But for Jackson and the peace brought at Ghent by his destruction of the most formidable savage allies England ever had, and the menace of the struggling Republic’s existence; by his prompt unmasking of treacherous Spain at Pensacola and startling the hitherto unbeaten Briton by knocking his forts down about his ears at Mobile and sinking their ships in the bay, Gettysburg would doubtless have been fought a half century earlier, and in Massachusetts.
Let us see: The War of 1812 was forced on the States intentionally and with all the emphasis of a bully who meets a timid enemy on the highway and kicks and cuffs him for pure cussedness. New England was for standing the kicking so long as her ships and schooners might still traffic in negro slaves, rum, codfish and castor oil. The war tied up her hulls to rotting at the wharves.
The war, until Jackson was discovered, had been a farce. From the Great Lakes to the South the bull-dozing, beef-eating, bloody-shirted Briton simply walked over the Yankee. “You’ll be setting the dogs on us next,” said a squad of Yankee soldiers, who staggered into a British camp to surrender and got cursed for coming.
Not one victory had they won. The British had burned the capital and run the President out of the back door. They had murdered citizens in the streets, and so empty was the treasury, and so degraded her credit that the Secretary of War had to pledge his private credit to get money enough to send Jackson to New Orleans. There was not money or credit enough left to buy wood to keep the cadets warm at West Point, and the young soldiers of the Republic’s future wars had to go into the woods and cut it and bring it in.
And all the time New England, the head and front of the Republic, sat sullen, secretly aiding the enemy and watching for a chance to secede. “Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America,” said the Boston Gazette, “who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison and Jefferson, and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their faces against us for years and spirited up the brutal part of the populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we then be held in slavery and driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction? No more taxes for New England until the administration makes peace.” As if the cuffed and cudgeled administration was not doing its best, even to parting with the last raiment on the back of its self-respect!
Since the beginning of things there have been two kinds of great men—talkers and doers. The former are called orators when they talk so much and so well that their talk becomes natural.
Clay was a talker—Jackson a doer. There was a time when these two men ran side by side in the minds and memories of the living public. But that public is dead now, and they are far apart. Only the doer lives, as only the doer should live. Talk, since the beginning of time, has been the cheapest commodity of the human race. “And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent.... But I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue.... And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said. Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.... And he shall be to thee instead of a mouth.” That is the Biblical precedent for placing the orator over the doer.
Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron. Clay, oily and brainy, and a man who “can speak well,” was sent over to make peace, with Bayard, and Gallatin, and Crawford and Adams—all Aarons and orators, and, praise God, all now dead and fast being forgotten. And they had been in Europe twelve long months, cooling their heels at the doors of diplomacy, or begging at the back door of its kitchen for such crumbs as the children might sweep off for the dogs. And after a while they got a few crumbs—England might be induced to quit her laying on of the lash if certain things were done to salve her wounded honor, including the fact that she could still impress American seaman wherever she could find them, and certain territory transferred to England, including what is now Wisconsin and Michigan and parts of Illinois and Indiana. For England of that day was the England of this day—a bully and a land-grabber.
And then the climax came—Bonaparte went under. Bonaparte, who had kept England so busy she hadn’t had time to whip us before, now in his fall unfettered the one thousand warships of Britain that had kept him out of the Channel and the Mediterranean and the army that later sent him to his Waterloo, and all these were free to fight the helpless under-dog across the waters.
And then the Aarons gave it up. One of them, Gallatin, wrote home from England: “The war is popular here, and that their national pride, inflated by their last unexpected success, cannot be satisfied without what they call the chastisement of America, cannot be doubted. They do not even suspect that we have any just cause of complaint, and consider us altogether the aggressor and the allies of Bonaparte.”