WEBSTER’S PRÉCIS OF the fighting scarcely scratched the surface of a war gone badly awry. The war hawks had predicted the easy conquest of Canada. “The militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet,” Henry Clay boasted to his fellow lawmakers. Clay couldn’t have been more wrong. A largely militia force under William Hull invaded Canada with high expectations, but it was repulsed by British and Indian forces, whose counterattack so terrified Hull that he surrendered Detroit without a shot being fired. Hull went on to order the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, on the future site of Chicago. Amid the evacuation more than eighty Americans were massacred by pro-British Potawatomie Indians.
A second attempt at capturing Canada began with an attack across the Niagara River near the great falls. It ended as soon as it started, with the rout of the Americans at Queenston Heights. A third try, a thrust north from Lake Champlain, fizzled when militia troops refused to fight beyond America’s borders.
Far from adding to American territory, the war soon found American forces fighting to keep from losing American ground. William Henry Harrison took over from Hull, who was court-martialed for cowardice, convicted and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved by Madison. Harrison rallied his troops and in 1813 moved against the British and their Shawnee allies, led by Tecumseh. He recaptured Detroit before crossing a short distance into Canada, where he defeated the Anglo-Indian allies and killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames.
Harrison’s victory eased the threat to the American Northwest, but it did nothing to secure the Atlantic seaboard. The British navy dominated America’s small fleet, strangling American commerce and ferrying British troops to undefended points along the coast. The only thing that prevented a full-scale British invasion was London’s continuing concern about the war against France. But that conflict ended in the spring of 1814 with the defeat of Napoleon. British ships and troops were transferred to the American theater and immediately began making their presence felt. In August the British squadron to which George Gleig was attached ascended the Chesapeake and landed the force that smashed the feckless defenders of Washington, rampaged about the city and burned the principal government buildings. Congress was not in session, sparing Clay, Calhoun and the other war hawks the ignominy of having to flee the enemy they had scorned. But Madison and his administration were forced to take refuge in Virginia. The only person who gained reputation that dark day was Dolley Madison, the president’s wife, who rescued a revered portrait of George Washington before the White House was torched.
JOHN CALHOUN REALIZED he had some explaining to do. He didn’t blame himself for having oversold the war. And he couldn’t blame the soldiers without seeming unpatriotic. So he blamed the Federalists. “Party spirit is more violent than I ever knew,” he told a friend. “In what it will terminate is impossible to conjecture.” Calhoun decried the threat of secession from Daniel Webster and other spokesmen for New England. They were criminally hindering the war effort and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Calhoun vowed to stay the course. “My resolve is taken. No menace, no threat of disunion shall shake me.” Calhoun would become the high priest of sectionalism, but at this early date he identified with the nation. “I by no means despair of the destiny of our nation or government,” he said. “National greatness and perfection are of slow growth, often checked, often to appearance destroyed.” But the underlying strength remained. “The intelligence, the virtue and the tone of public sentiment are too great in this country to permit its freedom to be destroyed by either domestic or foreign foes.”
Calhoun would construct a philosophy demanding respect for political minorities, but while he was in the majority, he demanded that the minority sit down and shut up. He distinguished between two species of opposition. “When it is simply the result of that diversity in the structure of our intellect which conducts to different conclusions on the same subject, and is confined within those bounds which love of country and political honesty prescribe, it is one of the most useful guardians of liberty,” he told the House. But too often it took a different form. “Combined with faction and ambition, it bursts those limits within which it may usefully act, and becomes the first of evils.” The latter variety, which Calhoun called “factious opposition,” sought not the good of the country but the good of the opposition. “The fiercest and most ungovernable passions of our nature—ambition, pride, rivalry and hate—enter into its dangerous composition, made all the more so by its power of delusion, by which its projects against government are covered in most instances, even to the eyes of its victims, by the specious show of patriotism.”
Calhoun regretted that factious opposition marked the Federalists’ resistance to the administration’s war measures. “What is it at this moment?” he asked rhetorically of the Federalists’ strategy. “Withhold the laws; withhold the loans; withhold the men who are to fight our battles; or, in other words, to destroy public faith and deliver the country unarmed to the mercy of the enemy.” The Federalists were engaged in nothing less than “moral treason,” the form of disloyalty “which in all ages and countries ever proved the most deadly foe to freedom.”
Calhoun called on every member of Congress to act with the Republican majority while the war lasted. Nothing less than the fate of the republic hung in the balance.
“It is the war of the Revolution revived,” he said, repeating the battle cry of the war hawks. “We are again struggling for our liberty and independence.” Americans must pull together as they had pulled together in 1776. “The enemy stands ready and eagerly watches to seize any opportunity which our feebleness or division may present to realize his gigantic schemes of conquest.” America must show no weakness; Congress must act as one.