On July 27th a new number of the paper appeared. It “contained spirited strictures upon the lawless temper of the city, and the indisposition of the civil or military officers to discharge the respective duties of their offices; and upon the executive of Maryland.” By “early candle light” a huge throng of men assembled outside the publisher’s house. “Major Barney, with about thirty horsemen under his command, moved down between 1 and 3 o’clock to the house,” but when his interposition proved ineffective, the mayor, the attorney-general, and the local militia commander escorted the publisher, Mr. Hanson, “and his friends,… to the gaol as a place of security.” This hollow square’s entire progress to the jail featured bombardment with rocks at times so heavy that the protected men feared for their lives, “notwithstanding it endangered the lives of the political favourites of the mob.”

  Meanwhile a Republican newspaper, the Whig, gave broad circulation to the charges that the men in the jail “were enemies to the country; that [Hanson’s] visit to Baltimore was the consequence of an arrangement to insult and dragoon the citizens; that they were murderers; [and] that they would avail themselves of a constitutional right to change the venue to an adjoining county, and thus escape the punishment due to their crimes.”

  The mayor and the militia general on the scene refused to arm the men under their protection, and the general, John Stricker, was found by the legislative committee to have forbidden his subordinate colonel “to deliver out to the men under his command ball cartridges.” When the militia infantry were called out, few answered—the committee said due “to the united causes of indisposition to protect the persons in the gaol, an apprehension of immediate danger, or future proscription, and to the inefficient preparation under which they were ordered to march.”

  The mob knew the militiamen had been removed from the scene. It also received a vow from the mayor that the men in the jail would not be relocated. Despite the mayor, the mob attacked the jail, and in the end it murdered General James Lingan, in days gone by recipient of accolades from George Washington himself. When the various malefactors came to trial, partisan Federalist juries acquitted even the most manifestly guilty of them—even the murderers of Lingan. This course of events led the committee to determine that Mayor Edward Johnson, Esq., displayed “indisposition to resort to the ordinary powers of coercion, with which he was invested, against the turbulent and wicked,… so distinguished as to encourage a belief that he connived at and approbated their excesses.” He used “intemperate language against the Federal Republican, the inevitable effect of which was to sanction and excite … the popular excesses against the same.” In short the mob took his and other officials’ cues that it might have its way without interference from them. Stricker came in for similar legislative excoriation—in his case for ordering a subordinate not “to fire on any assailants.” By merely rallying his troops in a display of force he could have overawed the mob. He could have, it said, but he never did. Finally the state’s attorney general, by forgoing the option of moving the trials to a county not dominated by rabid Republicans, essentially made it impossible for “an impartial trial to be had.” He too earned “from this house a severe animadversion”—for all the good it did.

  In these events’ aftermath, a handful of Republicans came to trial. A juror later said “that the affray originated with them tories [i.e., Federalists], and that they all ought to have been killed, and that he would rather starve than find a verdict of guilty against any of the rioters.”13 All were acquitted. The Federalist editor Hanson too, though he had been “severely beaten” repeatedly alongside General Lee, was brought to trial in the death of a man killed leading an assault upon the editor’s house, and Maryland’s leading Federalist attorneys—Luther Martin (long-time Maryland attorney general, he of Philadelphia Convention and Chase impeachment fame), Robert Goodloe Harper (hero of the XYZ Affair), and Philip Barton Key (also a Chase impeachment veteran, uncle of Francis Scott Key)—served him as defense counsel. Successful in their motion to relocate the trial to Federalist-dominated Annapolis, they persuaded a jury to acquit “without leaving its box.”14

  Federalists elsewhere expressed their outrage. The Hartford Courant thundered that the war’s real purpose was to destroy the freedom of the press. Republican mobs’ actions against the American Patriot in Savannah and the Norristown Herald in the Keystone State buttressed the allegation—as did local postmasters’ actions against local papers in several places. Other states witnessed scenes of Republican political violence too.15

  Republicans responded by hurling allegations of political machinations back at Federalists. The Baltimore government, apparently without any sense of shame, issued a report finding its own officials blameless.16 Perhaps misled by the report, which came to him under cover of a letter from the Maryland attorney general explaining that the post office in Baltimore had never been in danger during the riots and averring that in case any effort were made against it, “it would be instantly put down by a Very large proportion of the people of Baltimore,” President Madison characterized the city government’s report as “a seasonable antidote to the misrepresentations propagated by” Federalists.17

  40

  Congress turned to perfecting the military’s organization at the end of 1812. A delegation demanded that Eustis be replaced, and he resigned.1 This again brought up the question of what role Monroe would fill going forward. Senator William Crawford, R-GA, wrote that contenders for the War Department included Dearborn, Armstrong, Harrison, Tompkins, and Monroe.2 Monroe and Dearborn having turned it down, Gallatin told Madison, “No person thinks [Tompkins] equal to the place at such time as this,” then added, “The office requires first abilities & frightens those who know best its difficulties,” so that Crawford likely would decline if offered too.3 Crawford bowed out gracefully, telling Madison the day after receiving the offer, “I am not qualified to discharge the duties which would devolve upon me, by obeying your call, with reputation to myself, and with advantage to the Country.” Guessing that Madison would see political calculation in this, the senator added that, “in the present Situation of the nation, nothing but a deep Sense of my incapacity to discharge the duties of the office … would induce me to decline the offer.” Since DeWitt Clinton’s stab at the presidency in 1812 ruled out a future party nomination for him, that left John Armstrong as Monroe’s most likely rival in 1816. Yet his was the last candidacy standing for secretary of war.

  The president received advice about Armstrong versus Tompkins from Gallatin. Perhaps Armstrong was indolent, he said, but taking Tompkins from the New York governorship would likely entail the loss of that position by the Republican Party at the next election. If Tompkins must be taken into the Cabinet, Gallatin would cede his position to the New Yorker and let him become treasury secretary. Besides, he insisted, “I feel no hesitation in saying that as respects talents & military knowledge, Gen. Armstrong is much superior to the Governor, who I fear would prove inadequate to the task of organizing the department & the army.” Perhaps equally important, “Public opinion has also assigned a standing to Gen. Armstrong both as a military man & as a man of talents, which will shield him & the administration from the attacks to which the other gentleman would be as much exposed as Dr. Eustis.”4

  Madison wrote Armstrong on January 14, 1813, asking him to relieve Monroe of having to do double duty tout de suite and enclosing his commission. Armstrong responded promptly that he would indeed accept the post, but that “an interview with Gen. Dearborn, preliminary to [his] entering on the duties of the War Department, would be so useful, if not indispensable to a prompt & regular discharge of [the duties of the War Department]” that he would set out for Albany immediately, and thence to Washington.5 Madison could not have known that this minor instance of insubordination would come to be emblematic of Armstrong’s tenure at the War Department. Due mainly to unhappiness with his performance in France and his role in the Newburgh Conspiracy, the Senate confirmed the new secretary’s appointment by the narrow margin of 18–15.6

  Navy secretary Paul Hamilton also left at last, to be succeeded by William Jones. The outgoing secretary responded to the idea of resigning by pointing to the U.S. Navy’s several accomplishments in the war to this point, besides adding that the navy’s ships had all been refurbished and the department’s fiscal affairs carefully attended, but the president replied that Congress would make no further naval appropriations until Hamilton departed. Hamilton replied, “Sir, I understand your meaning, and here is my commission.”7

  The difference resembled that between night and day. Jones, a Pennsylvanian merchant and sea captain, had been considered for the post of secretary of the navy by Jefferson at the beginning of his administration. Madison would remember him as “the fittest minister who had ever been charged with the Navy Department,” and although there had been only a handful by then, the former president meant that as a significant compliment.8 No one knew when Jones assumed the post how straitened the navy’s circumstances soon would be.

  They also did not know—who could have dreamed?—that the geostrategic picture stood on the verge of a kaleidoscopic reorientation. Napoleon, successful in all of his wars from 1796 through 1809, decided in 1812 to attack his titular ally Alexander I, Emperor of All the Russias at the head of a 674,000-man army in the spring of 1812.9 As the leading historian of Napoleon’s warfare put it, “Time was to show that the decision to invade Russia constituted the irrevocable step which effectively compromised any remaining chance of survival for Napoleon and his Empire. From the time the first troops crossed the Niemen, the Emperor was committed to the path leading inexorably to St. Helena [the place of his ultimate exile], and although the next few years would hold several transient military successes for his arms, there could be no retracing his steps.”10

  The French emperor’s army began to cross the Niemen, then the border between East Prussia and the Russian Empire, on June 23rd—five days after Congress declared war on Britain. The campaign’s chief battle, which, though a victory, was not the climax Napoleon hoped it would be, occurred at Borodino on September 7, 1812, and a week after that, Napoleon marched into Moscow. He found that most of the city’s three hundred thousand inhabitants had heeded their governor’s order to abandon it.11 Frustrated by his Russian counterpart’s refusal to come to terms and immobilized by uncharacteristic indecision, Napoleon began the extremely long retreat back to France only after the Russian winter had begun to set in. By the time his Grande Armée crossed back out of Russian territory, it had dwindled to ninety-three thousand men. Napoleon had already reappeared in Paris to try to reconstitute his army; experienced soldiers and prime horses would prove impossible to replace.12

  Ordinarily Americans of both parties would have rejoiced at the news of Napoleon’s defeat. In 1812, however, it marked a significant strategic debacle for the United States. Having declared war on the chief power in a succession of anti-French coalitions, Great Britain, the Americans were left in a horrendously awkward position by Napoleon’s shocking defeat. Soon, Britain might decide to redirect some more substantial share of its military power into the North American war. Given the Americans’ poor performance in that war in 1812 and the Madison administration’s relatively weak political position, any such shift could be a disaster.

  However, Britain and America had a common friend: Emperor Alexander I. One need not accept Henry Adams’s argument that his grandfather’s skilled diplomacy accounted for Alexander’s decision to stand up to Napoleon in 1812 rather than accept more severe enforcement of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, and thus for Napoleon’s fateful decision to invade Russia, in order to believe that Adams did indeed stand close to the Russian autocrat. One need not accept it, but the French minister in St. Petersburg, Armand-Augustin-Louis, marquis de Caulaincourt, duc de Vicence, certainly did: “It seems you are great favorites here,” he told the American, “you have found powerful protection.”13

  As Henry Adams put it, “Adams’s diplomatic victory was Napoleonic in its magnitude and completeness.” It marked a major turning point in European history—among other things, we can see it now as bringing on the end of a millennium in which France was the most important European power. It also provoked Alexander to take the next obvious step and try to patch things up between his two Anglophone friends.

  The American minister kept a superb journal across his very long life from 1779, when he was aged twelve, until 1848, when he died three days after the last entry at age eighty. In that time he served in the highest governmental offices, including minister to Russia, member of the negotiating team at Ghent in 1815, United States representative, United States senator, secretary of state, and president of the United States. The diary is a priceless record of events only he could have described.

  As Adams recounted it, he went to see Count Romanzoff, Alexander’s chief minister, at 7:00 PM on September 21, 1812.14 Alexander had told Romanzoff to discuss the new international situation with Adams. As Alexander saw it, the commercial benefit he had expected his people to reap from his having made peace with England—access to American goods—now stood to be lost because of the Anglo-American war. Alexander had thought both sides hesitant to engage in such a war, and so he intended to offer his mediation. Did Adams know of “any difficulty or obstacle on the part of the Government of the United States, if he should offer his mediation for the purpose of effecting a pacification?”

  Adams replied that of course he could not at the moment know what his government was thinking, and in fact he had not even received official notice of the war’s declaration,

  But that I well knew, it was with extreme reluctance they had engaged in the War; that I was very sure, whatever determination they might form upon the proposal of the Emperor’s Mediation, they would receive … it as a new Evidence of His Majesty’s regard and friendship for the United States; and that I was not aware of any obstacle or difficulty which could occasion them to decline accepting it—For myself, I so deeply lamented the very existence of the War, that I should welcome any facility for bringing it to a just and honourable termination—I lamented it, because I thought that the only Cause which made it absolutely unavoidable [the Orders-in-Council], was actually removed at the moment when the Declaration was made.…

  According to Adams’s account, he went on to add that he thought British policy had left America no alternative to declaring war. “The Declaration of the English Regent in April, and the letter which Mr. Foster had written to the American Secretary of State in communicating it, had as it appeared to me left the American Government no alternative, but an immediate appeal to arms, or a dishonourable abandonment of all the unquestionable rights for which they had contended, and even the essential characteristics of an independent Nation—The blame of the War,” he concluded, “was therefore entirely on the English side; but the war itself was not the less disagreeable to me.…” In summation he insisted that “I lamented it particularly as occurring at a period when from my good wishes for Russia, and the Russian Cause, I should have rejoyced to see Friendship and Harmony taking place between America and England.… I knew the war would affect unfavourably the interests of Russia—I knew it must be highly injurious both to the United States and England—I could see no good result as likely to arise from it to any one.…”

  The count replied that he and the emperor had come to the same conclusion. In fact the emperor had had this idea of offering his mediation. Perhaps having a friend to both parties aid in the negotiations would smooth the way to a resolution. Adams and the count went back and forth about details of arranging a mediation, and then the count offered that Alexander truly did admire America, adding that Alexander had insisted on hearing that the count had such a picture on seeing the count’s picture of Monticello for himself.

  When next Adams chatted with the count, the conversation turned to the American grievances that had prompted the declaration of war.15 Yes, Adams told him, war might have been averted if the Orders-in-Council had been revoked sooner. Yet, war having begun, the U.S. Government almost certainly would insist on an end to impressment—a practice he went on to describe to the Russian. After telling him how it worked and why British sailors so strongly preferred service in American crews, for which the British government had “no other remedy … than that violent and tyrannical practice of their naval Officers of stealing men from our merchant vessels,” Adams said to Romanzoff that he “hoped if we could not hit upon any expedient for arranging it, he, the Count would furnish us with one,” and the Russian replied in the French that served as that era’s diplomatic language, “il faudra travailler à cela” (“we’ll have to work on that”).

  In the event the British rejected the mediation offer—Adams only learned of the British decision in November 1813, though Alexander, away at Bautzen in central Germany on campaign, received the news in July.16 By then another year of war had gone by.

  As Madison’s first presidential term drew to an end, the personnel of his administration were being shuffled some more. Treasury Secretary Gallatin, his most trusted and ablest Cabinet member, so disliked dealing with Armstrong in the Cabinet that he accepted an appointment to the peace delegation intended to negotiate through the Russian emperor’s mediation at St. Petersburg. Senator William Crawford, who accompanied Gallatin on the voyage to join Adams, advised Madison before he departed that General Wilkinson must not be left at New Orleans.17 The general had grown to be so disliked there, he counseled, that his continued presence in Louisiana would mean that that state’s senators would join the opposition in the next session of Congress—which would shift party control of the Senate into the hands of the Federalists. Rather than Wilkinson, Madison ought to send a general “whose character is above suspicion.” “In the Western and Southern States,” the Georgian senator said, Wilkinson “is generally believed to be one of the most abandoned and profligate of men. The Senators of these states with only two exceptions voted against him as major genl.” (The inexhaustibly pestiferous William Branch Giles of Virginia was joined in this by a South Carolinian.) For Wilkinson to stay on would be “in opposition to the feelings & wishes of the great majority of the people.” On March 10th Secretary Armstrong solved this problem: he ordered Wilkinson to report to General Dearborn, his new commanding officer, in the north.18 Try as they might, scholars have been unable to say why Wilkinson was not simply cashiered from the service.