Those citizens who tired of political controversy during the era could indulge in a wealth of literary works by the famous authors and artists of the day. The poems of Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley found their way across the Atlantic and into American parlors and libraries. So did the novels of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. If Americans wanted to read the literature of their own countrymen, Washington Irving was widely known—he was America’s first internationally acclaimed author—and soon thereafter arose James Fenimore Cooper. For those who craved the visual arts and could make the transatlantic voyage, there were the latter-day European masters Francisco Goya and William Blake, or, if not, there were American artists and portrait painters such as Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Singleton Copley.
Americans of the 1812 era ate pancakes, which had been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians, and mayonnaise was popular, but they ate no tomatoes, which were widely regarded as poisonous. There were, of course, no potato chips, Wheaties, hamburgers, or hot dogs, and much of the main-course table fare was still wild game: turkey, duck, deer, quail, and squirrel; there was domestic pork, chicken, mutton, beef, and seafood as well. They drank tea and coffee when they could get it and otherwise washed down their meals with wine, cider, or whisky.
Sudden death was an omnipresent reality, and medicine was in its primitive stages (“bleeding,” for example, was still a widely accepted medical practice, as were blood-sucking leeches, and, as a sort of cure-all for many ailments, patients were commonly fed mercury, one of the most dangerous elements on earth for human ingestion). The average American life span in the early 1800s was forty years or so; frightful epidemics of typhoid and yellow fever ravaged the country every year, as did scourges of cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, diphtheria, influenza, smallpox, dysentery, measles, and uncontrollable staph infections—not to mention things like shipwrecks, horse throws and kicks, house fires, the sudden and unpredictable arrival of natural disasters such as hurricanes, and, of course, duels. If you ventured outside the cities there was always the chance of getting eaten up by bears or mountain lions or being scalped by Indians. All in all, America was a fairly dangerous place, and many if not most families lost a heartbreaking number of children before they had even reached their teens. Complications from pregnancy and childbirth were the leading cause of death for women of childbearing age.
Nontheless, by 1812 those eight million Americans—except for the dwindling population of Indians and the ever increasing number of slaves—had surrounded themselves with eight million pleasurable dreams of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in their brave new world. They believed that they were part of a land of progress and bounty unknown across the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Since the end of the Revolution the U.S. merchant shipping fleet, like the population, had doubled in size, and American exports had tripled. Grain and corn from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and the newly opened lands to the west were transported across the North Atlantic to feed the peoples of Europe. Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and North Carolina provided Europe’s nicotine-addicted with tobacco aplenty. The vast cotton plantations of the Deep South were churning out hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton to stoke the looms of the New England states, and those of Manchester, England, and the coastal millworks of France. (Always a bit oddball, New Orleans had become a major supplier of refined sugar from its great sugarcane plantations.) Beneath all this ebullience and prosperity, however, by the time 1812 rolled around America seethed.
The cause of its indignation was the flagrant and long-standing depredation and bullying by the British, who had not forgiven the upstart American colonists for defeating their army at Yorktown thirty years earlier and setting up their own sovereign nation. All this became exacerbated with the rise of Napoleon and the subsequent war between Britain and France. That decade-old conflict had drained Britain of manpower, and especially of trained seamen, so in order to make up the losses the British navy, acting on orders from London, began intercepting American merchant ships and searching their crews for “British subjects,” whom they then “impressed” into their navy. This immediately became a sore point with the Americans, since the British policy was that anyone who had been born in Great Britain was still a British subject and always would be, whether he was now an American or not.
Among those who chronicled one such outrage was the French-born American naturalist and artist John J. Audubon, who, on a return trip from France, encountered one of these impressment interceptions. “We were running before the wind under all sail, but the unknown gained on us at a great rate and after a while stood to the windward of our ship about half a mile off. She fired a gun, the ball passed within a few yards of our bows; our captain heeded not, but kept on his course, flying the American flag. Another and another shot was fired at us; the enemy closed upon us.” When the captain hove to, the English ship sent over a boat containing two officers and a dozen armed sailors, who demanded all the captain’s papers and then ransacked the ship.
“Every one of the papers proved to be in perfect accordance with the laws existing between England and America,” wrote Audubon, but the English “robbed the ship of almost everything that was nice in the way of provisions, took our pigs, and sheep, coffee and wines and carried off our two best sailors.”
True, some impressed seamen were deserters from the British navy, but most were legitimate American citizens, which led to fractious confrontations, the most outrageous of which was the so-called Chesapeake Affair in 1807. In this incident, the new captain of an American frigate-of-war, the Chesapeake, took the ship prematurely to sea before all her guns were installed and, just off the Virginia coast, was jumped by the British fifty-gun warship Leopard, out searching for crewmen. An unequal fight ensued in which some twenty of Chesapeake’s seamen were killed or wounded, and the British carried off four others—three Americans and one Briton—claiming they were deserters.
In this way, more than six thousand Americans found themselves suddenly impressed into British service, a development that did not sit well at all with the American people, and which no amount of U.S. diplomacy could seem to rectify.
Further, both the British and the French put a clamp on the Americans’ right to trade with their enemies (meaning each other), and that drove a tremendous hole in America’s burgeoning economy. U.S. merchant ships were seized wherever found and impounded in English or French ports and their cargoes confiscated. The United States might have gone to war with both Britain and France over this issue, but ultimately chose war with England because, after a series of victories over the French navy, England was by far the strongest maritime power and thus was causing most of the trouble. For their part, the Americans wanted nothing to do with the fighting that was going on in Europe, and the slogan “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” was quickly taken up by newspaper editors and pamphleteers.
As America’s anger festered, her citizens became even more incensed by the treatment they were receiving in the British press; their country and its president were constantly lampooned and belittled as second-rate and cowardly. The British view was that while they themselves were engaged in a war of survival against the greatest menace the world had known (Napoleon), the timid and greedy Americans—instead of joining with them in this noble cause—had chosen to remain neutral.
When all the jawboning diplomacy produced no effect, the Jefferson administration began pushing economic sanctions through Congress in the hope that England would come to her senses and start respecting American rights on the seaways. First, in 1806, was the so-called Non-Importation Act, which forbade importing British goods but, by necessity, included so many loopholes to keep American manufactories going that it did little good. Next came the far more damaging Embargo Act of 1807, which forbade imports and exports into or out of America to or from any nation at all. The problem was, most of the resulting damage was done not to the Bri
tish but to the U.S. economy. In 1807 Americans exported some $108 million worth of goods (more than $1 trillion in today’s dollars); within a year that figure had sagged by 75 percent and the nation sank into a severe economic depression. Britain quickly found other export markets in South America. One political critic compared Jefferson’s laws with “trying to cure corns by cutting off the toes.” These two measures would still rank near the very top of “stupid and shortsighted legislation” were such an analytic list ever kept. Clearly something else had to be done.
In the meantime, out in what was referred to then as the West—Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan—the British, from their strongholds in Canada, were stirring up the Indians to prey on American settlers. This produced, of course, no idle fear; many remembered all too well the ravaging of British-backed Indian tribes during the Revolution. For instance, a letter from a British officer to Canada’s governor-general had been widely circulated in the press, in which the Englishman informed his boss that “at the request of the Seneca Chiefs I send herewith to your excellency under the care of James Boyd, eight packs of scalps cured, dried, hooped and painted with all the Indian triumphal marks.”
He then went on to inventory this grisly gift: Box no. 1 contained “43 scalps of congress soldiers killed in different skirmishes . . . also 62 farmers killed in their houses, the hoops red, the skin painted brown and marked with a black hoe, a black circle all around to denote their being surprised in the night and a black hatchet in the middle to denote their being killed with that weapon.”
The other boxes held even more ghoulish relics: “93 farmers killed in their houses. White circles and suns shew they were killed in the daytime; 97 farmers, hoops green to show working in fields . . . 102 farmers, 18 marked with yellow flame to shew that they were burned alive . . . 81 women, long hair, those braided to shew they were mothers . . . 193 boys scalps various ages . . . 211 girls scalps, big and little, small yellow hoops marked hatchet, club, knife, etc. . . . Mixture 122 with box of birch bark containing 29 infant scalps small white hoops. Only little black knife in middle to shew they were ripped out of mother’s body.”
It is not recorded how the British governor-general received this macabre present, but publication of the accompanying cover letter, whether it was authentic or not, had the effect of galvanizing both terror and disgust among Americans who learned of it, and the notion that the British were back at it again incited grave indignation.
As if that weren’t enough, a charismatic forty-three-year-old Shawnee Indian chief named Tecumseh went on a warpath of his own, which threatened dire consequences for Americans all over the southern and western states and territories.
After having suffered the death of his father at the hands of Americans when he was six years old, Tecumseh (or “Shooting Star,” as the name has been translated) developed a blinding hatred for the white race, which, when he grew older, turned into rage as settlers pushed deeper into his homeland of Indiana, Ohio, and other nearby states. It was recounted by a friend that Tecumseh said he “could not look upon the face of a white man without feeling the flesh crawl on my bones.” As he grew into adulthood, Tecumseh became a natural leader with a dignified bearing that even white men remarked on. Tall, handsome, intelligent, and brave, Tecumseh was remembered by a British officer this way: “In his appearance and nobel bearing one of the finest-looking men I have ever seen.”
The only atmosphere that the myriad of American Indian tribes had known in their history was eternal war—mostly with each other but recently, of course, with the settlers, too; and with the relentless American push westward, Tecumseh concluded that unless this expansion were stopped, the Indians would soon become extinct in a world dominated by whites. Thus he embarked on a stupendous undertaking: he would visit all the major tribes in what is today the Midwest and the South and persuade them to join a vast, warlike “Indian Confederation,” extending from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, backed and supplied by the British, to bring the Americans’ westward movement to an abrupt halt.
In the late summer of 1811, with about two dozen of his braves, Tecumseh set out in canoes from his village on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana and traveled down the Mississippi to convert the southern tribes: the great Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations.* 4 Tecumseh’s party had painted its war clubs red, for which they were soon given the sobriquet “Red Sticks,” but their first encounters were something less than successful. The Choctaws under Chief Pushmataha were unreceptive, the Chickasaws less so, but with the Creeks of Alabama Tecumseh struck a chord.
As an entranced audience of Creeks listened earnestly by their campfires, Tecumseh urged them to join with all the other tribes and drive the white man out; to kill his hogs and cattle and burn his crops and houses; to throw away their own looms and plows, abandon their livestock, and rejoin the Indian traditions of their ancestors; to kill the white man and his wives and children and even to “kill the old chiefs, friends of peace!” He told them that after the whites had cut down all the trees to make farms and stained the rivers with silt, they would then force the Indians into slavery as they had the Africans. Before he left the Creeks, Tecumseh issued a warning to those who were unconvinced that his voice had come directly through the Great Spirit in the Sky. “When I return to Tippecanoe,” he is reported to have said, “I will stamp my foot, and the earth will tremble!”
For those disbelievers among the Creeks, their epiphany arrived less than a month later when, on December 16, 1811, the New Madrid fault near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, lurched apart in an earthquake so tremendous that it was said to have changed the course of the Mississippi River and caused it to flow backward for a while. It was the most severe quake America has ever experienced, and its terrible tremors were felt as far away as the Creek Nation’s encampments on Alabama’s Tallapoosa River, north of Montgomery.
Not all Creeks had been able to agree on Tecumseh’s proposals, but among the audience the night Tecumseh spoke was young William Weatherford—a “half-breed” who went by the name of Chief Red Eagle—the son of a Scottish-American Alabama trader and a one-quarter-Indian mother. He was impressed (though not completely convinced) by the notion of Tecumseh’s great Indian confederation, but the impression stuck, especially after the prophetic earthquake of 1811. In the not too distant future Weatherford’s actions would have a distinct bearing on the Battle of New Orleans.
Two
During his terms in office (1801–1809), President Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republican majority in Congress had allowed the U.S. armed forces to deteriorate almost into oblivion. True to his pacific nature, Jefferson—along with most of his fellow party members—wished to avoid a large standing peacetime army, which, in addition to being an unnecessary government expense, they saw as a possible threat to the new republic itself. Therefore, the U.S. Army was cut by nearly one-third, to only 3,300 men, and, according to General Winfield Scott, later of Mexican War fame, was officered by “imbeciles and ignoramuses.”
The U.S. Navy was likewise neglected, due not only to concern over expenses but to Democratic Republican suspicions in those days that a large navy, roaming the world, would somehow always find a way to get a nation into war. Despite Jefferson’s temporary strengthening of the navy during his first term to fight the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, by the end of the decade the American sea arm consisted of only seven small frigates, a few sloops of war, and no ships of the line (which would correspond to modern-day battleships or aircraft carriers).
Proponents of these stingy military policies, Jefferson foremost among them, argued that in times of crisis America was better off relying on its citizen soldiers, that is, militias from the various states. So far as sea power was concerned, it was maintained by the largely Southern majority in Congress that Great Britain, with the world’s most powerful fleet, could simply overwhelm anything the United States might send against it and thus the expense of a large navy would be wasted. The theory went inst
ead that so-called privateers—armed ships privately owned but operating under government sponsorship—would serve in place of a regular navy. Not everyone was happy with this; John Adams later wrote Jefferson that he wished more frigates had been built. “Without this our Union will be a brittle china vase,” he said.
That’s how things stood in 1809 when Jefferson’s Virginia colleague and fellow pacifist James Madison became the fourth U.S. president, but now war clouds were gathering as England continued its humiliating depredations at sea (some eight hundred American merchant vessels had been seized over five years) as well as agitating the western Indian tribes to strike against American settlers. By 1812 Tecumseh and his followers had scalped and tomahawked so many citizens in the Indiana Territory that Governor William Henry Harrison wrote the secretary of war that most of the people had fled their farms for collective safety in various forts and blockhouses.
Nothing seemed to be working in Madison’s diplomacy. It didn’t help matters when the prince regent, after assuming the responsibilities of his father, the now-gone-mad King George III, appointed as Britain’s minister to the United States a rabid, America-hating thirty-one-year-old junior diplomat named Augustus John Foster. In letters home to his mother (published more than eighty years afterward), Foster complained that “corruption, immorality and self-interest” on the part of most Americans had “corroded” the democracy he loathed, and then went on to evaluate American women as “spying, inquisitive, vulgar and ignorant.” Not surprisingly, Foster’s arrival in Washington would not bode well for amicable diplomatic relations between the two countries.
By 1812 the ruinous embargo had been lifted, and the Non-Importation Act repealed, but the seizings and searchings by British men-of-war went unabated and the Indian horrors continued. Congress, still dominated by the party of Jefferson and Madison, was now beginning to clamor for war against England. Party-affiliated newspapers and pamphlets were pushing for a showdown: American honor is at stake . . . The United States would never gain the respect of other nations by allowing itself to be humiliated by the British . . . Interruption of oceanic trade is ruining the economy . . . British ships are kidnapping American citizens . . . British-incited Indians are scalping helpless women and children. And so on.