Liberty and Order

The War of 1812

G&S Typesetters PDF proof Although he seems to have believed that war was the only honorable alternative to the embargo, Jefferson declined to provide any firm guidance to Congress during his last weeks in office. Madison, who was as much an architect of the policy of commercial coercion as Jefferson himself, but even more inclined toward diffidence in the executive’s relationships with Congress, inherited the same set of troubles. Through the next several years, Congress and the administration struggled constantly to find a means by which the economic weapon could be used without damaging the United States more than it did the warring European powers. In 1809, the administration reached an agreement with British minister David Erskine and reopened trade with Britain, but Britain disavowed the arrangement; nonintercourse was once again imposed. In 1810, Macon’s Bill Number 2 (named after congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina) ended nonintercourse, but provided that it was to be reimposed against either of the European powers if the other ceased its violations of neutral rights without a comparable response. On 2 November 1810, believing that Napoleon had rescinded his decrees so far as they applied to American shipping, Madison proclaimed that nonintercourse would go into effect again unless Great Britain followed suit. On 11 March 1811, Congress sanctioned its reimposition . With Britain still refusing to rescind its orders and the governor of Canada providing aid and encouragement to Tecumseh and the Prophet, Shawnee brothers who were at the head of an Indian confederacy which was at war with the United States in the Northwest, several new and vigorous members of the Twelfth Congress, which met in November 1811, favored war. Madison had probably already made the same decision. Madison’s War Message 2 June 1812 I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them on the subject of our affairs with Great Britain. Without going back beyond the renewal in 1803 of the war in which Great Britain is engaged, and omitting unrepaired wrongs of inferior magnitude, the conduct of her government presents a series of acts hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation. British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it, not in the exercise of a belligerent right founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative over British subjects. . . . Could the seizure of British subjects in such cases be regarded as within the exercise of a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid an article of captured property to be adjudged without a regular investigation before a competent tribunal, would imperiously demand the fairest trial where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such a trial these rights are subjected to the will of every petty commander. The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone that, under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation and exposed, under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren. Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself , the United States have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations, and that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance of the practice, the British Government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements such as could not be rejected if the recovery of British subjects were the real and the sole object. The communication passed without effect. The War of 1812 331 The War of 1812 25-L2720 9/19/03 7:20 AM Page 331 G&S Typesetters PDF proof British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions they have added the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors, and have wantonly spilt American blood...