[1811-1812 A.D.]

Territory, marched with a considerable force towards the town of the Prophet, situated at the junction of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers, in the upper part of Tippecanoe county, Indiana. The Prophet appeared and proposed a conference, but Harrison, suspecting treachery, caused his soldiers to sleep on their arms that night (November 6th, 1811). At four o'clock the next morning the savages fell upon the American camp, but after a bloody battle until dawn the Indians were repulsed. The battle of Tippecanoe was one of the most desperate ever fought with the Indians, and the loss was heavy on both sides. Tecumseh was not present on this occasion, and it is said the Prophet took no part in the engagement.

These events, so evidently the work of British interference, aroused the spirit of the nation, and throughout the entire West, and in the Middle and Southern states, there was a desire for war. Yet the administration fully appreciated the deep responsibility involved in such a step; and having almost the entire body of the New England people in opposition, the presiIdent and his friends hesitated. The British orders in council continued to be rigorously enforced; insult after insult was offered to the American flag; and the British press insolently boasted that the United States "could not be kicked into a war." Forbearance was no longer a virtue.

In March, 1811, Pinkney, the American minister, was suddenly recalled from London; and, British ships being stationed before the principal harbours of the United States for the purpose of enforcing the British authority, open acts of hostility took place in May of the same year. The British frigate Guerrière, exercising the assumed right of search, carried off three or four natives of the states from some American vessels, whereupon orders came down from Washington to Commodore Rodgers to pursue the British ship and demand their own men. Rodgers sailed from the Chesapeake on the 12th of May, in the frigate President, and, not meeting with the offending Guerrière, fell in with a smaller vessel, the Little Belt, towards evening of the 16th of May. The President was a large ship, the Little Belt a small one; the President hailed, and in return, the Americans declared, a shot was fired. The British, on the other hand, declared that the President fired first; however that might be, a severe engagement took place, the guns of the Little Belt were silenced, and thirty-two of her men killed and wounded. Through the night the two ships lay at a little distance from each other to repair their damages, the British ship being almost disabled.y

It was plain that war was becoming popular in the United States. As for that, it had always been so; when Washington opposed it, he was abused; when Adams favoured it, he was extolled; when Jefferson avoided it, he risked even his immense influence over the nation. Congress now took up the question, and voted one measure after another, preparatory to hostilities with Great Britain (December-March, 1812). The president hesitated. He was no war leader by nature or by principle; the only tendency in that direction came to him from party motives. His party, or at any rate the more active portion of it, was all for arms: when he doubted, they urged; when he inclined to draw back, they drove him forward. It being the time when the congressional caucus was about to nominate for the presidency, Madison received the intimation that if he was a candidate for re-election he must come out for war.

he yielded, he did yield, embargo of sixty days.

Whether it was to force or to his own free will that and sent a message to congress, recommending an Congress received it, according to its intention, as a preliminary to war, and voted it, though far from unanimously, for ninety days (April 4th, 1812).f

[1812 A.D.]

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DISCREPANCIES

The English historians have, as a class, little disagreement with the American upon the justice and the conduct of the War of Independence. They accept it as indirectly redounding to their own real benefit, and their pages glow with praise of Washington and other patriots. But in the accounts of what has been called "the second War of Independence" there is such fundamental discrepancy between the historians of the two countries that it seems hardly possible they are treating the same conflict. To the Americans the War of 1812 was a combat in which they had no choice; they were goaded into the struggle for very existence. The English historian remembers only the stupendous threat of Napoleon to convert all Europe into one empire; he remembers the overwhelming success of this personified ambition, up to the point where England alone offered up resistance; he remembers the life-and-death struggle of his country. And when he thinks of the United States at all, he can only remember that at this crisis of British existence the United States turned against its own mother country, and threw its armies and its ships into the scale on Napoleon's side.

This very natural feeling colours the whole attitude of the British historians and renders them untrustworthy. Unfortunately, most of the American historians are equally unreliable; largely, no doubt, because the humiliations of the war were such that it was for many years difficult for an historian to resist the temptation to make as respectable a picture as possible, even if the cold facts had to be somewhat coloured. An exception, however, may be made of their accounts of the warfare on the sea, where some of the most notable naval engagements in the world's history took place, and in which the superiority of the American seamen was beyond question.

As to the justification of the war there can hardly be any doubt, unless it be based on a theory that the people who had so long postponed their duties to command self-respect, and had endured unflinchingly such insolent overriding of the laws of common decency, had lost every right of resistance. Some historians maintain that America's real injustice lay not in the declaration of war, but in its declaration against England, it being maintained that it should have been declared either against France alone, or against both England and France, and under no circumstances against England alone. But this theory has little practical basis; for, as events proved, the United States was hardly capable of maintaining war against England alone, to say nothing of bringing upon its shoulders the united weight of England and France; in the second place, England was the ancient enemy of the United States, and France had saved its very existence; in the third place, since the British navy ruled the seas, the British were far the greater sinners against the dignity and commerce of the United States.

Furthermore, it is well to remember that the struggle between Napoleon and Great Britain was not by any means a struggle between a ruthless oppressor and a nation whose hands were entirely clean of oppression. All around the world there were evidences of British land-hunger. The United States had cause enough to declare war against both countries; but such an act would have been mere suicide. Lacking the power to wage a successful combat against both, it was only reasonable that it should choose for an adversary the nation which had done it much the greater injury. The true disgrace of the United States lay in the fact that it had been so long declaring war, and that it waged the inevitable conflict so languidly and so awkwardly.a

[1812 A.D.]

BEGINNING OF THE WAR OF 1812; INTERNAL FACTIONS

The bill declaring war between the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland and their dependencies, and the United States of America and their territories, was accompanied by a report, setting forth the causes that impelled to war, of which the following is a summary :

(1) For impressing American citizens, while sailing on the seas, the highway of nations, dragging them on board their ships of war, and forcing them to serve against nations in amity with the United States; and even to participate in aggressions on the rights of their fellow citizens when met on the high seas.

(2) Violating the rights and peace of our coasts and harbours, harassing our departing commerce, and wantonly spilling American blood, within our territorial jurisdiction.

(3) Plundering our commerce on every sea, under pretended blockades, not of harbours, ports, or places invested by adequate force, but of extended coasts, without the application of fleets to render them legal, and enforcing them from the date of their proclamation, thereby giving them virtually retrospective effect.

(4) Committing numberless spoliations on our ships and commerce, under her orders in council of various dates.

(5) Employing secret agents within the United States, with a view to subvert our government and dismember our union.

(6) Encouraging the Indian tribes to make war on the people of the United States.

The bill, reported by the committee of foreign relations, passed the house of representatives on the 4th of June, by a majority of thirty, in one hundred and twenty-eight votes, and was transmitted to the senate for its concurrence. In the senate it was passed by a majority of six, in thirty-two votes. On the 18th of June it received the approbation of the president, and on the next day was publicly announced.dd

France having again-and this time unconditionally-repealed her aggressive decrees, Great Britain withdrew her arbitrary orders in council just as the war was declared (June 23rd). One of the chief grounds for hostilities, therefore, fell through. The other remained, but only, it was insisted by Great Britain, until the United States would take some measures to prevent British seamen from enlisting in the American service, which being done, there would be no need of search or of impressment by the navy of Great Britain. Proposals of an armistice were rejected by the United States (JuneOctober). "We must fight," cried the war party, "if it is only for our seamen ; six thousand of them are victims to these atrocious impressments." The British government had admitted, the year before, that they had sixteen hundred Americans in their service. "But your six thousand," retorted the advocates of peace, "are not all your own; there are foreigners, British subjects, amongst them; and will you fight for these?" "We will," was the reply [and here the sympathy of every generous heart must be theirs, so far as they were sincere]; "the stranger who comes to dwell or to toil amongst us is as much our own as if he were born in America."

The war was what might have been expected from the movements leading to it the cause of a party, nominally headed by Madison, the president, by James Monroe, the secretary of state, by Albert Gallatin (the same who appeared in the Pennsylvania insurrection of Washington's time), the secretary of the treasury, and by others, officers or supporters of the administration, both in and out of congress; but the real leaders of the war party were younger men, some risen to distinction, like Henry Clay, speaker of the house of representatives, and John C. Calhoun, member of the same body.

The party support which the war received explains the party opposition which it encountered. The signal, given by a protest from the federalist

[1813 A.D.]

members of congress, was caught up and repeated in public meetings and at private hearthstones. Even the pulpit threw open its doors to political harangues, and those not of the mildest sort. "The alternative then is," exclaimed a clergyman at Boston, "that if you do not wish to become the slaves of those who own slaves, and who are themselves the slaves of French slaves, you must either, in the language of the day, cut the connection, or so far alter the national constitution as to secure yourselves a due share in the government. The Union has long since been virtually dissolved, and it is full time that this portion of the United States should take care of itself." This single extract must stand here for a thousand others that might be cited. Coming from the source that it did, it is a striking illustration of the sectionality, nay, the personal vindictiveness, with which the opposition was animated. Strongest in New England, where alone the federalist party still retained its power, the hostility to the war spread through all parts of the country, gathering many of otherwise conflicting views around the banner that had so long been trailing in the dust. If we cannot sympathise with the party thus reviving, we need not join in the tumult raised against it on the score of treachery or dishonour. The federalists opposed the war not because they were anti-national, but because they thought it anti-national.

The war began at home. The office of a federalist paper, the Federal Republican, conducted by Alexander Hanson, at Baltimore, was sacked by a mob, who then went on to attack dwellings, pillage vessels, and, finally, to fire the house of an individual suspected of partialities for Great Britain (June 22nd, 23rd). Such being the passions, such the divisions, internally, the nation needed more than the usual panoply to protect itself externally. But it had less. The colonies of 1775 did not go to war more unprepared than the United States of 1812. There was no army to speak of. Generals abounded, it is true, Henry Dearborn, late secretary of war, being at the head of the list; but troops were few and far between, some thousands of regulars and of volunteers constituting the entire force. As to the militia, there were grave differences to prevent its efficient employment. In the first place, there was a general distrust of such bodies of troops. In the next place, there were local controversies, between certain of the state authorities and the general government, as to the power of the latter to call out the militia in the existing state of things, the constitution authorising congress "to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions."

If the army was inconsiderable, the navy was hardly perceptible, embracing only eight or ten frigates, as many more smaller vessels, and a flotilla of comparatively useless gunboats. The national finances were in a correspondingly low condition. The revenue, affected by the interruptions to commerce during the preceding years, needed all the stimulants which it could obtain, even in time of peace. It was wholly inadequate to the exigencies of war. Accordingly, resort was had to loans, then to direct taxes and licenses (1813). But the ways and means fell far short of the demands upon them. In fine, whether we take a financial or a military point of view, we find the country equally unfitted for hostilities. It might rely, indeed, upon its own inherent energies, the energies of six millions of freemen; but even these were distracted, and to a great degree paralysed.

Fortunate, therefore, was it that Great Britain was occupied-it may be said absorbed-in Europe. Her mighty struggle with Napoleon was at its height when the United States declared war. To British ears the declaration sounded much the same as the wail of a child amidst the contentions

[1813 A.D.]

of men. Very little heed was paid to it, the retraction of the orders in council being considered as likely to end it altogether. But to the astonishment of the British government the Americans persisted. "Let them wait," was the tone, "until Bonaparte is crushed, and they shall have their turn.”

HULL'S SURRENDER RETRIEVED BY PERRY

Notwithstanding the almost entire want of means, the United States government determined to carry the war into the enemy's country. For this purpose, William Hull, general and governor of Michigan Territory, crossed from Detroit to Sandwich in Canada, with about two thousand men (July 12th, 1813). In a little more than a month he had not only retreated, but surrendered, without a blow, to [an inferior force under] General Brock, the governor of Lower Canada (August 16th). The indignation of the Americans at this cowardly and disgraceful transaction knew no bounds. Expectation had been raised to such a height by the confident language of previous despatches from General Hull that nothing less than the capture of all Upper Canada was expected. The surrender, therefore, of an American army to an inferior force, together with the cession of a large extent of territory, as it had never entered into the calculations of the people, was almost too much for them to bear. As soon as General Hull was exchanged, he was, of course, brought before a court-martial, tried on the charges of treason, cowardice, and unofficer-like conduct, found guilty of the last two, and sentenced to be shot. The president, however, in consequence of his age and former services, remitted the capital punishment, but directed his name to be stricken from the rolls of the army-a disgrace which, to a lofty and honourable spirit, is worse than death.dd

The British, already in possession of the northern part of Michigan, were soon masters of the entire territory. So far from being able to recover it, General Harrison, who made the attempt in the ensuing autumn and winter, found it all he could do to save Ohio from falling with Michigan. A detachment of Kentuckians yielded to a superior force of British at Frenchtown, on the river Raisin (January, 1813), whereupon Harrison took post by the Maumee, at Fort Meigs, holding out there against the British and their Indian allies (April, May). The same fort was again assailed and again defended, General Clay being at that time in command. Fort Stephenson, on the Sandusky, was attacked in August, but defended with great spirit and success by a small garrison under Major Crogham. Yet Ohio was still in danger.

It was rescued by different operations from those as yet described. Captain Chauncey, after gathering a little fleet on Lake Ontario, where he achieved some successes, appointed Lieutenant Oliver H. Perry to the command on Lake Erie. Perry's first duty was to provide a fleet; his next, to lead it, when provided, against the British vessels under Captain Barclay.f

Early in the spring of this year the attention of the national government had been seriously directed towards the important object of obtaining the command on Lake Erie. The earnest representations of General Harrison had awakened the administration to a proper sense of the necessity of this measure, and great exertions were accordingly made to obtain a force competent to engage the enemy. Two brigs and several schooners were ordered ⚫ to be built at the port of Erie, under the directions of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry; the building of which that officer carried on with such rapidity that on the 2nd of August he was able to sail in quest of the enemy's squad