4

INVADING YOUR NEIGHBORS

In 2010 I began noticing them on the roads around the Washington, DC, area. For the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, the state of Maryland was changing its standard-issue license plates to plates commemorating the war. The license plate features a red, white, and blue image of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry with an even larger rendering of the Stars and Stripes flag waving atop the fort. In the air above it all are shimmering bursts of red that look like the fireworks one sees above most city skylines on July Fourth—except that the bursts represent the real “bombs bursting in air” that Francis Scott Key wrote about in his poem celebrating the defense of Fort McHenry against British attack. The poem would become the country’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The anthem and Maryland’s license plate offer sanitized, bloodless visions of war. While some of those bombs may have burst in air, others burst through the bodies of human beings defending Fort McHenry, as well as the bodies of British troops ordered to attack the fort. How is it that Maryland’s leaders decided to celebrate the War of 1812 on the license plate and in official commemorative events? Some state officials surely thought it would be a boon for Maryland’s tourist industry. But most in the United States know little about the war. I was one of them before starting this book. When I saw the license plates, I remember asking myself, What was that war really about?

The war probably got only a brief mention in my history classes. I had a sense that whatever story I was told while growing up was severely limited. Mostly I remember learning that the war was a “tie” and that Andrew Jackson defeated the British in a battle in New Orleans that took place two weeks after the war had ended. Many characterize the war as a tie, employing the language of sports that’s so often used to describe wars—as if a country or people could “win” when hundreds, thousands, or millions die and are injured. Of course, some do win in war—most often politicians, high-ranking military officials, business elites, and others who claim fortune or fame thanks to war. The vast majority, on all sides, suffer. The history books tend to depict Jackson’s “victory” in New Orleans as a quirky detail of the war that propelled Jackson to the presidency as a war hero and that reflected the slow speed of communications at the time. The many hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides of what was a tragic and unnecessary battle are generally ignored.

U.S. historians began writing about the war shortly after it ended. Their nationalist portrayals framed the war as a kind of second war for independence, with the United States as plucky underdog finally and forever overcoming the former colonial master. Perhaps these sorts of depictions explain in part why it took me about fifteen years of researching U.S. bases abroad before I thought to investigate a war in which U.S. forces invaded both Canada and Spanish- and indigenous-occupied Florida, occupying bases in both. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. U.S. forces attempted ten invasions of Canada between 1812 and the war’s end in 1814. “Nearly all,” writes historian J. C. A. Stagg, “ended in miserable and often bloody failures.”1

The U.S. War of 1812 was a war for expansion, a war for the conquest of neighboring lands, a war for empire. And it was widely resisted. The minority Federalist Party opposed the war vehemently. Some in New England considered secession from the United States. The militias of Maine and Connecticut refused the call to war. Militiamen from New York, Ohio, and beyond refused orders to fight in other states or to cross an international border to invade Canada. Some state courts ruled that the federal government did not have the power to require militias to fight in another country. In 1812 militiamen in the Northwest Territory refused to fight until they were paid.2 Thousands of enslaved men, women, and children fled captivity for sanctuary with British troops, who promised freedom. (Many of the formerly enslaved would ultimately resettle in Canada.)³

As the resistance indicates, the war was avoidable. The result could have been the dissolution of the United States just three decades after independence. “Tragic on a scale of vastness previously inconceivable to Americans,” writes Stagg of the death and destruction involved in a war that did almost nothing to change the status quo between the United States and Great Britain.⁴ During the war U.S. General Zebulon Pike’s army burned York, Canada (now Toronto), and its parliament. British troops torched Washington, DC, as revenge. Before their failed attack on Baltimore, British forces easily overran disorganized U.S. troops defending the nation’s capital. President James Madison; his wife, Dolly Madison; and other government leaders fled Washington, DC, for their lives. British troops burned the Capitol, parts of the Library of Congress, the Departments of War, State, Navy, and Treasury, and the President’s House. (The presidential mansion got the name White House after white paint had to be used to paint over the burn marks.) British Admiral George Cockburn raised the Union Jack over the city and marched his men down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When an onlooker yelled, “You could not have done this” if George Washington were alive, Cockburn retorted that Washington wouldn’t have “left his capitol defenseless, for the purpose of making conquest abroad.”⁵

Before he became president, James Madison opposed war. He believed in a president with limited powers. He supported vesting the power to make war in the legislative branch. The executive branch, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson prior to his presidency, “is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it.” Once president, however, Madison felt the temptation of the political capital to be won with war. With the encouragement of House of Representatives Speaker Henry Clay and other “war hawks,” Madison became the first president to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Congress agreed. Over two centuries presidents would find it easier and easier to wage war, with or without congressional approval. Just as Madison had previously feared, war became, over time, the “true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”⁶

Map 8. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1804–1848.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. Because of space limitations, this map does not reflect all conflicts between U.S. forces and Native American peoples. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. U.S. borders are for 1848. Key sources: Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History; “Fort Wiki,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.fortwiki.com; “North American Forts, 1526–1956,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.northamericanforts.com; Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018).

The war itself was at least five U.S. wars fought simultaneously. First, there was the country’s second war with the British Empire. Second, there was a war for Florida fought against the Spanish Empire and the Creek (or Muskogee) Confederacy, made up of Muskogee, Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and other speakers of Muskogean languages from Florida to New Orleans. Third, U.S. forces fought members of the Six Nations Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), who were allied with the British and supported by additional Iroquois allies. Fourth and fifth, there were two wars interrelated with the Six Nations Iroquois war: one with a collection of indigenous peoples from the Algonquian-language group (mostly from the eastern parts of the Northwest Territory and northward into today’s Ontario, Canada) and another with the Dakota Sioux and related peoples in the vicinity of the upper Mississippi River.7

The lines between and within each of these conflicts were blurry at best. Members of some indigenous groups fought far from home at times. So too, the Native peoples were far from homogenous groups. Each had its own complicated internal dynamics and relations with other indigenous and Euro-American peoples as a result of two centuries of prior displacement and death, warfare and disease, and societal fracturing accompanying these traumas. Intermarriage with other Native Americans and peoples of European and African ancestry further complicated the picture. It is little surprise that some American Indian peoples allied with the United States. Most allied with the British, given perceptions that they were more likely to slow or stop Euro-American westward migration into their lands. Some changed allegiances over time.⁸

Following the withdrawal of British forces to Canada and other parts of the British Empire at war’s end, Native peoples’ ability to resist U.S. expansion weakened further. The vicious “first way of war” was again the “engine of conquest.” Widespread land expropriations and the enforced separation of Indians and whites followed. To most settlers Indians were mere obstacles to drive out or annihilate.⁹

In 1813 Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia wrote the Secretary of War to say he would “rejoice at the opportunity of placing the American eagle on the ramparts of Mobile, Pensacola, and Fort St. Augustine” in Spanish- and Native American–controlled Florida.10 Jackson’s request reflected growing expansionist desires among many settlers, which contributed to the pressure to wage war against Britain two years before that war. Such feelings were already on display in Florida. In 1810 former Revolutionary War soldier Philemon Thomas led seventy-five Euro-American rebels into Spain’s Fort San Carlos in Baton Rouge, in what was then Spanish-controlled western Florida (today’s Louisiana). The attackers killed five Spanish soldiers. The other Spaniards surrendered or fled.¹¹

Thomas and fellow leaders of the revolt declared independence from Spain and the creation of what would be the short-lived West Florida Republic. The rebellion’s leaders formed a West Florida Assembly, created a blue and white Lone Star flag, and elected as governor the more or less aptly named Fulwar Skipwith. The assembly commissioned Thomas as a general of the republic’s army and ordered him to conquer as much Spanish territory as possible. Thomas seized lands from the Mississippi River to the Pearl River, which today forms the boundary between Louisiana and Mississippi. After seventy-four days of independence, President James Madison announced the annexation of the former Spanish territory to the United States.¹² The leaders of the rebellion got exactly what they wished. Other rebels would follow in the decades to come, declaring independent states in Texas (1835), in California (1846), and across the South (1861), spurring the U.S. Civil War.

In the rest of Spanish Florida, however, Congress refused Andrew Jackson’s request to invade with his Tennessee militia. Instead, U.S. leaders felt confident enough about the war with Britain to divert troops to form an invasion force to enter that part of Florida’s Gulf Coast still disputed by the United States and Spain. The U.S. Army conquered Mobile. It occupied the town’s fort, whose name changes alone tell Mobile’s colonial history: under France, it was Fort Condé; under British rule, Fort Charlotte; under Spain, Fort Carlota; and under U.S. rule, Fort Charlotte, once more.¹³

Jackson was left out of the fight but saw an opportunity when parts of the Muskogee Nation rebelled against an influx of thousands of Euro-American settlers into its territory. In August 1813 a splinter group of Muskogee, called the “Red Stick” movement, attacked and destroyed Fort Mims, near the border of the Mississippi Territory and West Florida. They killed hundreds of men, women, and children inside, including Euro-Americans, enslaved African Americans, and other Muskogee. Jackson now had cause to reassemble his militia. After nearly being defeated by the Red Sticks, U.S. Army troops returned to the region, allowing Jackson to take on nine hundred Muskogee warriors with three times that number of soldiers and allied Muskogee and Choctaw forces. Jackson’s troops overran the Red Sticks’ fortified camp on the Tallapoosa River, killing the vast majority of those inside. “I lament that two or three women and children were killed by accident,” Jackson later said sarcastically.14

Jackson forced Muskogee representatives to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The terms gave the United States more than half the Muskogee land—twenty-two million acres in today’s Alabama and Georgia—including land belonging to Jackson’s own Muskogee and Cherokee allies. When President Madison ordered Jackson to return the land the following year, Jackson refused the president’s order. The Madison administration backed down for fear of Jackson’s popularity. The War Department named Jackson a major general in the U.S. Army, in command of the southern frontier. His defeat of British forces invading New Orleans in January 1815 earned him acclaim across the United States. “In the public mind,” writes Daniel Howe, “Andrew Jackson had won the war.” Even when people learned that U.S. and British officials had signed a peace treaty two weeks earlier, the celebratory feelings remained. “The incompetence, confusion, cowardice, and humiliations of the fall of Washington were forgotten.” Nationalism surged. The war quickly became known as a second war for independence. The greatness of the United States was once again clear to many. “Seldom has a nation so successfully practiced self-induced amnesia,” notes historian Bradford Perkins.¹⁵

In the wake of the battle for New Orleans, Jackson imposed martial law on the city and kept it in place for more than two months after the battle. He had six militiamen executed after they tried to leave their militia before the end of their terms of service. He put a judge in jail who dared challenge his dictatorial powers.¹⁶

Under Jackson’s leadership war would beget bases, which would beget more war. In 1816 Jackson ordered the construction of Fort Scott, near the border between Georgia and Florida. Jackson wanted to use the fort to launch an attack on Nicholls Fort (also called the British Post) in Florida. British troops had abandoned the fort at the end of the war and left it in the hands of their allies in Florida—Seminoles and African Americans who had taken refuge in Florida after escaping from slavery in Georgia and elsewhere. Anglos began derisively calling the fort “Negro Fort.”

In July 1816 Jackson directed an invasion force to blow up the fort “regardless of the ground it stands on” and “restore the stolen negroes and property to their rightful owners.”17 With the help of Native American allies, U.S. forces destroyed the fort, killing 270 men, women, and children. The survivors were captured, tortured, and either killed or sold into slavery in Georgia and Alabama. This violated a U.S. law prohibiting the importation of enslaved people across an international border.¹⁸ Along with other military commanders, Jackson and the troops under his command had become a kind of de facto slave patrol army and protector of the “property rights” of slaveholders in the region. Like several presidents, Jackson was an “owner” of enslaved people—to the extent that one can own another human. His business in the trade of the enslaved helped Jackson amass the wealth to buy 420 acres of land in Nashville; when he died, as many as 150 people worked in the enslaved labor camp that Jackson called “The Hermitage.”¹⁹

In 1817, the year after destroying the “Negro Fort,” Jackson launched another invasion southward. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun issued orders to subdue Seminoles and Muskogee who were resisting settler incursions with raids into U.S.-controlled territory from Spanish Florida. Jackson interpreted his orders “liberally,” as historian Daniel Feller puts it. He ordered the construction of a new fort on the ruins of the “Negro Fort.” He proceeded to destroy “village after village” of the Seminoles’ Miccosukee band, before seizing Spanish forts at Pensacola and Saint Marks. Seminoles, including those of mixed Seminole and African ancestry, fled farther south into Florida.²⁰

Jackson was publicly criticized for going beyond his orders. However, claiming Florida from Spain was a long-term foreign policy goal for some politicians and elites dating to before 1812. In 1819 President James Monroe’s Secretary of State John Quincy Adams secured a treaty with Spanish representatives, giving control of Florida to the United States. In exchange the U.S. government agreed to pay up to $5 million in U.S. citizens’ claims against the Spanish government and to define the border between Louisiana Purchase lands and what remained of Spanish-controlled North America (today’s Texas-Louisiana border).21

Jackson’s conquests and a series of eleven enforced treaties with Native American peoples ethnically cleansed large parts of the South for Euro-American settlement.²² This was a precursor to the forced removal of Cherokees and others during Jackson’s presidency. According to one estimate, Jackson opened lands to Euro-Americans equivalent to three-quarters of today’s states of Florida and Alabama, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and smaller parts of North Carolina and Kentucky.²³ In short, Jackson was a driving force behind what historian Howe calls a long-term “struggle by the United States to secure white supremacy over a multiracial and multicultural society [in the South] that included Native Americans, African American maroons, French and Spanish Creoles, and intermixtures of all these peoples with each other and white Americans.”²⁴ For Jackson and others, securing total white supremacy meant the extermination or displacement of all indigenous people in the region.²⁵

Just ten days after news arrived in Washington, DC, that U.S. and British representatives had signed a peace treaty ending the 1812 war, President Madison asked Congress to declare war again. And so the congressmen did. The declared adversary this time was the North African state of Algiers. The Barbary Coast states of Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis had long demanded tribute—taxes—from the vessels of states and peoples trading in the Mediterranean. If money was not paid, Barbary warships attacked trade ships, taking cargoes and ships and holding sailors for ransom or selling them into slavery.

Between 1801 and 1805 Thomas Jefferson had already deployed U.S. naval vessels to the North African coast in what are known in the United States as the Barbary Wars. During a series of naval clashes, U.S. Marines and a U.S. Army lieutenant led a group of mercenaries to capture and occupy Tripoli’s port of Derna. The battle would be memorialized in Marine Corps lore as part of its hymn, which begins, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” (“Montezuma” refers to the 1846 war the U.S. government instigated with Mexico. Tripoli would prove the first of many occasions when U.S. forces would occupy Muslim lands in the greater Middle East.) In 1815, in the aftermath of war and amid renewed Barbary Coast attacks on U.S. trading vessels, Madison deployed two Navy squadrons to the Mediterranean. U.S. warships quickly captured two Algiers warships. U.S. officers enforced peace terms and an end to the tribute payments. This result was a boon to U.S. shipping and trading companies doing business in the Mediterranean.

The powers controlling North Africa’s Barbary Coast are often called the “Barbary pirates.” But these were no more pirates than any state that claims taxes, tariffs, or fees in exchange for the right to trade in a given area.26 Most states, generally speaking, just don’t resort to the kind of overt violence—essentially a protection racket—that the North African powers used to enforce such payments. This is important because it shows that when the U.S. military deployed to the Mediterranean, it did so to protect U.S. citizens’ individual and corporate economic interests in distant lands. Much as Army forts would support fur trappers, traders, and other business interests as settlers pushed westward, far-off naval stations helped advance the profit making of particular individuals and businesses, as well as the political-economic influence of the U.S. government far beyond North America. On the Barbary Coast the Navy was helping to open new markets to U.S. businesses, while serving as something of a protection service in its own right to ensure U.S. businesses maintained preferential trading access.

The war that the U.S. government started in 1812 was in no small part about competition with Britain and other European empires for commercial opportunities on the high seas. The war was motivated to a significant degree by the expansionist desires of some U.S. politicians, business leaders, and other elites looking for a new excuse to invade Canada and expand U.S. borders while the British military was distracted waging wars in Europe with Napoleon. The war was also a response to years of harassment of U.S. trade ships by both British and French warships, which is why senators came within two votes of declaring war on France as well as Britain.

The U.S. government had fought on-and-off naval battles with France between 1798 and 1800 (known in the United States as the “Quasi-Wars”). During these battles U.S. Navy frigates deployed to and operated from ports on several Caribbean islands. Their aim was to challenge French warships that were seizing U.S. merchant ships and their cargo to claim unpaid U.S debts from the war for independence.27 While some think of the U.S. Empire as attaining global status only around 1898, the Navy began establishing fleet stations across five continents shortly after the signing of the 1814 peace treaty with Britain.²⁸ To support what were still relatively small fleets, the Navy generally leased strategically located port warehouses and repair facilities—“leasehold bases”—in places such as Rio de Janeiro; Valparaiso, Chile; Magdalena Bay, Mexico; Panama City; Portugal’s Cape Verde; Spain’s Balearic Islands; Luanda, Angola; Hong Kong; and Macau.

Two prominent military analysts explain that the patrol bases were positioned “close to the ‘nexus of US security and economic interests,’ namely, important overseas markets.”²⁹ Notably, the analysts don’t explain how bases thousands of miles from the United States advanced U.S. security. Their assertion reflects the frequent conflation of the economic interests of U.S. businesses and elites with U.S. “national security.” It also reflects the frequently unsubstantiated claim that advancing corporate and elite profit making automatically advances U.S. security.

Through the middle of the nineteenth century, the Navy would use some of these and other temporary bases to support military interventions and operations in Taiwan, Uruguay, Japan, Holland, Mexico, Ecuador, China, Panama, and Korea.³⁰ The bases also allowed U.S. sailors to spend winter months in, for example, Spain’s Mediterranean island of Menorca, which had a reputation among sailors for warmth and “indulging low and vicious habits.”³¹ By the time of the U.S. Civil War, the Navy had a relatively small fleet of just forty-two ships. With little to no threat to U.S. shores from European competitors, “most . . . were patrolling thousands of miles away.”³² The creation of U.S. bases and U.S. fleets patrolling in support of U.S. business interests the world over reflected the aspirations of economic elites and U.S. politicians to global political-economic influence and power. These bases and fleets foreshadowed the hundreds of U.S. bases, stations, posts, and forts that would encircle the globe in the century to come, as well as the economic interests served and supported by those installations.

First, U.S. leaders would lay claim to the Western Hemisphere. In 1823 President James Monroe claimed exclusive right to colonize and dominate affairs across the Americas, warning European powers from interfering. “The American continents,” the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The U.S. government would treat any European intervention as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” The Monroe administration was declaring the United States the leading power in the Western Hemisphere and that it was not to be messed with.33

The Monroe Doctrine contained another proviso, committing the United States to a policy of nonintervention in European wars or “internal concerns.” Following the wars of the prior decade, this was notable. The main author of the doctrine, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, had famously warned of the dangers of looking for enemies abroad. The United States, he said in an Independence Day address in 1821, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” If it were to do so, Adams cautioned, the country “would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”³⁴

For Adams this stance did not mean isolationism. Rather, he said, the country should support the causes of freedom and independence for other nations. But it should do so through “the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example” rather than with military power. If the country involved itself in foreign wars, Adams said, “the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world,” said Adams. But “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”³⁵

In 1825 Adams became president. In contrast to the expansionist visions of Monroe and Jackson, who preceded and followed him in office, Adams proposed broad improvements to the nation’s infrastructure of roads and canals; investments to support science, invention, and enterprise; and global efforts toward improving humanity. He refused to sign a treaty that would have dispossessed the Muskogee Nation of its lands in Georgia. Unfortunately, Adams’s skills as a politician never matched his ideas and his ideals. Much of his agenda was never implemented. He became a one-term president. (Adams returned to serve in the House of Representatives. He was a passionate abolitionist who won the famous case representing the enslaved people who rebelled aboard the slaving ship Amistad and attempted to return to Africa. Adams died on the floor of the House in 1848, decrying the invasion of another neighbor, Mexico.)

Adams was defeated in 1828 by the general known for New Orleans fame and ethnic cleansing in the Southeast, Andrew Jackson. In the age of supposed Jacksonian democracy, ideas about the War of 1812 as a defensive war marked by Fort McHenry’s salvation in Baltimore and Jackson’s triumph in New Orleans became further entrenched. A fairer and more historically accurate depiction of the war on the license plate of Maryland or another state would probably depict the burning of Washington, Jackson’s expulsion of the Muskogee, or perhaps his invasion and occupation of forts in Spanish Florida. Such images probably wouldn’t be as good for states’ tourist industries today.

In the era of Jackson, the dispossession of Native Americans would accelerate. In contrast to Adams’s opposition to displacing the Muskogee, the new president continued his pattern of ethnic cleansing. Jackson and Congress used a chain of forts to move indigenous nations westward and establish a “permanent Indian frontier” on the Missouri River. The permanent frontier would soon prove not so permanent.