The History of American Military. Richard W. Stewart

      Map 15

      Congress did not lack the will to prepare for war. In March 1812 it had tried to place the Army’s supply system on a more adequate footing by establishing a Quartermaster Department on the military staff in place of the inefficient and costly military agent system. At the same time Congress created the Office of the Commissary General of Purchases in the War Department, and for the first time since the Revolution the Army’s supply system was placed under the exclusive control of the Secretary of War. In May Congress had made provision for an Ordnance Department responsible for the inspection and testing of all ordnance, cannon balls, shells, and shot; the construction of gun carriages and ammunition wagons; and the preparation and inspection of the “public powder.” It enlarged the Corps of Engineers by adding a company of bombardiers, sappers, and miners and expanded and reorganized the Military Academy at West Point. In addition to increasing the Regular Army, Congress had authorized the President to accept volunteer forces and to call upon the states for militia. The difficulty was not planning for an army, but raising one.

      One of the world’s major powers was ranged against the United States; but on the basis of available resources, the two belligerents were rather evenly matched. Most of Britain’s forces were tied up in the war against Napoleon, and for the time being very little military and naval assistance could be spared for the defense of Canada. At the outbreak of the war, there were about 7,000 British and Canadian regulars in Upper and Lower Canada (now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec). With a total white population of only half a million, Canada itself had only a small reservoir of militia to draw upon. When the war began, Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, the military commander and civil governor of Upper Canada, had 800 militiamen available in addition to his 1,600 regulars. In the course of the war, the two provinces put a total of about 10,000 militiamen in the field; whereas in the United States, probably 450,000 of the militiamen saw active service, though not more than half of them ever got near the front.

       Uncle Sam

      One of the enduring symbols of America is that of Uncle Sam. His origins are somewhat obscure, but the most convincing story is that he was originally a Troy, New York, meatpacker named Sam Wilson. Sam Wilson was given a contract in 1812 to supply meat for the troops in New York and New Jersey. His firm put the preserved meat in wooden barrels and stamped them “U.S.” When the barrels reached the troops, some of whom were apparently from the Troy area, the troops supposedly remarked that the “U.S.” must stand for Uncle Sam! Ostensibly from these humble beginnings grew a character in nineteenth century political cartoons of a tall, bearded man dressed in striped pants and wearing a vest and star-spangled hat. James Montgomery Flagg would render this American symbol most powerfully in his 1916–1917 recruiting poster of a stern Uncle Sam pointing a finger at the viewer and stating, “I want you for U.S. Army.”

       Tecumseh

      After Tecumseh’s death in battle while leading warriors of his own Shawnee and other tribes during the War of 1812, he became a revered symbol of the noble warrior dying in battle for a cause. Tecumseh had watched Indian lands in the Northwest Territory whittled away by a series of treaties with individual tribes and urged intertribal cooperation to halt the advance of white settlement. Yet his idea of a united Indian front against white expansion never came to pass. Instead, clan and local loyalties prevailed. Tecumseh did not enjoy unanimous backing even from his own tribe, the Shawnees. His program of unity and organization was attractive to the very white people he opposed, for it was just what they would have done; but it ran counter to the customs and traditions of the Indian people he meant to defend and failed to attract them in sufficient numbers.

      The support of Indian tribes gave Canada one source of manpower that the United States lacked. After the Battle of Tippecanoe, Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, had led his warriors across the border into Canada. There, along with the Canadian Indians, they joined the forces opposing the Americans. Perhaps 3,500 Indians were serving in the Canadian forces during the Thames River campaign in the fall of 1813, probably the largest number that took the field at any one time during the war.

      The bulk of the British Navy was also fighting in the war against Napoleon. In September 1812, three months after the outbreak of war with the United States, Britain had no more than eleven ships of the line, thirty-four frigates, and about an equal number of smaller naval vessels in the western Atlantic. These were all that could be spared for operations in American waters, which involved the tremendous tasks of escorting British merchant shipping, protecting the St. Lawrence River, blockading American ports, and at the same time hunting down American frigates.

      A significant weakness in the American position was the disunity of the country. In the New England states, public opinion ranged from mere apathy to actively expressed opposition to the war. A good many Massachusetts and Connecticut ship owners outfitted privateers (privately owned and armed vessels that were commissioned to take enemy ships), but how much of this was a result of patriotism and how much was hope for profit remains a matter of conjecture. Many New Englanders went so far as to sell grain and provisions to the British. Throughout the war, there were serious problems in raising and sustaining the militia from New England. Nevertheless, several of those states spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on local defense even if they contributed little directly to the federal effort. And despite the regional disaffection with the war, New England was second only to the Mid-Atlantic States