What Hath God Wrought (12 page)

After the Treaty of Ghent, the British left their former allies to the not-so-tender mercies of the United States. A series of U.S. treaties with the northwest tribes in 1814–15, beginning with the Second Treaty of Greenville, forced the Indians to declare themselves allies of the United States. Having complied with the letter of the Treaty of Ghent in the first round of treaties, the U.S. government then felt free to resume the negotiation of cessions of tribal lands in the Northwest, which recommenced in 1816 with the Potawatomi of Illinois. Over the next few years the fur-trading activities that the British had maintained on the American side of the Great Lakes were at last closed down, restricting the economic leverage of the Native Americans. Tenskwatawa, the once formidable prophet of a religious revitalization movement, eked out an obscure existence in Canadian exile.
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Tribes like the Cherokees who had allied with the United States during the War of 1812 found little gratitude afterwards. In the Southwest, Andrew Jackson, returning to his primary interest in gaining lands for white occupancy, extorted a fraudulent treaty with unauthorized Cherokees in September 1816, purporting to confirm the loss of the area he had taken from their tribe by the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Not willing to defy his popularity with southwestern voters, the Senate ratified it.
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By a series of such treaties in the years immediately after 1814, Jackson obtained vast lands for white settlement. A historian has estimated his acquisitions at three-quarters of Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and smaller portions of Kentucky and North Carolina.
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In the racial warfare around the Gulf, the Treaty of Ghent did not bring peace. In July 1816, amphibious expeditions of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and their Indian allies converged against the most powerful of North American maroon communities, the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River in Spanish East Florida. During their naval bombardment, a redhot shot hit the fort’s powder magazine, destroying the fort and taking more than 270 lives in a gigantic explosion. The leaders of the maroons were captured, tortured, and killed; about sixty surviving followers were rounded up and taken to Alabama and Georgia for sale into slavery (in violation of the federal law of 1807 prohibiting the importation of slaves across international boundaries). The victors treated the weapons and property of the maroon colony as booty and confiscated them.
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This was not the first time that Spanish sovereignty in Florida had been disregarded by the United States, and it would not be the last.

One other epilogue to the War of 1812 remained to be written: the punishment of Algiers. The dey of Algiers had sided with Britain and made war on United States commerce—a foolish decision since, because of the British blockade, there were few American ships then in the Mediterranean for the Algerians to seize. The advent of peace with Britain would bring a resumption of American exports to the Mediterranean and necessitated an immediate resolution of the problem with Algiers. Accordingly, President Madison wasted no time in calling upon Congress on February 23, 1815, to declare war against Algiers and authorize an expedition against that power. Flush with confidence and with a greatly expanded navy now at its disposal, Congress for once promptly complied with the president’s request.

Nominally tributary to the Ottoman Empire, Algiers was for all practical purposes independent, and Congress voted its declaration of war against the dey alone, not against the sultan. Like the other states of the Barbary Coast, Algiers had for centuries demanded and received tribute from nations wishing to trade in the Mediterranean. In default of tribute, the Barbary powers preyed upon a country’s shipping, capturing vessels, confiscating their cargoes, and either selling the crew as slaves or holding them as prisoners for ransom. Although often called “pirates,” the Barbary states were actually hostile governments and their predatory actions a form of warfare, not private crime. Smaller trading nations (such as the United States) suffered more than the great powers, since they found it harder to come up with the necessary protection money. Under the Jefferson administration, the United States had already been involved in several naval campaigns against the Barbary rulers; this time the country was better prepared to exert substantial force. If the Treaty of Ghent had achieved no assurances for American commerce, a war with Algiers might accomplish something more positive.

In May 1815, a ten-ship squadron set sail from New York for the Mediterranean, with an even stronger one to follow. The two squadrons were commanded respectively by Commodore Stephen Decatur and Commodore William Bainbridge, both of whom had had extensive experience in Jefferson’s wars on the Barbary Coast. Decatur’s last ship, the frigate
President
, had been captured by the British in January 1815 while trying to run the Royal Navy’s blockade off the coast of Long Island.
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His new assignment offered Decatur the chance to redeem his reputation, and he rose to the occasion. Off Cape de Gata, Spain, on June 17, Decatur caught up with the Algerian corsair Raïs Hamidou, who was killed in the ensuing engagement. Hamidou’s battered flagship
Meshouda
surrendered to Decatur’s flagship
Guerriere
. After taking another Algerian warship, Decatur entered the harbor of Algiers on June 29 and dictated peace terms. The tribute the United States had been paying Algiers before 1812 would cease but American ships would enjoy full trading privileges anyway; Algiers would return confiscated American property, release the ten Americans currently held captive, and pay them each a thousand dollars in compensation (modest enough for their sufferings).
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In return Decatur promised to give their captured ships back to the Algerians. The combination of strong force and reasonable demands proved effective: The dey signed. In the follow-up squadron, Commodore Bainbridge, who had spent nineteen months as a prisoner during the earlier Barbary Wars, enjoyed the satisfaction of reminding Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, all three, of American might. The other two Barbary governments followed the example of Algiers and renounced their claims to tribute from the United States. But the luckless Americans who had been released from Algerian captivity tragically died on the way home when the ship carrying them sank in a storm.
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The following year, the dey tried to renege on the new agreement. But with the Western powers no longer at war with each other, the days when the Barbary rulers could prey upon Mediterranean commerce were numbered. The weakness of Algiers having been revealed by the Americans, an Anglo–Dutch fleet bombarded the city in August 1816, destroying its fortifications and compelling the dey to release all eleven hundred Western captives and renounce permanently the enslavement of Christians. After this episode the dey was in no position to repudiate his treaty with the United States. Thus closed the era of the Barbary Wars. Not until the late twentieth century would the United States again make war against a Muslim ruler.
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Commodore Decatur received a hero’s welcome home. In Norfolk, Virginia, at one of the many banquets in his honor, he proposed a toast that became famous: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.”
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In the prevailing mood of postwar nationalism, this accurately summed up the feelings of most Americans.

III

James Madison is revered today by political scientists and legal scholars as “the Father of the Constitution,” but unlike such other Founders as Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, there is no popular cult of Madison today and few public monuments to his memory. It was the same even in his lifetime. Madison owed his presidency to the confidence of Jefferson and the other leaders of the Virginia Republican Party rather than to popularity with a mass following. By temperament, Madison was an intellectual rather than an executive. In the Constitutional Convention and the debate over ratification that followed, he had been in his element and earned his place in history. The papers he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) on behalf of the new national Constitution are rightly judged masterpieces of political argumentation and analysis. Afterwards Madison had drafted the Bill of Rights and led the opposition to his erstwhile collaborator Hamilton in the House of Representatives. He had made Jefferson a loyal secretary of state. But as a wartime president, James Madison did not display dynamic leadership. Andrew Jackson acknowledged Madison “a great civilian,” but declared “the mind of a philosopher could not dwell on blood and carnage with any composure,” and judged his talents “not fitted for a stormy sea.”
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Those who met the president often remarked on his small size; Washington Irving called him “a withered little Apple-John.”
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True, Madison’s height barely reached five feet six, two inches below the average for those days, but observers were also noticing that the president lacked a commanding presence. Fortunately, the vivacious and strong-willed Dolley Payne Todd Madison supplied some of the social skills her husband needed; she exerted more influence in the administration than any other antebellum first lady save Abigail Adams.
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The president, patient and fair to a fault, listened to advice and then found it hard to make up his mind. He had allowed himself to be dragged reluctantly into war with Great Britain. In waging it, he showed himself a poor judge of men. No one in politics feared him, and he had never been able to control Congress. He was too nice.

But if James Madison was not a strong chief executive, he remained a conscientious and public-spirited statesman. And in the relief and rejoicing over peace, the president enjoyed a sudden, unaccustomed popularity. His first State of the Union message after the conclusion of peace gave Madison his best chance to leave a lasting mark as president, and he recognized the opportunity. Madison determined to draw the appropriate lessons from the nation’s narrow escape from disaster. Accordingly, his Seventh Annual Message to Congress, dated December 5, 1815, sought to turn the war-generated nationalism to constructive purpose. The message laid out a comprehensive legislative program that showed his presidency in its best light. In subsequent years, its elements became known as the “Madisonian Platform.”
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Following the example of Jefferson rather than that of Washington, Madison sent his annual messages in writing and did not deliver them in person. For the president to open the session of Congress with an address in person seemed to Republicans, if not to Federalists, altogether too reminiscent of the monarch’s speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament. Not until Woodrow Wilson did an American president recur to Washington’s practice and deliver his State of the Union address in person.

Madison began by pointing with pride to the victory over Algiers, the reestablishment of commercial relations with Great Britain, and the pacification of the Indian tribes. Despite the inevitable reductions in the army, he warned, it was important to retain the general staff, reform the militia, and provide a system of military pensions that would “inspire a martial zeal for the public service.” Coastal defenses and naval ships under construction should be completed, not abandoned. Although peace had restored the government’s revenues and credit, Madison remained convinced that a national bank should be reconstituted. Such a bank would not only market government securities and provide credit for an expanding economy but provide a uniform national currency, the lack of which, the president noted, produced “embarrassments.” Support for a national bank, originally the brainchild of Jefferson’s adversary Alexander Hamilton, represented a major change of policy for the Republican Party. Nevertheless, in three weeks time, Madison’s secretary of the Treasury would lay before Congress a detailed plan for a second Bank of the United States.
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Madison presented the rest of his domestic program as flowing naturally from his concern with a strong defense posture. The tariff not only provided revenue, he reminded Congress; it could also protect against foreign competition those industries “necessary for the public defense.” Such a protective tariff, by making the United States independent of foreign markets or suppliers, would help avoid commercial troubles like those that had led to war in 1812. Where did this leave the principle of
laissez-faire
? “However wise the theory may be which leaves to the sagacity and interest of individuals the application of their industry and resources, there are in this as in other cases exceptions to the general rule.” Common sense should mitigate the application of any theory.

The most ambitious part of Madison’s address was his plea for “establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority.” The obvious benefits of improved transportation were economic and military; but, he bravely added, there would also be “political” benefits: “binding together the various parts of our extended confederacy.” The strict construction of the Constitution, to which Madison’s party stood pledged, need not stand in the way of progress. “Any defect of constitutional authority which may be encountered can be supplied” by amendment. Madison was playing upon the patriotic and optimistic postwar mood he sensed in the public. What better way to manifest this self-confidence than through a coherent program of national economic development?

In the American legislative process, the president proposes, but Congress disposes. Then, as now, one-third of the senators and all the members of the House of Representatives were newly chosen for each biennial Congress. Elections for the Fourteenth Congress had been held at various times throughout the fall and winter of 1814–15, for there was no nationally standardized date; then, in accordance with the ponderous operation of the Constitution prior to the Twentieth Amendment, the members waited until the first Monday in December 1815 to hold their first session.
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The Fourteenth Congress reflected choices the electorate had made during some of the darkest days of the war, and its members accordingly inclined toward strong government. They also comprised one of the most talented Congresses in history. The energetic, popular, and visionary Henry Clay of Kentucky returned to the Speakership. The chairman of the House Committee on National Currency was a brilliant and patriotic young South Carolinian named John C. Calhoun. Clay and Calhoun worked closely together; they ate in the same boardinghouse, and in that era when congressmen seldom brought their families to Washington, this relationship counted for a lot.
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Other capable nationalists included John Forsyth of Georgia, Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia, and Calhoun’s fellow South Carolinian William Lowndes. Daniel Webster led the small Federalist minority. Much reduced in numbers and influence, the Old Republican state-righters were typified in the Senate by Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina and in the House by the eccentric John Randolph of Roanoke County, Virginia. As usual in the period, the House displayed more leadership than the Senate, whose members were chosen by state legislatures rather than by direct popular election.
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