We hope that you'll bear with us as we indulge another discussion about the impact of secession on the future of the Union. Today, however, we want to leave the Civil War behind and revisit the War of 1812, perhaps the United States' best-known non-victory in its martial history. Unfortunately, this disaster of a war often is overshadowed by the Civil War when it comes to historical commemoration. Timing plays an important role. The secession crisis and the Civil War took place a tidy 50 years after the country's military build-up and entry into the War of 1812. The main reason that we so easily and quickly forget the latter conflict, however, was that it was fought on a much smaller scale and was so dissatisfying in its conclusion. The Civil War is, unquestionably, the country's great dramatic conflict, while the War of 1812 might be the country's most incompetent conflict.
But today is a fitting day to give the War of 1812 its place in the sun. On this date, two hundred years ago, President James Madison presented Congress with a trove of letters exposing sinister British designs to encourage the New England states to secede from the Union and join British Canada. New England's commercial trade had been prostrated by the American embargo against both the British and French, and the president was deeply distrustful of the loyalty of the region's Federalist leaders. As Garry Wills recounts in his biography of Madison, the president authorized Secretary of State James Monroe to pay $50,000 to purchase the collection of letters from a French nobleman who had obtained them surreptitiously from John Henry, an English spy. Wills describes the unprecedented purchase as part of a concerted effort by Madison to push Congress to increase the size of the American military and declare war on Britain.
The Henry Letters, as they've since come to be known, however, turned out to be a fantastic hoax. It was discovered rather quickly that Henry was a largely ineffectual Canadian spy, not an English one, and that his letters were filled with dubious information cribbed from various New England and Canadian newspapers. Moreover, the intermediary who delivered the letters to Monroe was no French nobleman but an imposter who had played the role to ingratiate himself into Washington's high society. He was Henry's accomplice in the affair, splitting the exorbitant reward with him. The revelation that the president had paid such a princely sum for fraudulent documents was embarrassing, but it did not amount to so much as a speed bump in Madison's steady march toward war.
One wonders why the president felt that these documents, which only confirmed what many Democratic-Republicans like himself already suspected, were worth such a steep price. New England Federalists ultimately showed their true blue colors at the so-called Hartford Convention, which took place at the tail end of the war from December 1814 to January 1815. Some members of the convention toyed with the idea of seceding from the Union, though no such proposal was adopted. Instead, the Hartford delegates drafted a demand for a host of political reforms, including amending the Constitution to eliminate the 3/5 clause and re-balance political power between free and slave states. In the epitome of bad timing, representatives of the convention arrived with these demands in Washington just as the city was celebrating news of Andrew Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans and the end of the war (which occurred in reverse order), causing easily outraged Democratic-Republicans to see the demands as unpatriotic at best and treasonous at worst.
Both the War of 1812 and the Civil War demonstrated, in different ways, not only political conflict over slavery but also the imperfect union of the country during the first half of the nineteenth century. The War of 1812 exposed the feeble communications and transport networks that ineffectively knit the disparate states together, and it incited New Englanders' jealousy of the seemingly outsized political power of slaveholders. The Civil War exposed the ideological divisions of a country that still had not achieved a substantial measure of national unity, and it revealed slave state leaders' consternation with the advances of a free soil movement that pledged to obstruct slavery's expansion. In some ways then, the Civil War perhaps finally corrected some of the grave problems first exposed in the War of 1812. So as we commemorate the Civil War, let's not forget America's most important non-victorious war and the connections between the two. The state of Virginia has planned a commemoration of the War of 1812 and hopefully others will follow suit.
I can think of no better way of illustrating how to combine our commemorations of the War of 1812 and the Civil War than with the following episode from Ellen Degeneres' old sitcom, in which she joined her father in a Civil War re-enactment. At about the 10:50 mark her proud father offers her the family sword, which, he announces, her great-great grandfather had used in 1865..... in a re-enactment of the War of 1812.
But today is a fitting day to give the War of 1812 its place in the sun. On this date, two hundred years ago, President James Madison presented Congress with a trove of letters exposing sinister British designs to encourage the New England states to secede from the Union and join British Canada. New England's commercial trade had been prostrated by the American embargo against both the British and French, and the president was deeply distrustful of the loyalty of the region's Federalist leaders. As Garry Wills recounts in his biography of Madison, the president authorized Secretary of State James Monroe to pay $50,000 to purchase the collection of letters from a French nobleman who had obtained them surreptitiously from John Henry, an English spy. Wills describes the unprecedented purchase as part of a concerted effort by Madison to push Congress to increase the size of the American military and declare war on Britain.
The Henry Letters, as they've since come to be known, however, turned out to be a fantastic hoax. It was discovered rather quickly that Henry was a largely ineffectual Canadian spy, not an English one, and that his letters were filled with dubious information cribbed from various New England and Canadian newspapers. Moreover, the intermediary who delivered the letters to Monroe was no French nobleman but an imposter who had played the role to ingratiate himself into Washington's high society. He was Henry's accomplice in the affair, splitting the exorbitant reward with him. The revelation that the president had paid such a princely sum for fraudulent documents was embarrassing, but it did not amount to so much as a speed bump in Madison's steady march toward war.
One wonders why the president felt that these documents, which only confirmed what many Democratic-Republicans like himself already suspected, were worth such a steep price. New England Federalists ultimately showed their true blue colors at the so-called Hartford Convention, which took place at the tail end of the war from December 1814 to January 1815. Some members of the convention toyed with the idea of seceding from the Union, though no such proposal was adopted. Instead, the Hartford delegates drafted a demand for a host of political reforms, including amending the Constitution to eliminate the 3/5 clause and re-balance political power between free and slave states. In the epitome of bad timing, representatives of the convention arrived with these demands in Washington just as the city was celebrating news of Andrew Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans and the end of the war (which occurred in reverse order), causing easily outraged Democratic-Republicans to see the demands as unpatriotic at best and treasonous at worst.
Both the War of 1812 and the Civil War demonstrated, in different ways, not only political conflict over slavery but also the imperfect union of the country during the first half of the nineteenth century. The War of 1812 exposed the feeble communications and transport networks that ineffectively knit the disparate states together, and it incited New Englanders' jealousy of the seemingly outsized political power of slaveholders. The Civil War exposed the ideological divisions of a country that still had not achieved a substantial measure of national unity, and it revealed slave state leaders' consternation with the advances of a free soil movement that pledged to obstruct slavery's expansion. In some ways then, the Civil War perhaps finally corrected some of the grave problems first exposed in the War of 1812. So as we commemorate the Civil War, let's not forget America's most important non-victorious war and the connections between the two. The state of Virginia has planned a commemoration of the War of 1812 and hopefully others will follow suit.
I can think of no better way of illustrating how to combine our commemorations of the War of 1812 and the Civil War than with the following episode from Ellen Degeneres' old sitcom, in which she joined her father in a Civil War re-enactment. At about the 10:50 mark her proud father offers her the family sword, which, he announces, her great-great grandfather had used in 1865..... in a re-enactment of the War of 1812.
love the ellen clip