This Day in Diplomatic History (Xmas Peace ‘Ends’ War of 1812)

Dec. 24, 1814—The “Second War of American Independence” ended on a far less triumphant note than the first, but given all that had happened since the start of hostilities, the United States was fortunate that its five-man delegation, led by John Quincy Adams (pictured here in a portrait by Gilbert Stuart), signed a peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium on the basis of status quo ante bellum (a return to the conditions before war broke out).

I put the word “ends” in quotes in the headline for this reason: because of still comparatively primitive communications, word of the “Christmas Peace” (i.e., the Treaty of Ghent) did not reach New York City until February 11, 1815. The newly two-month lag not only allowed the Battle of New Orleans to occur, but also other smaller engagements before the War of 1812 actually concluded.

It might be said that the British lost at the negotiating table what they had gained on the battlefield. The Americans, particularly Adams and fellow negotiator Henry Clay, might have felt annoyed with each other behind closed doors, but they preserved a united front before the British and held on grimly until circumstances turned more favorable. In addition, they represented a variety of regions and political interests (even a moderate Federalist, James Bayard, was present), and President James Madison gave them more or less maximum freedom to maneuver.

In contrast, the British government handicapped itself even from the start by repeating the same mistake they had done in dealing with Adams’ father and his fellow envoys in peace negotiations to end the American Revolution 30 years before: It sent inexperienced, lackluster negotiators, this time including an admiralty lawyer, an admiral and a young Undersecretary for War and the Colonies). Furthermore, unlike the American team (trusted by Madison by necessity because of the ocean between them), His Majesty’s government insisted that its team consult with them continually before agreeing to any terms.

For much of the five-month period of the negotiations, Madison was probably sorry that he had not gone back to Congress in 1812 and asked it to rescind its declaration of war once news reached it that one of the stated war causes, interference with American trade with France, had been eliminated as a result of Britain ending its Orders in Council curbing neutrals’ shipping to France and its continental allies. Thereafter, much of the war had gone badly indeed for the Americans—particularly on land, where the British had captured Detroit and, in late August 1814, even invaded Washington and burned the White House.

As a result, the British were initially in no mood to give anything away. In fact, their backs stiffened considerably, as they demanded territory in northern Maine, demilitarization of the Great Lakes and navigation rights on the Mississippi.

The reserved, intense Adams might have been dismayed by Clay’s late-night carousing, but one of the Kentuckian’s pastimes, gambling, proved helpful in the talks. As an aficionado of the game “Brag,” Clay excelled at bluffing. And so, at a particularly thorny point in the negotiations, he let it be known that he would be packing his bags and going home. The British team’s tone then moderated, at least somewhat.

What strengthened the American position the most, however, as I noted in a prior post, was Thomas Macdonough’s victory at Plattsburgh in September, which forced an end to the invasion of New York. That, coupled with Americans’ unexpectedly staff resistance at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, led the British to contemplate with growing dismay the prospect of a war thousands of miles away that would increasingly drain the treasury’s coffers.

The turning point on the British side came when the government asked for the advice of its victor in the Peninsular campaign in Spain against Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington. Though the “Iron Duke” would later show, as Prime Minister, his reactionary tendencies, on this occasion his military background allowed him to speak credibly and realistically. He not only expressed reluctance to lead a strengthened military force in Canada when the British couldn’t even control the Great Lakes, but pointed out that the British government could not insist on its stance of uti possidetis (right of possession of what was taken in battle): “You can get no territory; indeed, the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any.”

At that point, the British agreed to the American terms of status quo ante bellum. In the end, both the Americans and the British (with their Canadian colonists) could claim to have gotten something, though it hardly justified the lives lost to this point. 

The British and the Canadians had turned back American attempts to seize Canada and could now concentrate on repairing the damage left by the Napoleonic Wars (along with stamping out the French emperor’s return to power by finally defeating him at Waterloo the following year). The Americans had not won a single concession on any of the stated war causes—including the impressment of U.S. sailors and the rights of neutral U.S. vessels—but they retained the Great Lakes, allowing them to continue their expansion into the Midwest and their rise as a continental power, with the threat of any future British resort to force now removed. Moreover, the U.S. had extricated itself from a conflict that one of the negotiators, Albert Gallatin, had recently been forced to tell Madison would have to be continued without any financial assistance from any European power.

The one group that lost at the negotiating table were Britain's Native-American allies. Even before the final phase of the talks, one British negotiator, Henry Goulburn, indicated that they were “but a secondary object…As the Allies of Great Britain she must include them in the peace…But when the boundary [for Britain’s proposed buffer state along the Great Lakes] is once defined it is immaterial whether Indians are upon it or not.  Let it be a desert.  But we shall know that you cannot come upon us to attack us without crossing it.”

 

But Clay, the leader of the trans-Allegheny faction that had formed the backbone of the Congressional “war hawks,” dug in his heels on ceding any part of the Northwest Territories. In the end, all that the Native-Americans could come away with in the treaty was language entitling them to “all possessions, rights and privileges which they may have enjoyed, or been entitled to in 1811”—a clause that was nonenforceable without a clearly-drawn map of their land reserves. 

 

The Massachusetts Historical Society is in the midst of an extraordinary project: putting on Twitter the voluminous diaries of Adams. I have used those Twitter posts to recreate the account by perhaps the greatest diplomat in American history of how the treaty was concluded:

“Peace, between the United States and Great Britain, signed at the house of the British Plenipotentiaries. A few mistakes in the Copies were rectified & then the six Copies were signed and sealed by the… British & the… American Plenipotentiaries. Lord Gambier delivered to me the three British Copies [of the treaty]… which he said he hoped would be permanent; and I told him [Lord Gambier] I hoped it would be the last Treaty of Peace between Great-Britain and the United States.”

And so it has been.

 

This Day in Naval History (British Invasion Stymied at Plattsburgh)

September 11, 1814—In a war partly caused by British seizure of personnel aboard U.S. vessels, one such victim made good on his vow to “make England remember the day she impressed an American sailor.” 

Outnumbered in ships and men, Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough not only stopped what could have been a ruinous invasion of New York State via Lake Chaplain at the Battle of Plattsburgh, but through his victory gave American negotiators in Belgium a better position to achieve more favorable terms in ending the War of 1812.

Approximately 11,000 of the best, battle-hardened troops from Britain’s Napoleonic Wars had been dispatched to move down from Upper Canada into the Empire State. The movement was both a retaliatory measure (against an American republic that, by the British way of thinking, should have joined them against Napoleon, a dictator who posed a clear and present danger to European security) and a necessity (two-thirds of the British army in Canada were fed by American contractors—mostly Vermonters and New Yorkers who showed no scruple about trading with the enemy during war).

The American flotilla had been so hastily cobbled together that many matches for its guns were discovered to be defective, and the captain of one of its divisions was a mere 16-year-old midshipman. In fact, the makeshift navy possessed “a decided advantage only in their commander,” Henry Adams observed admiringly in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison. Still only 30 years old, Macdonough had already lived up to the military and naval legacy of his Delaware family. He had won wide plaudits for his bravery while serving under Stephen Decatur in the expedition against Tripoli’s pirates (the American republic’s first military encounter with the Moslem world).

But his truly formative pre-war experience was in 1810, when he was captured by a British “press gang” and taken aboard a frigate. That night, after securing the clothes of a British seaman, he requested and was granted permission to “overhaul a cutter carrying rum.” Once in the water, instead of going to the cutter, he made for the vessel from which he’d been seized, dodging constant fire sent his way after his ruse had been discovered.

Macdonough’s cunning, daring escape was one of the few acts of American defiance against Britain’s odious impressment policy. Particularly during the all-consuming struggle against Napoleon, the low pay, poor conditions, and near certainty of deadly action led to a severe manpower shortage aboard British vessels. So from 1793 to 1812, British “press gangs” had stopped American ships at sea, taking with them approximately 15,000 sailors. The British government might have been desperate, but even the pretext of plausibility they might have had (e.g., taking men who had deserted the Royal Navy for the American merchant marine) vanished in the case of Macdonough, a native-born American.

As the 23-year-old Theodore Roosevelt described it in his pioneering account, The Naval War of 1812, MacDonough had achieved his victory at Plattsburgh by leaving virtually nothing to chance:

“Not only were his vessels provided with springs, but also with anchors to be used astern in any emergency. The Saratoga was further prepared for a change of wind, or for the necessity of winding ship, by having a kedge planted broad off on each of her bows, with a hawser and preventer hawser (hanging in bights under water) leading from each quarter to the kedge on that side. There had not been time to train the men thoroughly at the guns; and to make these produce their full effect the constant supervision of the officers had to be exerted.”

Having taken all human precautions, he then turned his attention to an otherworldly source. On the morning of battle, he knelt on his ship, the Saratoga, and led his men in prayer.

The battle, completed in under three hours that afternoon, was decisive. The name “Saratoga” proved a good omen, as Plattsburgh, like that earlier American Revolution battle, marked the end of further British designs on the American interior. Sir George Prevost, governor-general of Canada, beat a hasty retreat back to his homebase.

Revenge was doubly sweet for this commander, then. It also represented a stinging comeuppance to British political and military authorities who had expected a cakewalk down Lake Champlain into the Empire State. 

When the news was received in London in mid-October, it arrived at the same time as the British failure to take Baltimore and their defeat at Fort Erie. This “lamentable event to the civilized world,” in the words of the Times of London, undercut the British stance of holding out for status uti possidetis (state of possession) at the bargaining table in Ghent. The American delegation (which included future Secretary of State and President John Quincy Adams) could not move the impressment issue that had been one of the causes of the conflict, but it avoided losing half of Maine, one of the British delegation's demands only a couple of weeks before they heard the news about the military reverses.

Flashback, August 1814: ‘Bladensburg Races’ Imperil DC

“The rockets’ red glare/The bombs bursting in air” represents the climax of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as well as the principal image that many Americans have of the War of 1812. But the image that so inspired eyewitness Francis Scott Key at the successful defense of Baltimore in September 1814 had struck such terror into American soldiers a few weeks before that they fled the battlefield in droves, opening Baltimore to bombardment –and, more immediately, Washington, D.C. to burning by British forces.

The Battle of Bladensburg, occurring on August 24, 1814, was nicknamed the “Bladensburg Races” for the disgraceful manner in which American militia fled the field. It left the nation's capital vulnerable within hours--and that's exactly what happened. (I described that process in an earlier post.) That’s one reason why the United States government over the years has allowed it to be overrun by suburban residences, a cemetery, parkland, and commercial developments.

It deserves to be better known. Americans would then understand that our military history is more rife with disaster than they could ever imagine. In other words, it didn’t start with Afghanistan or Iraq, or even Vietnam, folks. Nearly all of the political and military figures on the American side failed to distinguish themselves.

The British had nearly all the advantages on their side as their invasion force landed in Maryland in early August 1814: top commanders with more than 20 years in the field; a tough force, continually battle-tested by the Napoleonic Wars; and a desire to avenge the burning of government buildings in York (today’s Toronto) in the American campaign to take Canada the year before.

With Napoleon exiled (albeit, as it turned out, only temporarily), the British government thought it could spare a few troops to fight in North America. The total allotted—a mere 4,000—was only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands committed to the titanic struggle against the French emperor, but it was still more than the number of regulars that United States could muster.

The instructions for Major-General Robert Ross, a key subordinate in the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign, were merely that he create a diversion along the U.S. coast to relieve the pressure by American forces against Canada. That it turned into a great deal more owed much to the spectacular unpreparedness of American civil and military authorities.

Secretary of War John Armstrong bore particular responsibility for the American failure in this campaign. Henry Adams, in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison, is properly scathing about the monumental irresponsibility of this “indolent man, negligent of detail”:

“Armstrong's management of the Northern campaign caused severe criticism; but his neglect of the city of Washington exhausted the public patience. For two years Washington stood unprotected; not a battery or a breastwork was to be found on the river bank except the old and untenable Fort Washington, or Warburton. A thousand determined men might reach the town in thirty-six hours and destroy it before any general alarm could be given. Yet no city was more easily protected than Washington, at that day, from attack on its eastern side; any good engineer could have thrown up works in a week that would have made approach by a small force impossible. Armstrong neglected to fortify.”

The commander chosen by President James Madison to defend the Chesapeake, Brigadier General William Winder, was not much better. A fine, even brilliant, lawyer before the war, he had only a year of soldiering under his belt, and that had not been terribly distinguished, ending with his capture in the Canadian campaign. His chief qualifications were, in fact, familial rather than political: his Federalist uncle, the governor of Maryland, would be far better disposed toward providingmilitia for the defense of this region with a close relative in charge, Madison figured.

It was an appointment as disastrous as Armstrong’s. Preoccupied with paperwork and with riding around the region to get a better sense of the terrain, Winder merely grumbled that he didn’t have enough militia. He made no effort during the six weeks between his appointment and Bladensburg to select lines of defense or erect entrenchments.

Part of the problem was utter confusion about British intentions. Winder didn’t know if the invaders would assault Washington (via the Potomac River) or Baltimore (then the nation’s third-largest city), via the Patuxent River—or if they simply wanted to clear out the harassing flotilla of gunboats expertly put together by Joshua Barney. Eventually, with intelligence gleaned in raids over the last year by Admiral George Cockburn, the cautious Ross was persuaded that he would find little resistance if he attacked Washington.

The British had better intelligence (courtesy of escaped slaves) than the Americans. Knowing nothing except that British ships were rumored to be in the Potomac area, Secretary of State James Monroe rode out of Washington to scout the countryside. What he saw at Benedict, Md., convinced him that the British were making a thrust at DC. He wrote to the President, advising him to secure important government documents and records.

When it was finally determined what the British intentions were, Madison and Monroe hurried to Bladensburg. Monroe, conferring with one of Winder’s subordinates, adjusted the placement of troops. Nobody seemed bothered by the fact that Monroe was a civilian—he had, actually, more combat experience, by virtue of his Revolutionary War record, than either Winder or Armstrong. But he made the change without telling Winder, thus worsening coordination of troop movements.

Officially, the Battle of Bladensburg lasted between three and four hours, but for all effects and purposes it might as well have been five minutes—the point at which iron-tube canisters fired by the British, the so-called “Congreve rockets,” began to rain terror over the Americans. Winder was supposed to have 6,900 men at his disposal, but they were as inconstant as summer fireflies.

One after another American line of militia broke and fled. Historian Daniel Walker Howe called the panic that followed "the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms.” Among those who escaped: Francis Scott Key, serving as an aide to Gen. Samuel Smith.

My prior post on General Henry Hull and the fall of Detroit discussed some of the difficulties attendant on the Madison administration’s reliance on the militia. The disastrous reaction of these provisional, inexperienced, undisciplined soldiers began a slow but decisive turn away from militia on the part of subsequent Presidents. For all their fears of what a standing army could mean to civil liberties and fiscal prudence, Americans increasingly came to believe that such soldiers could not be depended on.

One serviceman who proved that he could be was Barney. The Revolutionary War seadog was the one American who recognized the danger from the British forces early on, concocted an inventive plan to ward off the threat, then did not buckle when the odds were against him. The flotilla of barges that he had built and assembled had continually harassed the British until, faced with that navy’s overwhelming force, he had reluctantly scuttled the vessels just before Bladensburg lest they fall into the wrong hands.

On the morning of battle, Barney convinced Madison to allow him to take most of his men away from guarding a bridge to forming another line of defense, near a road the British would take. Even after the rest of the American forces melted away in the face of the Congreve rockets, Barney and his men poured fire into the enemy. Grievously wounded and finally overwhelmed by superior British numbers, Barney was visited by Ross and Vice Admiral Alexander Cockrane, commander in chief of the Royal Navy's ships on the North American Station. The “flotillaman” and his crew “have given us the only fighting we have had," Cochrane told Ross.

A comparison of casualties bears out Cockrane’s statement. American losses totaled approximately 25 killed and 41 wounded. But the British left 64 men killed and 185 wounded on the battlefield. In other words, if the other American units had put up anywhere close to the resistance that Barney and his men had, Ross might have thought twice about any further offensive maneuvers against the Americans, let alone the devastating one he was about to unleash on Washington.

The will to fight was not the only example provided by Barney that was lost on his countrymen. Another was the willingness to use and reward anyone who backed American arms, even if they happened to be slaves. A crucial part of Barney’s mixed group of sailors and Marines consisted of African-Americans. (Opportunities to serve were better in the Navy because of the need to fill positions; the result was that roughly 15% to 20% of all posts were manned by African-Americans.)

One of the key figures in Barney’s force was an escaped slave, Charles Ball, a cook and seaman. When the fighting in the battle had turned hottest, Ball had manned the cannon to Barney’s left until his the latter’s bad wound had ended the resistance of the U.S. forces.

An American republic committed to freedom, however, did not realize until way too late—if it ever really did—how self-destructive its policy on slavery was. During the Chesapeake campaign, a regiment of ex-slaves known as the Colonial Marines had trained under Cockburn. According to an estimate by Harper’s contributing editor Andrew Cockburn, his naval ancestor might have been responsible for the liberation of approximately 6,000 slaves in the conflict.

A half-century later, Union commanders, at least partly from necessity, came to see the wisdom of British use of African-Americans. Emancipated slaves provided vital intelligence to the North in the Civil War, and their courage under fire was celebrated in Glory.