Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (26 page)

Read Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership Online

Authors: Conrad Black

This setback would be compounded by Madison, but was a lost opportunity, not a lasting defeat, and was more than overshadowed by the Louisiana Purchase. In strategic terms, the Jefferson presidency, though more ambiguous than its predecessors, continued America’s advance, in a world where almost all other nations were wracked by war.
CHAPTER FOUR
 
Reconciling with Britain
Abroad, and with Slavery at
Home, 1809–1836
 
1. JAMES MADISON AS PRESIDENT
 
Madison was the last principal founder of the nation still in harness. His presidency was heavily preoccupied with the perpetual crisis caused by the refusal of the British and French to take the United States and its sovereignty seriously. The novelty had worn off America, and Napoleon was a far more epochal and immense historic figure—other than in the most conventionally idealistic terms—than the American founders, and the struggle with him was entirely engrossing to Europe and terminally enervating to much of it, ultimately including France. Madison drifted through his first year, after the cancellation of Jefferson’s embargo, which act included authorizing the president to resume trade with any country that signaled the end of violations of America’s neutrality.
While in this mode, Madison was embarrassingly fleeced, first by the British and then by the French, as if in a stately early nineteenth century court quadrille. The British minister in Washington, David Erskine, told Madison’s secretary of state, Robert Smith, that the British orders in council that had so offended America would be withdrawn on June 10, 1809. Madison responded with a proclamation on April 19 lifting the ban on trade with Great Britain. The British foreign secretary, George Canning, disavowed Erskine and pulled him as minister on May 30, and Madison reimposed the trade embargo on Britain on August 9, 1809. The next legislative tackling of the trade question was by the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Nathaniel Macon, in early 1810. His bill stated that if either Britain or France relaxed its offensive measures, the president could prohibit trade with the other. (Only Britain and France were now players in this American game, which the subjects of their attempted reprisals barely seemed to notice.) Napoleon’s foreign minister, the Duke de Cadore,
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informed the American minister in Paris, John Armstrong, that France was ending its trade blockade. Madison, undismayed by the fiasco with Britain, announced on November 2, 1810, that the embargo against France had ended, and that commerce with Britain would end completely if it did not follow the French lead. In retaliation, Britain completely shut down New York as a port and redoubled the impressments of American sailors, before it came to light that Napoleon had not ended the anti-American trade exclusion at all. By then, such matters had been overtaken by more important and drastic events, as France had invaded Russia and America had gone back to war against Britain.
Madison did seize west Florida, which was the territory along the Gulf coast from the Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama, on October 27, 1810, as it had been Jefferson’s and his contention that American sovereignty over this territory could be legally inferred from the Louisiana Purchase. But Madison continued, almost four years after the imposition of the self-defeating embargo, to shuffle and reshuffle ineffectual remedies to the systematic British and French violations of American sovereignty. If he had followed Washington’s old dictum that peace should be pursued by preparing for war, and assembled an army capable of occupying Canada, Britain would have made concessions. Britain could not transfer the forces that would have been necessary to prevent an American occupation of Canada after it had committed its main army to the war in Spain in 1808. But Madison compounded Jefferson’s error and never armed himself with a plausible stick with which to threaten the British, who continued to treat the United States like a banana republic, a practice in which Napoleon emulated or surpassed them with simple chicanery, as he had no navy (having been relieved of it by Viscount Nelson and other British admirals) with which fully to replicate Britain’s outrages against America.
As the foreign policy problems worsened and the American foreign trade economy stagnated, apart from the formidable efforts of smugglers, the charter of the Bank of the United States came up for renewal. The tenacious Swiss banker and ethnologist Albert Gallatin, settling determinedly into his third full term as Treasury secretary, fought hard to renew the charter, with Madison’s support. The administration lost in the House, and a tie in the Senate was broken by the vote of Vice President Clinton, against the government, an almost unheard-of rebuff to the president. It was another unfortunate blunder, because the Bank was, as Hamilton had designed it, and as Gallatin had seen, a fine financing vehicle—something that, despite Jefferson and Madison’s aversion to debt and large government, would prove very necessary when, the following year, the United States found itself trying to fund a war against a Great Power. (Gallatin was a great authority on American Indian tribes, and here too his expertise could have been invaluable, as relations with the indigenous peoples were chronically and dishonestly mismanaged for generations.)
Finally, by 1811, American opinion was moving toward war with Britain despite all the Jefferson-Madison pusillanimity about porous and self-punitive economic embargoes. The formidable Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, The Prophet, were being encouraged by the British to build up an Indian buffer zone on the northwest frontier, and there was frequent skirmishing with settlers in the summer of 1811. The governor of the Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison, was induced to move against Tecumseh, who had attempted to organize all the main tribes, bands, and nations, as they variously called themselves, including in the Southwest, into a great defensive confederation. The Indians attacked the approaching Harrison at dawn on November 7 at Tippecanoe, and a fierce struggle see-sawed all day until the Americans forced retreat on the Indians, and burned their village down. This entered into American legend, in the absence of real war against sophisticated enemies, as a great victory, and after 30 years for the legend to be magnified by the American promotional machine, Harrison would join a succession of 11 men from Washington to Eisenhower who would ride military renown into the presidency.
By 1811, the British promotion of the Indians would inflame opinion in the West and North as efficiently as the maritime abrasions had aroused the seaboard states, especially New England and New York. Coming forward in the Congress now were young and aggressive men from the West and the South, who were widely known, following the description of John Randolph of Roanoke, as “war hawks.” Among the most prominent were Henry Clay of Kentucky, Speaker of the House in 1811; John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who followed Macon as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; and Richard M. Johnson (who in 1813 would claim to have killed Tecumseh). They advocated an armed and aggressive response to the British.
2. THE WAR OF 1812
 
On November 5, 1811, Madison, clearly preparing to take the plunge that would have been easier and timelier years before after suitable preparations, blasted the antics of the British on the high seas (“hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish”). He was no kinder to the French, who had hoodwinked him for a year into believing the continental blockade in the Berlin Decree of 1806 had been lifted, and finally called for additional commitments to national defense. On April 1, 1812, he asked the Congress for an immediate and general embargo for 60 days, and was empowered three days later to call up 100,000 militiamen from around the country for six months.
The war that was to follow was farcical in its beginning and in its end, and often in between. The Napoleonic blockade, enforced by the mighty French Grand Army, did cause serious hardship in Britain, and the prime minister, Spencer Percival, was contemplating easing the heavy-handed treatment of America when he became the only British prime minister to be assassinated, by a deranged man of incoherent political views, on May 11, 1812. He was replaced by Lord Liverpool, but the delay held up until June 23 the British suspension of the orders in council that blockaded America. On June 18, at Madison’s request, Congress declared war on Great Britain.
Madison delivered his request for a declaration of war on June 1; seventeen days to extract the declaration, with New England, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware voting against, illustrated how not to go to war. The country was sharply divided from the start, far more than it had been on the issue of independence from Britain, or than the South would be about seceding or the North over subduing secession nearly 50 years later. Not until the latter stages of the Vietnam War would America be so divided while exchanging fire with an enemy. Madison identified impressments of American sailors, violation of U.S. neutrality and territorial waters, the blockade of U.S. ports, and the related refusal to retract the enabling orders in council (as if the provocations would have been less galling if they weren’t declared official policy, but only judicial decisions) as the reasons for war. Indians were not mentioned.
Because of three full terms of mismanagement of America’s war-making powers and strategic position opposite Great Britain, the United States did not enter the war with such advantages as it should have enjoyed. Britain had its main army in Spain and was in no position to send heavy units to America. Its navy was fully engaged enforcing the blockade on France and its allied and conquered territories. The United States had 30 times as many people as Canada, and the U.S. Navy, though only 16 ships, had advantages of proximity and resupply, and was manned entirely by carefully selected and trained men. Against that, its army was not trained at all, public opinion was fragmented badly from the start, and there was no capacity to raise money efficiently since the lapse of the Bank of the United States. Madison was responsible, building on Jefferson’s woeful traditions in these matters, for all of these problems.
The British only cuffed the Americans about because they ruled the oceans and knew that the United States had no military capability to inconvenience them in Canada or the West Indies. Countries, like people, do what they think they can get away with, with impunity. Madison was ultimately correct to go to war, but it would not have been necessary if he had not been swindled so artistically by Napoleon. The war—late, poorly prepared both in war-making terms and in preparation of public opinion—was still the right thing to do if it were successful. If the United States had emerged from it in possession of Canada, none of the impotent saber-rattling and vapid posturing of the various embargoes would have counted for anything.
Madison, a profoundly pacifistic man, despite his eminent position as a revolutionary, did finally conclude that there was no option but war, and started with every opportunity to make the war a great success and another immense accretion to the territory of the United States. And he started it in high fettle, visiting each government department, rendering pep talks wearing a “little round hat and huge cockade.”
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The original American military plan was a harking back to the unfulfilled dreams of the previous wars about the ease of taking Canada (which had only been done by Britain in 1759, by penetrating the vast St. Lawrence like an endoscopy and seizing Quebec). There were to be the now traditional three parallel approaches: General Henry Dearborn would scoot up Lake Champlain and take Montreal; General Stephen Van Rensselaer would cross into Canada at the Niagara River and take what was to become Toronto; and a westerly force under General William Hull would attack across the St. Clair River at what is now Detroit and clean up whatever was left. The Americans were poorly trained militia, and the previous Washington and Adams Administrations’ commitment to a permanent general staff and the development of detailed provisional war plans had been abandoned. Thus, all that was imagined were predictable approaches toward Montreal and at the western ends of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Hull’s drive across the Detroit River into Canada was the first off, but it proceeded only a few miles and then he withdrew after a month, as he was rightly fearful of being cut off by Tecumseh, who had thrown his lot in with the British and Canadians following their capture of the American post on Michilimackinac Island. Hull abruptly surrendered Detroit to General Isaac Brock without any exchange of fire, and the Indians seized Fort Dearborn (Chicago) on August 15 and massacred the garrison. His entire force of 2,000 were instant POWs. Hull was court-martialed for cowardice and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted because of his Revolutionary War service, and he was dishonorably discharged.

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