In April, 1812, our French sister, Louisiana, brought her vivacity, gayety, and debts into the family. Her high spirits were needed to stimulate the action, and her sugar to sweeten the waters of strife, now effectually stirred between America and England, whose bottomless pretensions had become intolerable. Our public debt had become reduced to about $45,000,000, and our population augmented to seven and a half millions. It needed not the witch-hazel rods of the eloquent Clay, Calhoun, Langdon, Cheves, and others, to dip to and find the mines of national wealth and national feeling. Both were ready. At last, June 4, 1812, after the lapse of twenty-nine years, we found ourselves in a second wrestling-match with Great Britain. Our first grapple was near Detroit, and on the Canadian frontier, where a defeat, under Colonel Van Horne, and a success, under Colonel Miller, equalized losses and gains, through July and August. But the base Hull-sale surrender, without a blow, of Detroit, of an army of two thousand men, and the entire Territory of Michigan, by its cowardly or treacherous governor, caused our captain, officers, and entire crew to explode in very indignant terms. Colonel Lewis Cass, then commanding one of the regiments, snapped his sword in two pieces, rather than surrender it whole to the British General Brock. He took such an Anglo-phobia at this time, that the next fifty years could not cure it.
Fortunately we had better hulls on the water than on the land.
August 19, 1812, Captain Isaac Hull, in the frigate Constitution, fought the British Guerriere, and after knocking down every mast and spar and one third of her crew, compelled her to throw up the sponge. The mourning put on three days before for the loss, by General William Hull, of Michigan, and the army of the Northwest, was now put off for the bridal-wreath presented by Captain Isaac Hull to America, on her marriage to the sea. Like her spouse, the Ocean, the bride hastened to cast her weeds. The pallor of defeat gave place to the summoned roses of joy. Upon the crimson flushes the British bees now sought to light and to extract their carnation.
In October, the British tars, in a Frolic, set out to tease the delighted groom, but a Wasp, hovering near, made for the frolicsome bee, and in three quarters of an hour so stung it, that its shattered wings were only fit for microscopical studies. All the officers and crew of the Frolic, four only excepted, were killed or wounded; while the Wasp, although carrying fewer guns, had only ten killed or injured. A few days afterwards the frigate United States, commanded by Decatur,—whom we left eight years since before Tripoli, clearing out its wretched Bey,—engaged the British Macedonian, and took such a fancy to her that, after some violent flirtation, she completely won her. This engagement went hard with the proud, stiff old people in England, but a repetition of this sort of match-making did much to reconcile them to the first. The second engagement took place on Pacific ground, off the coast of Brazil, between that old sea-flirt, the Constitution, looking out, not for coffee or sparrows, but for a marine flirtation, and the Java, a buxom frigate, long-waisted and well padded with materials, adorned with heavy war jewelry, constituting very attractive charms, at her waist. In less than two hours after their acquaintance, these ardent strangers became so entangled in each other’s fortunes, that the Java gave up, like a true mistress, all her future to her fond and persistent lover. When the news of this wooing reached the stuffy old parents at home, they were frantic with rage. The family pride was alarmed and wounded. They immediately sent out a large fleet to watch that new and fashionable American promenade, the sea, to prevent any more flirtations and engagements like poor Guerriere’s and the unfortunate Java’s.
Meanwhile Mr. Madison was re-elected Captain by one hundred and twenty-eight votes; De Witt Clinton receiving eighty-nine. Mr. C. C. Pinckney, now sixty-six years old, and convinced that his capital was too small, abandoned the business; and as Mr. Calhoun was yet only thirty, and constitutionally ineligible, South Carolina was reduced to the humiliation of voting either for a Virginian or a New-Yorker.
Notwithstanding her successes on the water, America by no means abandoned the land.
She raised and set on foot, although some of course, as usual, got on horseback, three armies. The first of these was the Army of the West, under General William Henry Harrison, whose business it was made to chastise back into submissive quiet the Indian tribes, which England had enticed out to the pillage and harrying of our frontier settlers; a business which he successfully prosecuted at Fort Meigs, at Tippecanoe, and again, in October, 1813, at the Thames. At this last engagement somebody killed Tecumseh, and thus gave Colonel R. M. Johnson employment for the rest of his life in vindicating his right to the Shawnee’s scalp. The red chief thus, like Homer and others, caused after his death more contention than during his life. Soon after the Thames battle, General Harrison repaired to Buffalo, where, in consequence of some unexplained reason,—perhaps overcome by its vigorous Board of Trade, or seized by its enterprising forwarders,—he was transported into a resignation, and to Ohio.
The second army was that of the Centre, under General Dearborn, Jefferson’s Secretary of War, and now Commander-in-Chief of all the forces deployed along the southern shore of Lake Ontario and the Niagara frontier. A portion of this army, in April, 1813, left Sackett’s Harbor, and landing at York, now Toronto, took hold of it, and, shaking it empty of British and Indians, left it so dry, that vigorous drinking since has scarcely sufficed to absorb back any considerable numbers of the brick-colored originals, although something has succeeded in getting up very successful exhibitions of English red and white skins. While General Dearborn was absent from Sackett’s Harbor, Sir George Prevost thought it a good time to sail in. He landed with one thousand men; but General Brown,—a real, actual man, although disguised by this mythical name,—rallied the local militia, and, setting on the baronet and his thousand, took a large number of them, and held them as mutilated specimens of soldiers at leisure. General Dearborn soon after resigned, and General Wilkinson—who had been tried and acquitted for his too great intimacy, while in command at the Southwest, with the American Cain and his schemes—succeeded him; the only success that he ever had, as he always had the ill-assorted habit of never agreeing or co-operating with any one, especially on critical occasions. Like a rocking-chair in moving time, he took up more room than could be spared, and was pretty sure to be broken when required for use.
The third army was that of the North, placed under General Wade Hampton, grandfather of that leader of the Confederate black cavalry in the late Rebellion, who waded to his horse’s bits in the blood of his loyal countrymen, in order to keep the black bipeds in the South bridled and saddled to carry the unwading Hamptons. The army of the North, twelve thousand strong, was stationed on Lake Champlain, and was destined to co-operate with Wilkinson’s for the reduction of Montreal, then holding only a small garrison of six hundred; but the mutual enmity of the generals, growing out of old quarrels at New Orleans, frustrated all co-operation. Each drew himself into warm winter quarters, nursing his private grievances, as Mrs. Gamp did her special infirmities, while the poor unnursed, suffering patient, the campaign, took care of itself. Of course Montreal was not reduced, except to a satisfactory smile over the military pouting of the unco-operating commanders. The Secretary of War preferred charges against Wilkinson. The charges, as usual when touched by court-martials, went off in flashes in the pan. The campaign of 1813, rammed down with the double loads, the armies of the Centre and the North, went off in the same way.
The United States were now more at sea on land than on the sea itself.