On April 5, 1811, both Houses of Congress heard President Madison’s Annual Message.13 Much of the address he devoted to a description of American foreign relations, particularly as they related to Great Britain. When last Congress met, he said, the evident withdrawal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees had given hope that the British too might establish a trading system more friendly to America. This hope, he said, had been disappointed. Instead “the orders were … put into more rigorous execution.” Until France allowed neutral carriers to take British goods into territory it controlled, Britain would respond to America’s Nonimportation Act with reciprocal exclusion. Besides that, “indemnity and redress for other wrongs, have continued to be withheld.” Madison next conceded that contrary to expectation, France had not allowed America to trade freely with its territory either, nor had it shown any sign of intending “to restore the great amount of American property, seized and condemned, under Edicts; which, though not affecting our neutral relations,… were … founded in such unjust principles, that the reparation ought to have been prompt and ample.” France’s unexpected regulation of American trade might bring the administration to have to reciprocate toward her too. A minister plenipotentiary had been sent to France to sound the emperor’s government out. Britain in particular, Madison said, had requited American attempts to move relations into a better track not with measures to resolve legitimate grievances, but with “war on our lawful commerce” on “the threshold of our Territory.”

  Then came the climax of the message. In light of these facts, Madison said, “Congress will feel the duty of putting the United States into an armour, and an attitude demanded by the crisis, and corresponding with the national spirit and expectations.” Greater attention needed to be paid to smuggling, and something must be done to insure American manufactures’ continued success once the present scenario of commercial restriction passed.

  Madison noted that the government had paid down its debt substantially in the past year and urged Congress to prepare its fiscal house for whatever loans might prove necessary in the coming year. He closed with a prayer for “the blessing of Heaven on our beloved Country” in whatever measures might prove necessary.

  Madison also referred in his annual message to ongoing developments in Spain’s New World empire. By this point the U.S. Government had received communications from Venezuela asking that America recognize the government in Caracas. Madison told Congress it ought to look to all of “the great communities, which occupy the southern portion of our own hemisphere, and extend into our neighbourhood.” America’s “deep interest” should be prompted by “an enlarged philanthropy, and an enlightened forecast.” In response a special congressional committee issued a statement that once they were independent, Congress and the Executive would establish “with them, as sovereign and independent States, such amicable relations and commercial intercourse as may require their Legislative authority.”14

  33

  On November 7 Madison met with a delegate from Venezuela, Telesfora de Orea. Telesfora had given Monroe a copy of Venezuela’s declaration of independence and asked for diplomatic recognition.1 Soon after this Secretary of State Monroe wrote to the United States’ ministers in Britain, France, Denmark, and Russia with a statement of the administration position regarding this matter.2 He said that “A Revolution” had begun “in the Spanish provinces, South of the United States.” Madison had proffered friendly sentiments to delegations from some of those provinces, though he had not recognized them as independent. Monroe’s purpose, he concluded, was to instruct the ministers to endeavor to bring European countries to recognize these Spanish provinces as independent—both for their benefit and for America’s. Perhaps surprisingly the French minister in Washington told Monroe that Napoleon’s government would cooperate in this. The minister, Louis Sérurier, seems to have believed that Napoleon wanted American ships to be used to arm the Latin American revolutionaries—an odd deduction, as the reason they had moved toward independence was Napoleon’s dominance of Spain.3 Likely Napoleon judged that if not independent, the New World Spanish colonies’ weight would be on the anti-French side in the Peninsular War.

  As these events transpired, word had not yet arrived in Washington of extremely important developments in the Northwest (today’s Midwest).4 On November 7, 1811, the territorial governor of Indiana, William Henry Harrison, crushed a force of Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tecumseh, who, under the inspiration of his brother Tenskwatawa, aka the Prophet, had endeavored to unite Indians from Georgia to the Great Lakes against American expansion, was away trying to recruit Deep South Indian peoples into his pan-Indian resistance movement, but the Prophet was there. Sixty-eight of Harrison’s frontiersmen died in the skirmish, and the governor’s force took “90 fusees and rifles from the enemy, most of them new and of English manufacture.” Americans generally, and their political leaders in Washington specifically, scented British policy in this.5 Hostility among the Indians Tecumseh had recruited and was trying to recruit would be an important element of American foreign relations in the coming year.

  Secretary Monroe confided to the American minister in Britain, Jonathan Russell, that the United States had been brought to a choice between “abandoning their Commerce” and “resorting to other means more likely to obtain a respect for their rights. Between these alternatives,” he said, “there can be little cause for hesitation.” The government, he said, was going to fill the ranks of the army, then recruit ten thousand more. It was also going to authorize American merchant ships to arm for their own defense—a step sure to lead to war with Britain. America still preferred to learn of a reversal of Britain’s American policy, and Russell should call these facts to the British government’s attention.6

  Meanwhile Congress slowly turned in the direction the War Hawks urged. Henry Clay charged Representative John C. Calhoun with leadership of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Carolinian intended to make a complete change. On November 29, 1811, the committee reported six resolutions to the House: that the Executive ought immediately to recruit as many soldiers as existing law contemplated, the bounty of pay and lands to be increased; that ten thousand more regulars ought to be recruited, again with a bounty of land; that the president be authorized to recruit fifty thousand volunteer reserves; that the president should be authorized to call out militia units as needed; that all of the navy’s ships ought to be put in seagoing shape; and that merchantmen should be authorized to arm for self-defense.7

  By this point in his young congressional career, Calhoun had already come to certain conclusions about the president. Although a brilliant and “amiable” man, Madison “has not I fear the commanding talents, which are necessary to command those about him. He permits division in his cabinet. He reluctantly gives up the system of peace.” Yet perhaps the clear vector of developments would draw the chief executive along. “The Embargo is certainly a decisive stept. It is understood to be the prelude to war. I do not expect Congress will wait its termination to declare war.”

  Randolph of Roanoke intervened in the discussion to lay out his objections.8 Here we have an illustration of the reasons why, on hearing Mr. Randolph was up, people rushed from all over the District of Columbia to hear. Along the way he pilloried the majority for its evident abandonment of the principles on which the Republican Party originally stood, saying:

  I know not how gentlemen, calling themselves republicans, can advocate such a war. What was their doctrine in 1798–9, when the command of the army, that highest of all possible trusts in any government, be the form what it may, was reposed in the bosom of the Father of his country! the sanctuary of a nation’s love! The only hope that never came in vain? When other worthies of the revolution, Hamilton, Pinckney, and the younger Washington, men of tried patriotism, of approved conduct and value, of untarnished honor, held subordinate command under him? Republicans were then unwilling to trust a standing army even to his hands who had given proof that he was above all human temptation. Where now is the revolutionary hero to whom you are about to confide this sacred trust?

  Randolph thundered that James Wilkinson, the chief general in the American army, could not be compared to Washington; he called him “an acquitted felon.” “What! Then you were unwilling to vote an army, when such men as have been named held high command! When Washington himself was at the head.”

  Randolph scoffed at the causus belli the Republican majority had in mind, demanding to know, “Will you say that your provocations were less then than now, when your direct commerce was interdicted, your ambassadors hooted with derision from the French court, tribute demanded, actual war waged upon you?” Then, in reference to his hearty few fellow Old Republicans, he noted that, “Those who opposed the army then, were, indeed, denounced as partisans of France, as the same men, some of them at least, are now held up as the advocates of England, those firm and undeviating republicans, who then dared, and now dare, to cling to the ark of the Constitution, to defend it even at the expense of their fame rather than surrender themselves to the wild projects of mad ambition!”

  Insightful in his fury, Randolph turned to the psychology of power that had been preached by Jeffersonians when out of power in the 1790s. “There is a fatality, Sir,” he insisted, “attending plenitude of power. Soon or late, some mania seizes upon its possessors; they fall from the dizzy height, through the giddiness of their own heads. Like a vast estate, heaped up by the labor and industry of one man which seldom survives the third generation, power gained by patient assiduity, by a faithful and regular discharge of its attendant duties, soon gets above its own origin. Intoxicated with their own greatness, the federal party fell. Will not the same causes produce the same effects now as then?”

  Randolph would live to hear Federalists making the same prognostications and pleading the same moral case—but also to see fate treat Britain and America in the most surprising way. In 1812, however, unlike in days of old, few followed him.

  Speaker Henry Clay took to the well of the House on December 31, 1811, and in a lengthy speech laid out for all the world to hear his understanding of the government’s situation and the reasons why he thought the time had come for war.9 This performance of the young speaker demonstrated the rhetorical ability and patriotic ardor that would help keep him at the very top of the American political elite for decades to come. He ranged across all of the outstanding issues, in the process knocking down objections to the Calhoun Committee’s report raised mainly by John Randolph. The House had been discussing the question whether it ought to add fifteen or twenty-five thousand men to the army, and the speaker began by saying he favored the larger figure.

  Clay reasoned that since one must in those days count on about one-third of total manpower to be unavailable due to “desertion, sickness, & other incidents to which raw troops are peculiarly exposed,” since the likely American military objective, Quebec, probably would be defended by “between 7 and 8 thousand regular troops,” and since the besieging force would need to be at least “double the force of the besieged,” twenty-five thousand amounted to the minimum force to do the job.

  Clay also pointed out to his countrymen the folly of “trusting too confidently on a calculation, the basis of which was treason.” Absent Canadian assistance, for the army to proceed into Lower Canada would require garrisoning the conquered city first—which again would require manpower. American volunteers, he said, would not be fit “for the manning and garrisoning of forts.” In short Clay gave the House multiple reasons to conclude that twenty-five thousand regular soldiers would be a bare minimum.

  Clay noted that the purpose of these preparations was “war, and war with Great Britain. It had been supposed by some gentlemen,” he continued, “improper to discuss publicly so delicate a question.” As a newspaper reporter had Clay saying, “He did not feel the impropriety. It was a subject in its nature incapable of concealment.” American war preparations could not be hidden anyway. What use could England make of its knowledge? “She may, indeed, anticipate us, and commence the war. But that is what she is in fact doing, and she can add but little to the injury which she is inflicting.” He seemed to be warming to the idea of a declaration of war as he enumerated the losses America suffered: “commerce, character, a nation’s best treasure, honor!”

  America lost $10 million per year to the effects of the Orders-in-Council, Clay said. More onerously, he “could not … overlook the impressment of our seamen; an aggression upon which he never reflected without feelings of indignation.… The orders in council were pretended to have been reluctantly adopted as a measure of retaliation. The French decrees, their alleged basis, are revoked. England resorts to the expedient of denying the fact of the revocation.…” And now Augustus John Foster, the British minister to the U.S.A., demands that America secure passage of British manufactures into Europe.

  Parrying one of Randolph’s criticisms (which was also popular among Federalists), Clay noted that “England is said to be fighting for the world” before asking, “shall we, it is asked, attempt to weaken her exertions?” The British cause would indeed be admirable, he answered, if it were being pursued “[b]y scrupulous observance of the rights of others.” It then would “command the sympathies of the world.” Echoing Jefferson’s reference to Napoleon as the dictator by land and John Bull (a popular metaphorical depiction of Great Britain) as the dictator of the seas, the Kentuckian said that Americans were asked “[t]o bear the actual cuffs of her arrogance, that we may escape a chimerical French subjugation! We are invited—conjured to drink the potion of British poison actually presented to our lips, that we may avoid the imperial dose prepared by perturbed imaginations. We are called upon [Hear him thunder!]—to submit to debasement, dishonor and disgrace—to bow the neck to royal insolence, as a course of preparation for manly resistance to gallic invasion!” “[I]t was not by submission that our fathers achieved our independence.” Clay recalled that the Declaration of Independence rested its assertion of the necessity of independence on the “first appearance” of “encroachment.” Now Britain had moved from denying America the indirect trade—the right to trade between the West Indies and Europe—to denial even of the direct trade—of trade between America and the Continent. “Yield this point, and tomorrow intercourse between … planters on James river and Richmond will be interdicted.” The Royal Navy’s bottling up of the United States’ rivers amounted to invasion, he insisted.

  Clay estimated that the fiscal advantage to Britain of this hostile policy toward America could not account for it. More likely the British hoped by closing off America’s sea trade to draw American sailors, whom he estimated to number a hundred thousand, into the British merchant marine. He then insisted that talk of negative political consequences for the Republicans in case of war had to be mistaken. The people had seen this administration and the previous one endeavor to reach an honest accommodation with either or both of the great powers with “the utmost impartiality,” and so would place the blame where it belonged. Anyway, duty called, and he would respond. “He concluded,” the same newspaperman said, “by hoping that his remarks had tended to prove that the quantum of the force was not too great—that in its nature it was free from the objections urged against it, and that the object of its application was one imperiously called for by the crisis.”

  A few days later Chairman Calhoun reported on events in a letter to a friend in South Carolina. “Heretofore, the conductors of our affairs, have attempted to avoid and remove difficulties by a sort of political management. They thought, that national honor and interest could both be maintained and respected, not by war, or a preparation for it; but by commercial arrangements and negotiations. That might suit an inconsiderable nation,” he fumed, “or one that had not such important rights at stake. Experience has proved it improper for us.”10

  The day Calhoun’s committee reported, Secretary Monroe penned a lengthy letter to a British friend, Henry Vassall-Fox, Lord Holland.11 Monroe had cultivated a good relationship with this correspondent while the two of them negotiated in London in 1806, and so this significant British statesman made a logical recipient of what amounted to a warning—a reluctant warning. After invoking “The danger of the present moment to the peace of our countries,” Secretary Monroe described Britain’s position as demanding “as a condition on which the orders in council are to be revoked, not that the UStates shall protect their neutral rights only, in a commerce with the British dominions, against French invasion, but that they shall open the continent to British manufactures & productions, and failing in that, repeal their non importation act, while G. Britain retains her orders in full force. This attitude, maintaind,” he concluded, “must lead to war.” The reason was obvious: “The UStates consider the orders in council, more especially since the revocation of the French decrees so far as they affected our neutral trade, as war on the part of G Britain, and you will be sensible that when one party wages war, the other cannot long remain in peace.” Soon enough President Madison would issue a public statement echoing that last bit of plainspoken reasoning; we may suppose, then, that at least he had a hand in writing Monroe’s letter.