CHAPTER XIX

THE WESTERN WAR OF 1812

THREE days before William Henry Harrison escaped from destruction, and laid the foundation of his standing as a military hero, the Twelfth Congress assembled at Washington, chose Henry Clay of Kentucky as Speaker and organized its committees for immediate entry into war. The members of the new Congress, elected during 1810 and 1811, were chosen while American feeling against England was everywhere high. In the frontier States it carried all before it. The belief that England was behind Tecumseh and that his demonstration was in itself an act of war, was easily accepted in the West. The indignities that the United States had suffered at British hands on and off for eighteen years, aroused western resentment and stimulated another side of the western character from that which Aaron Burr had roused in 1806.

The frontier American has been capable of violent contrasts and has vibrated between individualism and localism at one extreme, and national idealism at the other. Foreign observers have been bewildered by quick American changes, and few Americans have been certain which, if either, tendency has represented the real American character. From 1783 until the collapse of the conspiracy of Burr, the forces that were in the lead throughout the West were indigenous, and grew out of the isolation of life and the importance of the individual. A low regard for Federal authority appeared. Angry legislatures scolded at acts of Congress and avowed belief in constitutional doctrines that could not have worked anywhere outside a state of anarchy. Leading citizens saw no wrong in intriguing with foreign nations. The danger of actual separation was present, and inspired Jefferson's prompt purchase of Louisiana when the closure of the Mississippi was threatened. The tendencies towards disunion were gradually lessened as the century advanced, but the West did not cease to look upon the affairs of the world from the viewpoint of the parish.

Directly opposite were the tendencies that induced a high regard for the ideal of a Nation as contrasted with the State.

Each of the thirteen original States had behind it a long history as colony, and a short period of real independence. Professor Van Tyne has shown beyond doubt how the States regarded themselves as sovereign during the Revolution, the most striking evidence being the fact that it was their several adoptions of independence rather than the declaration by Congress that gave weight to this momentous fact. Their actual independence, and their willingness to develop local aims at the expense of the National, caused Washington to age, and made his problem a general one of supreme politics and common sense, as well as one of military strategy. But this independence was confined to the original thirteen, or perhaps fourteen, if Vermont be included with them. No other State, except Texas, has had such experience. Instead, each new State as admitted to the Union has looked back to a period of growth under tutelage. One or two have broken off full-grown from a parent State, but most have begun as Indian country, occupied without controversy by Indian tribes. The quieting of Indian title, a necessary precedent to white occupation, has been a national duty. The settler has taken his deed directly from the Nation.

The Nation has stood behind and over the early stages of statehood development. By act of Congress the first government has been set up; by similar act a legislature has been allowed. In most cases an enabling act has been preliminary to the formation of a State constitution, and admission to the United States has been a privilege for which some States have waited long. The postal service has loomed big in western imagination, and has been a Federal function. In later years the Federal grant of land for schools and public institutions, and for railroad construction, has encouraged the local community to turn to Washington for aid. The Nation has ever been above the western State, and the free flowing imagination of the westerner has turned itself loose upon the Nation as an ideal. In personifying the United States, it was natural that the western traits should be those expected of the Nation. The sensitiveness of the westerner for personal honor and dignity was magnified as national honor. And in the two decades before the war Congress met in 1811, the United States had plenty of provocation to arouse the western sense of indignation and national resentment.

The grievances that justified the War of 1812 were mixed in character and long in accumulating. From the opening of the

European wars in 1793, England and France were in a struggle for survival. They fought on land and sea; and neutrals, met with on either element, suffered indignity and inconvenience. There was no real neutrality until Washington proclaimed it, and it was easier to proclaim than to make it respected. The Jay Treaty of 1794 gave respite that averted war with England at that time. The short naval war with France at the end of the century was terminated by a promise from Napoleon to show proper courtesy to the young republic. But when the wars were resumed, England and France tried to hurt each other by a policy of strangulation and trade curtailment. And the neutral carriers, who had taken over much of the commerce of the world, suffered. The British Orders in Council and the French retaliatory decrees were not inspired by special hostility to the United States. They indicated rather a determination on the part of both combatants not to risk injury by pausing to regard neutral convenience.

American grievances accumulated against both belligerents. Against England was the restraint of the colonial carrying trade, the maintenance of a virtual blockade of American ports, and the repeated seizure of seamen from American vessels on the allegation that they were of British origin. The United States admitted the right to search for contraband, to enforce actual blockades, and to determine the nationality and destination of the merchant ship. It denied a right to use the search for any other purpose, and regarded as insulting and degrading the British claim to enforce upon American ships the British doctrine of permanent allegiance. Against France the grievances were fewer in fact, and greater in outrage. Since French war vessels were unsafe at sea, there were few of them to search or injure American ships so long as these kept away from French ports. But in port in France, or wherever he could reach them, Napoleon caused the seizure and confiscation of American ships at will. France made no contention that her acts were lawful, as England did. She acted frankly in retaliation, and vented a weak maritime spite upon neutrals guileless enough to trust her. Great numbers of American vessels by putting themselves under British license, found the war trade profitable, and the States of New England that owned the ships were slow to resentment against the British acts. But elsewhere the searches and seizures roused the American spirit. Along the border they ranked with

the supposed British intrigue among the Indians in preparing the American mind for war.

The escapades of Burr came at the moment when the West was ready to throw off the spirit of localism and to take on for a time the idea of a Nation. The attack of the British frigate Leopard upon the American Chesapeake, was perhaps the pivotal episode. This occurred in June, 1807, and the United States was wrung with impotent rage at the picture of the helpless seamen on the American warship as they stood up under the broadside fire of the British bully. The officer who fired a single gun in defense with a live coal carried in his fingers became a hero; but the fact remained that an American frigate had allowed its men to be taken from its deck without resistance. Jefferson reported that no event since the Declaration of Independence had so greatly aroused the people; but neither he nor they took it to heart as an evidence of inefficient administration and lack of power to enforce respect. The western desire for revenge grew steadily from this date, and Jefferson spent the rest of his days in office in the futile effort to procure respect by pacific means. Madison inherited his problem in 1809, without Jefferson's ingenuity in dodging the issue. Embargoes and non-intercourse of different types were tried. New England was making money, and was in favor of putting up with the affronts; the Middle States were divided; but the West and South were insistent for immediate war.

The young Democratic leaders of 1811 were required to win over President Madison to their program. Madison had a realization of both the extent of the grievance and the inadequacy of American means for war. His message to Congress in 1811 complained of unprovoked injustice on the part of both England and France, and invited Congress to put "the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis." In March, 1812, he sent a special message, with papers showing a British intrigue in New England, and on June 1 he asked Congress to recognize the fact that England had created a state of war against the United States. It was alleged by northern critics of the President that he did this only under the threat that otherwise another man would be nominated for the presidency in 1812; but there is no evidence to prove the charge. He at least knew how little the country was ready, and coöperated in the passage of laws to increase the regular army, to utilize the militia, to

assemble a body of volunteers, and to improve the organization and services among the land forces.

Madison had few trained officers or men to draw upon, and a War Department in which the Secretary was assisted by only a handful of clerks. The appointments of men to hold commissions went naturally to those who sympathized with the war, and Federalists complained of favoritism and sectionalism in making them. Winfield Scott, who had himself entered the service in the wave of enthusiasm following the Chesapeake affair, described his fellow officers as inefficient, lazy, uncouth, and often drunken.1 For the high commands, in the absence of available men in the regular service, Madison dug out officers of experience in the Revolution, who had lived a quiet civil life for nearly thirty years. Governor William Hull, of Michigan Territory, became thus a brigadier general against his better judgment, and was sent to Ohio to create an army for operation in Ontario. MajorGeneral Henry Dearborn, with qualifications similar to those of Hull, was sent to command in New York and New England, and cover the approaches at Niagara and Lake Champlain. Before the war was actually declared on June 18, 1812, movements had been made on paper for the capture of Canada and the defense of the southwest border.

The western demand for immediate war was associated with a belief that Canada could be easily overrun and added to the Union and an unwillingness to burden the people with taxes for paying the costs of the enterprise. There was no fear of immediate invasion along the seacoast, or from New Orleans. In the Northwest, where the rival fur traders had long contested for the business of the Indians, there was both a danger of border attacks and a chance for gains. The United States had already a show of force along the Upper Lakes. There were as many as one hundred and twenty men at Detroit, eighty-five at Fort Wayne, eighty-eight at Michilimackinac, fifty-three at Fort Dearborn, and similar numbers at half a dozen other posts. Along the Wabash and Maumee was a natural line of defense, which lay, indeed, one hundred miles or more beyond the outposts of the agricultural population, but which did not include any impossible salient in case there should be a British aggressive. The likeliness of this was disregarded, and Hull was expected to enter Canada at once.

Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-Gen. Scott, LL.D., written by Himself (1864).