What So Proudly We Hailed: Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812

4. Dual Nationalisms: Legacies of the War of 1812

67 ChapterFour Dual Nationalisms: Legacies of the War of 1812 Alan Taylor On both the left and the right, American politicians and pundits frequently complain that the country has strayed from the original vision of our heroic national founders, the men who declared independence in 1776 and crafted the Constitution in 1787. According to Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.), for example, “There’s nothing that ails this country that couldn’t be fixed by paying more careful attention to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.”1 Like most myths about a nation’s origins, ours tend to gloss over the chaotic messiness of historical experience. In reality, save for seeking national independence and some version of popular sovereignty, the actual founders agreed on very little. Indeed, they collided throughout the Revolutionary War, the framing and ratifying of the Constitution, and the early years of the republic. If we must now follow the dictates of our founders, the question becomes this: Which ones? Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson? Thomas Paine or James Madison? John Adams or Samuel Adams? They did not speak with one voice and certainly did not anticipate the many dilemmas faced by a modern global power. Instead of endowing Americans with a fixed set of precepts, the founders gave us clashing principles, vigorous debates, and an especially brief and often ambiguous Constitution. Certainly, there was no single, unified set of canonical views that can now easily be deployed to resolve our contemporary Portions of this chapter appeared previously in Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens , British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 04-2414-8 ch4.indd 67 9/11/12 3:45 PM 68 / Alan Taylor dilemmas. On the contrary, the founders created some of those dilemmas by their inability to reconcile their views.2 The ideological divisions of the founding generation contributed to the American declaration of war against Britain in 1812 and to the many failures of the subsequent war effort. Indeed, the U.S. Congress and president declared the war as much for domestic political reasons as from foreign policy frustrations. By declaring and winning the war, the governing Republican party of Jefferson and Madison expected to vindicate its version of the republic. In particular, the Republicans sought to prove the capacity of a relatively weak federal government and a loose confederation of the states to defeat the coercive might of the more centralized British Empire. Republican leaders meant to mobilize the enthusiasm of the people for a crusade to vindicate their version of a republic. By winning such a war, the Republicans expected to discredit and ruin the Federalist opposition party, which regretted as reckless and foolish the attempt to wage war without a large and professional army and navy. They also recognized that the Republicans sought to destroy the future prospects of their party. Consequently, most of the Federalists did their best to frustrate a war effort that seemed ideologically driven to ruin them. In the War of 1812, we find the bitter fruits of the fundamental debate over the proper scale and reach of the federal government. Partisans Commentators today often decry the nation’s partisanship as unique and supposedly at odds with the harmony achieved by our founders. Although they designed the Constitution to discourage organized partisanship, the founders promptly polarized into fiercely partisan camps, each of which claimed that it alone could defend the Constitution and uphold the liberty of the people. On the one hand, Washington, Adams, and Hamilton claimed the name of Federalists, while Jefferson and Madison organized an opposition known as the Republicans (not to be confused with the current Republican Party, which emerged during the 1850s). During the early decades of the nation, political partisanship became especially rancorous because the stakes were so high: the very survival of the republic and its tenuous union of fractious states. Although endowed with immense potential for economic and demographic growth, the United States 04-2414-8 ch4.indd 68 9/11/12 3:45 PM Dual Nationalisms / 69 was a new and weak country in a dangerous world of powerful empires, primarily the British and the French. Moreover, the American leaders had gambled their union on a republic, a form of government notoriously shortlived in the European past. The vast geographic scale of the United States...