Can history explain anything? Henry Adams, after a lifetime of writing about American history, wasn’t sure that it could. “Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories,—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect,” he wrote. But he suspected that the assumptions wouldn’t bear scrutiny, and he was haunted by the idea that hoping for a causal explanation of human affairs might be a mistake. “Chaos was the law of nature,” he suggested late in life. “Order was the dream of man.”
Perhaps it was Adams’s penchant for historiographic nihilism that drew him to the War of 1812, the conflict with Britain that looms over his masterpiece, the nine-volume “History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.” As a great evil, a war calls out for some kind of theodicy—for an explanation of why it happened and what it meant—but the War of 1812 frustrates the desire for such answers. Its origins lie in a concatenation of misperceptions, crossed signals, and false hopes. Its end is no less obscure: America, which started the war, accomplished none of its stated aims, and the peace treaty merely restored the combatants to the status quo before the fight. A number of historians feel that neither Britain nor America won—though most agree that the Indians, allies of Britain who never again seriously obstructed white America’s expansion, definitely lost. At the time, no one seemed to have more than a partial understanding of why they were fighting. A British government official compared the two countries to two men holding their heads in buckets of water, to see who would drown first. Adams wrote of the first winter of the war, “So complicated and so historical had the causes of war become that no one even in America could explain or understand them.”
Many of Adams’s successors have found it just as hard to say what the war was about. Recently, in “The Civil War of 1812” (Knopf; 2010), Alan Taylor pushed pointillism even further than Adams did, taking as his subject the unstable allegiances and local vendettas along the border between America and Britain’s Canadian colonies—the sort of fractal details that tend to get smoothed out of popular narrative. “No single cause can explain the declaration of war,” he wrote. In “The Weight of Vengeance” (Oxford), a new study marking the war’s bicentennial year, Troy Bickham repeats the refrain: “There is no single explanation for the outbreak of war in June 1812.” But Bickham has a trick up his sleeve. It turns out that he’s an optimist. He thinks that it is possible to say what the war was about. What’s more, he’s sure that Britain lost.
Within America, the War of 1812 was controversial—advocated by Republicans, who were known for their hatred of taxes and big government, and opposed by Federalists, who favored élite rule, central banking, and a peacetime defense establishment. Donald R. Hickey, a Wayne State College historian and the dean of 1812 scholarship, has called the vote to declare war the closest in American history. “Many nations have gone to war in pure gayety of heart,” Adams wrote, “but perhaps the United States were first to force themselves into a war they dreaded, in the hope that the war itself might create the spirit they lacked.”
The slogan of the so-called War Hawks centered on two issues: “free trade and sailors’ rights.” By “sailors’ rights,” they meant an end to the British practice of conscripting, or impressing, sailors from American merchant ships. By 1812, between nine and twenty thousand British sailors were working aboard American vessels, which paid more than twice as well as the Royal Navy. Britain, at war with France for nearly two decades, didn’t think it could afford not to go after them. The American government considered many to be naturalized citizens, but British law deemed allegiance to the King indissoluble, and, at the time, it wasn’t easy to tell an American from a Briton even if you agreed on the definitions. Though the American government issued certificates of citizenship, they were so easily forged that few British captains respected them. Many sailors simply identified themselves with tattoos of American flags or eagles. Under the circumstances, Taylor writes, “every British impressment was an act of counterrevolution.” Secretary of State James Monroe counted more than sixty-two hundred impressments of American sailors between 1803 and 1811.
What about the “free trade” half of the slogan? British planters in the West Indies blamed American shippers for a sugar and coffee glut that was eroding prices in Europe, and they called for a crackdown on America’s profitable trade with France and the French West Indies. Intermittently, the British government tried to regulate the United States almost as if it were still a colony. In 1807, in response to an attempt by Napoleon to blockade its coast, Britain issued a series of decrees, known as Orders in Council, that required American ships to dock in a British port and pay a British tax before trading with any part of Europe under Napoleon’s control. As Adams put it, “American commerce was made English.”
Yet neither free trade nor sailors’ rights fully explains the outbreak of war. Impressment had been going on for years before Republicans started to harp on it, in late 1811. Even though the dispute had, in 1807, provoked a British warship to fire on an American one, no less an authority than Thomas Jefferson said he hoped that the two nations “might have shoved along.” In addition, war was bound to put a stop to commercial shipping, sending the very sailors whom America was trying to protect back to the Royal Navy in search of employment. Impressment hardly seems decisive when, Bickham points out, war continued even after the issue became moot, in the spring of 1814, when Napoleon fell from power and the Royal Navy began discharging sailors instead of recruiting them. As for free trade, America didn’t go to war until five years after the Orders in Council; instead, it tried what Jefferson called “peaceable coercion,” a series of obstacles to trade with Britain. And France behaved at least as badly, seizing American ships bound for or leaving Britain. “The Devil himself could not tell which government, England or France, is the most wicked,” a North Carolina congressman remarked. What’s more, America’s peaceable coercion of Britain eventually succeeded, thanks to an assist from Napoleon’s blockade and an economic depression: in 1811, high bread prices caused riots in England, and by the end of the year the mills of Manchester lacked cotton. Eventually, on June 16, 1812, Britain announced the rescinding of the Orders in Council. But the news didn’t reach America for five weeks, and two days after Britain’s announcement the United States declared war. President James Madison later admitted that he would have delayed the declaration if he had known about the repeal. British merchants were so confident that war had been forestalled that they rashly celebrated by sending the White House a large quantity of English cheese.
Still, Bickham insists that the war was “no accident,” and, indeed, British and American attempts to reach an armistice failed in August of that year, as did Russian offers to mediate, in 1813. In Bickham’s opinion, the war continued after the evaporation of its ostensible causes because a larger issue was at stake: “whether or not the United States would be respected as a sovereign nation.” Bickham writes that Britain “sought to stifle American ambition and turn it into a client state,” which implies that Americans confusedly but accurately diagnosed a threat to their interests. But if a historian, looking at the matter in retrospect, isn’t able to say exactly which interests the war protected, it seems just as likely that Americans were acting against their interests. Must the war mean what early Americans say?
Other historians have been more skeptical than Bickham. Hickey has written that “the supposed threat to American independence in 1812 was more imagined than real,” and, in a recent article in the Journal of American History, Lawrence A. Peskin points out that what he calls “conspiratorial Anglophobia” sometimes drifted away from reality. Some Americans were willing to believe, for example, that British secret agents were buying up Connecticut sheep in order to sabotage the textile industry. In Adams’s view, British politicians merely believed that “America ought to be equally interested with Europe in overthrowing the military despotism of Napoleon,” and they resented giving America a free ride. Bickham is aware of the resentment, and even explains how it justified, in British minds, interference in America’s trade, which was seen as taking unfair advantage of Napoleon’s attacks on British shipping. Bickham tends, however, to take American touchiness more seriously than British resentment, and this allocation of empathy seems questionable, given that it’s now easier to believe that Napoleon wanted to rule the world than to believe that Britain wanted to resubjugate America. But perhaps early Americans, through the haze of their emotions, did perceive a genuine danger, which, because they succeeded in averting it, never materialized and is now therefore hard for historians to see.
When war was declared, there were only ten or twelve thousand men in the American Army, and its officers were “sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking,” as one of the better ones later recalled. The Navy had only seventeen seaworthy ships. Britain, meanwhile, commanded a thousand ships and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors worldwide, and it collected forty times as much tax revenue from its citizens. In declaring war, America had, as one congressman lamented, chosen to “get married, & buy the furniture afterwards.” Though Congress repeatedly raised the wages and land bounties for soldiers, “these inducements were not enough to supply the place of enthusiasm,” Adams wrote. The Army never had more than fifty thousand regulars, and Monroe, when he became the Secretary of War, estimated that the country needed twice that many.
Lacking the budget to augment its Navy, America chose to invade Canada, which was still a British colony. Madison had long ago predicted, “When the pear is ripe it will fall of itself,” and many agreed with Jefferson’s assessment that conquest of Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.” Only seven thousand British troops were stationed there, and not all Canadians had strong loyalty to the King: Lower Canada, so called because it was lower on the St. Lawrence River, was full of Catholics of French origin, and the majority of Upper Canada’s residents had recently left America for the promise of nothing more lofty than cheap land and low taxes. When General William Hull, the governor of Michigan Territory, crossed the Detroit River and initiated hostilities, his message to Canadians assumed their willing capitulation: “You will be emancipated from Tyranny and oppression and restored to the dignified station of freemen.”
But, a month later, Hull was back in Detroit, under siege, drooling tobacco spittle and cowering while a British commander paraded Indians in vermillion-and-blue war paint before his fortifications. He surrendered, and the conquest of Canada began to recede as a possibility. By December, Henry Clay, the leader of Congress’s War Hawks, was calling the conquest of Canada “not the end but the means”—no more than a potential bargaining chip—and Bickham considers the idea that America went to war for the sake of Canadian territory a “myth.”
The campaign against Canada rarely rose above mediocrity. At least twice, American fighters arrived at the border only to decide that they preferred not to cross it, and their habit of looting undermined hopes of winning Canadian hearts and minds. Worse, America’s strategy was flawed. The key to the region was the St. Lawrence River. Whoever held Montreal controlled everything upstream. But to attack Montreal Americans had to pass through northern New York, where Federalist residents opposed the war. The Administration shifted its focus to the west, where there were plenty of Republicans eager to fight, but where, Taylor writes, “the war could never be won.” It’s a little like the joke about the drunk looking for his keys not where he dropped them but where the street lamp is.
Viewed as a narrative, the war has too many settings and a weak plot. The British take Detroit. The Americans fail to take Queenston. The Americans try to take Fort Erie. On Lake Ontario, the Americans raid York, the capital of Upper Canada, and burn the Parliament buildings. The British fail to take Fort Meigs. The Americans take Fort George. The Americans raid York again. The British burn Black Rock. The Americans retake Detroit. The Americans abandon Fort George. The British take Fort Niagara and burn Black Rock (again), as well as Buffalo. And so on, for nearly three years. As a diversion, the British Navy raided and burned towns along the Eastern Seaboard, and in late 1813 and 1814, in what was practically a separate war, Andrew Jackson roamed the Alabama Territory rounding up and killing rebel Creeks.
Amid the chaos, though, there are some lovely scenes. Taylor paints one of General James Wilkinson, Aaron Burr’s co-conspirator and betrayer, descending the St. Lawrence River with his troops while high on laudanum and whiskey, singing,
only to be defeated, upon arrival in Canada, by a British force half the size of his. He deserved worse, considering that he had lost a thousand of his men to disease and desertion by lodging them in a Louisiana swamp and appropriating their provisions.
The war had pathos, too, in the fate of the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, who sided with the British in the hope of forging a universal Indian confederacy. Tecumseh had a clear-eyed view of his people’s predicament, explaining to an American general, “You want, by your distinctions of Indian tribes, in allotting to each a particular tract of land, to make them to war with each other. You never see an Indian come and endeavor to make the white people do so.” When Tecumseh died, American soldiers cut off bits of his skin as souvenirs.
And there were some good lines. “I’ll try!” Colonel James Miller said, when ordered to capture British cannons at a battle near Niagara Falls. He succeeded, and Adams says that his story “for the next fifty years was told to every American school-boy as a model of modest courage.” The war also begat “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” and “Don’t give up the ship,” not to mention “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The best British line came when Admiral George Cockburn’s forces overran and burned Washington, D.C. “Be sure that all the C’s are destroyed, so that the rascals cannot any longer abuse my name,” Cockburn ordered, as he supervised the demolition of a newspaper’s printing office. The night before, his troops set fire to the White House after eating a supper they found on the table there.
America’s luck in the war was not all bad. A few months in, the American frigate Constitution challenged a British frigate to a sea duel. A British cannonball bounced off the wooden ship, earning it the name Old Ironsides, and it won. (The ship, which has been preserved by the Navy, sailed Boston Harbor in August, on the anniversary of the victory.) The British were shocked. In twenty years of war with the French, they had lost only a handful of naval engagements. “The sacred spell of the invincibility of the British navy was broken,” one British Parliamentarian declared. The American public recovered confidence in its power to fight; it was delighted, Adams wrote, by the discovery “that it still possessed the commonest and most brutal of human qualities.”
The American Navy took two more frigates that year. The success against the Royal Navy was unprecedented, but the damage inflicted was “trifling,” as Adams acknowledged. By late 1813, the Royal Navy had blockaded all of America south of New England, whose ports they left open for a while, probably as a reward for the region’s resistance to the war. In April, 1814, the British closed New England’s ports, too. The American economy was left in tatters.
A war tests a nation’s strength, which consists, practically speaking, of its citizens’ willingness to die for their country and to give it money. In 1814, such willingness began to fade in America. The Army shot a hundred and forty-six deserters, up from thirty-two the year before, and enlistment fell off when the government ran out of cash for recruiting bounties. “Something must be done and done speedily,” the Secretary of the Navy said, “or we shall have an opportunity of trying the experiment of maintaining an army and navy and carrying on a vigorous war without money.” In November, the federal government defaulted on the national debt, and the State Department wasn’t even able to pay its stationery bill.
Meanwhile, secessionists in New England, who had for years been scheming to split from the United States, saw their chance. Nantucket, pleading starvation, made a separate peace with Britain in August, declaring neutrality and suspending payment of federal taxes. Britain relented its blockade of the island and freed Nantucketers from its prisons. Block Island and several towns on Cape Cod followed, and, in British-occupied Maine, locals soon took oaths of neutrality and even of allegiance. After Connecticut and Massachusetts squabbled with the federal government over command of the state militias, newspapers and politicians proposed that the states should hold on to their federal tax revenues in order to pay for the militias themselves. The governor of Massachusetts dispatched an agent to Nova Scotia with a secret, treacherous message: if the rupture with the federal government turned violent, the state was willing to help defend Canada in exchange for British military assistance. President Madison looked “miserably shattered and woe-begone,” a Virginia lawyer reported in October. “His mind seems full of the New England sedition.” In December, representatives from five New England states met in Hartford, but all secessionist machinations became irrelevant in February, 1815, when news arrived that diplomats had signed a peace in Ghent at the end of the preceding year.
Hickey calls the treaty America’s “most significant victory.” The London Times had been calling for Madison’s execution, and the British had begun negotiations, in August, 1814, by asking for the annexation of northern Maine, the demilitarization of the Great Lakes, and the creation of an independent Indian nation in the Northwest, which would have taken up fifteen per cent of America’s land. They settled, in the end, for nothing. Bickham doubts, however, that America’s diplomats deserve all the credit. Britain’s allies were impatient to start trading with America, he explains, and at the Congress of Vienna, where the end of the Napoleonic Wars was being negotiated, it was awkward for Britain to ask Russia and Prussia to refrain from carving up smaller nations while Britain itself was known to be asking for chunks of the United States. In October, the Prime Minister warned a colleague that another season of war in America would cost “much more than we had any idea of,” and said he doubted that the British taxpayer was willing to foot the bill. The Duke of Wellington, the vanquisher of Napoleon, advised the Prime Minister that Britain hadn’t fought well enough to deserve keeping any American territory, and, soon afterward, Britain’s diplomats were instructed to get rid of what the Foreign Secretary called “the millstone of an American war” as fast as possible.
In London, the stock market rallied. Americans went on parades. In Washington, citizens heard of the peace only a week after learning that Andrew Jackson had routed British invaders in New Orleans, with a mere seventy-one American casualties to Britain’s two thousand and thirty-six. Although Jackson’s victory came too late to alter the terms of the peace, it succeeded in altering the memory of the war. Americans came to feel that they had won. Bickham, while not explicit, seems sympathetic to this view. Britain had aimed to “ignore American national sovereignty as it saw fit,” he writes, and found that it wasn’t able to.
British respect for American sovereignty did follow the war, and Britain and America never again tried to invade each other. The only question is whether the War of 1812 had anything to do with those facts. What if Britain began to respect America’s sovereignty simply because it no longer had a good reason not to? Once Napoleon fell, Britain didn’t need to fight him with sailors seized from American ships. Once the Continent was no longer controlled by a would-be world tyrant, Britain didn’t mind American ships trading there. The idea behind America, Henry Adams believed, was “that in the long run interest, not violence, would rule the world.” America grew timber, cotton, and tobacco that Britain wanted; Americans were excellent customers, and Britain looked forward to recapturing its hold on the American shipping business. The war’s true victor may have been not America but the American idea, as championed by the tightfisted British taxpayer. ♦
