CHAPTER XI. PRESIDENT MADISON UNDER FIRE
The dire calamity which Jefferson and his colleagues had for ten years bent all their energies to avert had now befallen the young Republic. War, with all its train of attendant evils, stalked upon the stage, and was about to test the hearts of pacifist and war-hawk alike. But nothing marked off the younger Republicans more sharply from the generation to which Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin belonged than the positive relief with which they hailed this break with Jeffersonian tradition. This attitude was something quite different from the usual intrepidity of youth in the face of danger; it was bottomed upon the conviction which Clay expressed when he answered the question, "What are we to gain by the war?" by saying, "What are we not to lose by peace? Commerce, character, a nation's best treasure, honor!" Calhoun had reached the same conclusion. The restrictive system as a means of resistance and of obtaining redress for wrongs, he declared to be unsuited to the genius of the American people. It required the most arbitrary laws; it rendered government odious; it bred discontent. War, on the other hand, strengthened the national character, fed the flame of patriotism, and perfected the organization of government. "Sir," he exclaimed, "I would prefer a single Victory over the enemy by sea or land to all the good we shall ever derive from the continuation of the non-importation act!" The issue was thus squarely faced: the alternative to peaceable coercion was now to be given a trial.
Scarcely less remarkable was the buoyant spirit with which these young Republicans faced the exigencies of war. Defeat was not to be found in their vocabulary. Clay pictured in fervent rhetoric a victorious army dictating the terms of peace at Quebec or at Halifax; Calhoun scouted the suggestion of unpreparedness, declaring that in four weeks after the declaration of war the whole of Upper and part of Lower Canada would be in our possession; and even soberer patriots believed that the conquest of Canada was only a matter of marching across the frontier to Montreal or Quebec. But for that matter older heads were not much wiser as prophets of military events. Even Jefferson assured the President that he had never known a war entered into under more favorable auspices, and predicted that Great Britain would surely be stripped of all her possessions on this continent; while Monroe seems to have anticipated a short decisive war terminating in a satisfactory accommodation with England. As for the President, he averred many years later that while he knew the unprepared state of the country, "he esteemed it necessary to throw forward the flag of the country, sure that the people would press onward and defend it."
There is something at once humorous and pathetic in this self-portrait of Madison throwing forward the flag of his country and summoning his legions to follow on. Never was a man called to lead in war who had so little of the martial in his character, and yet so earnest a purpose to rise to the emergency. An observer describes him, the day after war was declared, "visiting in person—a thing never known before—all the offices of the Departments of War and the Navy, stimulating everything in a manner worthy of a little commander-in-chief, with his little round hat and huge cockade." Stimulation was certainly needed in these two departments as events proved, but attention to petty details which should have been watched by subordinates is not the mark of a great commander. Jefferson afterward consoled Madison for the defeat of his armies by writing: "All you can do is to order—execution must depend on others and failures be imputed to them alone." Jefferson failed to perceive what Madison seems always to have forgotten, that a commander-in-chief who appoints and may remove his subordinates can never escape responsibility for their failures. The President's first duty was not to stimulate the performance of routine in the departments but to make sure of the competence of the executive heads of those departments.
William Eustis of Massachusetts, Secretary of War, was not without some little military experience, having served as a surgeon in the Revolutionary army, but he lacked every qualification for the onerous task before him. Senator Crawford of Georgia wrote to Monroe caustically that Eustis should have been forming general and comprehensive arrangements for the organization of the troops and for the prosecution of campaigns, instead of consuming his time reading advertisements of petty retailing merchants, to find where he could purchase one hundred shoes or two hundred hats. Of Paul Hamilton, the Secretary of Navy, even less could be expected, for he seems to have had absolutely no experience to qualify him for the post. Senator Crawford intimated that in instructing his naval officers Hamilton impressed upon them the desirability of keeping their superiors supplied with pineapples and other tropical fruits—an ill-natured comment which, true or not, gives us the measure of the man. Both Monroe and Gallatin shared the prevailing estimate of the Secretaries of War and of the Navy and expressed themselves without reserve to Jefferson; but the President with characteristic indecision hesitated to purge his Cabinet of these two incompetents, and for his want of decision he paid dearly.
The President had just left the Capital for his country place at Montpelier toward the end of August, when the news came that General William Hull, who had been ordered to invade Upper Canada and begin the military promenade to Quebec, had surrendered Detroit and his entire army without firing a gun. It was a crushing disaster and a well-deserved rebuke for the Administration, for whether the fault was Hull's or Eustis's, the President had to shoulder the responsibility. His first thought was to retrieve the defeat by commissioning Monroe to command a fresh army for the capture of Detroit; but this proposal which appealed strongly to Monroe had to be put aside—fortunately for all concerned, for Monroe's desire for military glory was probably not equalled by his capacity as a commander and the western campaign proved incomparably more difficult than wiseacres at Washington imagined.
What was needed, indeed, was not merely able commanders in the field, though they were difficult enough to find. There was much truth in Jefferson's naive remark to Madison: "The creator has not thought proper to mark those on the forehead who are of the stuff to make good generals. We are first, therefore, to seek them, blindfold, and then let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses." But neither seems to have comprehended that their opposition to military preparedness had caused this dearth of talent and was now forcing the Administration to select blindfold. More pressing even than the need of tacticians was the need of organizers of victory. The utter failure of the Niagara campaign vacated the office of Secretary of War; and with Eustis retired also the Secretary of the Navy. Monroe took over the duties of the one temporarily, and William Jones, a shipowner of Philadelphia, succeeded Hamilton.
If the President seriously intended to make Monroe Secretary of War and the head of the General Staff, he speedily discovered that he was powerless to do so. The Republican leaders in New York felt too keenly Josiah Quincy's taunt about a despotic Cabinet "composed, to all efficient purposes, of two Virginians and a foreigner" to permit Monroe to absorb two cabinet posts. To appease this jealousy of Virginia, Madison made an appointment which very nearly shipwrecked his Administration: he invited General John Armstrong of New York to become Secretary of War. Whatever may be said of Armstrong's qualifications for the post, his presence in the Cabinet was most inadvisable, for he did not and could not inspire the personal confidence of either Gallatin or Monroe. Once in office, he turned Monroe into a relentless enemy and fairly drove Gallatin out of office in disgust by appointing his old enemy, William Duane, editor of the Aurora, to the post of Adjutant-General. "And Armstrong!"—said Dallas who subsequently as Secretary of War knew whereof he spoke—"he was the devil from the beginning, is now, and ever will be!"
The man of clearest vision in these unhappy months of 1812 was undoubtedly Albert Gallatin. The defects of Madison as a War-President he had long foreseen; the need of reorganizing the Executive Departments he had pointed out as soon as war became inevitable; and the problem of financing the war he had attacked farsightedly, fearlessly, and without regard to political consistency. No one watched the approach of hostilities with a bitterer sense of blasted hopes. For ten years he had labored to limit expenditures, sacrificing even the military and naval establishments, that the people might be spared the burden of needless taxes;—and within this decade he had also scaled down the national debt one-half, so that posterity might not be saddled with burdens not of its own choosing. And now war threatened to undo his work. The young republic was after all not to lead its own life, realize a unique destiny, but to tread the old well-worn path of war, armaments, and high-handed government. Well, he would save what he could, do his best to avert "perpetual taxation, military establishments, and other corrupting or anti-republican habits or institutions."