Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

Madison was a lawyer thoroughly familiar with the international law of the time regarding questions of war and peace. Of course, he would also have been thoroughly familiar with George Washington’s interpretation of the power to declare war that had been granted to Congress in the Constitution that Madison had helped craft. Recall that George Washington understood that war needed to be declared constitutionally not for self-defense, but when the government intended to pursue an offensive expedition of some importance. Washington had been echoing Hugo Grotius, whose teachings on international law were central to Madison’s legal training.

Grotius, in his The Law of War and Peace (1625), noted that “In a case where either an attack is being warded off, or a penalty is demanded from the very person who has done wrong, no declaration is required by the law of nature.”4 Thus, contrary to Madison’s letter but fully consistent with what we believe was the true foreign policy purpose of the War of 1812; that is, as an offensive expedition of some importance, there was no need to declare war to defend against British abuse. Defense falls within the purview of the commander in chief; defense does not require a declaration of war. Hence, the president, well informed in the law, provided what amounted to an appealing public relations justification for Congress to declare war, rhetoric seemingly designed to appeal to the pro-Federalist New England states that were exposed to Britain’s naval interference—and to insulate him politically if the war went badly.

The Official Account

IN 1812 THE BRITISH WERE IN THE MIDST OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS with France. Following the French Revolution (1789) and the beheading of King Louis XVI (1793), France had fought on and off with its European rivals. From 1803, under Napoleon’s leadership, France had defeated in battle the major continental powers, including Austria, Prussia, Spain, and Russia. But Napoleon, while dominating continental Europe, could not defeat the British at sea. With the British unable to confront the French army directly on the Continent (although they introduced Wellington’s army into Spain following an uprising in 1808) and with the French unable to invade Britain, given the latter’s naval supremacy, economic warfare became a major component of the struggle between these two nineteenth-century superpowers. The United States’ merchant shipping became a bit player in that struggle.

In the early 1800s the United States was an important supplier of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods, but it was far from a major economic, let alone military, power. Both Britain and France had far more important issues to worry about—especially each other—than US sensibilities to how it was treated by either. Indeed, American complaints to the British government largely fell on deaf ears, just as President Madison noted they did. Even when the situation deteriorated into a state of war, for the British the war with the United States was but a minor sideshow compared to its struggle with France. In fact, having grown up in Britain, one of us was completely unaware that there had been a British-American War of 1812 until after having lived in the United States for several years. To the average Brit, the year 1812 certainly conjures up images of war, but the war it conjures up is Napoleon’s ultimately disastrous invasion of Russia. As William Kingsford writes in his History of Canada , “the events of the War of 1812 have not been forgotten in England for they have never been known there.”5

To Americans at the time, in contrast, it was an event of some significance, although that significance has faded with the passage of time, the experience of bigger wars, and the close ties that have emerged between the United States and Britain. The War of 1812 cost the lives of about fifteen thousand Americans.6 The British lost close to one third of that. The US national debt shot up from $45 million in 1812 to $127 million after the war, making the United States virtually bankrupt by the end of 1814. The nation’s capital city, Washington, DC, including the White House, was torched by the British, with US officials having to flee for their lives. Thus, its effects were substantial at the time and important to understand if we are to avoid other crises that seem momentarily important in their own time and that then shortly after fade into oblivion.

The Impressment Grievance

BRITAIN’S OVERRIDING FOCUS ON DEFEATING FRANCE ACCOUNTS FOR most of Madison’s complaints in his letter to Congress. Britain needed 140,000 sailors to man its vast navy. Conditions in the navy were appalling, casualty rates were enormous, and the pay was a pittance. Little wonder then, that many experienced sailors preferred service on American merchant vessels. However, the British did not recognize American naturalization and claimed the right to impress into service anyone they judged to be a British subject. To reclaim their sailors, the British navy boarded American ships to seize sailors they believed were British. The 1807 Leopard and Chesapeake incident is an often cited example of this kind of behavior. The HMS Leopard fired on the unprepared USS Chesapeake as it left Norfolk, Virginia. After the American ship’s surrender, four sailors were taken as deserters and one was subsequently hanged. Estimates suggest that perhaps as many as ten thousand US sailors were victims of such impressment. Indeed, the standard American high school account of the War of 1812 is that it was a war to stop the British from impressing American sailors, which, as we have seen, is certainly a part of the story. Whether it is the main story, however, is a quite different matter.

Although the British did impress thousands of American sailors, the impressment policy was on the way out before war was declared. In the fall of 1811 the British returned the two surviving men who had been impressed from the Chesapeake (the third having died in hospital) and they paid reparations. Further, in 1812 the British admiralty ordered the British navy to take extra care not to antagonize American shipping and “to contribute . . . to that good understanding which it is his Royal Highness’s most earnest wish to maintain.”7 Much of the fleet was ordered away from the US coast to prevent incidents. The impressment issue was therefore much diminished if not completely resolved before the war began.

The Free Trade Grievance

DURING THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, BRITAIN CERTAINLY WANTED TO STOP supplies from reaching France, which likewise wanted to cut off Britain’s access to goods. Trade by neutral nations, such as the United States, stood in the way of each side’s objectives, and so each did try to restrict and control American trade just as President Madison’s letter to Congress indicated. As the superpowers of the day, neither Britain nor France had much need to accommodate demands for fairness from a backwater like the United States. They seemed to have thought that weak nations need to know their place, in much the same way that the United States shows scant regard for the wishes of small, weak nations today. As Daniel Sheffey, a Virginia Federalist, observed in a speech on the eve of war, “We have considered ourselves of too much importance in the scale of nations.” Such a view, he went on to contend, “has led us into great errors. Instead of yielding to circumstances, which human power cannot control, we have imagined that our own destiny, and that of other nations, was in our hands, to be regulated as we thought proper.”8

As reported on June 3, 1812, by the Congressional Committee on Foreign Relations (headed by Calhoun), Britain’s Orders in Council were that “neutral powers are prohibited trading from one port to another of France, or her allies, or any other country with which G. Britain might not freely trade. . . . “9 As commented on in the US House of Representatives, Congress inferred that “the British government evidently disclaimed all regard for neutral rights.”10