discussion

Unit 5 Lecture: The War of 1812 and American Nationalism

President Thomas Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, continued Jefferson’s economic measures designed to stop Great Britain from curtailing American maritime rights on the Atlantic, but to no avail. Soon enough a number of war hawks from more western regions of the country demanded action and saw in Madison’s foreign policy headaches an opportunity to strike boldly again both the British in Canada and the natives in the Ohio and lower Mississippi valleys. With time and with a deteriorating economy, congressional leaders found the votes for war, even though Great Britain claimed at the last minute to be interested in negotiations. The War of 1812 had begun.

In general, the U.S. military was not up to the task of fighting, and the war can best be described as a stalemate in the various theatres of battle. (Although it should be noted that the United States held its own against the most powerful navy in the world—even if the British were also fighting a war in Europe.) The American invasion of Canada was more or less a disaster, even though U.S. troops did manage to burn the Canadian capital of York. The mid-Atlantic campaign proceeded along a similar line, with the American militia proving so ineffective that Washington, D.C. was not only invaded but badly damaged by British troops (President and Mrs. Madison fled the city during their dinner). But the fact that Americans held Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor at least showed that the Americans could put up some sort of fight. Also in the North, American troops killed Tecumseh after he joined the British, thus signaling how the American war against Britain was really a war against various rebellious tribes. And in what was then called the “Southwest”- modern day Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana- a young, daring militia general from Tennessee named Andrew Jackson would really give American nationalists something to boast over with his bloody and vicious defeat of the Creek native tribe at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, Alabama. Jackson then followed this up with a decisive defeat of British forces at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. This last victory in New Orleans appeared to vindicate the war hawks who wanted to fight with Great Britain, and served to discredit the Federalists, who not only opposed the war, but who went so far as to flirt with disunion in the Hartford Convention, which was meeting around the same time as Jackson’s victory in the New Orleans. The Hartford Convention made several partisan demands (such as no two sequential Presidents should come from the same state- an obvious attack on the Virginians so often in the White House), in addition to implying that the New England states would secede from the Union, if their demands were not met. But with victory, these actions simply looked treasonous.

The end of the war in 1815 saw power continue to shift to the south and west of the United States. This can be seen in the defeat of any significant Native American opposition to continued white settlement as far west as the Mississippi River. A rising American confidence and assertiveness in the foreign policy realm only continued in the 1810s, with plans by Jackson to detach Florida from Spain, even though he was reprimanded for his behavior. However, the Spanish soon lost interest in maintaining Florida and sold it to the United States for 5 million dollars in 1819. The assertiveness of the United States in Latin American affairs can also be seen in the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated in 1823. Among other things, this doctrine established the Western Hemisphere as an American sphere that should remain free from European interference.

The period after 1815 saw renewed peace throughout the western world and the United States was now free to focus more on economic modernization. During the war itself, American capitalists invested in the development of domestic textile manufacturing with pirated technology from Great Britain. Increasingly politicians such as a young Henry Clay advocated what has been called the American System that, among other things, would increase spending on infrastructure and encourage the development of modern banking. Along with other economic nationalists, Clay felt that the future for the American economy would be secure with modern financial innovation and manufacturing technology. However, modern finance had plenty of critics. This can be seen during the first modern banking crisis, or financial depression, the Panic of 1819, which was caused by overinvestment in unsustainable development largely caused by the need to supply war-torn Europe with food stuffs. But once the Europeans bought sufficient American goods, demand for crops (and by extension land) dropped, thus leaving many over-indebted Americans ruined. As many Americans discovered, there were consequences to borrowing and lending on credit and plenty of Americans such as Andrew Jackson would demand that the republic not be seduced by the apparent magic of paper money and banking in the years ahead. The agricultural mindset of many small farmers and southern plantation owners was hardly won over by the advocates of industrialization in the 1810s and 1820s.

Indeed, another consequence of the War of 1812 was the spread of the plantation economy into what was called the “Southwest”—meaning present-day Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas. Not only due to the removal of Indian tribes, but also due to the invention of the Cotton Gin, did southerners find new reasons to invest in a slaveholding economy based around cotton production. At a time when many Latin American republics, as well as Great Britain, were in the process of abolishing slavery, some landowning Americans became more, not less, attached to plantation agriculture based on the ownership of other human beings.