THE AMERICAN VICTORY at New Orleans was so astonishing as to appear miraculous. Jackson’s army killed, wounded or captured more than two thousand British soldiers while losing fewer than one hundred of its own. The British abandoned their design on New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley and sailed away in disgrace. Overnight Jackson became an American hero, the towering figure in an otherwise dismal war. Americans spoke of Jackson as the second George Washington, and New Orleans as the sequel to Yorktown. Before the battle the republican experiment had seemed on the brink of dissolution; after the battle it stood strong and glorious.
Henry Clay’s fortunes turned a handspring on the news of the victory. Clay had grown as dispirited as anyone by the first two years of the war. He might have questioned his own judgment in bringing on the conflict, but instead he blamed the president. “Mr. Madison is wholly unfit for the storms of war,” Clay wrote to a confidant. “Nature has cast him in too benevolent a mold. Admirably adapted to the tranquil scenes of peace, blending all the mild and amiable virtues, he is not fit for the rough and rude blasts which the conflicts of nations generate.”
Yet Madison was the president, and the de facto leader of the Republican party. Clay had no choice but to make do. Consequently when, in early 1814, Madison asked him to join a peace commission to negotiate an end to the war, Clay couldn’t say no. It was a shrewd appointment on the president’s part. Clay had played a large role in getting the country into the war; now he would have to take responsibility for getting the country out of it. At this time nearly everyone in the United States thought the country would be lucky to escape the war with its territory intact and its honor no more than bruised. The heady hopes of Clay and the others that Canada would fall into America’s grasp had proven delusional; Madison wanted to ensure that the chief delusionist signed the treaty that said it wasn’t going to happen.
Clay had his own calculations. He couldn’t plausibly turn down the assignment, and he supposed that it would confer gravitas on a young man eager to better himself in the political world. As speaker of the House, Clay was commonly accounted the second most powerful man in the American government. Having taken the measure of the man ahead of him—and having concluded that James Madison had nothing on Henry Clay—he let himself think he might become president in the fullness of time. The peace commission promised a path. A peace commissioner would gain diplomatic experience that would qualify him to become secretary of state, and secretaries of state had shown a habit of becoming president. Secretary Jefferson had become President Jefferson; Secretary Madison had become President Madison; Secretary James Monroe was being groomed to be President Monroe. Secretary Clay…?
The peace commission, which included John Quincy Adams, recently American minister to Russia, and Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, found little to do at first. The British, fresh from their defeat of Napoleon, were conspicuously uninterested in any terms the Americans could accept. “We were prepared, by the events which occurred in Europe, by the temper manifested in English pamphlets and prints, and by the well known arrogance of the British character, for the most extravagant propositions to be brought forward in our negotiations,” Clay informed Monroe in a confidential letter. “Unhappily we have not been disappointed in this expectation.” Britain’s envoys refused even to discuss the issues that had prompted the war. “The prospect of peace has vanished,” Clay said.
Peace was elusive even among the American commissioners. John Quincy Adams found fault in all men, and the better he knew them, the more fault he found. His acquaintance with Clay had been slight; as it improved, his opinion of Clay did not. James Gallatin was the teenage son of Albert Gallatin, who had brought the boy along to take notes and make copies. James also kept a diary. “Mr. Adams in a very bad temper,” he wrote not long after the negotiations began. “Mr. Clay annoys him. Father pours oil on the troubled waters.” The sniping continued. “Clay uses strong language to Adams, and Adams returns the compliment,” James wrote. “Father looks calmly on with a twinkle in his eye.” On another day: “Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay object to everything except what they suggest themselves. Father remains calm but firm and does all he can to keep peace.”
To a degree surprising in a diplomat, Adams could be deficient in basic tact. “We had been three hours in conference with the British plenipotentiaries,” Adams wrote to his wife. “And it had been perhaps the most unpleasant one that we have held with them. We had returned home, and were in session conversing together upon what had been passing in the conference, when Mr. Clay remarked that Mr. Goulburn”—of the British party—“was a man of much irritation. Irritability, said I, is the word, Mr. Clay: irritability. And then, fixing him with an earnest look, and a tone of voice between seriousness and jest, I added ‘like somebody else that I know.’ ” Clay laughed off the gibe before returning it: “Aye, that we do; all know him, and none better than yourself.”
Adams’s chronic complaint was that Clay—and the other members of the commission—failed to take their assignment as seriously as he did. “I dined again at the table-d’hôte at one,” Adams wrote in his diary. “The other gentlemen dined together, at four. They sit after dinner and drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare. I find it impossible, even with the most rigorous economy of time, to do half the writing that I ought.”
Eventually the British got down to business, and serious negotiations commenced. They lasted until December, when, on Christmas Eve, the two sides’ commissioners put their names to the Treaty of Ghent, the essence of which was a return to the status quo ante bellum. Neither side gained or lost territory; neither side won or surrendered rights. The British didn’t forswear seizing neutral ships; they didn’t abandon the principle of impressment. But they no longer required either against the United States now that the war with France was over. The Americans didn’t win Canada, but neither did they surrender land of their own.
“The terms of this instrument are undoubtedly not such as our country expected at the commencement of the war,” Clay reported to Monroe the day after the signing. This was a striking understatement from one of those most responsible for raising the initial American expectations. “Judged of, however, by the actual condition of things, so far as it is known to us, they cannot be pronounced very unfavorable. We lose no territory, I think no honor.”
ANDREW JACKSON DIDN’T get the word. No one west of the Atlantic did for several weeks after the Ghent signing. In the interim, Jackson rewrote the treaty, as it came to be interpreted by Americans. Nearly everyone in America had expected grim tidings from New Orleans; instead they received news of the tremendous victory. And then arrived the ship from Europe bearing the treaty. The sequence of events prompted many Americans to conclude—emotionally if not intellectually—that the triumph at New Orleans had forced the British to come to terms. Interpreted before New Orleans, the treaty had declared the war a draw; after New Orleans it made America the winner.
It made winners as well of Henry Clay and John Calhoun. The leaders of the war hawks, lately on the defensive, now basked in the glow of victory. They quietly forgot their promises of Canada falling easily into American hands and focused on their defense of American rights and honor. They had stood up for America, and been vindicated. What more could Americans ask of their leaders?
Clay benefited particularly from the turn of mood. He had braced himself, at the time of the signing of the treaty, for searching questions from disappointed constituents. Instead he came home to celebrations. Supporters in Washington, Philadelphia and Lexington held dinners and parades in his honor. Kentucky voters gave him back his seat in Congress, where he resumed his duties as House speaker. In the House he praised the war against the faint hearts who had called it into question. The war’s declaration had been just, he said, and though the most optimistic expectations accompanying the war’s start hadn’t been borne out, this was due to circumstances that had changed during the war. “France was annihilated, blotted out of the map of Europe; the vast power wielded by Bonaparte existed no longer,” Clay explained. Suddenly fighting alone against Britain, the United States had held the most powerful empire on earth to a draw. “Let any man look at the degraded condition of this country before the war—the scorn of the universe, the contempt of ourselves—and tell me if we have gained nothing by the war. What is our present situation? Respectability and character abroad, security and confidence at home.” Clay was proud to own his part in this result. “I gave a vote for the declaration of war. I exerted all the little influence and talents I could command to make the war. The war was made. It is terminated. And I declare, with perfect sincerity, if it had been permitted to me to lift the veil of futurity and to have seen the precise series of events which has occurred, my vote would have been unchanged.”