After Tippecanoe: Some Aspects of the War of 1812

The Coming of the War

9 THE COMING OF THE WAR William T. Utter Throughout the nineteenth century, historians interpreted the causes of the War of 1812 with remarkable consistency. They simply enlarged upon President Madison’s War Message. Henry Adams, in his magnificent history of the period, had thrown some doubts on Madison’s reasons for the declaration.1 But it was not until the early decades of this century that younger and more critical historians began to wrestle with the problem of the causes of the war. In 1902 Woodrow Wilson, a young professor at Princeton University, wrote a pot-boiler which he called A History of the American People.2 At the conclusion of his discussion of the outbreak of the war, he wrote this sentence: “The grounds of the war were singularly uncertain.” Let me give you my assurance that historians dislike writing a sentence like that and that you can take Professor Wilson’s phrase literally. In the first quarter of this century the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner became dominant among scholars who were studying early American history. Turner’s name is forever associated with the history of the American frontier, but his true interest seems to have been in the analysis of sectionalism, with emphasis on the West. The sectional nature of the support of the war had long been noted; as it was now studied in detail, a sort of double paradox became apparent . The declaration of war had received its greatest support from the West and the South, whereas the maritime sections, notably New England, were strong in their opposition—and this in spite of the fact that the war was being fought ostensibly for maritime rights. This paradox could be approached in many ways, no doubt, but the first, and possibly the most plausible, critic of the older interpretation was Louis M. Hacker, then a young professor at Columbia University, who in 1924 contributed an essay to the Mississippi Valley Historical Review entitled “Western Land Hunger and the War of 1812: A Conjecture.”3 The word “conjecture” might seem to indicate an uncertainty on the part of the writer, an uncertainty which does not appear in the essay 10 itself. Hacker abandoned almost completely Madison’s list of causes for the war, on the ground that he saw no association between those causes and the enthusiasm which westerners were displaying for the war. The true key to the paradox of the western attitude lay in covetousness , Mr. Hacker said. We were sinning; we coveted our neighbors’ lands. He asserted that Canada represented the greatest reserves of agricultural lands immediately accessible to westerners. To make his thesis more tenable, Hacker minimized even the Indian danger and exaggerated the hesitation which frontiersmen felt toward settling in the prairies—perhaps based on the assumption that prairies which could not grow trees could not grow crops. Mr. Hacker’s point of view was much criticized, and answered in part, but never completely refuted. My own reaction is that he did not search very ardently for contemporary evidence which might not support his theory. For example, he lists at some length toasts drunk at various banquets which made allusion to the glories of a war in which Canada would be conquered. These toasts were taken largely from a Zanesville paper. I could match this evidence, toast for toast, with expressions of the contrary point of view from such towns as Putnam and Marietta, where Federalist sympathies were much in evidence. It is a little as if historians had turned psychiatrists, got Madison and his lieutenants on the leather couch, and addressed them: “We know that the reasons you give for this declaration are not the true reasons. Now give us the truth, preferably something sinful.” We must distinguish between two ways of putting the matter. Historian A will say: there were a number of reasons why we were justified in declaring war against Britain. If we were to fight Great Britain we could do so only in Canada. In this way the conquest of Canada became , of necessity, one of our war aims. Historian B will say: we wanted Canada and therefore pretended that we were fighting Britain for causes one, two, three (the maritime causes), while it was understood among ourselves that our real reason was to conquer Canada. For historian B, expansionism becomes the primary cause. With all deference to Mr. Hacker, I feel that he used the latter approach. In 1925 there appeared a...