What Hath God Wrought (11 page)

Into this context of high anxiety in Washington, news of victory at New Orleans came like a deliverance from purgatory. To be sure, the repulse of the British invasion at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain the previous September had been strategically more important, prompting the British to abandon their plan to annex part of New England to Canada. But New Orleans was a much bigger battle, and the great disparity in casualties made it especially gratifying. The British army defeated in the Gulf included units that had fought in the Chesapeake, so the events at Bladensburg and Washington seemed properly avenged. The success of Jackson’s citizen army over professional soldiers seemed to vindicate those who had argued that the militia constituted the most cost-effective means of defense. The victory could therefore be welcomed wholeheartedly, not only by the Republican nationalists, who had wanted the war, but also by the “Old” Republicans, who had not wanted any innovations in the direction of bigger government. Finally, while the uncharismatic Madison had never captured the public imagination as a wartime leader, Jackson perfectly personified a popular war hero.

The curious aftermath of the New Orleans campaign, however, dampened the administration’s pleasure in the country’s new hero. Infatuated with his own sense of power, General Jackson kept the city of New Orleans under martial law until March 13, long after the first news of peace arrived. During this period his arbitrary rule lost him much of the universal popularity his victory had won him among the local population. On February 21, six militiamen who had tried to leave before their term of service expired were executed in Mobile by his orders, a draconian action at a time when everybody but Jackson considered the war over. When the federal district judge in New Orleans challenged Jackson’s dictatorship, the general put him in jail! After the eventual restoration of civil law, Judge Dominick Hall hailed Jackson into federal court and fined him a thousand dollars for contempt. Jackson’s admirers chipped in to pay the fine, but the general declined their money and paid it himself. Both the peremptory behavior of the strong-willed Jackson and the way he polarized people by it were premonitory of things to come. (Twenty-nine years later, a Democratic Congress would refund Jackson, by then an ex-president, the fine plus interest.)
²¹

II

Not until Monday evening, February 13, did Washington learn that a treaty of peace had been signed by representatives of Great Britain and the United States at Ghent, Belgium (then the Austrian Netherlands), on Christmas Eve of 1814. Because of storms in the Atlantic, this news had taken even longer in crossing the ocean than that from New Orleans had in coming through the forests and rivers of the continent. The delay in receiving the news from Europe had psychological significance. Upon first hearing, it seemed to the American public as if Jackson had won a decisive victory, and even when people later learned that the war had ended two weeks before his battle, its effect on their attitude remained.

In the public mind, Andrew Jackson had won the war; the incompetence, confusion, cowardice, and humiliations of the fall of Washington were forgotten. The President’s Mansion received a hasty coat of white paint over its stone exterior to hide the black smoke marks, though the interior took years to restore; from this cover dates the new name “White House.”
²²
The paint job symbolized the country’s attitude perfectly. Americans reinterpreted the War of 1812 as a second war for independence, a vindication of their national identity rather than a revelation of its precariousness. “Seldom has a nation so successfully practiced self-induced amnesia!” the historian Bradford Perkins has commented.
²³
In the euphoria of nationalism that the messengers from the Hartford Convention found upon arrival in Washington, they did not even dare to present their demands. Later, when the Capitol was rebuilt, Madison enjoyed the satisfaction of commissioning two huge paintings by John Trumbull depicting British defeats in an earlier war to decorate the walls of the rotunda.
²⁴

Viewing the war with hindsight after the Battle of New Orleans, Americans felt that they had won the respect of Europe in general and Britain in particular. Of much more importance, they had gained self-respect. “The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and characters which the Revolution had given,” declared Albert Gallatin, informal leader of the American negotiating team at Ghent. “The people…are more American; they feel and act more as a nation.” For their part, the Canadians too came to regard the war as a defining moment in their national history, and with even more justification. The successful repulse of the U.S. invasions fostered among the inhabitants of Upper Canada a sense of their own identity as a proud people, separate from the Americans.
²⁵

Like the prince regent, President Madison had no hesitation in accepting the Treaty of Ghent. On February 15, he submitted it to the Senate, which unanimously consented to ratification the following day. When news of the British ratification reached Washington on February 17, the president declared the war officially over. But naval engagements on the high seas continued as late as June 30, when the last hostile shots were fired in Sunda Strait near Java.
²⁶

The terms of the treaty provided for an end to the fighting and little else. “Nothing in substance but an indefinite suspension of hostilities was agreed to,” commented one of the American negotiators.
²⁷
The two sides referred some minor boundary disputes to commissions of arbitration. The British conceded nothing on either of the issues for which the United States had gone to war: restrictions on American trade and impressment of American seamen. Indeed, the treaty did not so much as mention these issues. It did require prisoners of war to be returned; among these were over two thousand Americans impressed into the Royal Navy before the war who had refused to fight against their own country. Unconscionable delays in repatriating American POWs occurred simply because the two governments disagreed about who should pay the cost of their transportation. At Dartmoor prison in England, over six thousand frustrated American sailors (eleven hundred of them black) still awaited release months after the treaty. In April 1815, they rioted. The guards fired, killing six and wounding sixty.
²⁸

Why, one may wonder, did Americans receive the terms of the Treaty of Ghent with such thankfulness? In the first place, people measure events in terms of their expectations. The Madison administration had long since become reconciled to making peace without obtaining recognition of the rights for which war had been declared. As far back as June 1814, the president and his cabinet had instructed their negotiators not to insist on these demands, deciding, in effect, to settle for less than victory in return for peace.
²⁹
The terms of Ghent therefore represented about as much as the American side could have expected after this decision had been reached. That the British had not insisted on any boundary concessions—particularly in the portion of Maine they occupied, where many people had already taken the oath to George III on the supposition that British rule would be permanent
³⁰
—came as good news for the United States and disappointed the Canadian public.

The peace also rendered most of the federal government’s political problems moot. With no war to fight, the need for conscription vanished, and placing the financial system on a more secure footing could safely wait for the next Congress. The prospects of secession by New England, constitutional crisis, or the breakup of the Republican Party all receded. The administration could safely reject advice to create a coalition government by reaching out to the Federalists with offers of patronage; the opposition could now be isolated and crushed.
³¹

Finally, regardless of the terms of the treaty, the public overwhelmingly welcomed peace itself. Indeed, the government would probably have accepted a less favorable treaty, in the interests of restoring peace. Maritime New England had of course wanted peace all along; by now the staple-producing agricultural regions as well were hurting badly from the British blockade and desperately needed peace to market their crops abroad. In fact, the peace came just in the nick of time. If the war and its economic hardships had dragged on much longer, the federal government, the Constitution, and the Republican Party might not have survived intact. With peace, they all did. And with peace the economy rebounded suddenly. The price of imports plummeted and that of export staples rose. Treasury bonds gained 13 percent overnight on the news of peace. What though the terms of the treaty were not all that Americans would have desired? Congressman William Lowndes of South Carolina went to the heart of the matter when he observed to his wife that “the time of making” the peace was “more fortunate” than the treaty itself.
³²

As things turned out, avoiding mention of the issues of the war in the treaty of peace proved convenient. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the occasion for British interference in American trade and impressment of American seamen came to an end. This, however, could not have been foreseen at the time. Indeed, Napoleon’s return to France from Elba on March 1, 1815, might well have inaugurated another protracted period of European warfare instead of only a short one. With perfect justice, therefore, some thoughtful observers warned that the new peace between the United States and Britain might prove only temporary. Both sides took some precautions against future wars. Throughout the next generation, the British strengthened the fortifications of Quebec.
³³

Considered as a conflict between Great Britain and the United States, the War of 1812 was a draw. For the Native Americans, however, it constituted a decisive defeat with lasting consequences. For centuries the tribes had been able to retain much autonomy—economic, political, and military—by playing off the British, French, Spanish, and Americans against each other. After 1815, nowhere east of the Mississippi could this strategy remain viable.
³⁴
The call of the Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (“the Prophet”), for united Native resistance against the encroaching white settlers had been sufficiently successful to bring on widespread frontier race war beginning in 1811, but not successful enough to forge durable pan-tribal cooperation. Tecumseh carried the message of militancy and traditionalism to the Southwest as well as the Northwest, and in both areas it often divided tribes internally. In 1812 Tecumseh and his followers sided with the British as representing the lesser white evil, but several tribes, notably the Cherokee in the South, allied with the United States. Others remained divided or neutral. The defeat and death of Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, and the slaughter of the traditionalist Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, marked the end of the serious military power of the American Indians in the Northwest and Southwest respectively.
³⁵

From the point of view of U.S. expansionism, Andrew Jackson really had been a major architect of victory in the War of 1812, though it was not his triumph at New Orleans but those in the Creek War that possessed strategic significance. In the Southwest, waging the War of 1812 represented part of a larger struggle by the United States to secure white supremacy over a multiracial and multicultural society that included Native Americans, African American maroons, French and Spanish Creoles, and intermixtures of all these peoples with each other and white Americans. Along the Gulf Coast, as in the Chesapeake, the British took advantage of racial divisions; they armed, uniformed, and trained about a thousand African Americans and some three thousand Indians for service with their forces.
³⁶
But the British did not mount a significant effort of their own in the region soon enough to prevent Jackson from crushing the Creek insurgency before he had to turn to defend New Orleans. On August 9, 1814, he imposed the Treaty of Fort Jackson upon the Creeks, forcing the tribe to cede over 22 million acres in Alabama and Georgia, more than half their territory. Among the lands thus seized, much belonged to Creeks who had been friendly to Jackson, for the conflict had begun as a civil war among Creeks. Some of it was not Creek land at all but belonged to Jackson’s allies the Cherokees. The eminent nineteenth-century historian John Bach McMaster called the Treaty of Fort Jackson a “gross and shameless” wrong, and the twenty-first century has no reason to alter that judgment.
³⁷

None of the Indian tribes was party to the Treaty of Ghent. Originally, the British negotiators had called for the creation of a completely independent Native American buffer state in the Great Lakes region, but they backed away from this demand when their U.S. counterparts made clear its unacceptability. By Article Nine of the treaty as agreed, the signatories undertook to make peace with the Indians on the same basis as their settlement with each other, the
status quo ante bellum
. The United States promised to restore to the Native Americans the “possessions, rights, and privileges, which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in 1811, previous to such hostilities.”
³⁸
This might seem to invalidate the Treaty of Fort Jackson, and so the Creeks hoped. In the months immediately following the peace, British agents in Spanish Florida promised refugee Creeks that Britain would make sure they recovered the lands lost at Fort Jackson. At first, the U.S. government itself accepted this interpretation of the requirements of the Ghent agreement. In June 1815, the Madison administration ordered Andrew Jackson to begin to return to the Creeks the lands taken from them by his treaty. But Jackson raged and refused to obey, and the government felt loath to enforce its edict upon a popular hero supported by white public opinion in the Southwest. Would the British make an issue of it? Lord Bathurst, the secretary of state for war, argued that they should, but he could not persuade his cabinet colleagues.
³⁹