The Wars Between England and America Part 7

On the side of the United States, the war was bound to take the form of an effort to capture all or part of Canada, for that was the only vulnerable British possession. On the sea the United States could hope at most to damage British commerce by means of the few national cruisers and such privateers as the shipowners of the country could send out. Without a single ship-of-the-line and with only five frigates, there existed no possibility of actually fighting the British navy. But on land it seemed as though a country with a population of over seven millions ought to be able to raise armies of such size as to overrun, by mere numbers, the slender resources of Canada; and it was the confident expectation of most of the western leaders that within a short time the whole region would be in American hands. "The acquisition of Canada this year," wrote Jefferson, "as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack on Halifax, the next and the final expulsion of England from the American continent."

Unfortunately for the success of these dreams, the policy of the Republican administrations had been such as to set up {218} insuperable difficulties. The regular army, reduced under Jefferson's "pa.s.sion for peace" to a bare minimum, was scattered in a few posts; the War Department was without means for equipping, feeding, and transporting bodies of troops; the whole mechanism of war administration had to be created. Further, the Secretary of the Army and nearly all the generals were elderly men, veterans of the Revolutionary Army, who had lost whatever energy they once possessed. The problem of war finances was rendered serious by the fact that revenue from the tariff, the sole important source of income, was sure to be cut off by the British naval power. The National Bank had been refused a new charter in 1811, and the government, democratic in its finances as in other matters, relied upon a hundred odd State banks of every degree of solvency for aid in carrying on financial operations.

The temper of the American people was exactly what it had been in colonial days. They regarded war as a matter to be carried on at the convenience of farmers and others, who were willing to serve in defence of their homes, but strongly objected to enlisting for any length of time. On the more pugnacious frontier, the prevailing military ideal was that of the armed mob or crowd--a body of fighters following a chosen leader against Indians. {219} Everywhere the elementary conceptions of obedience and duty were unknown. The very men who wished for war were unwilling to fight except on their own terms.

Still more fatal to military efficiency was the fact that the Federalists, and many of the northern Republicans, inhabiting the regions ab.u.t.ting on Canada, were violently opposed to the war, wished to see it fail, and were firmly resolved to do nothing to aid the administration. The utmost the Federalists would do was to defend themselves if attacked, but they would do that on their own responsibility and not under federal orders.

The only exception to this prevailing unmilitary condition was to be found in the navy, where, through cruising and through actual service against the Barbary corsairs, a genuinely trained body of officers and men had been created. Unable to do more than give a good account of themselves on the ocean in single combats, these officers found a chance on the northern lakes to display a fighting power and skill which is one of the few redeeming features of the war on the American side.

In 1812 hostilities began with a feeble attempt on the part of the United States to invade Canada, an effort whose details are of interest only in showing how impossible {220} it is for an essentially unmilitary people to improvise warfare. Congress had authorized a loan, the construction of vessels, and the enlistment of an army of 36,000 men; but the officers appointed to a.s.semble a military force found themselves unable, after months of recruiting and working, to gather more than half that number of raw troops, with a fluctuating body of State militia. With these rudiments of a military force, attempts to "invade" Canada were made in three directions--from Detroit, from the Niagara River, and from the northern end of Lake Champlain.

To meet these movements, there were actually less than 2,800 British soldiers west of Montreal; but fortunately they were commanded by Isaac Brock, an officer of daring and an aggressive temper. He at once entered into alliance with Tec.u.mseh and the western Indians, and thus brought to the British a.s.sistance a force of hundreds of warriors along the Ohio and Kentucky frontier. While General Hull, with about 2,000 troops, mainly volunteers from the West, marched under orders to Detroit and then, in July, invaded upper Canada, the outlying American posts at Chicago and Mackinac were either captured or destroyed by the Indians. Brock, gathering a handful of men, marched against Hull, terrified him for the safety of {221} his communications with the United States, forced the old man to retreat to Detroit, and finally, by advancing boldly against the slight fortifications of the post, frightened him into surrender. Hull had been set an impossible task, to conquer upper Canada with no sure means of getting reinforcements or supplies through a region swarming with Indians; but his conduct indicated no spark of pugnacity, and his surrender caused the loss of the entire north-west. Tec.u.mseh and his warriors now advanced against the Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio frontiers; and the nameless horrors of Indian ma.s.sacre and torture surged along the line of settlements. The frontiersmen flew to arms. General Harrison, with a commission from Kentucky, headed a large expedition to regain lost ground; but he only succeeded in building forts in north-western Ohio and waging a defensive war against the raids of Tec.u.mseh and the British general, Proctor, Brock's successor.

At Niagara, no move was made until the late autumn, when two American generals in succession--Van Rensselaer and Smyth--tried to lead a motley array of militia and regulars across the river. Brock met the first detachment and was killed in a skirmish, but his men were able to annihilate the main attack, on the brink of the river, while several thousand American militia, {222} refusing, on const.i.tutional grounds, to serve outside the jurisdiction of their state, watched safely from the eastern bank. The second effort in November, under General Smyth, proved an even worse fiasco. Meanwhile General Dearborn, the supreme commander, tried to invade near Lake Champlain; but, after he had marched his troops to the Canadian border, the militia refused to leave the soil of the United States, and so the campaign had to be abandoned.

The military efforts of the United States were, as the Canadian historian phrases it, "beneath criticism."

The only redeeming feature of the year was the record of the little American navy and the success of the privateers, who rushed to prey upon British commerce. Upwards of two hundred British vessels were captured, while all but about seventy American ships reached home safely. The British sent squadrons of cruisers, but were unable to begin a blockade. Their aim was to capture American men-of-war as rapidly as possible, to prevent their doing damage, so they unhesitatingly attacked American vessels whenever they met them, regardless of slight differences in size or gun-power. The British sea-captain of the day had a hearty contempt for Americans, and never dreamed that their navy could be any more dangerous than the {223} French. To the unlimited delight of the American public, and the stupefaction of England, five American cruisers in succession captured or sank five British in the autumn of 1812, utilizing superior weight of broadside and more accurate gunnery with merciless severity. These blows did no actual damage to a navy which comprised several hundred frigates and sloops, but the moral effect was great. It had been proved that Americans, after all, could fight.

In 1813 there was a change in administrative officers. Doctor Eustis was replaced in the War Department by John Armstrong, who had served in the Revolution, and William Jones of Philadelphia succeeded Paul Hamilton as Secretary of the Navy. Congress authorized more men, to the number of 58,000, and more ships, and voted more loans. Finally, in the summer it was actually driven to impose internal taxes like those which, when imposed by Federalists, had savoured of tyranny.

On the northern frontier, renewed efforts were made to collect a real army, and, with late comprehension of the necessities of the case, naval officers were sent to build flotillas to control Erie, Ontario, and Champlain. On their part, the British Ministry sent out a few troops and officers to Canada, but {224} relied this year chiefly upon a strict blockade, which was proclaimed first in December, 1812, and was extended, before the end of the year, to cover the entire coast, except New England. Ships-of-the-line, frigates, and sloops patrolled the entrances to all the seaports, terminating not only foreign but coastwise commerce.

Things went little if any better for the United States. The army was on paper 58,000 men; but the people of the north and west would not enlist. The utmost efforts at recruiting did not succeed in bringing one-half the nominal force into the field. The people would not take the war seriously, and the administration was helpless. To make matters worse, not only did the north-western frontier agonize under Indian warfare, but the south-west became involved, when, in August, 1813, the Creek Indians, affected by Tec.u.mseh's influence, rose and began a war in Tennessee and Georgia. For months Andrew Jackson, General of Tennessee militia, with other local commanders, carried on an exhausting and murderous conflict in the swamps and woods of the south-west. The war was now a.s.suming the character of the last stand of the Indians before the oncoming whites.

In the north-west, decisive blows were struck in this year by General Harrison and {225} Commander Perry. The latter built a small fleet of boats, carrying in all fifty-four guns, and sailed out to contest the control of Lake Erie. Captain Barclay, the British commander, with scantier resources, constructed a weaker fleet, with sixty-three lighter guns, and gallantly awaited the Americans on September 9. In a desperately fought battle, Perry's sloop, the _Lawrence_, was practically destroyed by the concentrated fire of the British; but the greater gun-power of the Americans told, and the entire British flotilla was compelled to surrender. This enabled Harrison, who had been waiting for months in his fortifications, to advance and pursue Proctor into upper Canada. On October 5 he brought him to action near the river Thames, winning a complete victory and killing Tec.u.mseh. The Americans then returned to Detroit, and the Indian war gradually simmered down, until in August, 1814, the leading tribes made peace.

To the eastward no such decisive action took place. Sir James Yeo and Commodore Chauncey, commanding the British and American vessels respectively on Lake Ontario, were each unwilling to risk a battle without a decisive superiority; and the result was that no serious engagement occurred. This rendered it impossible for either side to attain any military success in that region; and so the year 1813 {226} shows only a succession of raids, a species of activity in which the British proved much the more daring and efficient. During one of these affairs, General Dearborn occupied the Canadian town of York, now Toronto, and burned the public buildings--an act of needless destruction for which the United States was destined to pay heavily.

Further eastward, General Wilkinson and General Hampton began a joint invasion of lower Canada, Wilkinson leading a force of over 6,000 men down the St. Lawrence, Hampton advancing with 4,000 from Lake Champlain toward the same goal, Montreal. But at Chrystler's Farm, on November 11, the rearguard of Wilkinson's army suffered a thorough defeat at the hands of a small pursuing force; and Hampton underwent a similar repulse from an inferior body of French-Canadians under Colonel de Salaberry, at Chateauguy, on October 25. Finally, Hampton, suspecting that Armstrong and Wilkinson intended in case of any failure to throw the blame on him, decided to withdraw, November 11, and Wilkinson followed. The whole invasion came to an inglorious conclusion.

At sea the uniform success of American cruisers came to a stop, for, out of four naval duels, two were British victories, notably the taking of the unlucky _Chesapeake_ by the {227} _Shannon_. Only where privateers and sloops swept West Indian waters and hung about British convoys was there much to satisfy American feelings; and all the while the blockading squadrons cruised at their ease in Chesapeake and Delaware bays and Long Island Sound. The country was now subjected to increasing distress from the stoppage of all commerce; not only was the Federal government sorely pinched from loss of tariff revenue, but the New England towns suffered from starvation prices for food products, while in the middle and southern States grain was used to feed the cattle or allowed to rot.

For the season of 1814, it was necessary again to try to build up armies; and now the time was growing short during which the United States could hope to draw advantage from the preoccupation of England in the European struggle. During the winter of 1814, the final crushing of Napoleon took place, ending with his abdication and the restoration of the Bourbons. Simultaneously, the British campaign in Spain was carried to its triumphant conclusion, and after April British armies had no further European occupation. Unless peace were made, or unless the United States gained such advantages in Canada as to render the British ready to treat, it was practically certain that the {228} summer would find the full power of the British army, as well as the navy, in a position to be directed against the American frontier and the American sea-coast.

Congress, however, did nothing new. It authorized a loan, raised the bounty for enlistments, voted a further increase of the army, and adjourned. Armstrong, the Secretary of War, succeeded in replacing the worn-out veterans who had mismanaged the campaigns of 1812-1813 with fighting generals, younger men, such as Jacob Brown, Scott, Ripley, and Jackson, the Indian fighter; but he could not induce men to enlist any more freely, nor did he show any ability in planning operations. So events dragged on much as before.

On Lake Ontario, Chauncey and Yeo continued their cautious policy, building vessels continually and never venturing out of port unless for the moment in overwhelming force. The result was that first one then the other controlled the lake; but they never met. The only serious fighting took place near Niagara, where General Brown, with a little force of 2,600 men, tried to invade Canada, and was met first by General Riall, and later by General Drummond, with practically equal forces. Here the Americans actually fought, and fought hard, winning a slight success at Chippawa on July 5, and engaging {229} in a drawn battle at Lundy's Lane on July 25. Later forced to take refuge in Fort Erie, Brown made a successful defence against Drummond, and obliged him to abandon an effort at siege. Here, as in the naval combats, the military showing of the Americans was at last creditable; but the campaign was on too trivial a scale to produce any results. In the south-west this year, Jackson pushed through his attack on the Creeks to a triumphant conclusion, and in spite of mutinous militia and difficult forests compelled the Indians on August 9, 1814, to purchase peace by large cessions of land.

By the middle of the summer, however, the British were ready to lay a heavy hand on the United States and punish the insolent country for its annoying attack in the rear. New England was now subjected to the blockade, and troops from Wellington's irresistible army were sent across, some to the squadron in the Chesapeake, others to Canada, and later still others in a well-equipped expedition to New Orleans to conquer the mouth of the Mississippi.

The Chesapeake squadron, after raiding and provisioning itself at the expense of the Virginia and Maryland farmers, made a dash at Washington, sending boats up the Patuxent and Potomac rivers, and landing a body of about 2,000 men. On August 24, with absurd {230} ease, this force scattered in swift panic a hasty collection of militia, and entered Washington, sending the President and Cabinet flying into the country. In retaliation for the damage done at York, the British officers set fire to the capital and other public buildings, before retreating swiftly to their ships. A similar attack on Baltimore, September 11, was better met, and, although the British routed a force of militia, the attempt to take the city was abandoned.

The humiliation of the capture of Washington led to the downfall of Armstrong as Secretary of State, although not until after he had almost ruined another campaign.

While the British were threatening Washington, another force was gathering north of Lake Champlain, and a large frigate was being built to secure command of that lake. By the end of August, nearly 16,000 men, most of them from Wellington's regiments, were a.s.sembled to invade New York, probably with the intention of securing the permanent occupation of the northern part. In the face of this, Armstrong sent most of the American troops at Plattsburg on a useless march across New York State, leaving a bare handful under General McComb to meet the invasion. When Sir George Prevost, Governor-General of Canada, advanced to Plattsburg on September 6, he found nothing {231} but militia and volunteers before him. Fortunately for the United States, Prevost was no fighter, and he declined to advance or attack unless he had a naval control of the lake. On September 11 the decisive contest took place. McDonough, the American commander, with a small squadron, entirely defeated and captured the British flotilla under Downie. It was Lake Erie over again, with the difference that in this battle the American fleet was not superior to the British. It was a victory due to better planning and better gunnery, and it led to the immediate retreat of Prevost, who tamely abandoned the whole campaign, to the intense mortification of his officers and men. The remaining expedition, under General Pakenham, comprising 16,000 Peninsular veterans, under convoy of a strong fleet, sailed to the Gulf of Mexico and advanced to capture New Orleans. General Andrew Jackson was at hand, and with him a ma.s.s of militia and frontiersmen. Driven by the furious energy of the Indian fighter, the Americans showed aggressiveness and courage in skirmishes and night attacks, and finally won an astounding victory on January 8, 1815. On that day the British force tried to storm, by frontal attack, a line of intrenchments armed with cannon and packed with riflemen. In twenty-five minutes their columns were so badly cut up by {232} grapeshot and musketry that the whole attack was abandoned, after Pakenham himself had been killed.

The expedition withdrew, and sailing to Mobile, a town in Spanish territory, occupied by the Americans, retook it on February 11; but the main purpose of their invasion was foiled.

In this year, while American land forces struggled to escape destruction, the naval vessels were for the most part shut in by the blockade. Occasional captures were still made in single combat; but British frigates were now under orders to refuse battle with the larger American vessels, and the captures by sloops were counterbalanced by the British capture of the frigate _Ess.e.x_ by two antagonists in March, 1814. Practically the only extensive operations carried on were by American privateers, who now haunted the British Channel and captured merchantmen within sight of the English coasts. The irritation caused by these privateers was excessive, and made British shipowners and merchants anxious for peace; but it had no effect on the military situation. England was not to be subdued by mere annoyance.

By the end of 1814, the time seemed to be at hand when the United States must submit to peace on such terms as England chose to dictate, or risk disruption and ruin. The administrative weaknesses of the country {233} culminated in actual financial bankruptcy, which was due in no small part to the fact that Federalist financiers and bankers, determining to do all the damage possible, steadily refused to subscribe to the loans or to give any a.s.sistance. The powerful New England capital was entirely withheld. The result was that the strain on the rest of the banks became too great; and after the capture of Washington they all suspended specie payment, leaving the Government only the notes of suspended banks, or its own depreciated treasury notes for currency. All the coin in the country steadily flowed into the vaults of New England banks, while the Federal Treasury was compelled, on November 9, 1814, to admit its inability to pay interest on its loans. Congress met in the autumn and endeavoured to remedy the situation by chartering a bank; but under the general suspension of specie payments it was impossible to start one solvent from the beginning. When Congress authorized one without power to suspend specie payments, Madison vetoed it as useless. All that could be done was to issue more treasury notes. As for the army, a Bill for compulsory service was brought in, showing the enormous change in Republican ideals; but it failed to pa.s.s. Congress seemed helpless.

The American people would neither enlist for the war nor {234} authorize their representatives to pa.s.s genuine war measures.

The Federalists, controlling most of the New England States, now felt that the time had come to insist on a termination of their grievances.

Their governors had refused to allow militia to a.s.sist, their legislatures had done nothing to aid the war; their capitalists had declined to subscribe, and their farmers habitually sold provisions to the British over the Canadian boundary, actually supplying Sir George Prevost's army by contract. There met, at Hartford, on December 14, 1814, a convention of leading men, officially or unofficially representing the five New England States, who agreed upon a doc.u.ment which was intended to secure the special rights of their region. They demanded amendments to the Const.i.tution abolishing the reckoning of slaves as basis for congressional representation, providing for the partial distribution of government revenues among the States, prohibiting embargoes or commercial warfare, or the election of successive Presidents from the same State, and requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress to admit new States or declare war. This was meant for an ultimatum; and it was generally understood that, if the Federal government did not submit to these terms, the New England States would secede to {235} rid themselves of what they considered the intolerable oppression of Virginian misgovernment.

Such was the state of things in the winter of 1815. The administration of Madison had utterly failed to secure any of the ends of the war, to inflict punishment on Great Britain, or to conquer Canada. It had also utterly failed to maintain financial solvency, to enlist an army, to create a navy capable of keeping the sea, or to prevent a movement in New England which seemed to be on the verge of breaking the country into pieces. But to lay this miserable failure--for such only can it be called--to the personal discredit of Jefferson and Madison is unfair, for it was only the repet.i.tion under new governmental conditions of the old traditional colonial method of carrying on war as a local matter. The French and Indian War, the Revolution, and the War of 1812, repeated in different generations the same tale of amateur warfare, of the occasional success and usual worthlessness of the militia, the same administrative inefficiency, and the same financial breakdown. Without authority and obedience, there can be carried on no real war; and authority and obedience were no more known and no better appreciated in 1812 than they had been in the days of Washington.

Jefferson, Madison, {236} and their party had gone with the current of American tradition; that was their only fault.

CHAPTER XII

END OF THE ANTAGONISM: A CENTURY OF PEACE

When the American war began, the English showed a tendency to blame the Tory administration for permitting it to take place; but the chief feeling, after all, was one of annoyance at Madison and his party for having decided to give their a.s.sistance to Napoleon at the crisis of his career. The intercourse between Englishmen and New England Federalists had given British society its understanding of American politics and coloured its natural irritation toward the Republican administration with something of the deeper venom of the outraged New Englanders, who saw in Jefferson and his successors a race of half-Jacobins. During 1812 and 1813, accordingly, newspapers and ministerial speakers, when they referred to the contest, generally spoke of the necessity of {237} chastising an impudent and presumptuous antagonist. A friendly party such as had defended the colonists during the Revolution no longer existed, for the Whigs, however antagonistic to the Liverpool Ministry, were fully as firmly committed to maintaining British naval and commercial supremacy.

England's chief continental ally, however, the Tsar Alexander, considered the American war an unfortunate blunder; and, as early as September, 1812, he offered his mediation through young John Quincy Adams, Minister at St. Petersburg. The news reached America in March, 1813, and Madison revealed his willingness to withdraw from a contest already shown to be unprofitable by immediately accepting and nominating Adams, with Bayard and Gallatin, to serve as peace commissioners. Without waiting to hear from England, these envoys started for Russia, but reached there only to meet an official refusal on the part of England, dated July 5, 1813. The Liverpool Ministry did not wish to have the American war brought within the range of European consideration, since its settlement under such circ.u.mstances might raise questions of neutral rights which would be safer out of the hands of a Tsar whose predecessors had framed armed neutralities in 1780 and 1801. Accordingly, the British government intimated politely that {238} it would be willing to deal directly with the United States, and thus waved the unwelcome Russian mediation aside. Madison accepted this offer in March, 1814; but, although the American commissioners endeavoured through Alexander Baring, their friend and defender in Parliament, to get the British government to appoint a time and place for meeting, they encountered continued delays.

A considerable element in the Tory party felt that the time had come to inflict a severe punishment upon the United States, and newspapers and speakers of that connection announced freely that only by large concessions of territory could the contemptible republic purchase peace. When the Ministry finally sent commissioners to Ghent, on August 8, 1814, it was not with any expectation of coming to a prompt agreement, but merely to engage the Americans while the various expeditions then under way took Washington and Baltimore, occupied northern New York, and captured New Orleans. It was generally expected that a few months would find large portions of the United States in British possession, as was in fact the sea-coast of Maine, east of Pen.o.bscot Bay, after September first.

The instructions to the British peace commissioners were based on the _uti possedetis_, {239} as the British government intended it to be by the end of the year, when they expected to hold half of Maine, the northern parts of New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, the north-western post of Mackinnac, and possibly New Orleans and Mobile.

In addition, there was to be an Indian territory established under British guarantee west of the old treaty line of 1795, and all American fishing rights were to be terminated. On the other side, the American instructions, while hinting that England would do well to cede Canada, made the abandonment of the alleged right of impressments by England a _sine qua non_. Clearly no agreement between such points of view was possible; and the outcome of the negotiation was bound to depend on the course of events in the United States. The first interviews resulted in revealing that part of the British instructions related to the Indian territory with intimations of coming demands for territorial cessions. This the Americans instantly rejected on August 25, and the negotiation came to a standstill for several weeks.

The three British negotiators, Admiral Gambier, Henry Goulburn, and Doctor Adams were men of slight political or personal authority, and their part consisted chiefly in repeating their instructions and referring American replies back to Lord Castlereagh, {240} the Foreign Secretary, or to Lord Bathurst, who acted as his subst.i.tute while he attended the Congress of Vienna. The American commissioners, including the three original ones, Adams, Bayard, and Gallatin, to whom Clay and Russell of Ma.s.sachusetts were now added, clearly understood the situation, and had already warned Madison that an insistence on the abandonment of impressments would result in the failure to secure any treaty. In October, 1814, a despatch yielded this point and left the negotiators to make the best fight they could, unhampered by positive instructions. Undoubtedly they would have been compelled to submit to hard terms, in spite of their personal ability, which stood exceedingly high, had not news of the repulse at Baltimore, of the treaty of July, 1814, by which the north-western Indians agreed to fight the English, and, on October 17, of the retreat of Sir George Prevost after the defeat of Plattsburg, come in to change the situation.

Between August and October little had been accomplished, during a slow interchange of notes, beyond a withdrawal by the British of their demand for an Indian territory, and an acceptance in its place of an agreement to include the Indians in a general peace. Then the Cabinet, seeing that after Prevost's retreat they could no longer claim the {241} territory outlined in the first instructions, authorized the negotiators to demand only Mackinac and Niagara, with a right of way across Maine. The Americans, encouraged by the news from Plattsburg, replied on October 23, refusing to treat on the _uti possedetis_, or on any terms but the _status quo ante_. This brought the Tory government face to face with the question whether the war was to be continued for another year for the purpose of conquering a frontier for Canada; and, before the prospect of continued war taxation, annoyance from privateers, and a doubtful outcome, they hesitated. Turning to Wellington for a decision, they asked him whether he would accept the command in America for the purpose of conquering a peace. His reply showed little interest or desire to go, although he seemed confident of success; but he observed that, on the basis of the military situation, they had no right to demand any territorial cession.

The Ministry then, on November 18, definitely abandoned the claim for compensation, and accepted as a basis for discussion a plan submitted by the American commissioners. In the preparation of this a sharp quarrel had broken out between Clay, who insisted on terminating the British right to navigate the Mississippi, and Adams, who {242} demanded the retention of the American right to fish in Canadian waters. Gallatin pointed out that the two privileges stood together, and with great difficulty he induced the two men to agree to the omission of both matters from the treaty, although Clay refused until the last to sign. So the commission presented a united front in offering to renew both rights or postpone them for discussion; and the British commissioners finally accepted the latter alternative. The treaty was then signed in the old Carthusian Convent at Ghent, on December 24, 1814, as a simple cessation of hostilities and return to the _status quo ante_ as regards conquests. Not a word related to any of the numerous causes of the war. Impressments, blockades, Orders in Council, the Indian relations, the West Indian trade rights,--all were abandoned. So far as the United States was concerned the treaty was an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the war was a failure.

In view of the hopes of Canadian gains, the treaty was denounced in England by the Opposition journals and many of those most antagonistic to America as a cowardly surrender. But it was none the less heartily accepted by both peoples and both governments. It reached the United States on February 11, was sent to the Senate on February 15, and ratified unanimously the next day. There {243} still remained various vessels at sea, and so the winter of 1815 saw not only the amazing victory of Jackson at New Orleans, but also several naval actions, in which the United States frigate _President_ was taken by a squadron of British blockades, two American sloops in duels took two British smaller vessels, and the American _Const.i.tution_, in a night action, captured, together, two British sloops. Then the news spread, and peace finally arrived in fact.

In England, the whole affair was quickly forgotten in the tremendous excitement caused by the return of Napoleon from Elba, the uprising of Europe, and the dramatic meeting of the two great captains, Wellington and Napoleon, in the Waterloo campaign. By the time the Napoleonic Empire had finally collapsed, the story of the American war, with its maritime losses and scanty land triumphs, was an old one, and the British exporters, rushing to regain their former markets, were happy in the prospect of the reopening of American ports. By October, trade relations were re-established and the solid intercourse of the two countries was under way.

In America all disgraces and defeats were forgotten in the memories of New Orleans, Plattsburg, and Chippawa, and the people at large, willing to forgive all its failures to the {244} Republican administration, resumed with entire contentment the occupations of peace. The war fabric melted like a cloud; armies were disbanded, vessels were called home, credit rose, prices sprang upward, importations swelled, exportation began.

In truth, the time of antagonism was at an end, for, with the European peace of 1814, the immediate cause for irritation was removed, never to return. The whole structure of blockades, Orders in Council, seizures, and restrictions upon neutrals vanished; the necessity for British impressments ceased to exist; and, since France never again came into hostility with England, none of these grievances were revived. But in a broader way the year 1815 and the decades following marked the end of national hostility, for the fundamental antagonisms which, since 1763, had repeatedly brought about irritation and conflict, began after this time to die out.

In the first place, the defeat of the Indians in the war allowed the people of the United States to advance unchecked into the north-west and south-west, filling the old Indian lands, and rendering any continuation of the restrictive diplomacy on the part of England for the benefit of Canadian fur traders patently futile. The war was no sooner ended than roads, trails, and rivers swarmed {245} with westward-moving emigrants; and within a year the territory of Indiana, which the British commissioners at Ghent had wished to establish as an Indian reserve, was framing a State const.i.tution. In 1819 Illinois followed.

The revulsion of temper was ill.u.s.trated in the commencement at this time of the organized movement for settled international peace, which may be dated from the establishment of the New York and Ma.s.sachusetts Peace Societies in 1815, and the London Peace Society in the following year. But its most signal expression came in the remarkable agreement by which the Canadian-American frontier has been, for nearly a century, unfortified, and yet completely peaceful. On November 16, 1815, State Secretary Monroe instructed Adams to propose to the British Government that--as, "if each party augments its force there with a view to obtaining the ascendancy over the other, vast expense will be incurred and the danger of collision augmented in like degree"--such military preparations should be suspended on both sides. The smaller the number of the armed forces agreed upon, he said, the better; "or to abstain altogether from an armed force beyond that used for the revenue."

After some suspicious hesitation, Lord Castlereagh accepted this novel proposal; and it was {246} given effect to by an exchange of notes, signed by Mr. Bagot, British Minister at Washington, and Mr. Rush (Monroe's successor) on April 28 and 29, 1817, approved by the Senate a year later, and proclaimed by the President on April 28, 1818. By Rush-Bagot Agreement, the naval force of each Government was limited to one small gun-boat of each power on Champlain and Ontario, and two on the upper lakes, an arrangement of immense value to both Canada and the United States.

The old-time commercial antagonism was also destined to disappear in a few years after the close of the war. At first England clung to the time-honoured West Indian policy, and, when in 1815 the two countries adjusted their commercial relations, American vessels were still excluded, although given the right to trade directly with the East Indies. But already the new economic thought, which regarded compet.i.tion and reciprocal trade as the ideal, instead of legal discriminations and universal protectionism, was gaining ground, as England became more and more the manufacturing centre of the world.

Under Huskisson, in 1825, reciprocity was definitely subst.i.tuted for exclusion; and a few years later, under Peel and Russell, and within the lifetime of men who had maintained the Orders in Council, the whole {247} elaborate system of laws backed by the logic of Lord Sheffield and James Stephen was cast away and fell into disrepute and oblivion.

In America, it should be added, the rush of settlers into the West and the starting of manufactures served, within a few years from the end of the War of 1812, to alter largely the former dependence of the United States upon foreign commerce. By the time that England was ready to abandon its restrictive policy, the United States was beginning to be a manufacturing nation with its chief wealth in its great internal trade, and the ancient interest in the West Indies was fast falling into insignificance. The same men who raged against the Jay treaty and the Orders in Council lived to forget that they had ever considered the West India trade important. So, on both sides, the end of commercial antagonism was soon to follow on the Treaty of Ghent.

Finally, and more slowly, the original political and social antagonism ceased to be active, and ultimately died out. So far as the United States was concerned, the change was scarcely visible until three-quarters of a century after the Treaty of Ghent. The temper of the American people, formed by Revolutionary traditions and nourished on memories of battle and injuries, remained {248} steadily antagonistic toward England; and the triumph of western social ideals served to emphasize the distinction between the American democrat and the British aristocrat, until dislike became a tradition and a political and literary convention. But the emptiness of this normal national hatred of John Bull was shown in 1898, when, at the first distinct sign of friendliness on the part of the British government and people, the whole American anglophobia vanished, and the people of the continent realized that the time had come for a recognition of the essential and normal harmony of the ancient enemies.

In England, the change began somewhat earlier, for within less than a generation after the Treaty of Ghent the exclusive Tory control collapsed, and the Revolution of 1832 gave the middle cla.s.ses a share of political power. A few years later the Radicals, representing the working-men, became a distinct force in Parliament, and to middle cla.s.s and Radicals there was nothing abhorrent in the American Republic.

Aristocratic society continued, of course, as in the eighteenth century, to regard the United States with scant respect, and those members of the upper middle cla.s.ses who took their social tone from the aristocracy commonly reflected their prejudices. But the ma.s.ses of {249} the British people--whose relatives emigrated steadily to the western land of promise--felt a genuine sympathy and interest in the success of the great democratic experiment, a sympathy which was far deeper and more effective than had been that of the eighteenth-century Whigs. From the moment that these cla.s.ses made their weight felt in government, the time was at hand when the old social antagonism was to die out, and with it the deep political antipathy which, since the days of 1793, had tinged the official British opinion of a democratic state.