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36 ChapterThree The War of 1812 and the Rise of American Military Power Stephen Budiansky On June 15, 1812, three days before America’s declaration of war against Great Britain, former president John Adams sardonically assessed the young nation’s chances in its impending confrontation with the mightiest sea power in the world. Unlike most of his fellow New Englanders and Federalists, Adams saw war with Britain as inevitable and the cause just. But he despaired that America was woefully unprepared for the fight. “Our navy is so Lilliputian ,” Adams wrote his grandson, “that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.”1 The War of 1812 would bring about a transformation in American conceptions of the role of a professional standing army and navy in national security and foreign affairs. It would also underscore some subsequently alltoo -often neglected truths about the ways that a vastly outnumbered fighting force can foil the plans of even the mightiest superpower. These are lessons that the U.S. military is still relearning as it faces twenty-first-century threats from unconventional military forces that exploit concepts of asymmetric warfare that America’s small but resourceful navy deftly employed two centuries ago in its own war against the superpower of that age. For all that has changed in the technology of war and America’s place among the world’s great military powers, much about the War of 1812 remains strikingly modern with respect to the lessons that it holds for deterrence, preparedness, counterinsurgency strategy, and military professionalism. The nation’s ill-preparedness for the war with Britain in 1812 was all the more astonishing given that the decision to go to war was entirely America’s, the timing of the commencement of hostilities in American hands alone. 03-2414-8 ch3.indd 36 9/11/12 3:45 PM The Rise of American Military Power / 37 This was not a war that Great Britain sought, desired, or even expected. For the better part of a year, Augustus Foster, Britain’s minister to Washington , had been assiduously working to avert a military clash between the two nations. All charm, tact, and goodwill, Foster courted President James Madison ’s Republican backers in Congress with a lavish entertainment budget, earnest expressions of friendship, and soothing reassurances that his country understood that American talk of war was simply electoral politics or diplomatic saber-rattling. Foster confidently reported that 80 percent of Americans were opposed to war. Even after the declaration of war, he informed London that it was, in his view, largely just a bluff—that America had little or no intention of engaging in actual military action.2 When hostilities subsequently began on both land and sea, Britain for months gave the United States repeated opportunities to call it off without losing face—going so far as to unilaterally repeal the Orders in Council, whose revocation had been one of the two chief war aims announced by Madison, and avoiding military measures that might escalate the conflict throughout the fall of 1812. Nor were there any particular external circumstances that dictated the timing of Madison’s decision to seek congressional approval of a formal declaration of war in June 1812. America’s principal grievances against Britain were not new. The Orders in Council, through which Britain justified the seizure of some 1,000 American merchant vessels trading with France, had first been issued in 1807. The forcible impressment of thousands of American merchant seamen into the British Royal Navy had been going on since 1803. During that time there had been crises that had brought the United States, in the heat of anger, to the brink of war with Britain. In 1806 the British frigate Leander, stopping and searching American merchant ships just outside American territorial waters off New York harbor, had fired across the bow of an American vessel and the cannonball had struck a nearby merchant sloop, decapitating the unlucky helmsman; the news triggered convulsive anti-British demonstrations in New York and prompted President Thomas Jefferson to issue an order closing American ports to the British warships involved in the incident and demanding the arrest of Leander’s captain if he were ever found within American jurisdiction.3 The following year the country was again brought to a war pitch when a British ship of the line, Leopard, pursued, halted, and fired three broadsides into the American navy frigate Chesapeake off Norfolk and forcibly removed four British deserters who...

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