History

The War of 1812 was a necessary corrective to British arrogance, or an unnecessary catastrophe, or a tragic blunder, or a hairsbreadth escape, or an expensive stalemate, or an amazing victory, or the basis for continued independence and lasting peace, depending on who you listen to and how you see it. Maybe it was all of these things. As with nearly all wars, the country that emerged was quite different from the one that had entered the war.

Great Britain’s provocative and often outrageous policies had been stoking American anger for years. British warships stopped American ships outside American harbors and impressed into their own navy any sailors who in their opinion were British deserters. They seized any cargo that in their opinion was contraband. In 1807, a British warship had even fired on an American warship in American waters. Years of such incidents had their effect. Jefferson’s response, as we shall see, had been the Embargo, but that policy had lapsed with his presidency, on March 4, 1809.

In 1810, the West and South elected to Congress a group of young Republicans who boiled with resentment of the economic injuries done by the British, and the national humiliation inflicted, and the British practice of inciting American Indians in the Northwest against white settlers., They intended to seize Canada and either annex it or hold it as a bargaining chip, and thought it would be easy. When, in June, 1812, President James Madison asked Congress to declare war, these War Hawks provided his margin. (Not one of the 39 Federalists in Congress voted for war.)

The war was fought on the Canadian border and the Great Lakes, on the seas, and in the Southwest.

In the North, an American invasion of Canada failed, but American naval victories on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain prevented a corresponding British invasion of the United States. More important results followed the Battle of the Thames, in 1813, when General William Henry Harrison’s forces defeated a smaller British force and killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh.

Tecumseh had preached unity among all these Northwestern and Southwestern tribes, advocating a concerted effort to throw back the white settlers. Although he fought north of the Ohio, he encouraged the Red Stick Creek Indians to attack white settlements in northern Alabama and Georgia, and the Fort Mims massacre, which killed 400 to 500 settlers, set off what was known as the Creek War. That war ended in March, 1814, when Andrew Jackson’s mixed force of army regulars, Tennessee militiaman, and Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek Indians decisively defeated the Red Sticks in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. This action made Jackson a Major General and, along with his victory at New Orleans ten months later, a national hero.

At sea, the British strategy was to protect its own merchant shipping and blockade major American ports (except New England, which traded with Canada in defiance of American laws). American strategy was to employ hit-and-run tactics and engage Royal Navy vessels only under favorable circumstances. After the defeat of Napoleon freed military forces for use in the New World, the British mounted large-scale raids along the seacoasts, and three invasions. One failed to invade New York state via Lake Champlain, the second took Washington, D.C. and burned the Capitol and the White House but was repulsed at Baltimore, and the third was decimated at New Orleans.

Each side used both warships and privateers to attack the other’s merchant ships. (This was the last war in which the British used privateers) . American privateers captured 219 British merchant ships in the first four months of war, damaging British commercial interests, but not enough to send insurance rates soaring, which was their hope.

As additional ships were sent to North America in 1813, the Royal Navy tightened its blockade and extended it, by May 31, 1814, to the entire American coast. American exports decreased from $130 million in prewar 1807 to $7 million in 1814 – and most of the $7 million was in food exports that went to Britain or British colonies.

However, by mid-1814, neither the Americans nor the British wanted to continue the war. After a few months of haggling, they signed the Treaty of Ghent (in Belgium) on December 24, 1814, officially ending the war by returning relations to their pre-war status, with no territory lost or gained, and impressment left unmentioned because moot. The treaty was ratified by the British on December 27, and was quickly ratified after it arrived in Washington on February 17, 1815.

Meanwhile, on January 8, with neither side knowing that the peace had been signed, 8,000 British regulars trying to capture New Orleans were decisively defeated by Andrew Jackson’s 5,000-man army, which had prepared strong defenses just south of the city. The British regulars suffered heavy losses, amounting to more than 25% of their forces — 291 dead, 1,262 wounded, and 484 captured or missing. American casualties were less than two percent of their forces — 13 dead, 39 wounded, and 19 missing. The lopsided victory earned Jackson the official Thanks of Congress, and a gold medal. Meanwhile, the British had taken Mobile, but then, the following day, learned of the Treaty of Ghent, and so sailed home.

The big losers in the war were the Indians allied to the British. The British had demanded, as late as the fall of 1814, that a large “neutral” Indian state be created in what would become Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, but the Americans absolutely refused, and the British conceded the point. After 1814, British policymakers never again offered the Indians arms or encouragement, and without that powerful foreign sponsor, the Indians posed no further threat to white settlement.

Other than the Indians, the big losers from the war were the New England federalists, who had flirted with treason throughout the war and had met, in Hartford Connecticut, late in 1814 to discuss resistance to the war and even possible secession from the rest of the Union. But the end of the war made their publicly expressed views look defeatist or even treasonous. The Hartford Convention spelled the end of the Federalist Party.

Abstractly considered, it could be considered an unnecessary war. But in practice, while the British were what they were and the Americans were what they were, and the Indians what they were, there was little or no chance that the war could have been avoided. The best chance for that had been Thomas Jefferson’s experiment at economic coercion in place of war, as we shall see. But statesmen are rarely as reasonable as he.

All through the nineteenth century runs a continual, taken-for-granted background. Behind politics, and economics, and international affairs, and commerce, and the fine and useful arts, and industry and agriculture and everything else, there was this underground river, running quietly from east to west, transforming everything in its path.

The river was a river of internal immigration. People in New England upped stakes and moved to New York state, or Pennsylvania. People in the middle colonies, and people on the Atlantic seaboard of the old South moved across the Appalachians, or around them. The new nation’s boundaries extended to the Mississippi, and after the Louisiana Purchase extended to the distant Rockies, and after John Quincy Adams’ treaty extended to the Pacific Ocean. Could such vast expanses ever be populated by the new civilization?

Yes, it could.

The government of the Articles of Confederation had enacted Jefferson’s ideas in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, as we shall see. Instead of the original thirteen colonies holding land in common as a perpetual colony, that common land would be subdivided, and organized politically, and formed into states fully equal to the original thirteen. (The fact that it requires an effort for us to realize that things might have been different shows how thoroughly accepted this radical idea became.) Thus there was no political disadvantage to moving to a new territory.

No political disadvantage, and a tremendous economic advantage. America was desperately short of labor. Growing up with a new country, a man could make a good life for himself and his family. As Abraham Lincoln said, from his own experience, the paid laborer of today could become the independent laborer of tomorrow, and the employer of labor after that. Those conditions didn’t last forever, but they certainly lasted a good half-century, up to the onset of the Civil War.

And as people left the older states, their places were filled by continual and increasingly numerous immigration from the Old World, particularly after the War of 1812. What opportunity could hidebound, tightly controlled England and Scotland and Ireland offer a poor individual, compared to America? And what were the barriers? They already spoke the language. They were familiar with the political forms and the cultural background. They fit right in.

And then it wasn’t long before the various unhappy countries of Europe were providing waves of immigrants. They came, they did whatever work they found, they learned the language and absorbed the opportunities, and after a while – a few years, a couple of decades, maybe a generation – these immigrants or their children tended to move west as well, following economic opportunity, and their places in the older states were filled by new arrivals.

It was a vast, impersonal quiet kneading of peoples into one new people. No longer could the country be adequately described as New England, South, Middle Colonies. Yes, people tended to move west in more or less the same lines of latitude they were accustomed to, but the streams acted as streams do when they flow together. First there were eddies, then swirls, then mixture at the edges, and finally a new stream, larger than its constituent elements and no longer divisible. Behind the scenes, not directed by anybody, the republic was reshaping itself.

There’s no point in studying history if all you want to do is confirm the prejudices you bring to it. Not everything is black or white. Not all Indians were noble, nor were they all savage. Not every action of white settlers was right, nor were they all wrong. Not all underdogs were morally in the right, nor automatically wrong. It’s better to see the confusions and cross-currents than to pretend that all is clear. Nearly everything Andrew Jackson did in his lifetime polarized feelings, and polarizes them still. But if we are to understand his actions, and their causes and consequences, we will need to be aware of nuances and ambiguities that never would have troubled him.

The Florida situation in a nutshell:

In 1817, President James Monroe ordered the hero of the Creek War and the Battle of New Orleans to take volunteers from Tennessee to fight the Creek and Seminole Indians in Georgia, and prevent runaway slaves from finding refuge in neighboring Florida, which was then in the hands of the Spanish again, after a 20-year hiatus (1763 to 1783) under the British.

Seminoles attacked Jackson’s men; Jackson in turn captured their village, burned their houses, and in the process found letters indicating that the Indians were receiving secret assistance from the Spanish and the British in Florida. He invaded West Florida, captured Pensacola without a battle, deposed the governor, and then captured, tried and executed two British subjects who had been supplying and advising the Indians.

This caused an uproar for three reasons: First, he had invaded territory belonging to Spain, a country with which the United States was not at war. Second, he had executed British subjects captured outside American territory. And third, many worried, or for political reasons pretended to worry, that Jackson was an American Napoleon, who would turn the United States into a military dictatorship if he got a chance. Critics demanded that he be censured for exceeding orders.

Was this a land grab on the part of the United States? Well, maybe, maybe not. It depends on how you want to look at it.

On the one hand, the two Florida territories controlled the mouths of every river between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi, draining parts or all of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. And they constituted a potential jumping-off point for hostile forces seeking to invade or harass American territory. During the revolution, for example, the British were in control of Florida, and they recruited Seminoles to raid frontier settlements in Georgia. During the War of 1812, a British force on the Apalachicola River distributed arms to the Indian warriors and fugitive slaves, and began building a fort near Pensacola. Colonel Andrew Jackson drove them back to the Apalachicola River in 1814, and didn’t forget. Spain maintained only three small garrisons in Florida, and did not control the border.

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended Jackson’s actions, and, when an Adams defended the morality of an action, it was wise to listen. When the Spanish minister wrote asking that Jackson be punished, Adams answered the Spanish protest with a letter, and 72 supporting documents, blaming the war on the British, Spanish, and Indians. He said that Florida’s status as a province only nominally possessed by Spain was unsustainable. Spain must decide either to adequately garrison Florida or cede it to the United States. Spain got the point, and ceded Florida by the Adams-Onis Treaty earlier referred to. Jackson was named governor for a few months and went on to other things.

In any case, the United States took possession in 1821, and now had no southern border east of Texas. Early the next year, Capt. John R. Bell, provisional secretary of the Florida territory and temporary agent to the Seminoles, estimated the population at about 22,000 Indians, who held 5,000 slaves.

So what does this episode tell us?

Were the Indians in Florida the injured parties? Undoubtedly they were defending themselves, but (as usual) it wasn’t that simple. That wasn’t all they were doing. The Indians’ cross-border attacks, including killing settlers and stealing livestock, naturally made them targets for retaliation. Nor were they native to Florida. By 1710, Spanish slave raids, and disease, had virtually depopulated the entire peninsula, and when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, it took the few survivors to Cuba and New Spain. The Indians Jackson encountered had drifted into Florida in the years afterward.

Were the Spanish the injured party? Who depopulated the native Indians? Who encouraged slaves to escape from the United States by offering freedom and land? Spain, which had brought slavery to the New World, continued to practice it in Cuba, and would until 1886.

Were the British the injured party? The British government, on hearing the evidence on the two men Jackson hanged, agreed that their own actions had placed themselves beyond the protection of English law.

Was Jackson acting on his own, over-reaching in his high-handed fashion? Maybe not. Before setting off to fight the Creeks, Jackson had written the president, “Let it be signified to me through any channel … that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.” The orders he received in return were ambiguous, either to allow for what a later age would call plausible deniability or to leave him flexibility to meet unforeseeable circumstances.

The rights and wrongs of frontier warfare were always intermixed, with few willing to see more than one side of any issue. American squatters and outlaws raided the Seminoles, killing villagers and stealing their cattle. The Seminoles retaliated, including a raid that killed a woman in Georgia and her two young children. This kind of thing when on for decades. Who was innocent? Who was guilty?

Things change, but human nature changes slowly, if at all. In 1819, the Internet and TV “news” commentators were far, far in the future, but America’s first experience of boom-and-bust resulted in conspiracy theories, designated villains, and decades of political strife based on contradictory opinions about what had happened and why, just like now. Today, economists and historians agree that the root cause was the economic readjustments stemming from the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. But agreement ends there. As to whose efforts made things worse or better – well, here’s the story.

In Europe, what are called the Napoleonic Wars extended, with one 18-month intermission, from 1793 to 1814, followed by Napoleon’s 100-day return and final defeat in 1815. As a sort of side-show, America and England got involved in the two-and-a-half year War of 1812, as we shall see. In 1815, Europe was faced with a monumental job of reconstructing ordinary life, and this had consequences for America.

Wars always reorganize (or disorganize) economies, because above all else, armies have to be fed and supplied. The longer and more extensive the war, the more its needs change things. When the war is over, win or lose, a corresponding economic readjustment is going to follow, and the more advanced the economy, the greater the adjustment required (for retooling and reestablishment of markets, for instance). The American economy of 1819 was still primitive, but it was beginning to be quite different from what it had been, and so it was following different, invisible, rules, which meant that few people really understood what was going on – few even among those in positions of political or economic power.

Europe’s postwar reorganization had several effects:

• Initially, it caused a widespread decline in prices, due to a scarcity of gold and silver.
• Britain’s surplus manufactured goods, priced well below competitive rates, flooded American markets and put many American factories out of business.
• Food shortages in Europe sent agricultural demand, and prices, soaring, especially cotton, wheat, corn and tobacco. In response, American planters and farmers expanded production as fast and as much as they could, seeing the situation as a golden opportunity.

But in 1817 European farmers produced a great crop, which American farmers apparently never anticipated. Many farmers and planters in the South and West had bought new lands on credit, figuring to pay for them out of the profits they would make from exporting to Europe as postwar high prices. Instead, crop prices suddenly were half what they had been, and British weavers began substituting cotton from India for higher-price American cotton. Beginning in 1818, Southwestern planters watched cotton value fall. Their mortgages depended on the value of their crops, and that value was diminishing by the day.

No villains yet, really, just the laws of supply and demand. But then in the summer of 1818, the two-year-old Second Bank of the United States (which Jackson would kill in 1836) began contracting credit, and the whole postwar house of cards came tumbling in a heap. Was this a mistake? A necessity? A necessary but bungled response? Well –.

By August, 1818, the Bank of the United States was dangerously overextended, and of course its officers knew it. The bank’s president ordered its branches to reject bank notes from state-chartered banks, insisting on hard money. But that meant there was no way for the bank’s customers to repay it, because there wasn’t enough specie in circulation. In October, when the Treasury Department demanded that the bank transfer $2 million in specie to redeem bonds, it didn’t have it and its customers didn’t have it.

The bank squeezed. State banks in the West and South started calling the loans they had made to farmers and speculators, the loans that had enabled them to buy more land. When the money wasn’t there to repay the loans, land values dropped by up to 75% (which of course meant that the landowners had that much less security on their loans), and banks began foreclosing. When they did, they transferred the mortgages to their creditor — the Second Bank of the United States.

In January, 1819, the value of cotton broke — dropping 25% in a single day – and the ensuing panic drove the country into recession. This first major peacetime financial crisis was followed by a general economic collapse – featuring widespread bankruptcies and mass unemployment — that lasted through 1821.

These economic dislocations, for all the misery they produced, might be looked at as growing pains. America was no longer a colonial economy, shipping raw materials to Europe in return for finished goods. From now on, it would have to deal with the more complicated economic problems of the modern business cycle. But that was cold comfort.

The political wisdom of the day offered few solutions. President Monroe concentrated on governmental economizing. Congress passed a bill allowing debtors who owed money on land purchased from the government to keep the part of land they had already paid for. And for the first time, city and state governances began to turn their attention to policies aimed at poor relief.

From our vantage point, it seems simple enough. Global market dislocations, aggravated by land speculation and inflationary over-issuance of bank notes inadequately backed by specie. But it was all new to most of the country, and it was easy for people to jump to conclusions.

• The Bank of the United States, for instance. It wound up taking ownership of all that mortgaged and foreclosed land – maybe the whole crisis was part of a banker’s plot?
• The American System of tariff protection, internal improvements and, again, the bank – didn’t the collapse demonstrate the superiority of the old Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian republic with strictly limited government?

But it was just as easy for others to come to opposite conclusions.

• Certain protectionists blamed the panic on free trade and argued for tariffs to protect prosperity.
• Once the charter of the First Bank of the United States lapsed in 1811, state-chartered banks sprang up, evading any real regulation, resulting in an inflationary expansion based upon easy credit. Didn’t this show that a central bank was needed if there was to be economic stability?
• During the war, the government encouraged a proliferation of paper money, because in its need it turned to these new banks for loans. The older banks with more conservative lending practices accumulated specie, and the newer ones were starved for it, so the government allowed them to suspend specie payments. Wartime necessity, to prolong wartime lending, but it persisted after the war ended. Wasn’t the resulting mess largely due to banks being allowed to lend without having sufficient reserves?

The financial disaster and depression provoked popular bafflement, spiced by resentment against banks and bankers and federal economic policy. Anything new in that?

Slavery had been prohibited in the Northwest Territory since 1787, the second-most-important decision (after the Declaration of Independence) taken by the Continental Congress in the years between 1774 and the adoption of the Constitution in 1789. For reasons that we will go into at the proper time, this ordinance set important precedents, deciding the manner in which the new government was going to organize territories held in common. But for the moment, we confine ourselves to the results of the decision to ban slavery, which, as stated, actually predated the Constitution. (The act was reaffirmed by the first Congress.)

The Northwest Territory was the great triangle of land between the Ohio River, the Mississippi River, and the Great Lakes. The first territory owned by the general government rather than by an individual state, it was also the first territory in which slavery was prohibited from the outset. We know Jefferson’s response to the sudden surfacing of the slavery issue as a regional rather than as a national problem. It is well to remember that Jefferson had as much to do with the Northwest Ordinance’s prohibition of slavery as any man living. But he hadn’t foreseen how his precedent was going to morph until it threatened civil war.

Until 1820, the nation’s growth was incremental and non-divisive. The original 13 states had been joined by Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), Ohio (1803), Louisiana (1812), Indiana (1816), Mississippi (1817), Illinois (1818), and Alabama (1819). Orderly, peaceful and logical. As new territory achieved a certain minimal population, it petitioned for admission, northwestern and southwestern states coming in more or less together. By 1820, the slave-holding and non-slave-holding states numbered eleven each.

But in 1819, the territory of Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state. Missouri, like Louisiana (which had been a state for seven years), lay west of the Mississippi River, and thus was not part of the territory covered by the Northwest Ordinance.

Representative James Tallmadge, Jr., of New York offered two amendments to the Missouri statehood bill, prohibiting further importation of slaves into Missouri and requiring gradual emancipation for slaves already there. The amendments passed (along regional lines) in the House, but failed in the evenly divided Senate. This began a solid year of Congressional debate on the issue. Northerners argued that Congress had the power to prohibit slavery in a new state. Southerners said that new states had the same freedom to choose slavery as the original thirteen had had.

The slave states were already outnumbered in the House and clearly destined to be ever more outnumbered (as few emigrants chose to move to territory where they would have to compete with slave labor). They determined to keep a de facto veto power over federal legislation by maintaining parity in the Senate. The free states, meanwhile, were irritated by the constitutional provision that each male slave be counted as 60% of a man for the purposes of congressional representation, even though they were considered property otherwise. The North considered this constitutionally mandated over-representation of slave states, which it was. The admission of new slave states would make the situation worse.

Finally, the detached part of Massachusetts known as the District of Maine requested statehood. Speaker of the House Henry Clay demanded that Missouri be admitted alongside Maine, which struck his fellow representatives as a way out of their dilemma. The final compromise line was set at 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude. Any part of the Louisiana Purchase territory below the line was to be open to slavery, and anything above it – with the exception of the state of Missouri – was to be free. The Compromise passed the Senate on March 2, 1820, and the House on February 26, 1821.

Clay’s part in the Missouri Compromise earned him the title of “Great Pacificator.” Following this pairing formula, six more states entered the Union – Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Iowa and Wisconsin – entering, like the animals on Noah’s Ark, two by two, until in 1850 California finally overturned the balance.

In hindsight, perhaps it was a mistake to draw a line in the sand, as Jefferson saw right away. But it is the nature of politics to seek the quick fix, the easy way out, and let the future take care of itself. And perhaps the 36-30 line seemed a logical extension of the border formed by the Ohio. The Compromise did result in Congress excluding slavery from national territory, for the first time since the Northwest Ordinance. And Lincoln himself, as shrewd and thoughtful a political observer as ever lived, said that the Missouri Compromise line preserved the peace for 30 years and would have continued to do so had not Kansas-Nebraska destroyed it. Perhaps the best that can be said of the compromise is that it was the work of fallible but patriotic men, and it bought time.

Jefferson’s views on slavery were much like those that Abraham Lincoln would form half a century later – disapproval, and a hope that it would gradually die out, mixed with a strong belief that Congressional interference in the domestic institution of the slave states would lead to an end to the Union. But Jefferson, in his old age, did not think that geographically containing the “peculiar institution” was practical or wise or just. Writing to a northern congressman on April 22, 1820, a month after passage of the Missouri Compromise, Jefferson produced this prophetic and much-quoted analysis.

“I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way.

“The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power, would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a state. This certainly is the exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the Constitution has taken from them and given to the general government. Could Congress, for example, say that the non-freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other state?

“I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.”

Sad words, those. Think of having to say, after spending a lifetime in public service for which you did not necessarily have any more enthusiasm than Washington had, that you could see that all you and your remarkable generation had sacrificed to accomplish was doomed to fail. It amounts to saying that he had lost faith in the people’s ability to govern themselves. And what else had the revolution been about?

I have loved America and American history since before I can remember, but honestly, some of it makes painful reading, especially when you have to read of good things deliberately destroyed by the fears and prejudices of others. Eventually, some of what was lost can be regained, but think of all those wasted years! And today (at least since 1994, when a deliberately obstructionist Republican majority was elected to the House of Representatives in reaction to Bill Clinton’s first two years) we are in the trough of one of those spells of reaction that undo the good and reinforce the malicious.

But even in bad times, some good things survive, and serve as models.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/how-berea-college-makes-tuition-free-with-its-endowment/572644/