was “not unfriendly to gunboats.” This was a barely white lie. Jones, a former ship captain, detested Jefferson’s creations. He called them “receptacles of idleness and objects of waste.” Virtually quoting the Secretary of the Navy but omitting his name, Madison told Jefferson his gunboats had been judged “too slow in sailing and too heavy for rowing.” By 1815, there would not be a Jefferson gunboat left in the U.S. Navy.16

  Early in 1814, truly ominous news arrived from Europe. Emperor Napoleon, having lost a half-million men in his invasion of Russia, was on the brink of surrender to a British-led coalition of armies. In April, the Man of Destiny abdicated his throne and agreed to spend the rest of his days on the tiny island of Elba off the Italian coast. The exultant British decided they could now teach their American cousins some military lessons they would never forget.

  Plans were made to invade the United States from Niagara, Lake Champlain, and New Orleans. Hard fighting by American regulars, who had learned some lessons from two years of defeats, stopped the Niagara thrust. Meanwhile, a twenty-two-ship British squadron appeared off the Chesapeake escorting forty-five hundred men with orders to ravage the coast and if possible, attack Washington, D.C.

  With the army’s scant supply of regulars fighting on the Canadian border, President Madison had to rely on militia. The President summoned ninety-five thousand of these theoretically patriotic amateurs to defend the federal village. A mere sixty-five hundred responded to their president’s call. Madison accompanied these temporary soldiers to the battlefield, hoping that his presence would inspire them.

  Led by an incompetent general named William Winder, the militiamen made a stand at the village of Bladensburg, five miles from Washington. While President Madison watched, the British infantrymen charged. The militiamen fired a single volley and ran, sweeping General Winder and the President away in the terrified mob.17

  The British marched to Washington, D.C., where they almost captured Dolley Madison, who had refused to leave the presidential residence in spite of several warnings. The British burned the mansion and every other public building in Washington, D.C., except the patent office. It was a national—and presidential—humiliation that was almost beyond belief. A month later, when the House of Representatives convened for a special session of Congress, they voted 79-37 to abandon President Jefferson’s federal village.

  The city of Philadelphia assured the government they would be welcomed back and even designated buildings they could use. Madison, with his wife Dolley’s encouragement, rejected the idea, even though it was emanating from the supposed voice of the people, Congress. For the next four months, Congress debated abandonment of Washington, D.C., while Dolley and her husband hosted numerous dinners (in a rented private mansion) to persuade them to change their minds.

  As Madison grappled with the defeatism permeating Congress, a naval victory on Lake Champlain did wonders for everyone’s morale. A ten thousand-men British army headed down this long, narrow lake, which served as a kind of invasion highway into the heart of New York state. A thirty-year-old navy commander named Thomas Macdonagh smashed the enemy’s escorting fleet in one of the most important military victories in American history. The British army abandoned their invasion and retreated to Canada. The news had not a little to do with Congress deciding to stay in Washington, D.C.

  There was little else to cheer Madison’s collapsing administration in 1814. A “mediation commission” the President had sent to Europe to explore the possibility of peace drew no response from London. The federal government was unable to borrow money from American state banks and was reduced to selling bonds for forty cents on the dollar. In the fall of 1814, the Secretary of the Treasury told the President the country needed $50 million to escape bankruptcy. There was no hope of raising such a sum, and the government defaulted on payments due to reduce the national debt.

  The Secretary of the Treasury informed the Democratic-Republican majority in Congress that it was time to start taxing everything in sight, including western whiskey. He also urged the revival of the Bank of the United States. The latter was a gulp too large for Congress, even though President Madison recommended it. But the congressmen and senators succumbed to a tax program far heavier than anything perpetrated by those awful monocrats, Alexander Hamilton and George Washington.18

  New England was talking secession again, and openly trading with the enemy in Canada and the West Indies. The British army in Canada had recovered from its repulse on Lake Champlain and was preparing for a bigger, probably successful invasion. The only spark of h
ope came from Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson, that admirer of Aaron Burr, had magically emerged as a winning general. In a confrontation with the large and powerful Creek Indian nation, who were backed by the Spanish, he had shattered the Indian army and knocked them out of the war.

  President Madison promoted Jackson to major general and put him in charge of defending New Orleans. Early in 1815, he defeated an army of British regulars, ending Europe’s dream of controlling the Mississippi River and the politics of the western states. The news reached Washington, D.C. just as delegates from a convention held in Hartford, Connecticut, by the New England states arrived in town. They came demanding a revision of the Constitution to give them semi-independence—or they would secede from the Union. After watching congressmen and others celebrating the glorious news from New Orleans, they slunk out of town without presenting their ultimatum.

  Almost simultaneously, a treaty of peace arrived in the still fire-blackened capital. Commodore Macdonough’s victory on Lake Champlain had convinced the British that peace with their best overseas customer might be a better solution than more fire and sword. The treaty did not mention impressment or neutral rights, theoretically the two causes of the war. But President Madison signed it without consulting ex-President Jefferson, and Congress ratified it unanimously.

  Three years of seesawing between victory and defeat had changed President Madison’s mind about fighting a war Jefferson-style. In a message to Congress, he informed them that the experience had demonstrated the importance of “skill in the use of arms and the essential rules of discipline”—in a word, the training that a regular army gave the men in its ranks. He added that the “present system” of relying on militia was unlikely to inculcate these virtues in American soldiers. In line with this new thinking, Madison urged an expansion of the U.S. Military Academy.