CHAPTER SIX
Absolutist Apostasies

BEFORE EXPANSION COULD EVEN be considered, at least on such a grand, cosmic scale, the new United States first had to secure its own freedom of maneuver in the world system. What this meant exactly was still unknown and thus was always an ongoing process. The first test came soon after the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights when France embarked upon its own republican experiment. Yet the French Revolution followed a much different path than the American: more radical, more destabilizing, and much more violent. Other European monarchies, which naturally feared that the French were setting a dangerous example for their own people, united to suppress the revolutionary fervor. They also came to fear French ambitions to liberate the oppressed people of Europe, and dominate the continent in the process. In 1793, a general European war broke out. Unsurprisingly, the French looked to the Americans to honor at least the spirit of their 1778 alliance.¹

At first, Americans welcomed the French Revolution with near unanimity, a rare thing in the political life of the early republic. Their own liberties had spread to Europe, they boasted; their republican model would spark the reordering of a freer world. Partly because of millennial expectations that the revolutionary events in Paris were heralding a new age, perhaps even the return of Christ, the American clergy were particularly euphoric. The publication of eschatological books and pamphlets soared in the early 1790s along with hopes for a world free of absolutist monarchy. And not only monarchy—Americans rejoiced that the French had thrown off their despotic church as well as their despotic king. Unlike the rebellious Patriots in America, the French revolutionaries were anticlerical as well as antimonarchical and attacked the Roman Catholic Church with as much fervor as they did the Palace of Versailles. Many Americans hoped—and some even expected—that a full-blown reformation would engulf France and pave the way for the triumph of Protestantism, a glorious turn of events that would in turn launch the rest of Europe, still tyrannized by arbitrary Catholic rule, on the road to Protestant reform. Overall, most Americans agreed with Reverend Joseph Lathrop that France was undergoing a “transition from slavery to liberty—from a dungeon to open day—from total blindness to perfect vision.”²

They were not expecting what actually happened. Instead of replacing their king with a bourgeois, liberal, God-fearing republic, France descended into a bloody orgy of internal violence and external war. Death squads, lawlessness, and above all the prolific use of the guillotine led Americans to think twice about the French Revolution. Opinion turned slowly in response to the horror stories coming out of France, but turn it did when French revolutionaries imposed an absolutist dictatorship of the people to replace the absolutist dictatorship of an individual. Just as shocking was the Revolution’s atheistic iconoclasm. It was one thing to overthrow the Catholic Church; it was another entirely to try to overthrow God himself.

But it was not just the French who were giving radical republicanism a bad name. In Haiti, a successful slave revolt led to a race war between freed slaves and their former masters, which in turn caused hysteria in the United States, especially among Southerners, that racial rebellion and violence could soon spread to their own plantations. In Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 stoked simmering fears about popular revolt and anarchy in the United States itself. And in American religion, deism and skepticism spread rapidly in the 1790s, leading to worries that American morals and republican virtue were being corrupted by the misdirected anticlericalism in France. Thus while many Americans continued to support the French revolutionaries—most notably Thomas Jefferson—the intense ardor for France had begun to cool by 1795. Was radical revolution better than no revolution at all? Many Americans now had their doubts.³

In response, American politics became more divisively partisan, with conservative Federalists arguing with populist Republicans over who best represented America’s true republican spirit. The Federalists were the party of Washington, Adams, Jay, and Hamilton, and favored a strong central government; they found their strongest backing in the North and in the seaboard commercial cities. By contrast, as the party of Jefferson and Madison, the Republicans promoted robust states’ rights at the expense of a relatively weak national government; they enjoyed support in the South and the expanding western hinterland, and among farmers. Terrified by the specter of mob rule, Federalists preferred the reasonableness of British parliamentary democracy. Republicans, by contrast, sympathized closely with the French Revolution, even as it lurched into its most violent phase.⁴

Thus the resumption of hostilities between Britain and France in 1793 confronted U.S. foreign policy with its first crisis at a time when Americans themselves were deeply divided. Under President Washington, the Federalists controlled foreign policy. Though Washington did not adopt a pro-British stance—and could not, given the lingering bitterness of the Revolutionary War—he announced a policy of neutrality and reiterated the rights of neutrals to trade freely, even in wartime. The British suspected the United States of hiding a pro-French policy behind a legalistic cloak of neutrality; as the world’s premier naval power, preventing trade with France was one of Britain’s key strategic weapons. The British refused to recognize American neutrality and preyed on U.S. merchant shipping in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Few Americans enjoyed these depredations, but fewer still wanted to pick a war at sea with the Royal Navy—or even in their own Northwest, where British troops and their Indian allies were spoiling for a fight. To calm nerves, uphold the principle and practice of neutrality, and settle once and for all the outstanding tensions from the Revolutionary War, Washington decided to negotiate a new settlement with Britain. As his negotiator, he sent John Jay to London in 1794; within a year, Jay negotiated what quickly came to be known as the Jay Treaty. Insulted and then incensed by what it believed to be a supreme act of betrayal, France vowed to get even with the Americans. From 1798 to 1800, with John Adams now president, the United States and France fought the inelegantly but accurately named Quasi War, an undeclared conflict fought mostly on the high seas. The result, as many Republicans pointed out, was a Federalist foreign policy that favored the British. Rarely has the politics of American foreign policy been so bitterly contested.⁵

Both politics and diplomacy split along religious lines, too. The anticlericalism, deism, and atheism of the revolutionary turn in France did not much trouble theologically skeptical Republicans like Jefferson and Madison. On the other hand, Federalist—and not coincidentally Calvinist—New England had never really overcome its suspicions of Catholicism or tolerated deism, much less atheism. When confronted with the radical turn of events in France, the largely Federalist New England clergy found it natural to turn these suspicions into fears of the anarchy and violence that seemed to accompany a revolt against God as well as king. Conservative churchmen across the country, and not only Federalists, nodded in agreement. To the people and the clergy, the French Revolution seemed to herald another epoch in the coming of the millennium and Christ’s return to earth. The clergy’s opposition to the French Revolution—and to honoring the 1778 treaty with France—was not simply a matter of preserving their own privileges at home, but a panicky defensive measure to protect the American republic. The Protestant faith, they argued, provided the best insurance, and as a result religious passions intensified in New England and elsewhere. Alexander Hamilton rediscovered his own faith at this time and promoted initiatives, such as the Christian Constitutional Society, to preserve America’s religious virtues and patriotism against the radical contagion of the French Revolution.⁶

This unusually pious moment for Hamilton reflected a more general reassertion of Christian republicanism, especially the identification of the United States as God’s chosen nation and Americans as his chosen people. Protestant clergy teamed up with the Federalists to promote opposition to the radicalism of the French Revolution as a form of patriotism. As the New England clergy argued following the rise of violence in France, no revolution was better than one that unleashed anarchy and popular tyranny. Taking advantage of this shift in the public’s mood and indifferent to the strictures of separating the activities of church and state, President Washington proclaimed a national day of prayer and holy thanksgiving, the model for many regional celebrations on a smaller scale. While the renewal of Christian republicanism generated considerable hostility to radical French revolutionary violence in the 1790s, it also helped lay the foundations for both the expansive ideology of manifest destiny and the crusading reformist zeal of abolitionism and pacifism in the decades to come. This was precisely the internal contradiction that would later torment John Quincy Adams.⁷

Yet also infused with this Protestant mindset, albeit in a more subtle form, were some of the most important figures in early American diplomacy. John Adams, vice president until 1797 and then president until 1801, loathed Britain—but he loathed French absolutism and radicalism even more. His ideas and perceptions about France—even a republican France—were rooted in a typically Puritan, visceral anti-Catholicism, and he viewed this erstwhile ally as a threat to American security, interests, and values. In 1776, Adams had drafted the Model Treaty as the safest way for America to ensure its interests and protect its ideals in foreign relations, particularly its relations with France; in the 1790s, he updated this vision through neutrality, and then a resort to war when the principle and practice of neutrality needed enforcement. In the time between, he had been one of the first Americans to criticize the French Revolution. These old cultural suspicions provided the ideological bedrock for Adams’s hard-line policy during the Quasi War.⁸

Adams was not alone in harboring a vestigial distrust of French absolutism and Catholicism. French diplomats could not have been pleased when Washington sent John Jay to London to negotiate his eponymous treaty with the British. Jay did not wear his spirituality lightly: his faith was evangelical, and later in life he served as president of the American Bible Society. Nor his religious identity: his grandparents were French Huguenot refugees who escaped to the American colonies with England’s blessing and encouragement. Jay never forgot this act of Protestant solidarity, even at the outbreak of an anti-British war for independence that he supported. “I wish it well,” he said of Great Britain in 1778; “it afforded my ancestors asylum from persecution.” Jay was horrified by the violence of the French Revolution, and though he welcomed its outbreak in 1789, he was among the first Americans to turn against it. Jay’s 1795 treaty with the British proved to be explosively controversial, with even some of his fellow Federalists believing that he had conceded the British too much, too easily. But it should not have come as a shock. Jay acted as a patriotic American, but he also acted upon a visceral fear of France and a deep, sentimental attachment to Britain—and both emotions were rooted in the two countries’ different attitudes toward religious liberty.⁹

AS AMERICANS WRESTLED with the problems of foreign alliances, neutrality, and the desirability of republican revolutions elsewhere, they were also confronted with a crisis from another region that would become all too familiar in years to come: the Middle East. Though the term itself is anachronistic—nobody in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries yet called it “the Middle East”—its challenges were not. Pirates and raiders from the states of North Africa’s notoriously lawless Barbary Coast—Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, stretching from present-day Morocco to Libya—had been preying on European shipping for centuries. Even when they were still British colonists, American merchants and traders had crossed the globe in search of profit, and the Mediterranean world was one of their most lucrative destinations. Until the Revolution, American ships could count on the awesome might of the Royal Navy for protection from Barbary pirates. But independence severed all ties with the mother country, and American ships suddenly realized just how difficult navigating the Mediterranean could be. The pirates not only seized cargo and money, they captured American seamen, either to ransom or to sell into slavery. Dependent upon overseas trade, American officials could hardly let piracy go unopposed. After fruitless attempts to placate the Barbary rulers with tribute and ransom payments, they instead built a navy and sent it to the shores of North Africa to defend American shipping and assert the right to trade.¹⁰

Without realizing it, the Barbary pirates had provoked America’s first military conflict with Islam. Though religion did not spark the Barbary Wars that ran intermittently from the 1780s until 1815, it did give them color, texture, and purpose, leading to a clash of civilizations despite the best efforts of the U.S. government not to mix religion and foreign policy. The “United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,” proclaimed a 1797 treaty between the United States and Tripoli, “as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims].” By the terms of the treaty, the governments of the United States and Tripoli further pledged not to allow religion to become a cause of war. Two years later, President John Adams appointed William Eaton as consul to Tunis. Eaton sailed for the Mediterranean on a cresting wave of optimism, believing that “Universal Love” would disprove “the idea that Mahometans and Christians are natural enemies.” Though Adams’s successor, President Thomas Jefferson, wanted to punish the Barbary states and uphold American credibility through the use of military force, he did so in pursuit of trading rights, national honor, and reforming the international system rather than in the name of a Christian crusade against Islam.¹¹

Yet events, powered by religious (and racial) prejudices on both sides, would ultimately scuttle Eaton and Jefferson’s hopes. Despite the fine language of the 1797 treaty, the people of Barbary instinctively thought of Americans as Christians—and loathed them for it. Often they would add religious insult to economic or military injury, such as Tripoli’s decision to rename the captured ship USS Philadelphia as The Gift of Allah. But Americans were just as steeped in religious ideology and identity. Shortly before he ratified the 1797 treaty, and thus its clause denying America’s status as a Christian nation, Adams concluded his presidential inaugural address with a ringing endorsement of the political and social virtues of Christianity. With this Christian identity came a deep-rooted fear of Islam. The Puritans of colonial New England had thought of Muslims as a satanic force and the Ottoman Empire as a hellish source of earthly evil, and it was their view that had prevailed widely throughout the American colonies. Muslim Turks had always figured prominently alongside Catholics in the colonists’ millennial theology. These millennial beliefs intensified with the escalation of tensions between America and the Barbary states, giving Turks a more central role as anti-Christian forces who would provoke Christ’s return. Muslims, moreover, were thought to believe in a faith that was the very opposite of America’s virtuous Christian republicanism: lazy, decadent, corrupt, and despotic. Islam, Americans said, encouraged tyranny because it kept its believers ignorant and servile. Muslim potentates were even more all-powerful than the absolutist Catholic kings of Europe, their arbitrary power able to keep “the lives of millions on the footing of a lottery,” according to one bestselling book on Islam. Noah Webster accused the potentates of Barbary of posing a threat to the Christian faith, and with it freedom of conscience and political liberty, much as atheism in revolutionary France and deism in America did. Even the optimists despaired. After a few years serving as America’s envoy to Barbary, Eaton himself changed his view. “Her subjects have neither relish nor stimulus to ambition,” he reported on conditions in Algiers, because “Her religious system favors indolence” and superstition instead of “the Gift of reason.”¹²

But what the Americans feared most was captivity, because it almost always led to slavery. This was not the virtual, purely theoretical “slavery” in which the British had supposedly kept their taxpaying but unrepresented colonists, but the real thing. American fears about Barbary captivity were so visceral because they were so deep-rooted, echoing back to the horrors of Indian captivity along the unstable borderlands of colonial New England and New York. Indian heathens and Barbary Muslims both represented an antithesis to the American ideal; captivity among such “barbarians”—a revealing word that Americans used to describe both peoples—was an inversion of the normal balance of social power. Bondage was thus spiritual and cultural as well as physical. As Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustin, and especially the family of Eunice Williams could attest, captivity did not just mean a loss of freedom—it threatened assimilation into an alien culture and a total loss of identity.¹³

Loss of physical freedom, Americans assumed, would lead directly to a loss of their Christian faith, probably through forced conversion to Islam. It was widely assumed that seizure by the Barbary pirates could make one an unredeemed captive, condemned, as was little Eunice Williams, to a life of savagery and ignorance among the heathens. Such fears were not unreasonable: for centuries, Muslim slave masters, throughout the Ottoman Empire and along the Barbary coast, had been notorious for forcibly converting enslaved Europeans to Islam. Estimates vary, but by the time of America’s conflict in the Mediterranean, up to a million white Europeans had lived a life of Barbary slavery. Americans had also suffered Barbary captivity since the early seventeenth century, albeit on a much smaller scale. Cotton Mather, who played an important role in shaping the memory of colonial Indian captivity, claimed in 1703 that Muslim Barbary states boasted “the most horrible Captivity in the world.” Islamic law justified the enslavement of infidels, and while Americans did not think of themselves as blasphemous unbelievers, the Barbary pirates certainly did. “Now I have got you, you Christian dogs,” hissed Ali Hassan, the ruler of Algiers, at his American captives. Several American captives were unable to withstand the pressures to convert and completely transform their identities forever.¹⁴

After years of broken treaties, unending ransom and tribute payments, and the occasional feckless use of armed force, in 1815 President James Madison put an end to the conflict by dispatching a powerful fleet to the Mediterranean. No longer would Barbary pirates harass American shipping. Only military power, Americans believed, could redeem their captives in the Middle East—and the nation itself.

IT WAS NO coincidence that Madison felt free to act against Barbary in 1815. Only a few months before, the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain had come to an end. The U.S. Navy, a minnow before the war, grew substantially in size and ability in holding its own against the famed prowess of the Royal Navy and was better positioned to take on the Barbary pirates once hostilities with Britain had ended. But more important, Barbary and Britain posed many of the same challenges to the United States, over trading rights, freedom of the seas, and national honor. Having upheld America’s rights against the British, it was natural—and politically imperative—for Madison to send the same message to Barbary. American ideology and values had been battle-tested in both wars, and settling scores with these two enemies settled Americans’ views about the wider world. It also laid the foundations for Americans to turn inward and expand their own continental holdings and imperial ambitions.

With the renewal of war in Europe in 1803, the two main antagonists, Britain and France, each sought to freeze the other’s economy by blocking the import and export of raw materials and finished goods. As it did in the 1790s, this meant the harassment of American shipping, which traded with both nations. In 1806, Napoleonic France instituted the “Continental System,” effectively shutting Britain off from Europe; the British responded by blockading European ports to strangle the continent’s vital trade with the outside world. In a conflict with such dynamics, the United States, which as a neutral aimed to continue trading with everyone, was always going to run into trouble with Great Britain. The British compounded American anger with their policy of impressment: searching for runaways from the Royal Navy by boarding American vessels and conscripting American seamen. Having been bullied continually by British, French, and Barbary ships since winning their independence in 1783, nothing was more humiliating to Americans. But as important as freedom of the seas and trading rights were, especially to a nation that relied heavily upon maritime commerce, the main cause of war in 1812 was westward expansion. And here, too, tensions assumed a familiar face. Much as it had done in issuing the Proclamation Line in 1763 and the Quebec Act in 1774, London angered American settlers and farmers by supporting the right of Indian sovereignty in the Northwest, the huge swath of territory bounded by the Great Lakes to the north, the Ohio River to the south, and the Mississippi River to the west. Although the Jay Treaty was supposed to have settled the issue of Britain’s presence in the American frontier—which of course was originally supposed to have been settled by the 1783 Anglo-American peace treaty—British officials and troops in Canada continued to encourage Indian resistance to American expansion and settlement.¹⁵

Behind both causes for war—whether Americans could secure freedom of the seas and settlement of the west without British interference—lay the more delicate issues of national honor and the viability of republicanism. And deeper still, behind them lay an even more delicate national self-esteem that was in large part rooted in America’s religious traditions, values, and culture, which were inseparable from nationalism, republicanism, honor, and credibility. In this sense, religion had two roles: it helped give shape to the reasons for war, and thus to the war itself; and it provided Americans with a convenient, comprehensible, and powerful way of expressing their views.¹⁶

In general, American opinion divided deeply—more deeply, even, than during the French Revolution or any other crisis until the Civil War—along partisan lines of prowar Republicans and antiwar Federalists. So hostile to war was New England that its political leaders convened in Hartford in 1814 and only narrowly rejected a motion to secede from the United States. Luckily for Madison, though, a clear majority of Americans supported the Republican march to war, possibly because by this time a clear majority of Americans were Republicans themselves. Yet one thing united all Americans: the use of religious rhetoric and imagery either to damn or to sanctify the war. Both sides argued their case with a pious stridency and moral urgency that only religious faith could sustain.

Based mostly in the South and along the nation’s western borderlands, the so-called “war hawks” agitated for war as a way of both redeeming national honor and clearing the way for westward settlement. Renowned for his role in separating church and state but desperate for public support for a controversial war, President Madison set a providential national tone. By taking America to war, he told the nation in his War Message of June 1, 1812, he would “commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events.” Madison set aside August 20 as a national fast day of thanksgiving and prayer, the first of several during the war, so that a penitent America could appease the Lord’s “divine displeasure,” evidenced by his unleashing the British upon a backsliding nation, and ask for His “merciful forgiveness” in the form of victory.¹⁷

Other prominent Americans used religion to sanctify war with Britain. “Parson” Mason Weems, an ordained Episcopal minister and one of the era’s bestselling authors, believed that war would not only restore America’s virtue, it would also instill the virtues of self-control and hard work among its people. A celebrated biographer of George Washington, Weems contrasted the Christian republican values of the United States with the decadent “modern Goths” of Great Britain. Benjamin Rush, a noted physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, respected public intellectual, and devout evangelical, made a similar argument. In doing so, Rush even repudiated a cause close to his heart: Christian pacifism. War as a godly test of national character, war as a cleansing agent for the nation’s sins and weaknesses, war as a righteous instrument to redeem national virtue—these powerful ideas, pronounced constantly by Madison, Weems, Rush, and others, were quickly absorbed into a narrative of national patriotism, heroism, and justice that propelled the War of 1812 onward.¹⁸

Religious advocates for war also cast a covetous gaze westward. David Jones, a Baptist chaplain during the Revolutionary War, rabid Anglophobe, passionate supporter of war with Britain, and friend of President Madison, reported from his travels through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia that “never were people more unanimous” than they were in supporting the war. Jones especially encouraged the president to seize Protestant English Canada but not Catholic French Quebec, which would enable the United States to achieve its most important objective: subduing the Indian tribes who barred the way to westward settlement. “We must humble the Savages,” Jones advised Madison; “they must as a Conquered People ask for Peace” that would be contingent upon “their engaging to cultivate the Land, and abandon the former mode of Life.”¹⁹

But not everyone agreed that war was necessary, or even wise. The antiwar camp was strongest in the Federalist redoubt of New England, where it commanded overwhelming support. New England clergy, Congregationalists mostly, proclaimed that by waging war unjustly and unwisely, “without the approbation of heaven,” Madison had broken his sacred covenant with the people, just as George III had in 1776. The war was “execrable,” spat a Massachusetts minister, its mindless, unthinking supporters guilty of “tame, African, slavish deportment.” Many New Englanders looked wistfully upon their Puritan heritage for guidance and examples of moral courage in the face of a wicked government. In this latest incarnation of the Puritan jeremiad, clergy and state officials accused the Madison administration of betraying America’s true principles. Invoking the Puritan founders, Governor John Cotton Smith of Connecticut addressed the state’s General Assembly in October 1814, when secessionist dissent was at its peak, and promised to “imitate their virtues” in the hope “that God who supported them in the darkest hours will not forsake their descendants.” Even Baptists, mostly Jeffersonians and Madisonians and thus not usually sympathetic to Federalist causes, protested the war, which helped blunt Republican efforts to tie New England, and its established churches, to the suppression of religious liberty. Isaac Backus, like the Republicans a champion of the separation of church and state and a fierce opponent of Federalist New England’s religious establishments, railed against “calamities and multiple evils of War.” That Americans “may learn righteousness” from their humiliations and depredations would be the only good to come from war with Britain.²⁰

While military officials in New England may not have believed that war in general was always evil, they shared the general hostility to this particular war with Britain. Few rituals in New England’s religious culture were as celebrated as the annual artillery election sermon, delivered by an esteemed minister to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, a Boston-based militia founded by the first Puritan settlers. The same day Madison delivered his War Address to Congress, Reverend Eliphalet Porter of Roxbury, Massachusetts, delivered the 1812 election sermon. As the “threatening clouds” of war gathered, Porter preached that war was just only if it was necessary and defensive. “They who are called to assume the character of the soldier,” Porter warned, “can never be indifferent to the moral nature of their cause.” Two years later, Reverend Samuel Cary used his election sermon to accuse Madison of betraying the ideals of the Revolution, for stooping low to emulate the sinful ambitions of European kings. Reflecting the Federalists’ habitual suspicion of mob rule, Cary concluded that the wars in North America and Europe had shown that the untrammeled popular will could be a source for anarchy as well as freedom. The war was “so unexpected, so appalling” that it “baffled all our calculations and all human foresight.” But God would see to it that America and Europe would both soon be at peace, able then to let the true Christian spirit flourish in resurrecting a godly society.²¹

Though it was a minority view in many parts, opposition could also be found nationwide thanks to the emergence of a “greater New England” populated by thousands of inland migrants who moved from Massachusetts and Connecticut to establish transplanted towns, villages, and farms in western New York, Ohio, and beyond. Reverend S. P. Robbins, a preacher in Marietta, Ohio, wrote to his family back in Connecticut that though “the war is far more popular here than with you,” he resisted it nonetheless, “on account of its being so unnecessary and unjust.” Robbins confessed to harboring other, more radical thoughts: “were I drafted … I should not go—and should think I was more justifiable in refusing.” He blamed Madison for an especially unenlightened foreign policy and for visiting the horrors of a tyrannical war upon republican America. “To what extent,” Robbins concluded in words that would echo down through future debates over war, slavery, and civil rights, “ought we to obey the civil constituted authorities of our country?” Antiwar sentiment could also be found wherever Federalists lived—even in as unlikely a place as South Carolina, where the expansion of slavery and plantation agriculture and the prevalence of land speculators made it a particularly strong supporter of war with Britain. Here, too, antiwar activists believed that God was on their side. The “Finger of HEAVEN points to PEACE!!!” screeched one South Carolina Federalist; another damned the war as “the scourge of an avenging God” who was disappointed that His people had diverted from the path set down by the “virtuous WASHINGTON.”²²

Yet while the antiwar movement may have called upon God, few of its members were Christian pacifists. Like many Loyalists during the Revolution, antiwar Federalists were opposed to this particular war, not to all wars as a matter of principle. Until the War of 1812, almost all American thinking on war lacked consistency. After all, Jefferson and Madison, the architects of wars against Barbary and Britain, had argued that war was the enemy of liberty because it led to higher taxes, standing armies, and ambitious governments. Still, the War of 1812 marked an important turning point in American history because it gave birth to the first truly pacifistic antiwar movement. Once confined to the traditional peace sects, predominantly the Society of Friends and the Moravians, pacifists emerged from other denominations as well. Activists such as David Dodge, a wealthy New York merchant and active Presbyterian layman, and Reverend Noah Worcester, a New Hampshire Unitarian, established small antiwar followings and spawned local peace societies. Most significant was the branching out of Christian pacifism—at that time the basis for virtually all pacifism in the United States—beyond its usual Quaker and Moravian confines. Equally significant was pacifists’ ability to gain recognition for their status as conscientious objectors even if they failed to win broad acceptance or sympathy. And though they failed to slow the march to war, or even influence policy, during the War of 1812 Christian pacifists managed to present a credible moral and political alternative to war. No longer could the state claim a monopoly on righteousness. It was a fateful development that would push future U.S. foreign policy to further heights of moralistic purpose, even when it also resorted to the use of brutal, bloody force.²³

When news of the war’s end arrived in the winter of 1815, Americans celebrated as if they had won a tremendous victory. On the face of it, this was absurd: the national capital had been sacked and burned, the British had officially conceded nothing on impressment, and one of the main objectives of the war, the conquest of Canada, had ended in total failure. All this mattered little, though. Somewhat chastened by their flirtations with secession, antiwar protesters were relieved that their bitter nightmare of war and dissent was over. And despite the failure of the war to achieve anything tangible, Madison’s supporters claimed they had fought and won a “second war of independence” from the domineering British. Americans had always wanted to act alone in the world and remain free from the contaminating corruptions of Europe, but since 1783 Britain and France had not allowed them any such liberty. Now, having matched the British in war, few would dare challenge the United States in the Western Hemisphere. “God had tested Americans and their government,” a writer from the popular magazine Niles’ Weekly Register boasted, “to secure future peace and establish our mild and benevolent institutions.” They could all be “proud in the belief that America now stands in the first rank of nations.”²⁴

During the war, all sides invoked the guiding hand of providence to illustrate the righteousness of their cause. The war’s opponents saw it as God’s way of chastising his people for electing the Republicans to power. The failed invasion of Canada and the burning of Washington, D.C., were sure signs, in the words of a New Hampshire preacher, of “the indignation of Heaven.” Supporters, however, could just as plausibly point to a series of naval victories against the Royal Navy on Lake Erie, the defeat of a British invasion at Lake Champlain, and of course General Andrew Jackson’s glorious triumph at the Battle of New Orleans as proof that the “God of Battles is surely on our side.” America, a Vermont newspaper concluded at war’s end, had fought “a holy war, for the Lord has fought for us the battles, and given us the victories.” In both these readings of God’s providence, America had endured a test of its will and character—and most important, its faith. In a strange way, then, the end of the war not only treated the nation’s sectional and political wounds, it vindicated and enhanced a vision of the United States as divinely destined for peace, prosperity, and above all, national greatness. As Americans like David Jones turned their attentions inland and focused their unceasing energies on conquering and settling the west, they did so confident in the knowledge that they were doing the Lord’s work. They were fulfilling America’s destiny, though the consequences for Native Americans would be disastrous. “It appears evident that God has been on our side,” a Methodist preacher from Brooklyn announced in 1815. “If God be for us, who can stand against us?”²⁵