Journal of the Early Republic

Wars are notoriously protean, slippery events. In the words of the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz, trying to understand what is happening in the heat of battle, let alone what happened the day before or might happen the day after, can be like peering into a fog at twilight. Over time as well as space, armed conflicts rarely look the same close up as they do from a distance. Because different people experience war in different ways, wars never have just one meaning, including for people with similar goals and objectives. As the fog of war spreads, as figures loom in and out of view—sometimes taking on grotesque forms, sometimes appearing in unexpected locations, sometimes vanishing without a [End Page 109] trace—the question of what any given conflict (or set of conflicts) means for the men and women caught in its grip changes too. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, as Clausewitz aptly observed, the results are often murky.¹

The War of 1812 is no exception, as the three books under review here show. As Donald R. Hickey writes in the introduction to the Library of America’s document compilation on the war, the second contest between Britain and the United States—the American Revolutionary War, of course, was the first one—remains in many ways a “forgotten conflict” (xxx). Because the outcome was so inconclusive, with the Madison administration failing to achieve any of its wartime objectives, both sides were able to claim victory at the war’s end. No less important, the War of 1812 was not one war but several. Some of these are well known. Today, Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner” are familiar parts of the war’s narrative. But Wellington’s soldiers were not Jackson’s only concern on the Gulf Coast, as the region’s Indians already knew and as the Spanish would soon find out. And for thousands of enslaved men and women, the British forces that besieged Fort McHenry were not the “haughty host” in the third verse of Key’s anthem (reproduced with the other three verses in Hickey’s anthology) but potential friends and liberators (545). These too were part of the war two hundred years ago, though their stories do not easily fit into a single narrative.

As the title suggests, Paul Gilje’s Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights is about an especially important part of the war: the war at sea. In 1812, one of the United States’s principal demands was that Britain respect the right of its ships and sailors to trade freely with other nations. As Gilje notes, this was the war’s central story for Americans at the time, especially Americans who read newspapers and who participated in the republic’s charged and often-toxic partisan politics. Although the war’s maritime origins can be heavy sailing for modern readers, Gilje does a masterful job explaining the underlying issues. When Congress declared war, Britain was locked in a global, life-and-death struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. Under the rules of war, Britain claimed the right to seize neutral ships that traded with France and its empire. At the height [End Page 110] of Napoleon’s power, that empire included all of continental Europe, as well as parts of the Americas and the Caribbean, and the perpetually undermanned Royal Navy viewed all British-born able-bodied seamen as legitimate recruits, including seamen onboard U.S. ships. In the face of these threats, Americans sought to initiate what Gilje—in a nod to Felix Gilbert’s influential essay To the Farewell Address (1961)—calls a new era of “enlightened diplomacy” (36). Under this new world order as Americans imagined it, the ships of all nations would have the right to trade freely in times of war as well as peace, and great powers like Britain would stop preying on the citizens of lesser powers like the United States. As the basis for a practical diplomacy, such ideas stood little chance of being implemented, but as a call to arms, they were potent indeed.

Not surprisingly, free trade and sailors’ rights had a particular resonance for the American mariners whose livelihoods and, often, lives Britain’s dominion of the sea threatened. Gilje, who has previously written about dockside workers, artisans, and sailors in the early republic, tells this part of the war’s history with particular aplomb. For ordinary sailors, there was no need to read the French philosophers whose ideas Gilje, taking his cues from Gilbert, sees as undergirding the new diplomacy. For many Americans, however, including most Federalists and quite a few Republicans, common seamen were hardly sympathetic characters—racially diverse, notoriously unruly, often low born, and worldly in ways that respectable society found both risible and threatening. Under Jefferson’s two administrations, attitudes began to shift, as Jack Tar’s “ordeal” came to stand in for the maritime plight of the nation as a whole. First during the Tripolitan War of 1803–1804, then continuing through the bloody Chesapeake affair and Jefferson’s retaliatory embargo in 1807, Republicans embraced the cause of sailors’ rights, using it to make common cause with ordinary Americans at sea in the same way that they did yeoman farmers and artisans on land. That many sailors were black does not seem to have troubled publicists. “Jack Tar,” writes Gilje, “was a citizen as worthy of protection as any member of the elite” (181).

The result is an engaging and compelling account of a cause that Jefferson’s Republicans turned into an effective slogan during the War of 1812 and that remained a centerpiece of U.S. relations with Britain until the Civil War. But Americans weren’t the only people with reason to dislike the Royal Navy. In The Evil Necessity, Denver Brunsman shows that the naval press gangs that roved ports around the Atlantic world [End Page 111] were equally unpopular in Britain. Because his narrative ends in 1763—the American and French Revolutionary wars, discussed briefly in the epilogue, are to be the subject of a projected second volume—Brunsman makes only passing reference to the impressment controversies that poisoned Anglo–American relations in the decade before 1812, yet his analysis dovetails nicely with Gilje’s. By the time of Napoleon’s final defeat, approximately three quarters of the men in the Royal Navy had been taken against their will, many, Brunsman suggests, from merchant ships sailing under the flags of neutral powers like the United States (246).

Brunsman’s main target is the British naval historian N. A. M. Rodger. According to Rodger, Britain’s senior service, at least at the time of the two mid-eighteenth-century wars with France, was effectively a volunteer force; despite its notoriety, Rodger claimed, impressment was “for the most part a humdrum affair” that played a relatively small role in manning the Georgian navy.² Drawing on a range of sources, including numerous contemporary accounts of anti-impressment riots in Britain, Ireland, North America, and the West Indies, Brunsman argues the opposite, insisting that for skilled seamen in particular, impressment was “fundamental” to Britain’s naval success during the first half of the eighteenth century, and he contends that the practice had “devastating consequences” for seaport communities (2). Brunsman is careful not to fall into the trap, which he associates with the work of Marxist historians such as Marcus Rediker, of assuming that resistance was the only popular response to the navy’s depredations. Once captured sailors were on board the king’s ships, he writes, they often made peace with their new situation, embracing the “shipboard discipline, male camaraderie, and … professional ethic” (12). Careful readers may note that this is not all that different from how Rodger depicts impressment’s effects. There is no question, however, that the Royal Navy’s press gangs were both profoundly disruptive and deeply unpopular in the British and colonial ports where they operated. Humdrum they were not.

Among other things, Brunsman’s analysis is a reminder that foreign wars are often civil conflicts as well. During the three-day Knowles Riot in 1747, crowds in Boston responded to an indiscriminate sweep by [End Page 112] naval press gangs with protests that included breaking the windows of the colonial assembly house, burning what they (mistakenly) took to be a naval barge on the town common, and kidnapping several officers. The last action so infuriated Admiral Charles Knowles, the British commander, that he threatened to turn his guns on the town and show its inhabitants that “the Kings Government is … as good as a Mob” (233). Nor was the violence in Boston unusual, as ports in Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies all experienced similar protests. Partly in response, the navy adopted less confrontational methods during the Seven Years’ War, yet the potential for conflict remained. During the 1760s, as Brunsman and Gilje both note, anger in North American ports over impressment contributed to mounting discontent over Parliament’s colonial taxes and reforms. Likewise, memories of colonial jack tars who resisted press gangs before the revolution may have emboldened British naval officers to search U.S.-flagged vessels after 1783. And American mariners had long memories too, as an episode that Gilje relates shows: In 1796, when a press gang seized an American sailor in Liverpool, 250 of his countrymen stormed the recruiting station, freed the captive, and forced the outnumbered officer and his men to “give three cheers to the United States of America” (106). Although the antagonists now belonged to different nations, the trans-Atlantic civil war that was the American Revolution, if not the disturbances in colonial seaports during the 1740s and 1750s, was surely on the minds of everyone present.

If the war at sea was central to how Americans understood the conflict with Britain, it was not the war’s only theatre. West of the Appalachians, the war was an Indian war or, to be precise, several Indian wars; in the Chesapeake and the Lower South, the war had elements of a Britishbacked slave insurrection; in New York and Michigan, it turned into a war to annex Canada; and in New England, the war came close to being a war of secession. In many places, the war was also a low-grade civil war that pitted Republicans, who largely supported the Madison administration, against Federalists, almost all of whom were opposed. For a sense of this wider context, there is no substitute for an anthology like the Library of America document collection. Judiciously chosen and expertly edited by Donald R. Hickey, one of the war’s leading historians, the compilation contains official papers such as General William Henry Harrison’s proclamation of an armistice with the northwestern Indians in 1813 and Admiral Alexander Cochrane’s “appeal” to American slaves, written in 1814 from the British naval station at Bermuda (332, 424–25). [End Page 113] Also present are numerous personal letters and memoirs, some by wellknown figures—Tecumseh, Dolley Madison, and Arthur Wellesley (the future duke of Wellington), all make appearances in the volume—others by the humble and obscure. Among the latter is an account of the British capture of Washington by Paul Jennings, at the time a fifteen-year-old black footman in the president’s household. Along with vignettes about the First Family, Jennings noted with pride the skill and heroism at the battle of Bladensburg of a U.S. naval battery manned predominantly by “tall, strapping negroes” (508). Although they clearly had things in common, Paul Jennings’s war differed in fundamental ways from Mr. Madison’s.

Like most wars, the War of 1812 defies easy classification. So does the war’s conclusion and aftermath. In laying the Treaty of Ghent, which restored peace with Britain, before Congress in 1815, President Madison was confident that the war had been “highly honorable to the nation” (Hickey, 689). Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Madison was right in that the war did help foster a new sense of national pride and unity in the United States, especially among free men and women. For Indians, Africans, and African Americans, on the other hand, both the war and the peace that followed tended to limit opportunities for emancipation and autonomy. In the Union’s often half-hearted attempts to enforce the laws against the slave trade, the post-war popularity of free trade and sailors’ rights effectively scuttled diplomatic efforts to permit British warships to stop American vessels suspected of smuggling human cargo—something the Madison administration quietly allowed before the war³—and it opened the way for the star-spangled banner to become a popular flag of convenience for the illegal African slave trade to Cuba and Brazil. This outcome was certainly not one of Madison’s goals when he pushed the United States into war, but it most definitely was one of the war’s consequences. If the fog of war makes it impossible to know what is happening while the bullets are flying, the same is true of predicting what will happen after the shooting has stopped. As Clausewitz warned, that is what happens when people choose to settle their political differences by other means. [End Page 114]