Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
at all, public opinion was fragmented badly from the start, and there was no capacity to raise money efficiently since the lapse of the Bank of the United States. Madison was responsible, building on Jefferson’s woeful traditions in these matters, for all of these problems.
The British only cuffed the Americans about because they ruled the oceans and knew that the United States had no military capability to inconvenience them in Canada or the West Indies. Countries, like people, do what they think they can get away with, with impunity. Madison was ultimately correct to go to war, but it would not have been necessary if he had not been swindled so artistically by Napoleon. The war—late, poorly prepared both in war-making terms and in preparation of public opinion—was still the right thing to do if it were successful. If the United States had emerged from it in possession of Canada, none of the impotent saber-rattling and vapid posturing of the various embargoes would have counted for anything.
Madison, a profoundly pacifistic man, despite his eminent position as a revolutionary, did finally conclude that there was no option but war, and started with every opportunity to make the war a great success and another immense accretion to the territory of the United States. And he started it in high fettle, visiting each government department, rendering pep talks wearing a “little round hat and huge cockade.”2
The original American military plan was a harking back to the unfulfilled dreams of the previous wars about the ease of taking Canada (which had only been done by Britain in 1759, by penetrating the vast St. Lawrence like an endoscopy and seizing Quebec). There were to be the now traditional three parallel approaches: General Henry Dearborn would scoot up Lake Champlain and take Montreal; General Stephen Van Rensselaer would cross into Canada at the Niagara River and take what was to become Toronto; and a westerly force under General William Hull would attack across the St. Clair River at what is now Detroit and clean up whatever was left. The Americans were poorly trained militia, and the previous Washington and Adams Administrations’ commitment to a permanent general staff and the development of detailed provisional war plans had been abandoned. Thus, all that was imagined were predictable approaches toward Montreal and at the western ends of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Hull’s drive across the Detroit River into Canada was the first off, but it proceeded only a few miles and then he withdrew after a month, as he was rightly fearful of being cut off by Tecumseh, who had thrown his lot in with the British and Canadians following their capture of the American post on Michilimackinac Island. Hull abruptly surrendered Detroit to General Isaac Brock without any exchange of fire, and the Indians seized Fort Dearborn (Chicago) on August 15 and massacred the garrison. His entire force of 2,000 were instant POWs. Hull was court-martialed for cowardice and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted because of his Revolutionary War service, and he was dishonorably discharged.
As if for the convenience of the defenders, the Americans deferred the attack at Niagara until the complete rout and capture of the Detroit forces, and Brock awaited Rensselaer on the Niagara River starting in late August. (Rensselaer had no military experience, but he was a Federalist and was appointed by New York governor Daniel Tompkins in a move to placate political opposition.) After two months, the Americans attacked at Queenston Heights and won the engagement, killing Brock. As the struggle reached its climax, the New York reservists declined to assist the rest of the American force, because their obligation to do so did not extend beyond the borders of the state. The British repulsed the invaders, and Van Rensselaer retired and was replaced by General Alexander Smyth. Smyth dithered for over a month before attempting another invasion of Canada, which was easily repulsed on November 28, and he was sacked. Dearborn set out from Plattsburg for Montreal on November 19, hoping to coordinate with Smyth. His New York reservists also refused to cross the border into Quebec, and Dearborn returned diffidently to Plattsburg. After this sequence of fiascoes, Madison fired the war secretary, William Eustis, and replaced him with John Armstrong, who proved abrasive and unsuitable.
In the first year of the conflict, the United States did do better on the ocean and on the Great Lakes, and in single-vessel combat more than held its own with the Royal Navy, which had swept the waters around Europe of adversaries. Monroe had been asked by Madison at the end of the year to test the waters with peace overtures to the British. Once again, Madison had completely misjudged the prospects. The United States had had such a ludicrous start to the war that the British had no incentive at all to negotiate. As part of the same ambivalence about the war, the United States had maintained a chargé in London even after the outbreak of war, and the chargé advised the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh (Marquis of Londonderry), that peace could be had if the British would abandon impressment of American sailors, and blockades of American ports, and pay for damage to American ships and forts. Castlereagh declined to negotiate on that basis, and a British overture from Admiral Warren, who commanded their forces in Halifax, directly to Monroe was rejected by Monroe unless the British promised to abandon impressment. This was not acceptable and the desultory war continued into 1813.
3. THE 1812 ELECTION
The presidential election of 1812 saw the origin of what became a wartime tradition of the nomination of a peace candidate by the party out of office. George Clinton’s capable nephew, De Witt Clinton, mayor of New York City and champion of the Erie Canal, which he later built, as governor, was nominated by the New York state antiwar Republicans, with former Empire loyalist Jared Ingersoll for vice president, and the Federalists, fading and fragmented, endorsed both candidates. With the antiwar Democratic-Republicans having defected, President Madison was unanimously renominated by the Democratic-Republican congressional caucus. George Clinton had died, and Elbridge Gerry was nominated for vice president with Madison.
Of the principal founders of the country, Franklin had been too old to participate in the government, and Washington, Hamilton, and Adams were men of affairs, practical officers, and people of commercial and administrative talent. None of them was particularly talented politically, other than, in the broadest sense, Washington. Jefferson the great polemicist and political theorist and Madison the great constitutional expert did not possess great practical skills of administration or the instinct of the national interest other than in an idealized sense of natural expansion into unpopulated areas. They thought it was sufficient to raise the lamp to the world and have a balanced Constitution and economical government and all else would follow, and they suspected Adams and Hamilton of being commercially dominated warmongers, with fragile attachment to any notion of individual or popular rights (quite unfairly in the case of Adams).
There were limitations to the Adams-Hamilton view of a dominating state and powerful standing armed forces, counting nothing on the goodwill of nations or the halcyon powers of America’s founding principles and institutions. But the first group, prominently including Franklin, had an unerring instinct for the national interest, for the self-interestedness of other countries, for the limitations of sonorous assertions of inalienable rights as substitutes for armed force and the will to use it. Their strategic grasp never faltered, where Jefferson and Madison allowed the United States to lapse back into neo-colonial irrelevance, having neither the strength to threaten British possession of Canada, nor the strategic weight and diplomatic finesse to hold any sort of balance between France and Britain in wars that involved all the European powers for decades.
But Jefferson and Madison were immensely skillful politically. Their unpretentious method of government, tendency to devolve government to the states, and emphasis on broadening the suffrage and generalizing availability and quality of education while reducing taxes all hugely endeared them to the country. Hamilton and Adams, who between them won only one serious election, Adams as president, and that only because of Washington’s endorsement and by a narrow margin, had no such appeal or success. This was the problem of the Federalists, who began as supporters of the Constitution but once the Constitution was adopted and implemented never developed as a party and merely became a group of interests, and not such widespread interests at that—essentially the commercial and financial elites of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The Democratic-Republicans essentially controlled the whole political spectrum, and most of the political competition in the country was between its factions. In these circumstances, inept though Madison’s delayed, hesitant, backing into war had been, unwise though it was to go to war as head of a divided country, if he ran the war intelligently, he had yet a great chance to pick the fine