Facetime

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh, your 20th century guy, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: And I’m your 19th century guy.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf.

PETER: Your 18th century guy. This week marks the bicentennial of America’s first declaration of war, that is the War of 1812.

BRIAN: We’ve already touched on how different the war looks today from opposite sides of the US, Canada border. That would also have been the case 200 years ago. But back then, the war would also have had vastly different meanings within the United States. Not to put too fine a point on it, guys, but the War of 1812 came very close to turning into a civil war.

ED: Yeah, that’s right. 40 some odd years before Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, America faced its first secession crisis. And this time the hot heads threatening to bolt from the United States were Northerners.

PETER: So the hot heads are far from the Federalist party. And their orientation is commercial. They’re into trade. And that means their primary connections are with the great trading partner, that’s with Britain, the enemy in the War of 1812.

And they’re looking south and they see national politics being hijacked by the Republicans. These Republicans are all about protecting farmers. Jefferson, Madison had both imposed trade embargoes that hammered New England’s shipping economy. And then when the Republicans start beating the war drum in 1812, well, that was the last straw.

BRIAN: Those New Englanders, the Federalists, they knew that their coastal towns would be on the front lines of any attack by the British Navy. So in June, when word reached New England that the US had declared war, people shuttered their shops. They rang church bells in protest. Some even flew the flag at half mast. And as the war got under way, those symbolic protests morphed into very real attempts to undermine the government in Washington. Here’s UC Davis historian, Alan Taylor.

ALAN TAYLOR: There are a lot of common people that do a lot of things to try to undermine the war effort. They will prosecute people who enlist in the army for their debts so that they won’t be in a position to enlist. They will smuggle with the British. And there are a fair number of Federalists who are willing to sell military information to the British during the war and they are spies.

BRIAN: Can you describe to us the most concrete steps that politicians in New England took to show their displeasure with this war?

ALAN TAYLOR: Right. Now, it’s important to bear in mind that there is a strong minority of Republicans in New England. And they were quite committed to supporting the war. So the Federalist majority, they kept hoping that they could continue to build their public support and marginalize the Republicans so that if they indeed decided to secede, they would be able to win a Civil War within New England.

So they’re pretty cautious. But they tend to throw caution more to the wind as the war goes so badly. In the end of 1814, you had the governor of Massachusetts, a Federalist, Caleb Strong, who sent a secret emissary to Nova Scotia to consult with the British colonial governor there to sound out whether the British would welcome the secession of New England and would provide a military protection for the New England Federalists should they take this move.

BRIAN: So he was pursuing his own foreign policy in many ways.

ALAN TAYLOR: It’s a contingency plan. So everybody’s hedging their bets. Nobody’s really willing to take the plunge yet.

And there’s also a convention of Federalist delegates from the New England states that meets in Hartford in December of 1814 to see whether they really have the courage to take this plunge. They decide they don’t. But they make a set of pretty non negotiable and completely unacceptable demands of the national government.

And then they scheduled a new convention that would meet in the spring if the war was still ongoing and if their demands had not been met. And it’s pretty clear that if they had indeed met again in the spring that they would have summoned up the courage and would have seceded from the Union. But fortunately for the union, peace arrived in February of 1815 and prevented this further convention.

BRIAN: And did those resolutions, even from 1814, although they fell short of secession, leave the Federalists with egg on their face?

ALAN TAYLOR: Well, it did because their delegation from this Hartford Convention shows up in Washington DC in February of 1815 just at the time the two other pieces of news arrive. The first is of this glorious victory at New Orleans won by Andrew Jackson crushing a British invasion force. And the second piece of news arrives almost at the same time that the United States has negotiated a very favorable peace treaty with the British at Ghent in December of 1814. And both these pieces of news utterly discredit the Federalists. They are cast as defeatists at best and as traitors at worst.

BRIAN: And does that help explain how out of what you call a civil war we get a period in a American history that’s generally considered to be unifying? You know, one wouldn’t expect this kind of conclusion from what you have been describing in terms of all these divisions.

ALAN TAYLOR: Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. You would think that this war, which had been mostly a set of embarrassing defeats for the United States, would lead people to question their form of government and their union. But what happens is this very favorable peace treaty sets off an orgy of celebration in which Americans insist that they won a very glorious victory in the war. And it will lead to a very boisterous form of nationalism, which hadn’t really existed before the war.

BRIAN: Alan Taylor is an historian At UC Davis. His book is The Civil War of 1812.