by Mark Zuehlke
There was little truth to these accusations against the British. As Tecumseh, the Prophet, and their followers had shown increasing hostility toward America, the British representatives with whom they had contact counselled caution and moderation. Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, Upper Canada’s military commander, enunciated British policy clearly in instructions issued in the spring of 1811 to his officers stationed on the frontier. “I am decidedly of opinion that upon every principle of policy our interest should lead us to use all our endeavours to prevent a rupture between the Indians and the subjects of the United States.” His officers and those of the Indian Department were “to use all their influence to dissuade the Indians from their projected plan of hostility, given them clearly to understand that they must not expect any assistance from us. The officers, however, must be extremely cautious in pointing out to them, that it is for their good only that this advice is given to them, and not from any dereliction of that regard with which we always view their interests.”19
These were not just empty words. Throughout 1811, British agents stationed at frontier trading posts reduced the amounts of gunpowder and lead normally issued to the Indians so they would have sufficient supply to enable hunting but no surplus for military use. In past years, one report stated, the Indians coming to Amherstburg had been issued almost 3,200 pounds of powder; this was cut to 1,211 pounds.20
The British effort to avert war on the American frontier had little to do with altruism toward either the Indians or the settlers. Unlike the politicians in London, Brock fully expected that Canada could face attack from the United States at any moment. He hoped that by constraining the Indians to keep the peace, their military potential could be retained until the Americans declared war outright. Then he would rally the Indians to the British cause and deploy them effectively in concert with his own regulars and Canadian militiamen. If the Indians acted independently, Brock feared they would be slaughtered by the American troops, resulting in the confederacy being scattered and its members so demoralized they would be of no use in the future defence of Canada.
Brock’s pragmatic approach was typical of British North American dealings with Indians, which largely continued the policies of New France. For the 150 years of its duration New France’s European settler population had always been grossly outnumbered by the Indians. To secure their power in North America, the French had entered into alliances with various Indian nations that established military and commercial inter-dependencies. Fur-trade camps, missionary outposts, and military garrisons were scattered thinly through the frontier beyond the St. Lawrence River’s banks where most of the habitant settlers lived. New France’s influence over the Indian nations was cemented by the mutual benefits realized through the fur trade more than military dominance. Indeed, without these military alliances, New France could not have survived.
New France was almost perpetually at war with the British colonies south of it. On the northern frontier of these colonies the British authorities established similar trade and military alliances with Indian nations that were pitted against those allied to the French. When New France was vanquished in 1769, the British conquerors not only undertook to quell discontent among the habitants but also sought to develop peaceful relationships with the majority of the Indian nations, for, like the French had been, they were grossly outnumbered. Also like the French, the British commercial interest in the newly acquired colonies was based on the fur trade rather than agricultural expansion. This was no longer the case in the older southern colonies that would form the United States.
The fur trade simply could not exist without a wilderness peopled by Indians who could trap and skin animals and then deliver their pelts to the traders in exchange for European goods. This coexistent relationship meant that the Europeans living in British North America did not see the Indians as savage enemies impeding the march of progress. While Indian nations were displaced by settlement within Upper and Lower Canada, the pace of this agrarian expansion was sufficiently slow that the advance was not preceded by bloody territorial warfare.
Heavily influenced by the church, the British administration also looked upon the Indian nations with a paternalistic eye. The French missionaries had sought to convert the Indians in order to save their souls and gradually wean them from a hunting-and-gathering life considered at odds with the influence of Christianity. But missionary zeal after Britain conquered New France became less vigorous as the power of the Roman Catholic Church was reduced. Instead the British governors made little effort to undermine the traditional Indian way of life so long as the natives kept the peace and continued to work in the fur trade. And, knowing the thin line of redcoats and Canadian militia could not alone repel any determined American invasion, the British continued to foster a web of military alliances with the Indians on the frontier and to husband their power so that they could be unleashed against any invading force.
SIX
War Hawks
SPRING 1812
South of the Canadian border the pro-war rhetoric mounted, becoming increasingly hysterical and fanciful. Nowhere was this more the case than on the debating floor of the Twelfth Congress. From the Speaker’s chair, Henry Clay orchestrated the select team of young westerners who had come to Washington in the fall of 1811 with clear intention to force the issue. They were called the War Hawks. Although each was a man of hot temper and independent spirit, Clay provided leadership. Upon arriving in Washington, Clay and six of the most prominent War Hawks together rented several cramped rooms over a tavern. Given Washington’s critical shortage of lodging for senators and congressmen, such arrangements were common. Often two or more congressmen shared a single room.
John C. Calhoun, William Lowndes, Felix Grundy, Langdon Cheves, and George M. Bibb joined Clay in the tavern. Grundy and Cheves were thirty-five, Clay thirty-four, Calhoun and Lowndes just twenty-nine. All believed President Madison lacked the mettle to lead Congress into war and so it fell on their shoulders to exert “some controlling or at least some concentrating influence.” Dubbing their quarters the War Mess, on November 3 they set to work in these dingy environs hammering out a strategy to win their colleagues over. Absolutely essential was the need to have one of their own elected Speaker. Lowndes of South Carolina argued that the man with the requisite talent and experience “to urge and drive, to conciliate and persuade,” was Henry Clay, that “clever man whom they call the Western Star.”1 The others concurred and the following day pulled off the unprecedented coup of having Clay elected on the first ballot.
Despite the War Hawk.’ fears that Madison lacked the fortitude to take the necessary, bold, and decisive step, the president expressed reluctant support for their position in his annual address to the opening of Congress. While sharply rebuking France for its imposition of maritime trade restrictions, Madison laid greatest blame for America’s predicament on Great Britain’s doorstep. The actions of the British, both on the seas and on the western frontier, he said, were forcing America to strengthen its navy and army to meet these dual threats. All efforts at reconciliation had been rebuffed and Britain’s cabinet was imposing on “the threshold of our territory … measures which under existing circumstances have the character as well as the effect of war on our lawful commerce. With this evidence of hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish … Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.”2
The president sought laws to expand the army to full strength, mobilize the militia as needed, develop military academies, enlarge military supply stocks, and stockpile materials for naval construction. Although the national treasury had collected more than $13.5 million in the past year, enabling $5 million in debt reduction, Madison sought authority to take out loans to meet potential defence expenditures. He came very close, but not quite, to recommending Congress declare war.
Madison’s me
ssage outlined the government’s economic, military, and foreign policies for the forthcoming year. It fell to Congress to study the various parts of this plan and accept, modify, or reject each component while also deciding whether to cross that line in the sand beyond which war must follow. As Speaker, Clay moved immediately to ensure that the War Hawks dictated Congress’s reaction by dividing Madison’s message into nine parts, referred to seven select and two standing committees. Ignoring seniority, Clay assigned the three vital subjects of foreign relations and military and naval affairs to committees where the War Hawks held the chair and comprised most of the membership.
Those congressmen opposed to Madison’s presidency and reputed to be either pro-British or anti-war were shut out of these committees or granted only minority standing. This fate befell veteran Congressmen John Randolph and Josiah Quincy. This was Randolph’s seventh congressional session. From Roanoke, Virginia, Randolph had broken with Jefferson years earlier to become the “mad genius of discord” around whom rallied a group of southern congressmen opposed to Republican policies and equally despising the Federalists. Shrill of voice and almost freakishly emaciated, Randolph was a quick-tongued, fast-fisted bully who played the role of congressional bad boy by dressing carelessly and casually tossing his legs over his desk while slouching low in his chair when bored. Continually courted by the Federalists, he shunned them, sitting instead as an independent. Randolph was determined to challenge this “horde of upstart patriots” led by Clay, who, he wrote, had “strided from the door of the Hall as soon as he entered it to the Speaker’s Chair.”3
Quincy, a Massachusetts Federalist returning for his fourth term to Congress, believed that Madison and the War Hawks conspired to bring the nation to war purely to advance the desires of those “wild men on the Missouri” for more land. He thought everyone living west of the protective wall of the Appalachians was “foreign, uncouth, abhorrent and menacing to the divine right of Eastern conservatives to dominate society and politics.” Quincy argued that Jefferson and Madison’s western policies, particularly the Louisiana Purchase and those that had created new states there, violated the Constitution and threatened to tear the Union apart.4
The House was a notoriously rowdy forum described by various newspapers as akin to “aturbulent cock-pit.” The Speakers of the two previous sessions had each proven incapable of maintaining order and decorum, particularly when Quincy or Randolph held forth.5 Three days into the Tenth Congress, Randolph had tromped into the House with his favourite female hound dog in tow, a clear violation of protocol. Hesitant to confront a man who spoke often of his love of pistols and duelling, Speaker Joseph B. Varnum failed to order the animal ejected. By urging the dog to bark threateningly and lunge at any congressmen Randolph disliked who dared to take the floor, the Virginian not only disrupted proceedings but virtually hijacked control of the House. When Congressman Willis Alton complained that the dog had tripped him, Randolph battered the man with his cane.
Having cowed Congress in the past, it surprised nobody that within days of the Twelfth Congress convening Randolph sauntered into the House with the dog on his heels to challenge Clay’s authority. No sooner had the dog passed through the door, however, than Clay ordered the doorkeeper “to take her out,” as no females were allowed into the House. The dog was summarily removed without protest from Randolph and it never reappeared. Congressman John A. Harper, a New Hampshire War Hawk, thought Clay’s quick thinking greatly increased his stock while devaluing Randolph’s.6
Clay carefully orchestrated the debates and never hesitated to relinquish the Speaker’s chair to personally argue for war. When the House split over a bill amendment that would increase enlistment of new soldiers from 15,000 to 25,000, Clay declared that simply investing Quebec’s fortifications would require the greater total proposed. While giving lip service to the value of volunteer militia, Clay said only regulars were capable of carrying out such a “siege” and of also building and manning the garrisons necessary to secure other strategically vital positions during an invasion of Canada. He then proposed the following scenario for the conquest of all British North America: “Canada is invaded; the upper part falls, and you proceed to Quebec. It is true there would be no European enemy behind to be apprehended; but the people of that country might rise …. Therefore … a portion of the invading army would be distributed in the upper country, after its conquest, amongst the places susceptible of military strength and defence. The army, considerably reduced, sets itself down before Quebec. Suppose it falls. Here again will be requisite a number of men to hold and defend it. And if the war is prosecuted still farther, and the lower country and Halifax are assailed … it [is] obvious that the whole force of 25,000 men would not be too great.”7
A standing army was generally anathema to Republican philosophy, so at issue was not only the size of the force to be raised but its very creation. Many a Republican feared that if the regular army was too large a rogue president might employ it to impose a dictatorship. Alternatively, the army might also rise of its own accord to establish military rule. Clay assured the House that this army would be “enlisted for a limited time, raised for the sole purpose of war, and … disbanded on the return of peace.” Even “supposing it to be corrupted and its arms turned by the ambition of its leaders against the freedom of the country,” the people, “consisting of upwards of seven millions, affording a physical power of about a million of men capable of bearing arms, and ardently devoted to liberty, could not be subdued by an army of 25,000 men.” In Massachusetts, Clay declared, every militiaman was being armed “and he trusted in God that that great object would be persevered in until every man in the nation could proudly shoulder the musket which was to defend his country and himself …. Such a people has nothing to fear from a petty, contemptible force of 25,000 regulars.”8
The object for such an army, Clay said, was “distinctly to be war, and war with Great Britain.” He then used the debate on the amendment to advance the case for declaring war. In its campaign against France, “England is said to be fighting for the world, and shall we … attempt to weaken her exertions?” This, of course, was the prime argument of New England Federalists opposing war. Clay scorned the idea that Britain acted for the world. Were that the case, would not Britain scrupulously observe the rights of others and abide by international laws? Instead, he said, America was “called upon to submit to debasement, dishonour and disgrace—to bow the neck to royal insolence.” The “real cause of British aggression [against the United States] was not to distress an enemy [France], but to destroy a rival …. She sickens at your prosperity, and beholds in your growth—your sails spread on every ocean, and your numerous seamen, the foundations of a power which, at no very distant day, is to make her tremble for naval superiority.”9
The amended bill passed by ninety votes to thirty-five against on December 31, 1811. Madison had authorization to add 25,000 men to the regular army. A contented Clay wrote to William Worsley, editor of Lexington’s Reporter: “I consider it as the strongest war measure that could be adopted, short of an actual declaration of war, which I have no doubt will be made before we rise, unless England ceases her aggressions.”10
As the congressional session ground on through the winter of 1811–12, the War Hawks clamoured ever more loudly. Increasingly their speeches addressed less the supposed outrages Britain had visited upon the nation than the right of America to conquer Canada in order to expel the British from North America. Grundy set the tone on December 9, during debate on the report of the foreign relations committee. “This war, if carried successfully,” he said, “will have its advantages. We shall drive the British from our Continent…. I therefore feel anxious not only to add the Floridas to the South, but the Canadas to the North of this empire.” War Hawk Richard Johnson of Kentucky invoked God in support of American domination of Canada: “I shall never die contented until I see her expulsion from North America and her territories incorporated with the United States….
In point of territorial limit the map will prove [conquering Canada’s] importance. The waters of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi interlock in a number of places and the Great Disposer of Human Events intended those two rivers should belong to the same people.”11
Others voiced even grander designs. An ardent supporter of the War Hawks from Tennessee asked where it was “written in the book of fate that the American republic shall not stretch her limits from the capes of Chesapeake to Nootka sound, from the isthmus of Panama to Hudson bay?”12 Although the term manifest destiny had yet to be coined—that would wait upon John L. O’Sullivan in 1845—the Republican War Hawks expressed essentially the same philosophy. There was little to differentiate their position from O’Sullivan’s claim that it was America’s mission to fulfill its “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.”13 And as would prove true in the 1840s, the vision of a United States whose wings spread wide and unchallenged over the entire continent enticed the imagination of many Americans.
The eternal pioneer thirst for fresh land made Canada a tempting target for conquest. Indeed, many Americans had already settled there. Because of the barrier presented by the Appalachians to westward movement, a common migration route popularized in about 1800 drew thousands of pioneers from the United States into Upper Canada at Niagara. They then moved down the Niagara Peninsula to cross back into America at Detroit on their way to the Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys. Many of these Americans passing through Canada decided to stay. Land was cheap, the result of the government of Upper Canada’s generous land grant system that allowed a settler to claim 200 acres for little more than payment of modest administrative fees and swearing allegiance to the British Crown. The soil was fertile, and the Indians in Upper Canada, as opposed to those on America’s western frontier, were not hostile.14
