War Looms

Foreign affairs dominated Madison’s presidency. Days before he took office in March 1809, Congress had repealed the Embargo Act and replaced it with the milder Non-Intercourse Act. The act dropped the general embargo on foreign exports but continued trade prohibitions against France and Britain. The act empowered the president to drop the trade restrictions if either of the nations removed their constraints on US trade.

When the act failed to compel either nation to change course, Congress passed Macon’s Bill No. 2. The new law removed all prohibitions on US trade but empowered the president to reimpose restrictions on one of the belligerent powers if the other removed its hindrances to US commerce. The US government hoped the move would entice Britain or France to win an upper hand by complying with US demands, thereby triggering American trade restrictions against its enemy.

Napoleon responded first, making flimsy promises to repeal his anti-neutral policies. Napoleon convinced Madison but not the British, who assumed that the French emperor had no intention of following through on his commitment. Madison threatened the British that Napoleon’s response would prompt US action against them. Unmoved, British leaders insisted they would continue to seize US ships until Napoleon ceased his commercial warfare against Britain. That policy essentially guaranteed continued hostilities against US commerce until Napoleon’s defeat.

While Madison wrestled with Britain over its policies eastward in the Atlantic, he felt growing pressure from the empire’s actions in the West. Determined to resist US expansion westward, a large coalition of Native American nations had begun to reconstruct an ominous British-Native American confederacy, led by the prophet Tenskwatawa and his diplomat brother Tecumseh. The British supplied their Native American allies with arms but cautioned moderation. They would depend on Native Americans to defend British Canada if war erupted with the United States, but they wanted to avoid hasty hostilities.

Hostilities came when Madison allowed Governor William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory to recruit a patrol to reconnoiter a Native American encampment along the Tippecanoe River. Despite Madison’s warning against “needless hostilities,” battle broke out, and Harrison’s troops burned Tenskwatawa’s city of gathered Native Americans. The fight was more of a debacle than a victory, but Madison cast it as a triumph in the face of criticism that his administration had bungled the mission. A battle with Native Americans allied with Britain and armed by the British military invited louder calls for war.

While the administration was accusing British officials of sparking the violence at Tippecanoe, it learned that Britain had sent the spy John Henry to New England several years earlier. Henry and his French con artist partner, Paul Émile Soubiran, sold Henry’s official correspondence to the administration, convincing Madison and Monroe that it would prove a conspiracy between the British and Federalists. The papers caused more headaches for Madison than they were worth, leading to accusations that he had misused public funds to embarrass Federalists and aid his reelection. Still, Madison added Henry’s mission to his growing list of complaints against the British.

In April 1812, Congress approved military preparations and a ninety-day embargo against the British. Though Napoleon showed no sign of abating his restrictions on neutral trade, Madison and Republicans considered Britain the more imminent threat. Madison made a list of British transgressions for Congress—impressment (the most paramount in Madison’s mind), the arming of Native Americans, the Henry mission, and a host of Orders in Council that Britain used to restrict neutral trade.

On June 1, 1812, Madison turned his complaints into an address, which he sent to Congress. Careful not to cross what he viewed as a clear line of presidential authority, he did not ask Congress to declare war, but he left no doubt of his preference for it. The House of Representatives voted for war on June 4. A divided Senate debated for two weeks before following suit on June 17, and President Madison signed the declaration of war the next day. The United States was at war with Britain for the second time in just over a quarter century, and Madison became the nation’s first wartime president (at least of a declared war).

The War of 1812

Many Americans viewed the war as a second war of independence—not for political independence but for economic and maritime independence. As with the first War of American Independence, the Madison administration made Canada a prime target, not just to defeat the British but to annex and further expand across North America. Also, as with the first War of American Independence, the invasion of Canada failed. By the fall of 1812, several waves of American troops had surrendered from Detroit to Niagara. The defeats hardened Federalist anger, and some New England states refused to supply militia afterward, making it more difficult to prosecute the war.

Despite the promising start to the war for Britain, the British cabinet offered an armistice. In June 1812, they had rescinded the offending Orders in Council, but Madison and Congress did not receive that news until after they had declared war. British authorities hoped that Madison would accept the armistice so they could avoid an unwelcome distraction from their war against Napoleon. Madison considered it but then rejected it, not wanting to show weakness and insisting that impressment must stop as well, a stipulation the British would not entertain.

Intent on seeing the war through, Madison needed good military news, which came the following year. In 1813, US forces took York, present-day Toronto, and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s sailors defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie. William Henry Harrison led troops again against Tecumseh’s Native American forces and British allies and defeated them at the Battle of Thames River. The next year, US forces followed the victory with another route of Native American forces at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend near the Gulf Coast, fracturing the alliance between the British and Native Americans.

Throughout 1814, the British and Americans fought to a stalemate. The British went on the offensive after defeating Napoleon and won a major victory when they attacked Washington, DC. The seat of American government fell, with British troops torching the White House and most other federal buildings, sending Madison and most of his cabinet in flight. Dolley Madison and Madison’s enslaved valet Paul Jennings are remembered in history for their role in securing Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington from the White House before they fled. The burning failed to turn the course of the war, however, as US forces repelled the British advance at Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, inspiring Francis Scott Key’s penning of what would become the national anthem.

By 1814, British and US representatives began peace negotiations, and the British wanted a major piece of US real estate as leverage, so they planned an attack on New Orleans. British commanders sent 6,000 men to take the vital city. On January 8, 1815, a motley crew of US regular forces, militia, free black and enslaved fighters, and even French pirates, repulsed the British attack. The US forces killed one-third of the British troops in just minutes, suffering only seventy deaths on the American side.

The victory is habitually dismissed as meaningless since it came two weeks after the belligerents signed a peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium. However, it inspired patriotic morale in the postwar United States and, along with the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, signaled US power in the Gulf region. Until the war, Native American nations, the Spanish, French, and British had all jockeyed for power in the area. In 1810, as Spanish dominions in the Americas fractured, Madison took advantage of the chaos to annex West Florida based on tepid claims to the region from the Louisiana Purchase. Still, the US grasp on the Gulf Coast remained vulnerable. The Battle of New Orleans concluded the War of 1812, but it also secured US strength in a prolonged military and diplomatic contest over the southern coast.

Effects of the War

The United States ratified the Treaty of Ghent in February 1815. Historians have had difficulty making sense of a war that seems to have resolved nothing. The treaty returned US-British relations to the status quo antebellum, all as it was before the war. By then, however, the British had defeated Napoleon, obviating the need to interrupt US commerce and send press gangs aboard US ships. Of all the belligerents, Canadians may have the strongest claims to victory, having repulsed successive waves of US invasions and ultimately annexation. British-allied Native Americans lost the most in the war. Their confederacy shattered and they lost British support, they faced an uncertain future with their American enemies now the unqualified masters of the middle of the continent.

Madison’s reputation fluctuated with US fortunes during the war, so the Battle of New Orleans landed it on a high mark. A surge of patriotism flooded the nation after the war as Americans cast their draw with Britain as a victory, considering they remained independent and lost no territory. The war also secured the political prospects of many other Americans who distinguished themselves in combat, especially Andrew Jackson, who commanded US forces at the Battle of New Orleans.

However dubious, American successes left Federalists who opposed the war on the wrong side of the question. They had suffered national setbacks since 1800, and the war left the party shattered. In 1814, leading New England Federalists attended the Hartford Convention, where they considered secession from the union. Though they stopped short of that drastic measure, their complaints sounded sufficiently disloyal to a jubilant postwar nation to ensure their demise as a viable party.