The Chesapeake squadron, after raiding and provisioning itself at the expense of the Virginia and Maryland farmers, made a dash at Washington, sending boats up the Patuxent and Potomac rivers, and landing a body of about 2,000 men. On August 24, with absurd {230} ease, this force scattered in swift panic a hasty collection of militia, and entered Washington, sending the President and Cabinet flying into the country. In retaliation for the damage done at York, the British officers set fire to the capital and other public buildings, before retreating swiftly to their ships. A similar attack on Baltimore, September 11, was better met, and, although the British routed a force of militia, the attempt to take the city was abandoned. The humiliation of the capture of Washington led to the downfall of Armstrong as Secretary of State, although not until after he had almost ruined another campaign.
While the British were threatening Washington, another force was gathering north of Lake Champlain, and a large frigate was being built to secure command of that lake. By the end of August, nearly 16,000 men, most of them from Wellington's regiments, were assembled to invade New York, probably with the intention of securing the permanent occupation of the northern part. In the face of this, Armstrong sent most of the American troops at Plattsburg on a useless march across New York State, leaving a bare handful under General McComb to meet the invasion. When Sir George Prevost, Governor-General of Canada, advanced to Plattsburg on September 6, he found nothing {231} but militia and volunteers before him. Fortunately for the United States, Prevost was no fighter, and he declined to advance or attack unless he had a naval control of the lake. On September 11 the decisive contest took place. McDonough, the American commander, with a small squadron, entirely defeated and captured the British flotilla under Downie. It was Lake Erie over again, with the difference that in this battle the American fleet was not superior to the British. It was a victory due to better planning and better gunnery, and it led to the immediate retreat of Prevost, who tamely abandoned the whole campaign, to the intense mortification of his officers and men. The remaining expedition, under General Pakenham, comprising 16,000 Peninsular veterans, under convoy of a strong fleet, sailed to the Gulf of Mexico and advanced to capture New Orleans. General Andrew Jackson was at hand, and with him a mass of militia and frontiersmen. Driven by the furious energy of the Indian fighter, the Americans showed aggressiveness and courage in skirmishes and night attacks, and finally won an astounding victory on January 8, 1815. On that day the British force tried to storm, by frontal attack, a line of intrenchments armed with cannon and packed with riflemen. In twenty-five minutes their columns were so badly cut up by {232} grapeshot and musketry that the whole attack was abandoned, after Pakenham himself had been killed. The expedition withdrew, and sailing to Mobile, a town in Spanish territory, occupied by the Americans, retook it on February 11; but the main purpose of their invasion was foiled.
In this year, while American land forces struggled to escape destruction, the naval vessels were for the most part shut in by the blockade. Occasional captures were still made in single combat; but British frigates were now under orders to refuse battle with the larger American vessels, and the captures by sloops were counterbalanced by the British capture of the frigate Essex by two antagonists in March, 1814. Practically the only extensive operations carried on were by American privateers, who now haunted the British Channel and captured merchantmen within sight of the English coasts. The irritation caused by these privateers was excessive, and made British shipowners and merchants anxious for peace; but it had no effect on the military situation. England was not to be subdued by mere annoyance.
By the end of 1814, the time seemed to be at hand when the United States must submit to peace on such terms as England chose to dictate, or risk disruption and ruin. The administrative weaknesses of the country {233} culminated in actual financial bankruptcy, which was due in no small part to the fact that Federalist financiers and bankers, determining to do all the damage possible, steadily refused to subscribe to the loans or to give any assistance. The powerful New England capital was entirely withheld. The result was that the strain on the rest of the banks became too great; and after the capture of Washington they all suspended specie payment, leaving the Government only the notes of suspended banks, or its own depreciated treasury notes for currency. All the coin in the country steadily flowed into the vaults of New England banks, while the Federal Treasury was compelled, on November 9, 1814, to admit its inability to pay interest on its loans. Congress met in the autumn and endeavoured to remedy the situation by chartering a bank; but under the general suspension of specie payments it was impossible to start one solvent from the beginning. When Congress authorized one without power to suspend specie payments, Madison vetoed it as useless. All that could be done was to issue more treasury notes. As for the army, a Bill for compulsory service was brought in, showing the enormous change in Republican ideals; but it failed to pass. Congress seemed helpless. The American people would neither enlist for the war nor {234} authorize their representatives to pass genuine war measures.
The Federalists, controlling most of the New England States, now felt that the time had come to insist on a termination of their grievances. Their governors had refused to allow militia to assist, their legislatures had done nothing to aid the war; their capitalists had declined to subscribe, and their farmers habitually sold provisions to the British over the Canadian boundary, actually supplying Sir George Prevost's army by contract. There met, at Hartford, on December 14, 1814, a convention of leading men, officially or unofficially representing the five New England States, who agreed upon a document which was intended to secure the special rights of their region. They demanded amendments to the Constitution abolishing the reckoning of slaves as basis for congressional representation, providing for the partial distribution of government revenues among the States, prohibiting embargoes or commercial warfare, or the election of successive Presidents from the same State, and requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress to admit new States or declare war. This was meant for an ultimatum; and it was generally understood that, if the Federal government did not submit to these terms, the New England States would secede to {235} rid themselves of what they considered the intolerable oppression of Virginian misgovernment.
Such was the state of things in the winter of 1815. The administration of Madison had utterly failed to secure any of the ends of the war, to inflict punishment on Great Britain, or to conquer Canada. It had also utterly failed to maintain financial solvency, to enlist an army, to create a navy capable of keeping the sea, or to prevent a movement in New England which seemed to be on the verge of breaking the country into pieces. But to lay this miserable failure—for such only can it be called—to the personal discredit of Jefferson and Madison is unfair, for it was only the repetition under new governmental conditions of the old traditional colonial method of carrying on war as a local matter. The French and Indian War, the Revolution, and the War of 1812, repeated in different generations the same tale of amateur warfare, of the occasional success and usual worthlessness of the militia, the same administrative inefficiency, and the same financial breakdown. Without authority and obedience, there can be carried on no real war; and authority and obedience were no more known and no better appreciated in 1812 than they had been in the days of Washington. Jefferson, Madison, {236} and their party had gone with the current of American tradition; that was their only fault.
CHAPTER XII
END OF THE ANTAGONISM: A CENTURY OF PEACE
When the American war began, the English showed a tendency to blame the Tory administration for permitting it to take place; but the chief feeling, after all, was one of annoyance at Madison and his party for having decided to give their assistance to Napoleon at the crisis of his career. The intercourse between Englishmen and New England Federalists had given British society its understanding of American politics and coloured its natural irritation toward the Republican administration with something of the deeper venom of the outraged New Englanders, who saw in Jefferson and his successors a race of half-Jacobins. During 1812 and 1813, accordingly, newspapers and ministerial speakers, when they referred to the contest, generally spoke of the necessity of {237} chastising an impudent and presumptuous antagonist. A friendly party such as had defended the colonists during the Revolution no longer existed, for the Whigs, however antagonistic to the Liverpool Ministry, were fully as firmly committed to maintaining British naval and commercial supremacy.
England's chief continental ally, however, the Tsar Alexander, considered the American war an unfortunate blunder; and, as early as September, 1812, he offered his mediation through young John Quincy Adams, Minister at St. Petersburg. The news reached America in March, 1813, and Madison revealed his willingness to withdraw from a contest already shown to be unprofitable by immediately accepting and nominating Adams, with Bayard and Gallatin, to serve as peace commissioners. Without waiting to hear from England, these envoys started for Russia, but reached there only to meet an official refusal on the part of England, dated July 5, 1813. The Liverpool Ministry did not wish to have the American war brought within the range of European consideration, since its settlement under such circumstances might raise questions of neutral rights which would be safer out of the hands of a Tsar whose predecessors had framed armed neutralities in 1780 and 1801. Accordingly, the British government intimated politely that {238} it would be willing to deal directly with the United States, and thus waved the unwelcome Russian mediation aside. Madison accepted this offer in March, 1814; but, although the American commissioners endeavoured through Alexander Baring, their friend and defender in Parliament, to get the British government to appoint a time and place for meeting, they encountered continued delays.