The signers drew the reader’s attention to the “series of restrictions on commerce” opposed by them all along because “inefficient as respected foreign nations, and injurious chiefly to ourselves.” Successive administrations’ enforcement of them they explained by reference to the fact that “Success, in the system, had become identified with the pride, the character, and the hope of our Cabinet.” Their failure to change directions owed to the fact that, “As is natural with men, who have a great stake depending on the success of a favorite theory, pertinacity seemed to increase as its hopelessness became apparent.” The theory’s failure “was carefully attributed to the influence of opposition.” That factor, not “its intrinsic imbecility,” received the blame whenever Republicans had to explain the situation to the people.

  America did have real grievances, this congressional minority conceded. Yet, “although very grievous to our interests, and in many [aspects] humiliating to our pride,… [they] yet were of a nature which, in the present state of the world, either would not justify war, or which war would not remedy.” So, for example, persistent British naval intrusions into American coastal waters called for improvement of coastal and harbor fortifications, “but, in no light can they be considered as making a resort to war, at the present time, on the part of the United States, either necessary or expedient.” Too, some kind of accounting for the hostilities with the Indians in the Northwest in 1811 ought to be forthcoming from the Executive. Though Congress had been told that the British spurred Tecumseh and the Prophet into hostilities, Congress needed information about steps taken “to remove any cause of complaint, either real or imaginary, which the Indians might allege,” and it seemed clear that declaring war on Britain had not heightened that region’s safety.

  Quincy and Bayard next turned to the obvious question of how a land war would resolve problems of “free trade and sailors’ rights.” “What balm,” they asked, “has Canada for wounded honor? How are our mariners benefited by a war, which exposes those who are free, without promising release to those who are impressed?” Too, if American honor required war with Britain, what did honor urge in response to similar offenses by France?

  “With a navy comparatively nominal,” they concluded, “we are about to enter into the lists against the greatest marine on the globe. With a commerce unprotected and spread over every ocean, we propose to make profit by privateering, and for this endanger the wealth of which we are honest proprietors.” The respective military assets of America and the United Kingdom made America’s strategy of invasion foolish, and there was no need to enter into “that awful contest which is laying waste Europe” without substantial fortifications, men, or money. Perhaps worst, “It cannot be concealed, that to engage in the present war against England is to place ourselves on the side of France.…” The whole idea seemed immoral and imprudent—and thus drew the opposition of the country’s conservative party, the party of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton.

  In private some of them went further. Former secretary of state Timothy Pickering, highest of High Federalists, wrote that he had known directly from the French minister during the Washington administration of congressional Republicans bribed into taking a pro-French line. He could not, he said, “undertake to affirm that French money had been liberally distributed on this occasion,” though he was certain of it. Fortunately the declaration of war had brought “all New England” around to opposing the Republicans, “nor can I doubt of it in New York.” He said of Napoleon that “neither Jefferson nor Madison have dared resist [his] will; because I presume they stand committed to him, and dread an exposure.”4

  “I would preserve the Union of the States,” Pickering continued, “if possible.” “But I would not be deluded by a word. To my ears there is no magic in the sound of Union. If the great objects of union are utterly abandoned,—much more, if they are wantonly, corruptly, and treacherously sacrificed by the Southern and Western States,—let the Union be severed.” He did not think it could happen, however, as the West would always need New Orleans as an emporium for its trade. “And peace with Britain we must have and will have. We cannot exist, but in poverty and contempt, without foreign commerce. And by a war of any continuance with Great Britain, that commerce will be annihilated.” After expressing great confidence that out of self-interest, Britain would forgo “any destruction of our seaports,” Pickering concluded that America “will have peace and commerce.” He would do what he could to bring that into being.

  Pickering also expressed confidence in the new governor of Massachusetts, Caleb Strong, and in the likelihood that Federalists would cement control of the Massachusetts General Court in the next election. Strong did not disappoint. Rather, almost immediately after Pickering’s letter he gave Secretary of War William Eustis’s request for “a detachment from the militia of Massachusetts for defence of the maritime frontier” the back of his hand. To Eustis’s reminder that Madison had called on governors to get their militias ready, Strong replied that “The people of this State appear to be under no apprehension of an invasion.…” Although some coastal towns had requested resupply in light of the declaration of war, he said, “they expressed no desire that any part of the militia should be called out for their defence, and, in some cases, we were assured such a measure would be disagreeable to them.”5

  Strong next gave Eustis details of his reasoning in not providing the Federal Government the militiamen it had requested. He said that he inferred that Eustis did not believe the danger of a British invasion was “now very considerable,” or else the plan would not have been to send Massachusetts units westward. Add to that the governor of Nova Scotia’s proclamation “forbid[ding] any incursions or depredations upon our territories,” and the U.S. Constitution’s conditions on which the Federal Government could call militia units into its service had not been met. In general, then, he believed that Massachusetts men should remain in Massachusetts in preparedness for an enemy attack, as did his Council and Massachusetts’s Supreme Court. (That court advised that only the governor could decide whether a call into federal service was constitutionally valid and that even if called into federal service, militia units must be commanded by state officers.)6 Governor Strong would, he concluded, happily comply with federal orders in case the Constitution’s conditions on which state units could be called into federal service were met in the future. Thus had the Federalists, heretofore the loose-construction and military-measures party, become the opposite. They would remain so through the balance of the war.

  At the war’s outset Secretary of War William Eustis’s complete inadequacy to his role and General James Wilkinson’s notoriety and general ineptitude posed substantial problems. In the last weeks before the declaration of war and the first weeks thereafter, a surprising answer to the Eustis problem percolated among the American elite. Richard Rush, son of signer of the Declaration of Independence Dr. Benjamin Rush and later a significant political figure in his own right, tried to persuade his acquaintances in the Madison administration’s inner circle to shuffle the deck chairs to make room for Thomas Jefferson to resume his Washington administration position as secretary of state. James Monroe, meanwhile, would receive Washington’s old military rank of lieutenant general.7

  After sharing his idea with Jefferson in a letter that claimed Gallatin was on board (“tickled to the nines with the idea”), Rush concluded by saying, “[I]t is a little odd that I, who claim to be so retired, so falling back, at my onset here, should have begun in my [later?] moon with entirely new-modeling the cabinet!” And so that was that. Except that it wasn’t.

  Apparently Monroe took the notion of returning to the military life he had known in the Revolution seriously. He wrote to his chief political advisor, his son-in-law the prominent Virginia attorney George Hay, describing his thoughts about raising a force of Virginians and leading it north. Hay replied that he had spoken with Governor James Barbour, who sent Monroe a letter the same day agreeing that Monroe could raise a force in Virginia and assuring him that his great prestige in his home state meant probable success for his recruitment efforts. However, Barbour continued to say that news from Britain of the Orders-in-Council’s repeal meant such efforts would likely be for naught, as the war now looked likely to be “evanescent.”8 Hay, on the other hand, said, “If the war continues, your Situation as Commander of a division of the army will be preferable to that which you now hold,” but that the news from England seemed to indicate Monroe should remain in charge of the State Department.9 He would, but the idea of a Canadian command continued to dance in his head.

  Wade Hampton I, another of the brigadiers, loathed Wilkinson so intensely that he stayed on his South Carolina plantation rather than take up his position on the northern border. Similar problems beset the ranks of more junior officers. It would perhaps be the new recruits, then, who invaded Canada. Yet Madison and Gallatin’s idea of putting Henry Clay in command of the fresh troops that he had just prodded Congress into empowering Madison to recruit, and even giving him George Washington’s old rank of lieutenant general, ran aground on other Cabinet secretaries’ insistence that the Kentuckian could not be spared from Congress.10 The incumbent military leadership would in the main have to do.

  The westernmost American force was concentrated at Detroit, which is separated by only a narrow passage across the Detroit River from what then was Upper Canada (today’s Ontario). As British troops in that entire extensive province numbered only around twelve hundred, it would have been an inviting target—if the president had had a way of knowing how minor its military resources were. Yet he could not know that Canada’s total forces on hand numbered about six thousand British regulars, twenty-one hundred Canadian auxiliaries, and three thousand Indian allies because, as one historian put it, “the War Department had no intelligence information beyond vague rumors drifting across the Canadian border. Besides that, the generals had done no advance planning of potential operations against Canada.”11 Madison, Monroe, Gallatin, Eustis, and Hamilton did know that Canada was sparsely populated and Upper Canada had few troops on hand. They also knew that the United States’ population of 7.7 million was counterposed to Canada’s 500,000. Much of that Canadian population—about 60 percent—consisted of immigrants arrived from the United States since 1792 in quest of open land and the traditionally low British taxes. These “Late Loyalists,” as they were known, seemed unlikely to be staunchly defensive of royal authority in the event of war. The local governor and military commander, Major General Isaac Brock, described them as “either indifferent to what is passing, or so completely American as to rejoice in the prospects of a change of Governments.”12

  Americans in government and outside it therefore felt an outsized optimism concerning their nation’s military prospects. Former president Jefferson, for example, wrote William Duane, whom he had appointed a lieutenant colonel, thanking him for “the military Manuals you were so kind as to send me” and with some truly remarkable ruminations on the situation. “[T]his is the sort of book most needed in our country,” he mused, “where even the elements of tactics are unknown. the young have never seen service; & the old are past it: and of those among them who are not superannuated themselves, their science is become so.” Skipping past Duane’s lamentations concerning the incompetence of Secretary Eustis, the effects of which Duane claimed to be able to detail at length, Jefferson admitted, “I see, as you do, the difficulties & defects we have to encounter in war, and should expect disasters, if we had an enemy on land capable of inflicting them.” As it was, however, “the seeds of genius … which need only soil & season to germinate, will develop themselves among our military men. some of them will become prominent, and, seconded by the native energy of our citizens, will soon, I hope, to our force, add the benefits of skill. the acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; & will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, & the final expulsion of England from the American continent.” The British “fleet will annihilate our public force on the water,” he feared, “but our privateers will eat out the vitals of their commerce. perhaps they may burn New York or Boston,” he warmed to his subject, but “if they do, we must burn the city of London, not by expensive fleets or Congreve rockets, but by employing an hundred or two Jack the painters, whom nakedness famine, desperation & hardened vice will abundantly furnish from among themselves.”13 Congressman John C. Calhoun put it more directly: “in four weeks from the time that a declaration of war is heard on our frontier, the whole of Upper and a part of Lower Canada will be in our possession.”14

  Madison opted then for both land campaigns and naval activity. The U.S. Navy would pose no threat to its British counterpart, but American warships and privateers (private vessels licensed by the Federal Government to conduct warlike measures against British ships, including taking them as prizes) could harass the Royal Navy while the main work was done on land. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, would head north from three staging areas: at Detroit, at Niagara, and farther east.15

  The American strategy was to strike quickly before Britain could reinforce its North American troops. The invasion’s objective was Montreal. The Northwest, Eustis believed, would not be a British target. Michigan Territory governor William Hull, a veteran of the Revolution, tried to persuade officials in Washington otherwise. Although Hull had earlier insisted that American control of Lake Erie must precede any significant incursion into Canada, he eventually abandoned that analysis in favor of the idea that a large American army’s appearance at Detroit would intimidate the British into abandoning the region. Unfortunately for the American cause, the British captured Hull’s papers, thus learning of Hull’s plans. Major General Isaac Brock reported, “Till I read these letters, I had no idea General Hull was advancing with so large a force.”16

  37

  Hull wrote very hopefully to Eustis on July 19:

  The army is encamped directly opposite to Detroit. The camp is entrenched. I am mounting the 24-pounders and making every preparation for the siege of Malden. The British force, which in numbers was superior to the American, including militia and Indians, is daily diminishing. Fifty or sixty [of the militia] have deserted daily since the American standard was displayed, and taken protection. They are now reduced to less than one hundred. In a day or two I expect the whole will desert. The Indian force is diminishing in the same proportion. I have now a council of ten or twelve nations sitting at Brownstown, and I have no doubt but the result will be that they will remain neutral.

  Then came the part of the letter on which the campaign would turn:

  The brig “Adams” was launched on the 4th of July. I have removed her to Detroit under cover of the cannon, and shall have her finished and armed as soon as possible. We shall then have command of the upper lakes. If you have not a force at Niagara, the whole force of the province will be directed against this army.… It is all important that Niagara should be invested. All our success will depend upon it.1

  The army’s senior officer, Major General Henry Dearborn, made no urgent effort to invest Niagara with any alacrity. Then again, he was “an elderly man of sixty-one years who had grown enormously fat, and he could only move very slowly with great difficulty,” which may help explain his hesitance before accepting his high command, so quickness could not be counted among his attributes.2 Secretary of War Eustis gave no indication that he should hurry to Niagara. Having ordered Hull on June 24 to invade western Canada, Eustis two days later wrote Dearborn that it was uncertain when exactly Hull would invade Canada, and therefore Dearborn should “take [his] own time and give the necessary orders to officers on the sea-coast.” Once he arrived at Albany, Dearborn would “be able to form an opinion of the time required to prepare the troops for action.” Summing up Eustis’s performance, Henry Adams judges, “Such orders as those of June 24 to Hull, and of June 26 to Dearborn, passed beyond bounds of ordinary incapacity.…”3 Robert Allen Rutland, longtime editor of Madison’s papers, does not excuse Eustis or Dearborn, but he puts ultimate responsibility where the Constitution does: with the commander-in-chief. “The early strategy of a three-pronged thrust into Canada,” he says, “was based on the uninformed belief that British resistance might be little more than token. No timetable existed, which meant that the three efforts would be launched in helter-skelter fashion.”4

  Though he looked the part of a general, Hull combined the inapt character traits of “vacillation and stubborn pride,”5 and his “qualities of indecision and inflexibility had possibly been reinforced by a stroke he had suffered about a year before his appointment to the army.” One of his comrades later recalled that after that, “he never appeared to be the man he was before.” His colonels agreed. Worse yet, his men saw him “in great embarrassment when, on parade before leaving for Detroit, the general lost control of his horse, his stirrups, his balance as well as his hat, and frantically clutched the mane of the frightened animal to save himself.” Whatever prestige he had had in his army must have vanished after that.6

  Hull crossed into Canada in the second week of July aiming to seize Fort Amherstburg. In an augury of things to come, two hundred Ohio militiamen refused to follow him. They claimed the Constitution required them to obey him only within the United States. Hull then issued a proclamation that defecting Canadians would be welcomed: “I come to find enemies,” he said, “not to make them, I come to protect, not to injure you.” He referred to his force as “an army of Friends.” After warning, “If the barbarous and savage policy of Great Britain be pursued, and the savages are let loose to murder our citizens and butcher our women and children, this war, will be a war of extermination,” Hull added, “The first stroke with the Tomahawk the first attempt with the scalping knife will be the signal for one indiscriminate scene of desolation. No white man found fighting by the side of an Indian will be taken prisoner.” Yet he concluded with an offer to accept into his force any Canadian who wanted to join it.7 Though Hull’s proclamation did not yield him significant additions to his force, it did persuade hundreds of Canadian militiamen to go home. In general things were going well.8