On June 18, 1812, President James Madison took the nation to war. On that date he signed a bill passed by Congress declaring that the United States was at war with Great Britain.
That war, known as the War of 1812, would have a great effect on the young United States, and particularly on the town of Alexandria, an effect not entirely what was intended.
Why, then, did the young United States on a day in June 202 years ago go to war, for the second time, with the most powerful nation on earth? What did Alexandrians think about this war?
The declaration of war received far from unanimous support in Congress. In the House 39 percent of the Congressmen opposed the war. In the Senate, 41 percent of the Senators were opposed, slightly more than in the House.
In Alexandria, Samuel Snowden, the 38-year-old editor of the Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political, voiced Alexandria’s opposition to the war. In a stinging editorial, he wondered whether Congress was “really so mad as to wish to involve us in a partial and disastrous war.”
Those who favored war, led by President Madison, pointed to the grievous affront that for years their old enemy Great Britain had given the fledgling United States by seizing its ships (389 had been seized since November 1807) and by pressing U.S. citizens into involuntary service in the British navy. Approximately 9,990 American seamen were so impressed from 1807 to January 1, 1812. As Madison indignantly stated in his message to Congress seeking war: “. . . thousands of American citizens . . . have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation. . . . to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes [and] to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors. . .”
War supporters also pointed to the orders adopted by the royal British government and enforced by a naval blockade that arrogantly required U.S. ships to stop at a British port and pay British custom duties before entering a port on the European continent.
Great Britain took these strong measures because it was in the midst of a deadly war with Napoleonic France and badly needed ships, seamen, and trade. For the U.S., however, that was hardly sufficient justification for actions that grated harshly on its proud sovereignty.
In addition, western states, like Ohio and Kentucky, suspected that Great Britain had been urging Indians living in Canada and in the Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois Territories to attack their communities. A Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper emotionally editorialized: “The SCALPING KNIFE and TOMAHAWK of British savages, [are] now again devastating our frontiers.”
Moreover, representatives from these western states, like young Congressman Henry Clay of Kentucky, looked at British Canada and saw easy pickings. Why should the British control that part of North America, and not the U.S.? Clay asserted that the Kentucky militia by itself could easily capture Montreal and proclaimed, “I prefer the troubled ocean of war. . . to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.”
On the other side, those opposing the war were concentrated mainly in the northeastern states. New England merchants, with their minds on the bottom line, thought: so we lose a few ships and a few sailors every now and then – isn’t that just the cost of doing business? Why go to war with the nation with the most powerful navy on earth? Won’t war mean we lose more ships, and won’t it likely bring about New England’s economic collapse? In addition, New Englanders were bothered very little by the problems of Indians in the western states. They would point out how quiet the Indians were along their own borders.
Virginia’s John Randolph was a leading opponent of the war. On the floor of the House, he asked rhetorically how the country could “go to war without money, without men, without a navy . . . ?” (In 1812, the British navy had some 620 warships. The American navy had fewer than 20.)
Randolph may have been motivated in part by his dislike of Henry Clay. When Clay became Speaker of the House, he had ordered Randolph not to bring his hunting dogs onto the House floor as Randolph was accustomed to doing. Randolph later colorfully expressed his thoughts about Clay, describing him as “being so brilliant yet so corrupt, which like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shined and stunk.”
Like Randolph, most Alexandrians opposed the war, following the lead of Samuel Snowden and the Gazette. On the day after war was declared, Snowden prophetically wrote: “While we are . . . beating out the brains of our unoffending neighbors in the north [in Canada], what surety have we that a diversion more horrid will not be meted to us in the south? What pledge have we that a naval force will not be sent to lay our rich maritime cities under enormous contributions, or raze them to the ground?”
He and other Alexandrians would learn that there was little surety at all.
Main Sources:
Alexandria Gazette (During the war, the Gazette was known by different names, but in these articles it will be called simply the Alexandria Gazette.); “1812: The War that Forged a Nation” by Walter R. Borneman; “The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Volume I,” edited by William S. Dudley; and “The War of 1812: A Forgotten War” by Donald R. Hickey.
Ted Pulliam’s articles have appeared in the Washington Post, American History magazine, WWII History magazine, and other publications. His book, “Historic Alexandria: An Illustrated History,” was published in 2011 by the Office of Historic Alexandria.