William C. Davis - The Greatest Fury: The Battle of New Orleans and the Rebirth of America

I T WAS A time of omens. The greatest comet in memory stretched a million miles across the night skies. The most powerful earthquakes in recorded history twisted the great Mississippi at will, swallowing communities, spitting up islands, and ringing church bells from New Orleans to Boston. With the heavens and the firmament in conflict with each other, Shawnee mystics foretold a war between the living and the dead.

In an atmosphere redolent of Revelations forecast of woe for the earth, it was fitting that men make war among themselves, even a small war for little reasons. In 1783, when Great Britain bid grudging farewell to thirteen colonies in North America, it still had an empire in the vastness of Canada, the islands of the West Indies, and elsewhere. Nine years later, when Britain began two decades of war with France, success depended on sustaining her thriving mercantile economy to fund the contest, and that meant holding supremacy on the seas, both of which threatened the Americans, whose burgeoning carrying trade depended heavily on France. Heavily committed in Europe, Britain neither needed nor wanted a conflict with the infant United States. Still, if Yankee trade or alliances threatened its efforts on the Continent, John Bull would accept a war with America better than lose a war with France.

The new nation across the Atlantic sailed an uncertain course through waters peppered with political shoals and reefs, trying to safeguard its flowering commerce and growing national pride. It flirted with neutrality, an alliance with France, and an implicit alliance with Britain, but sitting on the fence in a world at war only makes a better target. For three years the United States and France even fought a so-called naval Quasi-War that hard-pressed Napoleon soon enough halted. A brief peace in Europe in 1802 could not hold, and a year later they were fighting again, each striking at the other by acts to curtail its trade with America. That only aggravated other issues, chief among them the impressment policy of British naval captains who forcibly removed seamen from American vessels on the pretext that they were deserters from the Royal Navy. The number actually taken was small, but it was an emotional issue that outraged national pride exaggerated dramatically.

The United States responded to this and other provocations by barring all British imports, and then by a total embargo on all American foreign trade that fathered a thriving smuggling enterprise. In 1809, Congress allowed trade with all nations but Britain and France to resume, and two years later removed the ban on France. No matter how America tried to use its foreign trade as a weapon, it failed, harming Yankee merchants and exporters more than it did the European combatants.

Watching and condemning all of this was Thomas Jeffersons new Democratic Republican Party, and especially a wing of younger congressmen mostly from the southern and trans-Allegheny states called War Hawks. They took office in November 1811. Their inflammatory rhetoric reflected the comet still blazing overhead, even as their incessant hammering on commerce and national honor echoed stresses just weeks away from fracturing the earths crust. Backed by Jeffersons successor, James Madison, they ultimately persuaded Congress to take a more aggressive stand toward Britain. In June 1812, as the waning comet still fluttered faintly above continuing aftershocks of the great quakes, Madison and Congress declared war on Britain.