1812

AT THE END of 1807 Jefferson decided to counter Britain’s Orders in Council and its practice of impressment, as well as Napoleon’s decrees, by instituting a wide-ranging embargo. Jefferson believed that Britain and her West Indian colonies were so dependent on American trade, particularly in raw materials, that London would be forced to withdraw her Orders in Council and to put a stop to impressment in a matter of weeks. He hoped that, faced with an Anglo-American entente, Napoleon would follow suit. Jefferson liked to think of the embargo as a form of “peaceful coercion,” an alternative to either war or submission, and he had the enthusiastic support of Madison, who also believed that the embargo was the only way to avoid having to choose between a costly war or abject surrender to colonial status.

In December 1807, Congress passed the Embargo Act by a wide margin. The legislation prohibited all exports to any foreign port and required a bond for coastal traders. Foreign ships could still bring goods to American ports, but they had to return in ballast. Albert Gallatin, the Treasury secretary whose job it would be to enforce the act, did not like it, but he dutifully took on the nearly impossible task of implementing it.

Jefferson’s hope was that by sacrificing America’s trade for a short period the embargo would save the nation’s ships and men from British and French depredations. Meanwhile, to defend the coasts, he dramatically increased the navy’s fleet of gunboats—small craft ranging in size from forty-five to seventy feet and carrying one to two heavy guns. By the end of 1807 the Republican Congress had authorized construction of 278 of these boats, though by the time the War of 1812 broke out, just 165 were available.

Jefferson viewed this fleet of gunboats as defensive in nature and far less expensive than building frigates or ships of the line. He thought the navy’s larger ships contributed almost nothing to the nation’s defense. In a war with Britain, he assumed the Royal Navy would quickly seize them. Gunboats, on the other hand, could “withdraw from the reach of the enemy,” he argued, and be “formidable . . . in shoally waters.” Not a single officer in the navy agreed with him, however. None thought the gunboats could protect the coasts. They viewed Jefferson’s mosquito fleet with scorn, and when war came, the gunboats proved nearly useless.

FOR NEW ENGLAND Federalists, the embargo was the last straw. Shutting off the region’s seagoing commerce would wreak havoc on its economy. And so the Federalist Party, moribund since Jefferson’s stunning reelection in 1804, came back to life, invigorated by opposition to the embargo. Flouting of the law was widespread. Jefferson, surprised by this level of resistance, grew more tenacious in his attempts at enforcement. He should not have been shocked that so many Americans despised the embargo, however. Despite widespread evasion, exports plunged from over one hundred million in 1807 to just twenty two million the following year.

Even more maddening, while the law proved exceptionally hard on the United States, it appeared to have little effect on Britain or France. Foreign Secretary Canning ridiculed it. But this was just a pretense. The British were indeed hampered by their inability to import American raw materials, and the embargo played a role in causing Britain’s depression in 1809–10. Nevertheless, London and Paris ignored the embargo and steadfastly refused to change their maritime policies, forcing Jefferson to keep the increasingly unpopular law in force far longer than he anticipated. Week after week the economy declined, and increasingly strident calls for relief came from across the country, particularly from New England. By the winter of 1809 a civil war was brewing over the domestic distress caused by the stoppage of trade. “The evils which are menaced by the continuance of this policy,” the Massachusetts legislature informed Congress, “. . . must soon become intolerable, and endanger our domestic peace, and the union of these states.” Finally, on March 1, 1809, just three days before Jefferson left office, Congress repealed the hated embargo. The president, with great reluctance, signed the bill, bequeathing to his successor the problem of what to do about British and French provocations.

It was not a legacy President Madison coveted. Despite his strong support for the unpopular embargo, he had been elected handily in 1808 with 122 electoral votes to 47. He was furious with the New England Federalists for doing everything they could to thwart a policy he believed could have achieved American goals without war or submission. Like Jefferson, Madison was convinced that if the country had persevered with the embargo just a while longer, the British would have relented. That may have been true, but politically the embargo was dead.

On March 15, 1809, immediately after Madison took office, Congress replaced the embargo with the Non-Intercourse Act, which permitted trade with all nations except Britain and France. The legislation unintentionally favored the British. Despite the law, goods flowed freely to Britain through a number of channels, while the Royal Navy enforced the blockade of Napoleonic Europe.

The British, of course, did not feel favored by the new law, and their ambassador in Washington, David Erskine (the only British ambassador who genuinely liked America), sought ways to prevent Anglo-American relations from deteriorating further. He approached Madison in April 1809 for talks about easing tensions between the two countries. The president was receptive, and in a short six weeks he and Erskine negotiated an agreement whereby Britain would revoke the Orders in Council if the United States would end non-intercourse against Great Britain. Both Erskine and Madison felt they had achieved a genuine breakthrough. In the end, however, Canning rejected the agreement, recalling Erskine and replacing him with a hard-line, anti-American Tory, Francis J. Jackson, who went out of his way to sour relations between the two countries. Federalists, particularly in Massachusetts, supported Jackson against their own government, which only encouraged Perceval and Canning, to suppose that with the United States so hopelessly divided, Madison could never act effectively against them. With the end of the Embargo Act, American ships reappeared on the high seas, and the British again went right after them, exacerbating relations between the two countries. Perceval and Canning were showing no restraint whatever.

On May 1, 1810, in order to revive the revenue stream flowing to the cashstarved Treasury, Congress replaced the Non-Intercourse Act with Macon’s Bill #2, which restored trade with the entire world, including Britain and France. Moreover, the bill stipulated that if either Britain or France ceased interfering with neutral trade, the United States would stop trading with the other nation. This provision moved Napoleon to notify the United States that he was removing his Berlin and Milan decrees, although, in truth, he had no intention of doing so. Madison, choosing to believe him, asked Britain to rescind the Orders in Council, or be faced with the prospect of having trade with America cut off. London was quick to point out that Napoleon had not actually done what he said and so refused.

On February 11, 1811, Madison, having given Perceval three months’ warning, imposed nonimportation against Great Britain, and as 1811 progressed, relations between the two governments further deteriorated. The Royal Navy appeared again off New York, stopping and seizing American ships, and aggressively impressing American seamen. Particularly noxious were the frigates Guerriere and Melampus.

On May 1 the Guerriere stopped the brig Spitfire and impressed an innocent Maine man serving as apprentice to the master. New York City was in an uproar over the incident, and the secretary of the navy ordered Captain John Rodgers, then at Annapolis, to rush to New York in the President and “vindicate the injured honor of our navy and revive the drooping spirits of the nation.” On May 16, 1811, while he was on his way to New York, Rodgers spotted a British warship forty-five miles northeast of Cape Henry. Thinking she might be the Guerriere, he went after her. The stranger fled, but Rodgers caught up with her at eightthirty that evening, when visibility was poor. Confusion ensued as both ships started shooting before they knew who the other was.

The stranger turned out to be the 20-gun British sloop of war Little Belt, a two-decked, formerly Danish warship. She was much smaller than the President, and Rodgers forced her to strike her colors in a few minutes. After the brief fight, the captain of the badly banged-up Little Belt, Arthur Bingham, refused all help from Rodgers and struggled back to Halifax, while Rodgers sailed the President to New York, where he received a hero’s welcome. Such was the state of British-American relations that the president was quick to publicly congratulate Rodgers.

AS 1811 PROGRESSED, Madison, in utter frustration, was coming to the conclusion that war with Britain was unavoidable. He would not give up on trying to get the British to change their policies, but it looked increasingly unlikely they would do so. During the summer he conferred at length with Jefferson and Secretary of State James Monroe at Monticello and decided that only an actual declaration of war would move Perceval to the negotiating table. “We have been so long dealing in small ways of embargoes, non-intercourse, and non-importation, with menaces of war, &c.,” explained Monroe, “that the British Government has not believed us. We must actually get to war before the intention to make it will be credited either here or abroad.” In a similar vein, the president wrote that, “Perceval [and his colleagues] . . . prefer war with us to a repeal of their Orders in Council. We have nothing left therefore, but to make ready for it.”

On November 4, 1811, Madison urged Congress to strengthen the nation’s defenses, which for the last eleven years under Republican rule had been allowed to deteriorate. He asked Congress to authorize an additional 10,000 men for the regular army, which would have brought it up to 20,000. Congress responded on January 11, 1812, by increasing bounties for an enlistment of five years from $12 to $16, plus three months pay and 160 acres of land, and it approved an increase in the regular army of 25,000—in other words, 15,000 more troops than the 10,000 Madison asked for. The legislation thus authorized a regular force of up to 35,000.

Republican malcontents like Senator William Giles of Virginia, eager to chastise the president for being too soft on Britain and too lax about keeping up the nation’s defenses, promoted the larger number. Giles, paradoxically, had been a strong supporter and, indeed, an intimate of President Jefferson, and he had worked hard for the election of Madison, but his antipathy toward Treasury Secretary Gallatin estranged him from the president, and he became a bitter opponent.

Madison felt that he would have great difficulty bringing the existing regular army up to full strength and then raising 10,000 more men. Enlisting 25,000 seemed impossible. Nonetheless, his supporters in the House approved the higher number, 94 to 34. Speaker Henry Clay declared that a larger army was indispensable to America’s “commerce, character, [and] a nation’s best treasure, honor!”

Considering its size and prosperity, the United States could have easily supported a regular force of 100,000, but Madison never wanted a large standing army, nor would Republicans in Congress have approved one, since they considered it a threat to the Constitution. Like Jefferson and most other Republicans, Madison intended to rely on state militias—citizen soldiers who could be organized, equipped, and trained ahead of time and then called upon when needed. Militiamen would serve only for brief periods before returning to their civilian pursuits, making it impossible for an American Caesar or Napoleon to misuse them.

In April, with war increasingly likely, Congress authorized the president to call up to 100,000 state militiamen for six months of federal service. The militiamen were an unknown quantity, however. It was not at all certain they could fight or would be willing to march beyond the country’s borders. Thirty days later, Congress authorized Madison to call up 50,000 volunteers in addition to the militiamen and the regulars. Volunteers were neither militiamen nor regulars but something in between. They were men who served for brief periods of a few months and then went home. Regular army personnel signed on for five years. No one was confident that volunteers in sufficient numbers would respond to the president’s call. Indeed, it was unlikely they would. By June recruitment had produced no more than 5,000 additional men for the regular army, bringing it near 12,000, out of the authorized total of 35,000. The War Department was so disorganized it could not even give Congress exact figures on their present manpower.

The legislation also authorized the appointment of two major generals and five brigadier generals. The president, if he saw fit, could make one major general senior to the others and thus the leader of the army. Back on January 27, Madison had appointed the former secretary of war under Jefferson, sixty-two-year-old Henry Dearborn, as the senior major general, and he was given command of the entire northern army based outside Albany, New York. Dearborn’s advanced age did not seem to bother the president. A distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary War and a physician, Dearborn had been in the thick of the fighting from Bunker Hill to Valley Forge and Yorktown, rising to colonel and later, at the close of the war, serving on Washington’s staff as deputy quartermaster general. No one had seen more combat than Henry Dearborn, and no one was better acquainted with the suffering of the patriot army. After the war he had become a successful congressman and then, for eight years, Jefferson’s secretary of war. During that time he had formed a close personal relationship with Secretary of State Madison.

For his second major general, Madison appointed sixty-two-year-old Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, to whom he gave command of the southern army. Pinckney had had a long, distinguished career as a soldier during the Revolution, as a diplomat afterward, and as a politician, but his capacity to lead an army at this stage in his life was limited. Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, reflecting the views of many Southerners, observed that he “was not more at a loss to account for any proceeding than the nomination of Pinckney to be major-general.” Macon assumed Pinckney’s appointment was the work of Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton, who, he said, “is about as fit for his place as the Indian Prophet would be for Emperor of Europe.”

Macon’s slur against Paul Hamilton was a gross exaggeration. It’s true that Hamilton had been appointed in 1809 strictly for political reasons; he was a landsman, after all, with no obvious qualifications to lead the Navy Department. Madison appointed him first and foremost to achieve geographical balance in his cabinet. Still, Secretary Hamilton had fought with distinction in the Revolutionary War in South Carolina under guerilla leaders like Francis Marion, and in 1804, after many years as a successful planter and local politician, he became governor of South Carolina. A strong patriot, Hamilton did his best to strengthen the navy with little help from the chief executive or the Republican Congress. Unfortunately, having little understanding of naval strategy, he was unable to give sound advice to the president on how to use the country’s limited naval resources. His appointment can only be seen as one more indication of the little regard Madison had for the navy.

ON NOVEMBER 4, 1811, Madison requested Congress to increase the navy. It was not that the president had suddenly become enamored of the fleet; rather, he wanted to send a message to London. On January 17 Langdon Cheves, chairman of the House Naval Committee, asked his colleagues to approve building twelve 74-gun ships-of-the-line and twenty frigates. That touched off an acrimonious debate that ended on January 27, with the House voting 62–59 to defeat a drastically reduced bill to add ten frigates to the navy. Instead of expanding the navy, Congress appropriated $600,000 to acquire timber over a three-year period. The message was the exact opposite of the one Madison wanted to send. Perceval could only view the bill’s defeat as another sign that the United States lacked the will to fight.

The arguments against expanding the navy had been heard inside and outside of Congress for many years, and they had not changed. A larger navy, its opponents said, would endanger liberty, plunge the country into unnecessary wars, and become an enormous burden on taxpayers. Congressman Adam Seybert of Philadelphia, the well-known scientist, warned that an expanded navy would not return to its small state after the war but would become a permanent force at great expense and “a powerful engine in the hands of an ambitious Executive.” Attempting to make the United States into a naval power, Seybert predicted, would likely destroy the Constitution. “We cannot contend with Great Britain on the ocean,” he said, “but we can undermine our form of government by trying to do so.”

The lack of Republican support did not prevent the navy from being ready when Congress declared war, however. Its leaders were veterans of two conflicts—the Quasi-War with France, from 1798 to 1800, and the war with Tripoli, from 1801 to 1805. They were eager to test their mettle against the British. Although the warships they commanded were old and few in number, these men were anxious to prove they were the finest afloat. Composed entirely of volunteers, their crews included no shortage of experienced fighters. And all of them received far better treatment than their British counterparts, making their ships—other things being equal—more potent. In spite of the young navy’s excellence and fighting spirit, however, its small size would remain an enormous handicap.