1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism

Chapter 1 Celebrating Love, Liberty, and Progeny: United Staes, Circa 1811

h Chapter 1 Celebrating Love, Liberty, and Progeny united states, circa 1811 Hezekiah Niles nurtured a visceral antagonism toward the British. The founder and editor of the Niles Weekly Register, who began publishing out of Baltimore in 1811, claimed that, back during the American Revolution , British soldiers had menaced his pregnant mother and almost killed him in utero. As he told the story in the pages of his paper, he “nearly perished with his mother a short time before he was born. A British grenadier gallantly attacked her with his bayonet, but she was saved as though by the interposition of Providence.” In relating this episode, Niles no doubt hoped, as he did with every article he wrote, that he had “done a good deal to . . . rouse . . . a national feeling and [to] buil[d] up [a] pride of character hitherto too much neglected.” Born in 1777 to Pennsylvania Quakers, by 1811 Niles was himself a family man in his prime, a Republican newspaper publisher with firm nationalist views, and—his religious roots notwithstanding—a steady promoter of renewed war with Britain.1 Niles’s tale of his near miss with feticide carried significant political charge. Like many of his fellow Republicans, Niles had come to believe that population strength provided the key to American national power. Beyond inflicting personal tragedy, disrupting reproduction imperiled the nation. Niles’s concern with population questions ran deep. He recounted his own story in March 1812, just three months before the United States declared war on Britain, and in the same weekly issue in which he also featured an installment of an article he titled “An Analytical Review of the ‘Essay on the Principle of Population, by T. R. Malthus, A.M.’ with Some Remarks 2 Chapter 1 More Particularly Applicable to the Present and Probable Future State of the United States.”2 Niles presented Malthus to the public only to contradict him. His “analytical review” of the Essay on Population aimed to explain why the British theorist’s arguments in favor of population restriction were not “particularly applicable” to the United States. Perhaps Niles’s remembrance of his family anecdote was spurred by his close engagement with contemporary political economy. Or perhaps his interest in the role of reproduction in national progress stemmed from the knowledge of his own prenatal danger. Either way, Niles took it upon himself to increase public awareness of the interconnections between individual reproduction and national population, the better to inspire his fellow Americans with patriotic fervor at a moment of national crisis. h All wars put population strength at a premium and create strong public interest in personal attachment to the nation. Resident populations must be mobilized, neutralized, and/or defended. Wars always ask people to give themselves to their country. But in America, in 1812, the very idea of entering into open battle remained highly controversial. Since the constitutional founding of the United States in 1789, the nation had never yet made a formal declaration of war. The decision to do so generated intense debate. Members of President James Madison’s Democratic-Republican Party, predominant in the South and West, broadly supported military action against Britain, from challenging the Royal Navy at sea to mounting a conquest of Canada. Members of the opposition Federalist Party railed against war from their New England base. Wide swaths of the population remained more or less open to persuasion. Interlinked arguments about family generation and national expansion were at the center of these vigorous discussions. The population practices and patriotic emotions that emerged during the United States’ inaugural war would shape the nation for many ages to come.3 Growth-oriented Republicans embraced a polarizing vision of national progress in which people would become endeared to the nation through unfettered freedom to reproduce. Procreation functioned simultaneously as a fundamental right and an essential obligation. A nation that protected the natural human drive to beget children deserved the love and loyalty of its inhabitants. In return, those who enjoyed these liberties owed their offspring to the nation, the very embodiment of patriotic love.4 Celebrating Love, Liberty, and Progeny 3 Even before the American Revolution, local commentators and international observers had remarked on the fantastic fecundity of North America. Its lands were fertile and so were its people. Ironically, the English had first established colonies in part out of concern over perceived population excesses in their small island nation. But on...