Proverbially wars are popular at their beginning; commonly, in representative governments, they are declared by aid of some part of the opposition. In the case of the War of 1812 the party in power, instead of gaining strength by the declaration, lost about one fourth of its votes, and the opposition actually gained nearly one fifth of the Administration’s strength. In the Senate the loss was still greater. There too the President’s Message was debated in secret, but the proceedings were very deliberate. A select committee, with Senator Anderson of Tennessee at its head, took charge of the Message, and consumed a week in studying it. June 8 the committee reported the House bill with amendments. June 11 the Senate, by a vote of seventeen to thirteen, returned the bill to the committee for further amendment. June 12 the committee reported the amendments as instructed. The Senate discussed them, was equally divided, and accordingly threw out its own amendments. June 15 the Senate voted the third reading of the House bill by a vote of nineteen to thirteen. June 16, after a strong speech for delay from Senator James A. Bayard, the Senate again adjourned without action; and only June 18, after two weeks of secret discussion, did the bill pass. Nineteen senators voted in its favor; thirteen in opposition. Samuel Smith, Giles, and Leib, the three Republican senators most openly hostile to Madison, voted with the majority. Except Pennsylvania, the entire representation of no Northern State declared itself for the war; except Kentucky, every State south of the Potomac and the Ohio voted for the declaration. Not only was the war to be a party measure, but it was also sectional; while the Republican majority, formerly so large, was reduced to dependence on the factious support of Smith, Giles, and Leib.
The bill with its amendments was at once returned to the House and passed. Without a moment’s delay the President signed it, and the same day, June 18, 1812, the war began.
“The President’s proclamation was issued yesterday,” wrote Richard Rush, the comptroller, to his father, June 20;[176] ... “he visited 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.”
In resorting to old-fashioned methods of violence, Congress had also to decide whether to retain or to throw away its weapons of peaceful coercion. The Non-importation Act stopped importations from England. If war should be considered as taking the place of non-importation, it would have the curious result of restoring trade with England. Opinions were almost as hotly divided on the question of war with, or war without, non-importation as on the question of war and peace itself; while even this detail of policy was distorted by the too familiar interference of Napoleon,—for the non-importation was a part of his system, and its retention implied alliance with him, while the admission of English merchandise would be considered by him almost an act of war. The non-importation was known to press severely on the industries of England, but it threatened to paralyze America. In the absence of taxation, nothing but the admission of British goods into the United States could so increase the receipts of the Treasury as to supply the government with its necessary resources. Thus, two paths lay open. Congress might admit British goods, and by doing so dispense with internal taxes, relieve the commercial States, and offend France; or might shut out British goods, disgust the commercial States, double the burden of the war to America, but distress England and please Napoleon.
War having been declared June 18, on June 19 Langdon Cheves introduced, from the Committee of Ways and Means, a bill partially suspending the Non-importation Act. He supported his motion by a letter from Gallatin, accepting this bill as an alternative to the tax bills. On the same day news arrived of more American vessels burned by French frigates. Chaos seemed beyond control. War with England was about to restore commerce with her; alliance with France was a state of war with her. The war party proposed to depend on peace taxes at the cost of France their ally, in the interests of England their enemy; the peace party called for war taxes to discredit the war; both parties wanted trade with England with whom they were at war; while every one was displeased with the necessity of assisting France, the only ally that America possessed in the world. Serurier went to the Secretary of State to discuss this extraordinary situation, but found Monroe in no happy temper.[177]
“He began by complaining to me of what, for that matter, I knew already,—that a considerable number of new American ships, going to Spain and Portugal and returning, had been very recently burned by our frigates, and that others had been destroyed on the voyage even to England. The Secretary of State on this occasion, and with bitterness, renewed to me his complaints and those of the Government and of Congress, whose discontent he represented as having reached its height. I am, Monseigneur, as weary of hearing these eternal grumblings as of having to trouble you with them; but I think myself obliged to transmit to you whatever is said of an official character. Mr. Monroe averred that for his part, as Secretary of State, since he had never ceased down to this moment to maintain the repeal of our decrees, he found himself suddenly compromised in the face of his friends and of the public, and he must admit he had almost lost the hope of an arrangement with us. Such were, Monseigneur, his expressions; after which he retraced to me the system that the Administration had never ceased pursuing with constancy and firmness for eighteen months, and the last act of which had at length been what I had seen, a formal declaration of war against England by the republic,—‘at a moment,’ he added, ‘when it feels ill-assured of France, and is so ill-treated by her.’ He finished at last by saying to me, with a sort of political coquetry, that he was among his friends obliged to admit that they had been too weak toward France, and that perhaps they had been too quick in regard to England.”
Serurier wrote that the bitterness against France was really such as would have caused a declaration of war against her as well as against England, if the Administration had not stopped the movement in Congress; nothing prevented the double war except the military difficulties in its way. At the moment when, June 23, the French minister was writing in these terms to the Duc de Bassano, the House of Representatives was considering the action he feared. Cheves had proposed to modify the non-importation,—the Federalists moved to repeal it altogether; and although they were defeated that day in committee, when Cheves’s bill came before the House no less a champion than Calhoun rose to advocate the reopening of trade.
Whatever Calhoun in those days did, was boldly and well done; but his speech of June 24, 1812, against commercial restrictions, was perhaps the boldest and the best of his early efforts. Neither great courage nor much intelligence was needed to support war, from the moment war became a party measure; but an attack on the system of commercial restriction was a blow at Madison, which belittled Jefferson, and threw something like contempt on the Republican party from its beginning twenty years before, down to the actual moment. How gently Calhoun did this, and yet how firmly he laid his hands on the rein that was to guide his party into an opposite path, could be seen in his short speech.
“The restrictive system, as a mode of resistance,” he said, “and a means of obtaining a redress of our wrongs, has never been a favorite one with me. I wish not to censure the motives which dictated it, or to attribute weakness to those who first resorted to it for a restoration of our rights.... I object to the restrictive system, and for the following reasons,—because it does not suit the genius of our people, or that of our government, or the geographical character of our country.”
With a single gesture, this young statesman of the new school swept away the statesmanship of Jefferson and Madison, and waved aside the strongest convictions of his party; but he did it with such temperate statement, and with so serious a manner, that although he said in effect little less than had been said for years by Federalists and enemies, he seemed rather to lead than to oppose. “We have had a peace like a war: in the name of heaven let us not have the only thing that is worse,—a war like a peace.” That his voice should be at once obeyed was not to be expected; but so many Republican members followed Calhoun, Cheves, and Lowndes, that the Federalists came within three votes of carrying their point; and so equally divided was the House that, June 25, when the Federalists returned to the attack and asked for a committee to report a bill repealing the non-importation, the House divided sixty against sixty, and the Speaker’s vote alone defeated the motion.