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November 1 - November 3, 2019
“Make friends by being honest and keep them by being steadfast. Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue for slander—settle them cases yourself!”2 Andy wouldn’t forget her advice, and he would take care to settle more than just slander. Great Britain had left him an orphan, and one day he would settle that score.
June 1, 1812, America declared war. After a hot debate, James Madison’s war resolution was passed by a vote of 19–13 in the Senate and 79–49 in the House of Representatives,
Less than thirty years removed from the last war, and with virtually no national army, were Americans prepared to take on Britain and defend themselves, this time without the help of France? The world was about to find out.
The Federalist Party, mainly representing northerners whose economy relied on British trade, had unanimously opposed the war declaration.
Five years earlier, when a British ship attacked the U.S. Navy’s Chesapeake, killing three sailors and taking four others from the ship to impress them into service to the Crown, then-president Thomas Jefferson had attempted to retaliate. To protest this blatant hostility, Congress passed the Embargo Act, prohibiting overseas trade with Great Britain. Unfortunately,
A major Shawnee uprising in the Indiana Territory in 1811 escalated the fear. And as the bloodshed increased, there were reports that the British were providing the Indians with weapons and promising them land if they carried out violent raids against American settlers.
The West had gained new influence in the elections of 1810 and 1811, when the region sent a spirited band of new representatives to the Capitol. These men saw British attitudes toward the United States as a threat to American liberty and independence; they also saw the need for westward expansion, a move that the British were trying to thwart. Led by a young Kentuckian named Henry Clay, they quickly gained the nickname War Hawks, because, despite the risks, they knew it was time to fight. Clay became Speaker of the House and he, along with the War Hawks and like-minded Republicans from the
...more
of 1812 began.
he accepted an appointment as a public prosecutor in North Carolina’s western district. That took him beyond the boundaries of the state, to the other side of the Appalachians. Jackson arrived in a region that, a few years after his arrival, became the state of Tennessee.
By the time Tennessee joined the Union, in 1796, he had won the respect of his neighbors, who chose him as their delegate to the state’s constitutional convention. Jackson then served as Tennessee’s first congressman for one session before becoming a U.S. senator. But he found life in the political realm of the Federal City frustrating—too little got done for the decisive young Jackson—and he
accepted an appointment to Tennessee’s Supreme Court.
His next venture into public service
elected major general of the Tennessee militia, in February 1802.
Leading the militia was a good fit for Jackson’s style,
As Jackson would soon say to his troops, in the autumn of 1812, “Every man of the western country turns his eyes intuitively upon the mouth of the Mississippi.”
Jefferson sensed an opportunity. He dispatched his friend James Monroe to Paris, instructing him to try to purchase New Orleans.
The Louisiana Purchase had been completed in 1803 and, at a purchase price of $15 million for more than eight hundred thousand square miles of territory, the land had been a staggering bargain (the cost to America’s treasury worked out to less than three cents an acre).
Although Louisiana became a state in April 1812, the British still questioned the legitimacy of America’s ownership of the Louisiana Territory—Napoleon had taken Louisiana from Spain and, to some Europeans, it remained rightfully a possession of the Spanish Crown. Jackson feared that sort of thinking could provide the British with just the pretext they needed to interfere with the American experiment—capturing New Orleans would be the perfect way to disrupt America’s western expansion.
Who would lead the nation to war?
But first Jackson had to convince the men in Washington that a general from the backwoods was the one to lead the fight. That would be anything but easy.
The Boston Evening Post soon dubbed the conflict “Mr. Madison’s War.” With no template to follow—he was the first American president ever to sign a formal declaration of war—James Madison was largely on his own.
Madison’s usually reliable friend Thomas Jefferson added his voice from Monticello. He thought the capture of Canada a sure thing.
Guiding the charge toward Canada was Madison’s secretary of war, William Eustis,
Eustis lacked battle experience, and it soon showed.
the Federalists regarded going to war as foolhardy and unnecessary, and they had unanimously voted against the president’s war declaration. Though the War Hawks had prevailed, with bad news from the front, opposition voices had only grown louder.
The two dozen warships of the American fleet were outnumbered at least thirty to one by the Royal Navy,
Even if Madison had the money and unity he needed, his military leaders were not what they should be: his generals were old, his secretary of war was incompetent, and his secretary of the navy was usually intoxicated.
Essentially, Armstrong was asking Jackson to disband his army, disarm his men, and leave them to find their way home as best they could.
even wrote to the president: “I cannot believe [that] after inviting us to rally round the standard of country in its defense . . . you would dismiss us from service eight hundred miles from our homes, without money, without supplies.” It has to be a “mistake,” wrote Jackson.16
they covered an average of eighteen miles a day.
Along the way, one soldier remarked upon Jackson’s toughness. Then another observed that he was as “tough as hickory.” Said aloud, the comparison rang true and, soon enough, his men took to calling their commander “Hickory” and eventually “Old Hickory.”
In the meantime, another danger to the people of the West was brewing. As Jackson had feared, the Indian trouble in the region was growing more serious by the day. A warring faction of Creeks called the Red Sticks (the tomahawk-like war clubs they carried were painted red) had allied themselves with the British. Soon enough, Andrew Jackson would have to face them down.
The more serious matter of a slander to Rachel Jackson’s honor had led Jackson to an armed face-to-face with the sitting governor of Tennessee, John Sevier, in 1803.
Then in June one of his officers, William Carroll, asked the general to be his second.
Jackson was left bleeding profusely after lead from Jesse Benton’s pistol smashed the general’s left shoulder and lodged in his upper arm.
Red Eagle and his band of Creeks had surprised the inhabitants of a small village inside a crude stockade near the Alabama River.
on August 30, 1813, all but a handful of the roughly three hundred inhabitants—including many women and children—had been slaughtered.
Jackson also faced a deadline. The first Volunteers had enlisted for one year and expected to be discharged from service on December 10.
neck to the north provided the only land entry, across which the Red Sticks had constructed a breastwork. Built of large timbers and earth, this fortress wall was 8 feet tall and 350 yards wide. It was lined with portholes through which the Indians could shoot at attackers.
With the U.S. victory at Horseshoe Bend, the Creek War was effectively over.
Jackson negotiated the Treaty of Fort Jackson. On August 9, 1814, the Creek chiefs signed it, agreeing to give the United States—and the man they called Sharp Knife—more than twenty-two million acres of land.
The Royal Navy might lead the siege, but to get to New Orleans its ships would have to sail a hundred miles up the Mississippi.
If the British were to send a land force from the east, where would they land? Jackson believed that the most likely site was Mobile, a city 150 miles to the east,
When the Seven Years’ War in Europe shifted the political landscape (the 1756–63 conflict was known to Americans as the French and Indian War), Louisiana was ceded to Spain.
Action was required; the threat was real. “Before one month,” he warned, “the British . . . expect to be in possession of Mobile and all the surrounding country.” If he did not get the support he needed, he was not sure he could stop the British from taking this key port and then moving on to New Orleans.
On August 24, the British played their hand: At the little town of Bladensburg, eight miles from Washington, the British attacked.
there were some four thousand British troops facing perhaps seven thousand American defenders—but he was wrong. Led by the British general Robert Ross and Sir George Cockburn, a hot-tempered admiral in the Royal Navy, the enemy sliced through the line of intimidated militiamen, captured Bladensburg, and headed straight for Washington.
In the end, it wasn’t the brave efforts of the American people that put out the fires or stopped the destruction. Only the arrival, with miraculous timing, of a powerful storm prevented more of the city from being damaged by the flames.
At Madison’s request, James Monroe took on a second job in the cabinet, becoming secretary of war as well as secretary of state.
Lafitte and his men were being invited—or were they being forced?—into British service.
