What were the main achievements of Jefferson’s administration?
What was the impact of the Marshall court on the U. S. government?
How did the Louisiana Purchase change the United States?
What were the causes and effects of the War of 1812?
He decades after the Revolution were years of dynamic change as Americans laid the foundation for the nation’s development as the first society in the world organized by the principle of democratic capitalism and its promise of equal opportunity for all—except African Americans, Native Americans, and women. As Thomas Jefferson said, America was becoming an “empire of liberty” in which all facets of society—politics, education, science, religion, and livelihoods—were experiencing dynamic change.
The New American Nation
In 1800 there were 5,300,000 people living in the United States, a fifth of whom were enslaved blacks. Americans in the fifty years after independence were in perpetual motion: they were on the move and on the make. Many Americans believed that they were a nation of destiny. Their prospects seemed unlimited, their optimism unrestrained. The opportunity to pursue one’s dreams animated the drama of American life. As John Adams observed, “There is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America. . . because the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest.”
Land sales west of the Appalachian Mountains soared in the early nineteenth century as aspiring farmers shoved Indians aside in order to establish homesteads of their own. Enterprising, mobile, and increasingly diverse in religion and national origin, tens of thousands of people uprooted themselves from settled communities and went west in search of personal advancement, occupying more territory in a single generation than had been settled in the 150 years of colonial history. Between 1800 and 1820 the transAppalachian population soared from 300,000 to 2 million. By 1840, over 40 percent of Americans lived west of the Appalachians in eight new states.
The spirit of opportunistic independence affected free African Americans as well as whites, Indians as well as immigrants. Free blacks were the fastest-growing segment of the population during the early nineteenth century. Many enslaved Americans had gained their freedom during the Revolutionary War by escaping, joining the British forces, or serving in American military units. Every state except South Carolina and Georgia promised freedom to slaves who fought the British. Afterward, state after state in the North outlawed slavery, and anti-slavery societies blossomed, exerting increasing pressure on the South to end the degrading practice. Pressure of another sort affected the besieged Indian tribes. The westward migration of Americans brought incessant conflict with Native Americans. Indians fiercely resisted the invasion of their ancestral lands but ultimately succumbed to a federal government and a federal army determined to displace them.
Most whites, however, were less concerned about Indians and slavery than they were about seizing their own opportunities. Politicians north and south suppressed the volatile issue of slavery; their priorities were elsewhere. Westward expansion, economic growth, urban-industrial development, and the democratization of politics preoccupied a generation of Americans born after 1776—especially outside the South. In 1790 nine out of ten Americans lived on the land and engaged in household rather than commercial production; their sphere of activity was local. But with each passing year, more and more farmers focused on producing surplus crops and livestock to sell in regional markets. Such commercial agriculture was especially evident in the South, where European demand for cotton caused prices to soar. The burgeoning market economy produced boom-and-bust cycles, but overall the years from 1790 to 1830 were quite prosperous, with young Americans experiencing unprecedented opportunities for economic gain and geographic mobility.
ECONOMIC GROWTH With independence, Americans were freed from British restrictions on their economic life; they could now create new industries and exploit new markets. It was not simply Alexander Hamilton’s financial initiatives and the capitalistic energies of wealthy investors and speculators that sparked America’s dramatic commercial growth in these years. It was also the strenuous efforts of ordinary men and women who were willing to take risks, uproot families, use unstable paper money issued by unregulated local banks, purchase factory-made goods, and tinker with new machines and tools. Free enterprise was the keynote of the era.
While most Americans continued to work as farmers, a growing number found employment in new or greatly expanded enterprises: textiles, banking, transportation, publishing, retailing, teaching, preaching, medicine, law, construction, and engineering. Technological innovations (steam power, power tools, and new modes of transportation) and their social applications (mass communication, turnpikes, the postal service, banks, and corporations) fostered an array of new industries and businesses. The emergence of a factory system transformed the nature of work for many Americans. In short, the decentralized agrarian republic of 1776, nestled along the Atlantic seaboard, had by 1830 become a sprawling commercial nation connected by networks of roads and canals and cemented by economic relationships—all animated by a restless spirit of enterprise, experimentation, and expansion.
Jeffersonian Simplicity
Political life in the new republic was also transformed during the early nineteenth century, as an increasing proportion of white males gained the right to vote when property qualifications were reduced. The first president of the nineteenth century promoted such democratization. On March 4, 1801, the fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, tall and thin, with red hair and a ruddy complexion, became the first president to be inaugurated in the new national capital named Washington, District of Columbia. The new city was still a motley array of buildings clustered around two centers, Capitol Hill and the executive mansion. Congress, having met in eight towns and cities since 1774, had at last found a permanent home but enjoyed few amenities. There were only two places of amusement—one a racetrack, the other a theater thick with “tobacco smoke, whiskey breaths, and other stenches.” Jefferson’s informal inauguration befitted the primitive surroundings. The new president left his lodgings and walked down a stump-strewn pennsylvania Avenue to the unfinished Capitol. He entered the Senate chamber, took the oath administered by Chief Justice John Marshall, read his inaugural address in a barely audible voice, and returned to his boardinghouse for dinner. A tone of simplicity and conciliation ran through his inaugural speech. The campaign between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans had been so fierce that some had predicted civil war. Jefferson now appealed for unity. “We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists,” he said. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
JEFFERSON IN OFFICE The deliberate display of republican simplicity at Jefferson’s inauguration set the style of his administration. Although a cosmopolitan man with expensive personal tastes, especially in land, wine, and books, he took pains to avoid the “monarchical” occasions of pomp and circumstance that had characterized the Federalist administrations. Jefferson’s political platform called for shrinking the infant federal government by slashing its budget and strictly interpreting the Constitution so as not to infringe upon states’ rights.
Jefferson called his election the “revolution of 1800,” but the electoral margin had been razor thin, and the policies that he followed were more conciliatory than revolutionary. His overwhelming reelection in 1804 attested to the popularity of his first term. Jefferson placed in policy-making positions men of his own party, and he was the first president to pursue the role of party leader, cultivating congressional support at his dinner parties and elsewhere. In the cabinet the leading figures were Secretary of State James Madison, a longtime neighbor and political ally, and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, a Swiss-born Pennsylvania Republican whose financial skills had won him the respect of the Federalists. In an effort to cultivate Federalist-controlled New England, Jefferson chose men from that region for the positions of attorney general, secretary of war, and postmaster general.
In lesser offices, however, Jefferson often succumbed to pressure from the Republicans to remove Federalists. In one area he removed the offices altogether. In 1802, the Republican-controlled Congress repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801 and so abolished the circuit judgeships and other offices to which John Adams had made his “midnight appointments.”
MARBURY V. MADISON The midnight judicial appointments that John Adams made just before leaving office sparked the pathbreaking case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the first in which the Supreme Court declared a federal law unconstitutional. The case involved the appointment of the Maryland Federalist William Marbury, a prominent land speculator, as justice of the peace in the District of Columbia. Marbury’s letter of appointment, or
The executive mansion
A watercolor of the president’s house during Jefferson’s term in office. Jefferson described it as “big enough for two emperors, one pope, and the grand lama in the bargain.”
Commission, signed by President Adams two days before he left office, was still undelivered when Madison took office as secretary of state, and Jefferson directed him to withhold it. Marbury then sued for a court order directing Madison to deliver his commission.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion, written by Chief Justice John Marshall, a brilliant Virginia Federalist and ardent critic of Jefferson, his distant relative, held that Marbury deserved his commission but denied that the Court had jurisdiction in the case. Section 13 of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789, which gave the Court original jurisdiction in such proceedings, was unconstitutional, the Court ruled, because the Constitution specified that the Court should have original jurisdiction only in cases involving foreign ambassadors or states. The Court, therefore, could issue no order in the case. With one bold stroke the Federalist Marshall had chastised the Jeffersonian Republicans while subtly avoiding an awkward confrontation with an administration that might have defied his order. At the same time, he established a stunning precedent: the Court declared a federal law invalid on the grounds that it violated provisions of the Constitution. Marshall stressed that it “is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” In other words, the Supreme Court was assuming the right of iudicial review, meaning that it would decide whether acts of Congress were constitutional. So even though Marbury never gained his judgeship, Marshall established the Supreme Court as the final judge of constitutional interpretation. Since the Marbury decision, the Court has struck down over 150 acts of Congress and over 1,100 acts of state legislatures.
DOMESTIC REFORMS Although Marshall got the better of Jefferson in court, the president’s first term produced a succession of triumphs in both domestic and foreign affairs. Jefferson did not set out to dismantle Alexander Hamilton’s economic program, despite his harsh criticism of it. Under the tutelage of Treasury Secretary Gallatin, he learned to accept the national bank as an essential convenience. Jefferson detested Hamilton’s belief that a federal debt was a national “blessing” because it gave the bankers and investors who lent money to the U. S. government a direct financial stake in the success of the new republic. Jefferson believed that a large federal debt would bring only high taxes and government corruption, so he set about reducing government expenses and paying down the debt. At the same time, he won the repeal of the whiskey tax, much to the relief of backwoods distillers, drinkers, and grain farmers.
Without the income from such taxes, frugality was all the more necessary to a federal government dependent for its revenues chiefly upon tariffs on imports and the sale of government-owned western lands. Fortunately, however, both sources of income flourished during Jefferson’s presidency. The continuing wars in Europe increased American shipping traffic and thus padded the federal Treasury. Commercial prosperity was directly linked to the ability of Americans to trade with both sides in the European wars. At the same time, settlers flocked to land in the western territories they purchased from the government. Ohio’s admission to the Union in 1803 increased to seventeen the number of states.
Jefferson’s commitment to “wise and frugal government” enabled the United States to live within its income. The basic formula was simple: cut back on military expenses. National defense should be left to state militias. The navy, which the Federalists had already reduced, ought to be reduced further.
While reducing the expense of the federal government, Jefferson in 1807 signed a landmark bill—long overdue—that outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States. The new law took effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date possible under the Constitution. At the time, South Carolina was the only state that still permitted the foreign slave trade, having reopened it in 1803.
THE BARBARY PIRATES Issues of foreign relations emerged early in Jefferson’s first term, when events in the distant Mediterranean Sea gave him second thoughts about the need for a navy. On the Barbary Coast of North Africa, the Islamic rulers of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli had for years promoted piracy and extortion, preying upon European and American merchant ships in the Mediterranean Sea. After the Revolution, Mediterranean pirates in small, fast ships called corsairs captured American vessels and enslaved the crews. The U. S. government made blackmail payments, first to Morocco in 1786, then to the others in the 1790s. In 1801, however, the pasha (ruler) of Tripoli upped his demands and declared war on the United States. Jefferson sent warships to blockade Tripoli. A wearisome naval war dragged on until 1805, punctuated in 1804 by the notable exploit of Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, who slipped into Tripoli Harbor by night and set fire to the frigate Philadelphia, which had been captured (along with its crew) after it ran aground. The pasha finally settled for a $60,000 ransom and released the Philadelphia’s crew, whom he had held hostage for more than a year. It was still blackmail (called “tribute” in the nineteenth century), but less than the $300,000 the pasha had demanded at first and much less than the cost of war.
THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE While the conflict with the Barbary pirates continued, events elsewhere led to the greatest single achievement of the Jefferson administration. The vast Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was a brilliant diplomatic coup that more than doubled the territory of the United States. The purchase included territory extending far beyond the boundaries of present-day Louisiana. Its estimated 875,000 square miles, from which would be formed six states in their entirety and most or part of nine more, comprised the entire Mississippi River valley west of the river. The Louisiana territory had been ceded to Spain in 1763, following the Seven Years’ War, with Great Britain receiving Florida from Spain in an exchange of sorts. Since that time the dream of retaking Louisiana had stirred the French, and the audacious general Napoleon Bonaparte had retrieved it for France from his Spanish allies in 1800. Spain had decided, under French pressure, that the region was too costly to administer—and defend.
When word of the deal transferring the Louisiana Territory from Spain to France reached Washington in 1801, an alarmed President Jefferson sent Robert R. Livingston to Paris as the new U. S. minister to France. Spain in control of the Mississippi River outlet was bad enough, but the power-hungry Napoleon in control could only mean serious trouble. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans,” Jefferson wrote Livingston, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation,” an unhappy prospect for the French-loving Jefferson.
Burning of the Frigate Philadelphia
Lieutenant William Decatur set fire to the captured Philadelphia during the United States’ standoff with Tripoli over the enslavement of American sailors.
Early in 1803, Jefferson sent his trusted Virginia friend James Monroe to assist Livingston in Paris. Their goal was to purchase New Orleans from France. No sooner had Monroe arrived than the French surprised Livingston by asking if the United States would like to buy the whole of the Louisiana Territory. Livingston snapped up the offer. Napoleon was willing to sell the Louisiana Territory because his French army in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) had been decimated not only by a massive slave revolt but also by yellow fever. Some 350,000 Haitians and 24,000 French soldiers had died in Haiti. Concerned about financing another round of warfare in Europe, Napoleon decided to cut French losses in the Americas by selling the entire Louisiana Territory and thereby gaining cash for his ongoing war with Great Britain.
By the Treaty of Cession, dated April 30, 1803, the United States obtained the Louisiana Territory for about $15 million. The surprising turn of events presented President Jefferson with a “noble bargain,” but also with a constitutional dilemma. Nowhere did the Constitution mention the purchase of territory. Jefferson acknowledged that the purchase was “beyond the Constitution.” Like a velvet hypocrite, Jefferson, the champion of states’ rights and “strict construction” of the Constitution, allowed his desire for empire to trump his legal scruples. He lamely expressed the hope “that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of loose construction [of the Constitution] when it shall produce ill effects.”
Jefferson and other Republicans supported the Louisiana Purchase for several reasons. Acquiring the immense territory, the president explained, would be “favorable to the immediate interests of our Western citizens” and would promote “the peace and security of the nation in general” by removing French power from the region and by creating a protective buffer separating the United States from the rest of the world. Jefferson also hoped that the new territory might become a haven for free blacks and thereby diminish racial tensions along the Atlantic seaboard. New England Federalists, however, were not convinced by such arguments. Many of them worried that the growing westward exodus was driving up wages on the Atlantic coast by reducing the workforce and lowering the value of real estate in their region. They also boggled at the prospect of new western states that would likely be settled by southern slaveholders who were Jeffersonian Republicans. In a reversal that anticipated many more reversals on constitutional issues, Federalists found themselves arguing for strict construction of the Constitution in opposing the Louisiana Purchase, while Jefferson and the Republicans brushed aside Federalist reservations. The opportunity to double the size of the United States trumped any legal reservations.
The Senate ratified the treaty by an overwhelming vote of 26 to 6, and on December 20, 1803, U. S. officials took formal possession of the sprawling Louisiana Territory. For the time being the Spanish kept West Florida, but within a decade that area would be ripe for the plucking. In 1810 American settlers staged a rebellion in Baton Rouge against Spanish rule and proclaimed the republic of West Florida, which was quickly annexed and occupied by the United States as far east as the Pearl River. In 1812, upon becoming the Union’s eighteenth state, Louisiana absorbed the Florida parishes. In 1813, with Spain itself a battlefield for French and British forces, Americans took over the rest of West Florida, the Gulf coast of the future states of Mississippi and Alabama. Legally, as the U. S. government has claimed ever since, all these areas were included in the Louisiana Purchase.
Jefferson’s decision to swallow his constitutional reservations and acquire the vast Louisiana territory proved to be one of the most important factors shaping America’s development. It was by far the most popular and significant event of his presidency. His decision was also embedded with irony. By adding the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson, the lover of liberty and owner of slaves, helped expand the sphere of slavery, an
One of Lewis and Clark’s maps
In their journals, Lewis and Clark sketched detailed maps of unexplored regions.
Institution that anguished him all the while he reinforced it. As a newspaper editor asked in 1803, “Will Republicans, who glory in their sacred regard to the rights of human nature, purchase an immense wilderness for the purpose of cultivating it with the labor of slaves?” The answer was a resounding yes.
LEWIS AND CLARK Thomas Jefferson was fascinated by the mysterious region he had purchased west of the Mississippi River. To learn more about its geography, its flora and fauna, and its prospects for trade and agriculture, he asked Congress in 1803 to fund a mapping and scientific expedition to the far Northwest, beyond the Mississippi River, in what was still foreign territory. Congress approved, and Jefferson assigned as the commanders of the expedition two former army officers: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
In 1804 the “Corps of Discovery,” numbering nearly fifty, set out from a small village near St. Louis to ascend the muddy Missouri River. Six months after leaving St. Louis, near the Mandan Sioux villages in what would become North Dakota, they built Fort Mandan and wintered in relative comfort, sending downriver a barge loaded with maps, soil samples, and live specimens, such as the prairie dog and the magpie, previously unknown in America.
In the spring, Lewis and Clark added to their main party a remarkable young Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, who proved an enormous help as a guide, translator, and negotiator as the group headed westward into uncharted territory. They crossed the Rocky Mountains and used canoes to descend the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific ocean. Near the future site of Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River, they built Fort Clatsop, where they spent the winter, struggling to find enough to eat. The following spring they split into two parties, with Lewis’s group backtracking by almost the same route and Clark’s band going by way of the Yellowstone River. Remarkably, they reunited at the juncture of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, returning together to St. Louis in 1806, having been gone nearly two and a half years. No longer was the Far West unknown country. The explorers’ reports of friendly Indians and abundant beaver pelts quickly attracted traders and trappers to the region and gave the United States a claim to the Oregon Country by right of discovery and exploration.
POLITICAL SCHEMES Thomas Jefferson’s policies, including the Louisiana Purchase, brought him solid support in the South and the West. In New England, however, Federalists panicked at the implications of the Louisana Purchase. The acquisition of a vast new empire in the West would reduce New England and the Federalist party to insignificance in political affairs. Federalists hatched a scheme to link New York to New England. To that end, they contacted Vice President Aaron Burr, a prominent New Yorker who had been on the outs with the Jeffersonians. Their plan, which depended upon Burr’s election as governor of New York, could not win the support of even the extreme Federalists: Alexander Hamilton bitterly opposed it on the grounds that Burr was “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.”
Those remarks led to Hamilton’s famous duel with Burr, in July 1804 at Weehawken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. Hamilton’s sense of honor compelled him to meet the vice president’s challenge and demonstrate his courage—yet he was determined not to fire at his opponent. Burr had no such scruples; he shot and killed Hamilton. The killing of Hamilton ended Burr’s political career. Burr would lose the gubernatorial election, but his defeat did not end his secret schemes to garner wealth and stature for himself.
In the meantime, the presidential campaign of 1804 began when a congressional caucus of Republicans renominated Jefferson and chose the New Yorker George Clinton for vice president. (By then, to avoid the problems associated with parties running multiple candidates for the presidency, Congress had passed, and the states would soon ratify, the Twelfth Amendment, stipulating that electors use separate ballots to vote for the president and vice president.) Opposed by the Federalists Charles C. Pinckney and Rufus King, Jefferson and Clinton won 162 of the 176 electoral votes. It was the first landslide election in American history.
Divisions in the Republican Party
Freed from a strong opposition—Federalists made up only a quarter of the new Congress—the dominant Republican majority began to fragment into warring factions during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The
Virginian John Randolph—known also as John Randolph of Roanoke—was initially a loyal Jeffersonian, but over time he emerged as the most conspicuous of the Republican dissidents. Randolph became the feisty spokesman for a shifting group of “Old Republicans,” whose adherence to party principles had rendered them more Jeffersonian than Jefferson himself. The Old Republicans were mostly southerners who defended states’ rights and strict construction of the Constitution. They opposed any compromise with the Federalists and promoted an agrarian way of life. The Jeffersonian Republicans tended to be more moderate, pragmatic, and nationalistic in their orientation. As Thomas Jefferson himself demonstrated, they were willing to go along with tariffs on imports and a national bank, and to stretch the “implied powers” of the Constitution to accommodate the Louisiana Purchase.
THE BURR CONSPIRACY For all of his popularity, Jefferson in some quarters aroused intense opposition. Aaron Burr, for example, despised the president. Sheer brilliance and opportunism had carried Burr to the vice presidency in 1800. He might easily have become Jefferson’s heir apparent, but a taste for backroom deal making was his tragic flaw. After the controversy over his mortal duel with Alexander Hamilton subsided, Burr focused his attention on a cockeyed scheme to carve out a personal empire for himself in the West. What came to be known as the Burr Conspiracy was hatched when Burr met with General James Wilkinson. Just what Wilkinson and Burr were up to may never be known. The most likely explanation is that they conspired to get the Louisiana Territory to secede from the Union and set up an independent republic. Earlier Burr had solicited British support for his scheme to separate “the western part of the United States in its whole extent.”
Whatever the goal, Burr learned in early 1807 that Jefferson had ordered his arrest for treason. He tried to flee to Florida but was caught and brought for trial before Chief Justice John Marshall. Since the prosecution failed to produce two witnesses to an overt act of treason by Burr, the jury found him not guilty. Treason under the Constitution, Marshall wrote, consists of “levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies” and requires “two witnesses to the same overt act” for conviction. As for Burr, with further charges pending, he skipped bail and took refuge in France, but he returned unmolested in 1812 to practice law in New York. He survived to a virile old age. At seventy-eight, shortly before his death in 1836, he was divorced on the grounds of adultery.
War in Europe
Thomas Jefferson learned a hard lesson that would affect most presidents of the United States: rarely did their second terms garner as much success as their first terms. During Jefferson’s second term he ran afoul of intractable problems created by the renewal of the European war pitting Napoleonic France against Great Britain—and most of Europe—in 1803, which tested Jefferson’s desire to avoid “entangling alliances” with European nations.
Preparation for war to defend commerce
In 1806 and 1807, American shipping was caught in the crossfire of the war between Britain and France.
Harassment by BRITAIN AND FRANCE For two years after the renewal of European warfare, American shippers reaped the financial benefits, taking over trade with the French and Spanish West Indies. But the warring powers soon started limiting the freedom of neutral nations to trade with their enemies. In 1807 the commercial provisions of Jay’s Treaty expired, and the British interference with American shipping increased, not just in a desperate effort to keep supplies from Napoleon’s continent but also to hobble U. S. competition with British merchant ships. The situation presented American shippers with a dilemma: if they complied with the demands of the British to stop trading with the French, they were subject to seizure by the French, and vice versa. In the meantime, British warships stopped, searched, and seized a growing number of American merchant ships crossing the Atlantic.
The prospects for profits were so great, however, that American shippers ran the risk. For seamen the danger was heightened by the British renewal of the practice of impressment. Great Britain needed twelve thousand new sailors each year to man its warships. The use of armed “press-gangs” to kidnap men in British (and colonial) ports was a
Long-standing method of recruitment used by the British navy. The seizure of British subjects from American vessels provided a new source of recruits, justified on the principle that British citizens remained British subjects for life: “Once an Englishman, always an Englishman.” To Americans, the British practice of impressment assaulted the honor and dignity of the new nation.
On June 22, 1807, the British warship Leopard accosted a U. S. naval vessel, the Chesapeake, on its maiden voyage, about eight miles off the Virginia coast. After the Chesapeake’s captain refused to be searched for British deserters, the Leopard opened fire, killing three Americans and wounding eighteen. The Chesapeake, unready for battle, was forced to strike its colors (to lower the flag as a sign of surrendering). A British search party seized four men, one of whom was later hanged for desertion from the British navy. Soon after the Chesapeake limped back into Norfolk, the Washington Federalist editorialized: “We have never, on any occasion, witnessed. . . such a thirst for revenge.” Public wrath was so aroused by the Chesapeake incident that Jefferson could have declared war on the spot. Had Congress been in session, he might have been forced into one. But Jefferson, like John Adams before him, resisted war fever—and suffered politically as a result. Jefferson ordered all British warships out of U. S. ports on July 12, 1807. But such a timid response angered many Americans. One Federalist called Jefferson a “dish of skim milk curdling at the head of our nation.”
THE EMBARGO Congress decided to go beyond Jefferson’s effort at “peaceable coercion.” In 1807 legislators passed the unprecedented Embargo Act, which stopped all exports of American goods and prohibited American ships from leaving for foreign ports. The U. S. Navy was deployed to enforce the embargo. In effect, the United States blockaded its own shipping. Congress was empowered to declare an embargo by its constitutional authority to regulate commerce, which in this case Republicans interpreted broadly as the power to prohibit commerce altogether.
Jefferson’s embargo failed from the beginning because few Americans were willing to make the necessary sacrifices required by the shutting off of foreign trade. Merchants in New England howled at the loss of their greatest industry: oceangoing commerce. The value of American exports plummeted from $48 million in 1807 to $9 million a year later. Meanwhile, smuggling grew rampant, especially along the border with Canada. While American ships sat idle in ports, their crews laid off and unpaid, the British enjoyed a near monopoly on legitimate trade with Canada and the West Indies. As it turned out, France was little hurt by the embargo, which led some Americans to argue that Jefferson intended the embargo to aid the French in the war against Britain.
American resistance to the embargo revived the Federalist party in New England, which charged that Jefferson was in league with the French. At the same time, commercial farmers and planters in the South and West suffered for want of foreign outlets for their grain, cotton, and tobacco. After fifteen months, Jefferson accepted failure and repealed the ineffective embargo in 1809, shortly before he relinquished the “splendid misery” of the presidency.
In the election of 1808 the presidential succession passed to another Virginian, Secretary of State James Madison. The Federalists, backing Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of New York, revived enough as a result of the public backlash against the embargo to win 47 electoral votes to Madison’s 122.
THE DRIFT TO WAR The brilliant Madison may have been the “Father of the Constitution,” but he proved a mediocre chief executive. From the beginning his presidency was entangled in foreign affairs and crippled by naivete. Madison and his advisers repeatedly overestimated the young republic’s diplomatic leverage and military strength. The result was humiliation. Like Jefferson, Madison insisted on upholding the principle of freedom of the seas for neutral nations, but he was unwilling to create a navy strong enough to support it. He continued Jefferson’s policy of “peaceable coercion” by different but no more effective means. In place of the embargo, Congress reopened trade with all countries except France and Great Britain and authorized the president to reopen trade with whichever of these gave up its restrictions on American trade. The British minister in Washington, David Erskine, assured Madison’s secretary of state that Britain would revoke its restrictions in 1809. With that assurance, Madison reopened trade with Britain, but Erskine had acted on his own, and his superiors repudiated his action and recalled him. Madison’s trade restrictions proved as ineffective as the embargo. The president’s policies sparked an economic recession and brought no change in British behavior. In the vain search for an alternative, Congress in 1810 reversed itself and adopted a measure introduced by Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina. Called Macon’s Bill number 2, it reopened trade with the warring powers but provided that if either Great Britain or France dropped its restrictions on American trade, the United States would embargo trade with the other.
This time, Napoleon took a turn at trying to bamboozle Madison. The French foreign minister, the Duke de Cadore, informed the U. S. minister in Paris that Napoleon had withdrawn the Berlin and Milan Decrees, but the carefully worded Cadore letter had strings attached: revocation of the decrees depended upon the British doing likewise. The strings were plain to see, but Madison either misunderstood or, more likely, foolishly went along in the hope of putting pressure on the British. The British initially refused to give in, and on June 1, 1812, Madison reluctantly asked Congress to declare war.
On June 5, the House of Representatives voted for war by 79 to 49. Two weeks later, the Senate concurred by a narrower vote, 19 to 13. The southern and western states wanted war; the Northeast, fearful of losing its maritime trade across the Atlantic, opposed war. Every Federalist in Congress opposed the war; 80 percent of Republicans supported it. On June 16, however, the British foreign minister, facing an economic crisis, ended restraints on U. S. trade. Britain preferred not to risk war with the United States on top of its war with Napoleon. But on June 18, not having heard of the British action, Madison signed the declaration of war. He did so for three reasons: (1) to protest the British Orders in Council, which allowed the Royal Navy to interfere with American shipping; (2) to stop the British impressments of sailors from American ships; and (3) to end British encouragement of Indian attacks on Americans living along the western and northern frontiers. With more time or more patience, Madison’s policy would have been vindicated without resort to war. By declaring war, Republicans hoped to unite the nation and discredit the Federalists. To generate popular support for the war, Jefferson advised Madison that he needed, above all, “to stop Indian barbarities. The conquest of Canada will do this.”
The War of 1812
In 1812 the United States found itself embroiled in another war against Great Britain, barely thirty years after the Revolutionary War had ended. How that happened remains contested terrain among historians.
CAUSES The main cause of the war—the violation of American shipping rights—dominated President Madison’s war message and provided the most evident reason for a mounting American hostility toward the British. Yet the geographic distribution of the congressional vote for war raises a troubling question. The preponderance of the vote came from members of Congress representing the farm regions from Pennsylvania southward and westward. The maritime states of New York and New England, the region that bore the brunt of British attacks on U. S. shipping, voted against the declaration of war. One explanation for this seeming anomaly is simple enough: the farming regions suffered damage to their markets for grain, cotton, and
Tobacco while New England shippers made profits from smuggling in spite of the British restrictions.
Other plausible explanations for the sectional vote, however, include frontier Indian attacks in the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky) that were blamed on British agents, competition with the British over the profitable fur trade in the Great Lakes region, and the desire among Americans for new land in Canada and the Floridas (West and East). Conflicts with Indians were endemic to a rapidly expanding West. Land-hungry settlers and speculators kept moving out ahead of government surveys and sales in search of fertile acres. The constant pressure to sell tribal lands repeatedly forced or persuaded Indians to sign treaties they did not always understand. It was an old story, dating from the Jamestown settlement, but one that took a new turn with the rise of two Shawnee leaders, Tecumseh and his twin brother, Tenskwatawa, “the Prophet.”
Tecumseh
The Shawnee leader who tried to unite Indian tribes in defense of their lands. Tecumseh was killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames.
THE BATTLE OF TIPPECANOE Tecumseh saw with blazing clarity the consequences of Indian disunity. From his base on the Tippecanoe River in northern Indiana, he traveled from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico to form a confederation of tribes to defend Indian hunting grounds, insisting that no land cession to whites was valid without the consent of all tribes, since they held the land in common. In October 1811 the charismatic Tecum-seh called on a council meeting of Creeks and other southern tribes to “let the white race perish!” He told them that nothing good would come of continued treaty negotiations with whites.
William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, learned of Tecumseh’s plans, met with him twice, and pronounced him “one of those uncommon geniuses who spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.” In the fall of 1811, Harrison decided that Tecumseh’s effort to organize a massive anti-American tribal confederacy must be stopped. He gathered a thousand troops and advanced on
Tecumseh’s capital, Prophetstown, on the Tippecanoe River, while the leader was away. Tecumseh’s followers attacked Harrison’s encampment on the river, but the Shawnees lost a bloody engagement that left about a quarter of Harrison’s men dead or wounded. Harrison’s troops burned the town and destroyed its supplies. Tecumseh’s dreams of an Indian confederacy went up in smoke, and Tecumseh himself fled to British protection in Canada.
THE ASSAULT ON CANADA The Battle of Tippecanoe reinforced suspicions that British agents in the Great Lakes region were inciting the Indians. Actually the incident was mainly Harrison’s doing. With little hope of help from war-torn Europe, British officials in Canada had steered a careful course, discouraging warfare but seeking to keep the Indians’ friendship and fur trade. The British treated the Indians as independent peoples living between British Canada and the United States. By contrast, most Americans on the northern border loathed and feared Indians, deeming them murderous, heathen savages deserving of extinction. To eliminate the Indian menace, Americans reasoned, they needed to remove its foreign support, and they saw the British Canadian province of Ontario as a pistol pointing at the United States.
Conquest of Canada would accomplish a twofold purpose: it would eliminate British influence among the Indians and open a new empire for land-hungry Americans. It was also one place where the British, in case of war, were vulnerable to an American attack. Madison and others acted on the mistaken assumption that many Canadians were eager to be liberated from British control. That there were nearly 8 million Americans in 1812 and only 300,000 Canadians led many bellicose Americans to believe the conquest of Canada would be quick and easy. New York alone had a million in habitants compared to just 75,000 in neighboring Upper Canada. Thomas Jefferson had told President Madison that the American “acquisition of Canada” was simply a “matter of marching” north with a military force. To the far south, the British were also vulnerable. East Florida, still under Spanish control, posed a similar threat to the Americans. Spain was too weak or simply unwilling to prevent sporadic Indian attacks across the border with Georgia. In addition, the British were suspected of smuggling goods through Florida and conspiring with Indians along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Such concerns helped generate war fever. In the Congress that assembled in late 1811, new members from southern and western districts clamored for war in defense of “national honor” and to rid the Northwest of the “Indian problem.” Among them were Henry Clay and Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. John Randolph of Roanoke christened these “new boys” the “war hawks.”
After they entered the House, Randolph said, “We have heard but one word— like the whip-poor-will, but one eternal monotonous tone—Canada! Canada! Canada!” The new speaker of the house, young Henry Clay, a tall, rawboned westerner who, like Andrew Jackson, was known for his combative temperament and propensity for dueling, yearned for war. “I am for resistance by the sword,” he vowed. He promised that the Kentucky militia stood ready to march on Canada to acquire its lucrative fur trade and to suppress the British effort to incite Indian attacks along the American frontier. “I don’t like Henry Clay,” Calhoun said. “He is a bad man, an imposter, a creator of wicked schemes. I wouldn’t speak to him, but, by God, I love him.” When then Congressman Calhoun heard the news of the outbreak of war, he threw his arms around House Speaker Henry Clay’s neck and led his war-hawk colleagues in an Indian war dance.
WAR PREPARATIONS As it turned out, the war hawks would get neither Canada nor Florida, for James Madison had carried into war a nation that was ill prepared both financially and militarily. The Jeffersonian Republican emphasis on small federal budgets and military cutbacks was not an effective way to win a war. And Madison, a studious, soft-spoken man, lacked the martial qualities needed to inspire national confidence and resolve. He was no George Washington.
Moreover, the national economy was not prepared for war. In 1811, despite earnest pleas from Treasury Secretary Gallatin, Congress had let the twenty-year charter of the Bank of the United States expire. In addition, once war began, the British navy blockaded American ports, thereby cutting off imports, a major source of national revenue. By March 1813, Gallatin warned President Madison that: “We have hardly enough money to last till the end of the month.” Furthermore, the extinction of the Bank of the United States brought chaos to the nation’s financial system. Loans were now needed to cover about two thirds of the war costs, and northeastern opponents of the war were reluctant to lend money to the federal government.
The military situation was almost as bad. War had become more and more likely for nearly a decade, but Jefferson’s defense cutbacks had prevented preparations. When the War of 1812 began, the army numbered only 3,287 men, ill trained, poorly equipped, and miserably led by aging officers past their prime and with little combat experience. In January 1812 Congress authorized an army of 35,000 men, but a year later, only 18,500 had been recruited—only by enticing them with promises of land and cash bounties. The British, on the other hand, had nearly 250,000 men in uniform worldwide.
The U. S. Navy was in comparatively good shape, with able officers and trained men whose seamanship had been tested in the fighting against
France and Tripoli. Its ships were well outfitted and seaworthy—all sixteen of them (the British had six hundred warships). In the first year of the war, it was the navy that produced the only U. S. victories, in isolated duels with British vessels, but their effect was mainly an occasional boost to morale. Within a year the British had blockaded the U. S. coast, except for New England, where they hoped to cultivate anti-war feeling, and most of the little American fleet was bottled up in port.
A CONTINENTAL WAR The War of 1812 ended up involving three wars fought on three separate fronts. One conflict occurred on the waters of the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay and along the middle Atlantic coast. The second war occurred in the south, in Alabama, Mississippi, and West and East Florida, culminating in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. In that theater, American forces led by General Andrew Jackson invaded lands owned by the Creeks and other Indians as well as the Spanish. The third war might be more accurately called the Canadian-American War. It began in what was then called the Old Northwest, in what is now northern Indiana and Ohio, southeastern Michigan, and regions around Lakes Huron and Michigan. There the fighting raged back and forth along the ill-defined border between the United States and British Canada.
THE WAR IN THE NORTH The only place where the United States could effectively strike at the British was Canada. There the war essentially became a civil war, very much like the American Revolution, in which one side (Canadians—many of whom were former American Loyalists who had fled north in 1783) remained loyal to the British Empire while the other side (Americans) sought to continue the continental revolution against the empire. On both sides of the border the destruction and bloodshed embittered the combatants as well as civilians. Indians dominated the heavily wooded area around the Great Lakes, using British-supplied weapons and ammunition to resist the steady advance of American settlers into the contested region. At the same time, the British authorities had grown dependent on the Indians to help them defend Canada from attack. Michigan’s governor recognized the reciprocal relationship: “The British cannot hold Upper Canada without the assistance of the Indians,” but the “Indians cannot conduct a war without the assistance of a civilized nation [Great Britain].”
The Madison administration opted for a three-pronged assault on British Canada: along the Lake Champlain route toward Montreal, with General Henry Dearborn in command; along the Niagara River, with forces
Under General Stephen Van Rensselaer; and into Upper Canada (today called Ontario) from Detroit, with General William Hull and some two thousand men.
In 1812, Hull marched his troops across the Detroit River but was pushed back by the British. Sickly and senile, the indecisive Hull procrastinated in cramped, dirty Detroit while his position worsened. The British commander cleverly played upon Hull’s worst fears. Gathering what redcoats he could to parade in view of Detroit’s defenders, he announced that thousands of Indian allies were at the rear and that once fighting began, he would be unable to control them. Fearing a massacre of Detroit’s civilians, Hull surrendered his entire force to British bluff and bravado. The shocking surrender stunned the nation and opened the entire Northwest to raids by British troops and their Indian allies. Republicans felt humiliated. The American soldiers appeared to be cowards. In Kentucky a Republican said General Hull must be a “traitor” or “nearly an idiot.” He was eventually court-martialed for cowardice and sentenced to death, only to be pardoned.
In the especially porous northern borderland between the United States and Canada, a powerful combination of British regular troops and their Indian allies repeatedly defeated U. S. invasion efforts. The botched American attempts revived the British contempt for the American soldiers as inept, unreliable, and cowardly. As one American complained, “the taunts and sarcasms of the Tories on both sides of the river are not to be endured.” Madison’s navy secretary now pushed vigorously for American naval control of the Great Lakes and other inland waterways along the Canadian border. If the Americans could break the British naval supply line and secure Lake Erie, they could erect a barrier between the British and their Indian allies. At Presque Isle (near Erie), Pennsylvania, in 1813, twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Hazard Perry, already a fourteen-year veteran, was building ships from timber cut in nearby forests. By the end of the summer, Commodore Perry set out in search of the British, whom he found at Lake Erie’s Put-in-Bay on September 10. After completing the preparations for battle, Perry told an aide, “This is the most important day of my life.”
Two British warships used their superior weapons to pummel the Lawrence, Perry’s flagship. After four hours of intense shelling, none of the Lawrence’s guns was working, and most of the crew was dead or wounded. The British expected the Americans to flee, but Perry refused to quit. He had himself rowed to another vessel, carried the battle to the enemy, and finally accepted the surrender of the entire British squadron. Hatless and bloodied, Perry sent to General William Henry Harrison the long-awaited message: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
American naval control of Lake Erie forced the British to evacuate Upper Canada. They gave up Detroit, and an American army defeated them at the Battle of the Thames on October 5. British power in Upper Canada was eliminated. In the course of the battle, Tecumseh fell, his dream of Indian unity dying with him. Perry’s victory on Lake Erie and Harrison’s defeat of Tecumseh enabled the Americans to recover control of Michigan and seize the Western District of Upper Canada.
THE WAR IN THE SOUTH In the South, too, the war flared up in 1813. On August 30, so-called “Red Stick” Creeks allied with the British
Attacked Fort Mims, on the Alabama River thirty miles above the Gulf coast town of Mobile, killing 553 men, women, and children, butchering and scalping half of them. The news of the massacre outraged Americans, especially those eager to remove the Creeks from the Mississippi Territory (which then included Alabama). When word of the Fort Mims slaughter reached Andrew Jackson at his home in Tennessee, he was in bed recovering from a Nashville street brawl with Thomas Hart Benton, later a senator from Missouri. As the commanding general of the Army of West Tennessee, the flinty Jackson, his injured arm still in a sling, summoned about 2,500 volunteer state militiamen (including Private David Crockett). Jackson told all “brave Tennesseans” that their “frontier [was] threatened with invasion by the savage foe” and that the Indians were advancing “towards your frontier
With scalping knives unsheathed, to butcher your wives, your children, and your helpless babes. Time is not to be lost.”
Jackson’s volunteers then set out on a vengeful campaign southward across Alabama that crushed the Creek resistance, village by village. David Crockett remembered that the Americans, eager to exact revenge for the massacre at Fort Mims, surrounded one Creek village and attacked at dawn. Dozens of “Red Sticks” sought safety in a house, whereupon Crockett and the Americans “shot them like dogs; and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the forty-six Creek warriors in it.”
The decisive battle in the “Creek War” occurred on March 27, 1814, at Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa River, in the heart of Upper Creek country in east-central Alabama. Jackson’s Cherokee allies played a crucial role in the assault against an elaborate Creek fort harboring 1,100 men, women, and children. Jackson’s forces surrounded the fort, set fire to it, and shot the Creeks as they tried to escape. Nine hundred of them were killed, including three hundred who were slaughtered as they struggled to cross the river. Jackson reported to his wife that the “carnage was dreadful.” His men had “regained all the scalps taken from Fort Mims.” Fewer than fifty of Jackson’s men and Indian allies were killed. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend was the worst defeat ever inflicted upon Native Americans. With the Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed in August 1814, the devastated Creeks were forced to cede two thirds of their land to the United States, some twenty-three million acres, including a third of Georgia and most of Alabama. Even those Creeks who had fought on Jackson’s side were forced to give up their lands. Red Eagle, the chief of the Creeks defeated by the Americans, told Jackson: “I am in your power. . . . My people are all gone. I can do no more but weep over the misfortunes of my nation.” For his part, Jackson declared that “the power of the Creeks is I think forever broken.” President Madison rewarded Jackson by naming him a major general in the regular army of the United States.
Four days after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Napoleon’s European empire collapsed with the defeat of his French army by British and Prussian forces at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. Now free to deal solely with the United States, the British in 1814 invaded America from Canada. They also implemented a naval blockade of the New England ports and launched raids on coastal towns from Delaware south to Florida. The final piece of the British war plan was to seize New Orleans in order to sever American access to the Mississippi River, lifeline of the West.
THOMAS MACDONOUGH’s NAVAL VICTORY The main British military effort focused on launching from Canada a massive invasion of the
United States. The outnumbered American defenders were saved only by the superb ability of Commodore Thomas Macdonough, commander of the U. S. naval squadron on Lake Champlain. The British army bogged down while its warships engaged Macdonough’s ships in a battle that ended with the entire British fleet either destroyed or captured. The Battle of Lake Champlain (also called the Battle of Plattsburgh) forced the British to abandon the northern campaign. The British forces retreated to Canada.
FIGHTING IN THE CHESAPEAKE Meanwhile, however, U. S. forces suffered the most humiliating experience of the war as British troops captured and burned Washington, D. C. In August 1814, four thousand British troops landed at Benedict, Maryland, and headed for undefended Washington, thirty-five miles away. Thousands of frightened Americans fled the city. All President Madison could do was frantically call out the poorly led ragtag militia. The president then left the White House to join the militiamen marching to confront the British in Maryland, but their feeble defense disintegrated as the British invaders attacked.
On August 24 the redcoats marched unopposed into the American capital, where British officers ate a meal in the White House that had been prepared for President Madison and his wife, Dolley, who had fled the grounds just in time, after first saving a copy of the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s portrait. The vengeful British, aware that American troops had earlier burned and sacked the Canadian capital at York (Toronto), then burned the White House, the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and most other government buildings. A tornado the next day compounded the damage, but a violent thunderstorm dampened both the fires and the enthusiasm of the British forces, who headed north to assault Baltimore.
The British destruction of Washington, D. C., infuriated Americans. A Baltimore newspaper reported that the “spirit of the nation is roused.” That vengeful spirit showed itself when fifty British warships sailed into Baltimore harbor on September 13. About a thousand Americans held Fort McHenry on an island in the harbor. The British fleet unleashed a ferocious, nightlong bombardment of the fort. Yet the Americans refused to surrender. Francis Scott Key, a Washington, D. C., lawyer and occasional poet, watched the siege on a British ship in the harbor, having been dispatched to negotiate the release of a captured American. The sight of the American flag (the “star-spangled banner”) still in place at dawn meant that the fort and the city had survived the British onslaught. The scene inspired him to scribble the verses of what came to be called “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which began, “Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light?” Later revised and set to the tune of an English drinking song, it eventually became America’s national anthem. The inability of the British to conquer Fort McHenry led them to abandon the attack on Baltimore.
While the fighting raged in the United States, American representatives, including Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams, had begun meetings in Ghent, near Brussels in present day Belgium, to discuss ending the war. The prolonged, contentious negotiations began just after British victories in the war, and the British diplomats responded by making outrageous demands about transferring American territory to Canada. The American delegation refused. Then, after the Battle of Lake Champlain and the failure of the British invasion of Baltimore, the British grew more flexible. Still, the negotiations dragged on throughout the fall of 1814. Finally, on Christmas Eve, 1814, the diplomats reached an agreement.
The willingness of the British to continue fighting in North America was eroded by the eagerness of British merchants to renew trade with America, and by the war-weariness of a tax-burdened public. The British finally decided that the American war was not worth the cost. One by one, demands were dropped on both sides, until the envoys agreed to end the war, return the prisoners, restore the previous boundaries, and settle nothing else. What had begun as an American effort to invade and conquer Canada had turned into a second war of independence against the world’s greatest empire. Although the Americans lost the northern war for Canada, they had won the western and southern wars to subdue the Indians.
World History
