Hour of Crisis: War of 1812

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A World War. The War of 1812 was fought in every region of the United States—from the Northern frontier to New Orleans to the edge of Western settlement. The war also held tremendous importance for the West. There were two major causes of the conflict. The first was international: the United States was caught up in the bitter Napoleonic wars ravaging Europe. Essentially, the federal government (under President James Madison, who was elected in 1808 and reelected in 1812) insisted that the United States be able to remain a neutral trading partner for both the British and the French. Neither Britain nor France wanted the United States to trade with the other warring party. Under pressure to stand up for the new republic’s rights on the high seas, Madison proclaimed that unless Great Britain overturned its policy barring French-American trade, the new republic would declare war on England.

Indians v. Settlers in the West. The second reason to fight involved the longstanding conflicts between Western settlers and Indians in the Great Lakes region. No government had been able to restrain the land-hungry white settlers flooding into the Ohio River valley, and Indians such as the Shawnees watched as, year after year, they were driven further west. To make matters worse, the Westerners complained that the British government in Canada was aiding the Indians in their raids on American settlements.

Tecumseh and the Prophet. Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, and his brother Tenskwatawa, a holy man known as the Prophet, began working to unite the tribes east of the Mississippi into one confederation. The Prophet also insisted that Indians throw off the trappings of white culture, such as alcohol, and invigorate their own cultures. In November 1811 Gen. William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, led one thousand soldiers against the Prophet at Tippecanoe Creek. While the battle was essentially a draw, Harrison proved that the Native American followers of Tecumseh and his brother were far from invincible. The fledgling Indian confederation buckled.

Pioneers Cry for War. The settlers, unwilling to blame their own greed for land for the growing tensions, continued to blame the British in Canada. All along the frontier, American settlers cried for battle against Great Britain, with many fully expecting Canada to fall and be made part of the United States.

The “War Hawks.” In Congress a group of talented young legislators took the lead in the movement for war against Great Britain. Known as the “War Hawks,” nearly all of them were Madisonian Republicans from the South and West, including Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and George M. Troup of Georgia. Ardent nationalists, they favored war to protect American honor against repeated insults by the old mother country—to capitulate to Britain’s demands, they argued, would amount to recolonization. During the winter and spring of 1811–1812, the War Hawks led Congress into a declaration of war. When it came on 18 June 1812, every Federalist and nearly every Northeastern Republican opposed the measure; Republicans of the South and West voted almost unanimously for war.

An Inauspicious Beginning. The war began badly for the United States. What the War Hawks had envisioned as a quick and welcome invasion of Canada turned out to be a costly disaster. Instead of sweeping gallantly through Canada, the British and their Indian allies, all of whom formerly allied with Tecumseh, occupied most of the American garrisons in the Northwest, including Fort Michilimackinac in northern Michigan and Fort Dearborn (now Chicago). Creek Indians also drove American settlers out of western Tennessee.

The American Offensive. Americans fought back in 1813 by burning the Canadian capital of York (Toronto) and destroying the British fleet on Lake Erie. Richard M. Johnson, a Kentucky War Hawk on leave to command the state militia, killed Tecumseh in the Battle of the Thames River on 5 October 1813. Several officers built political careers on the battle: its participants included a future president (William Henry Harrison), vice president (Richard M. Johnson), four United States senators, almost twenty congressmen, and three governors of Kentucky. In the spring of 1814 Andrew Jackson, commanding the Tennessee militia and allied Chocktaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, defeated Indians allied with the British at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. These battles dealt a final blow to Indian military power east of the Mississippi.

The British Counterattack. Of course the British had other things to worry about before 1814, most notably Napoleon and the French, but after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in April of that year, the English were able finally to focus on the American war. During the summer of 1814 they raided the shores of Chesapeake Bay and burned the American capital in retaliation for setting York ablaze the previous year. An attack on the city of Baltimore proved less successful for the English. The most memorable legacy of that conflict was Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written to commemorate the British failure to advance past an American garrison guarding Baltimore Harbor at Fort McHenry.

The Battle of New Orleans. By late 1814 the British decided to seize the city of New Orleans and use it as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations, already under way in Europe. A large British force sailed up the Mississippi and clashed with an American army of Kentucky and Tennessee militiamen, New Orleans laborers and free blacks, and almost one thousand French pirates under the command of Andrew Jackson. On 8 January 1815, two weeks after a peace treaty that ended the war was signed at Ghent, six thousand British soldiers charged the well-entrenched American force of four thousand. After thirty minutes of horrific losses on the British side—two thousand one hundred redcoats were killed or wounded compared to just seventy-one Americans—the English halted the charge. Although the battle made no difference at all on the already concluded peace settlement, it made a national figure of Andrew Jackson, the “hero of New Orleans.”

The Treaty of Ghent. After the war was over, the United States and Britain resolved many boundary difficulties and agreed to demilitarize the Great Lakes. As a result of this decision, British and American soldiers withdrew from the border between British Canada and the United States. In 1818 both sides agreed that the Forty-ninth parallel would be the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase between Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains and that they would jointly control the rich Oregon Territory for the next ten years. With the threat of war and border skirmishes reduced by the treaties, settlers from both the United States and Great Britain began to occupy the upper Midwest and Oregon.

The Adams-Onis Treaty. Also as a result of the War of 1812, the United States acquired Florida from Spain and fixed the settlement of the western boundary of Louisiana. After Andrew Jackson led an invasion of Florida in 1818 to punish Seminole Indians for raiding American settlements, Spain decided it was too costly to defend its overseas possession. In the Adams-Onis Treaty (named for the American secretary of state John Quincy Adams and the Spanish foreign minister Luis de Onis), Spain ceded all of Florida to the United States and gave up all its possessions in the Pacific Northwest. In exchange the United States gave up its dubious claims to Texas. The future president John Quincy Adams, who had negotiated the treaty, wrote in his diary that “[t]he acquisition of a definite line of boundary to the [Pacific] forms a great epoch in our history.”

Source

J. C. A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy and Warfare in the Early Republic, 1783–1830 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).