On the 29th of April the American sloop-of-war Peacock, carrying eighteen guns and commanded by Captain Lewis Warrington, was cruising off the coast of Florida when she sighted the British brig-of-war Epervier, eighteen guns, convoying three merchantmen. The two men-of-war hauled up for action, and after a battle of forty-two minutes the English flag was struck. The Epervier had lost twenty-two men killed or wounded, her rigging was badly cut up, and there was five feet of water in the hold, more than forty shot having entered her hull. The Peacock, which was much heavier than her antagonist, had received very little injury, and but two of her crew were wounded. The prize had $118,000 in specie on board. Soon after this the Peacock cruised in the Bay of Biscay and along the coast of Portugal, and captured fourteen merchantmen.
Captain Johnston Blakeley, in the Wasp, a sister ship to the Peacock, sailed from Portsmouth, N. H., for a cruise in the chops of the English Channel. At daylight on the 28th of June he sighted two sail on the lee beam and one on the weather beam. Avoiding the former, he made for the latter, which proved to be the British brig Reindeer, of eighteen guns. There was considerable manoeuvring for the weather-gauge, but the Englishman succeeded in keeping it, and by three o'clock had come within sixty yards. At that short distance she had five shots at the Wasp, with a shifting carronade, firing round shot and grape, before the Wasp could bring a single gun to bear on her. But Blakeley then made a half-board, and by firing from aft forward finally brought every gun into use. This was too heavy for the Reindeer, and she ran into the Wasp and attempted to board, her crew being led by Captain Manners in person. But every attempt was repelled by the crew of the Wasp, and when Captain Blakeley ordered them in turn to board the enemy, they were on her deck and the British flag was hauled down in one minute. The whole action had lasted but half an hour. The Reindeer had lost twenty-five killed, including her captain, and forty-two wounded; the Wasp, five killed and twenty-two wounded. The upper half of the hull of the Reindeer was a complete wreck, and she had to be burned. A few weeks later, September 1st, the Wasp, after making three prizes, discovered four sail and bore up for the most weatherly of them. Between nine and ten o'clock at night the two ships came close together, and broadsides were exchanged till the enemy became silent. Blakeley hailed, and was answered that she surrendered. She was the British brig Avon, of eighteen guns. But before the Americans had taken possession of her, another British man-of-war came up. The Wasp made ready to engage her; but before she could do so, two others appeared, and she then put up her helm and ran off before the wind. It was afterward learned that the Avon had sunk, and her consort with difficulty rescued the survivors of her crew. In the next twenty days the Wasp took three prizes, and then, continuing her cruise, was never heard from again.
One of the bloodiest sea-fights of this year took place in the harbor of Fayal, Azores. The American privateer General Armstrong, carrying fourteen guns and ninety men, commanded by Captain Samuel C. Reid, put in there for water on the 26th of September. A few hours later, three British war-vessels—the Plantagenet, Carnation, and Rota—entered the harbor. It was a neutral port, but they cared no more for its neutrality than Hillyar had cared for that of Valparaiso.
In the evening, under a full moon, four armed boats were sent from these vessels to cut out the privateer. As they approached her, they were warned off several times, but paid no attention to it, and attempted to board. Reid then opened fire on them, and drove them off with heavy loss. For greater security, the Armstrong was hauled up close to the fort, and moored. The Governor remonstrated with Captain Van Lloyd, commander of the English fleet; to which the captain answered that he was determined to destroy the privateer, and if the fort protected her he would bombard the town till not a house was left standing.
At midnight the Armstrong was attacked again, this time by fourteen launches, each carrying about fifty men. Reid promptly opened his broadside on them, with terrible effect; yet two or three of them succeeded in reaching the vessel, and the crew then met them with cutlass and pistol, and scarcely a man in them was left alive. A letter written from Fayal at the time, by an Englishman, says the officers in charge of the boats cheered on their men with a shout of "No quarter!" and that "the Americans fought with great firmness, but more like bloodthirsty savages than anything else. They rushed into the boats, sword in hand, and put every soul to death, as far as came within their power. Several boats floated on shore, full of dead bodies."
Next morning, the Carnation sailed in and engaged the Armstrong; but after a short action she was badly cut up and obliged to haul off for repairs. Several guns on the Armstrong had been dismounted; and as Captain Reid now saw that her ultimate destruction was certain, he cut away her masts, blew a hole in her bottom, and went ashore with his men. Two of the crew had been killed, and seven wounded. The ascertained loss of the British was one hundred and twenty killed and ninety wounded.
After burning the abandoned wreck, Van Lloyd demanded of the Governor that the gallant little crew he had failed to capture should be given up to him as prisoners. This modest request was of course refused, and Captain Reid and his men then took possession of an old convent, declaring that they would defend themselves to the last. But they were not molested.
The vessel that was despatched to England to take home the British sailors wounded in this action, was not permitted to carry a single letter from anybody. Indeed, not only this affair, says Cobbett in his "Letters," but the loss of the Avon, the battle of Plattsburg, and other actions not creditable to the English arms, were carefully concealed from the English public. At the demand of Portugal, the British Government apologized for the violation of neutrality; but the owners of the Armstrong never obtained any indemnity.
This was the last naval action before the declaration of peace; but as that declaration did not immediately reach the cruisers at sea, three others were fought. On the 15th of January, 1815, Commodore Decatur, in the President, had a prolonged battle with the frigate Endymion, off Long Island, and reduced her to a wreck. But two other British cruisers came up, and he was compelled to surrender.
He had lost eighty men killed or wounded. On the 20th of February, the Constitution, Captain Charles Stewart, off the coast of Portugal, captured both the Cyane, of thirty-four guns, and the Levant, of twenty-one, after a battle of forty minutes, in which he lost fifteen men, and inflicted a loss of about forty. The Levant was subsequently recaptured by three English cruisers, while she was in Port Praya, another neutral harbor. On the 23d of March, the American brig Hornet, Captain James Biddle, and the British brig Penguin, Captain Dickenson, being almost exactly matched in men and metal, fought a battle of twenty-two minutes' duration, off the island of Tristan d'Acunha, at the close of which the Penguin, having lost forty-two men and been badly crippled, surrendered. Her commander was killed. The Hornet had one man killed and ten wounded. This was the last of what the London Times had fallen into the habit of calling "the painful events at sea."
Attitude of the Federalists, Real and Imputed—The Convention at Hartford—Its Popular Reputation—What General Scott did not say at Chippewa.
When a destructive war had been carried on for two years, when recruiting was slow, and the Government heavily in debt, and yet no way appeared but to fight it out, it might have been expected that harsh criticism of the policy of the Administration, coming from the party that had steadily opposed the war, would subject that party to the charge of being unpatriotic and untrue to the Union. It might also have been expected that an opposition which had become chronic could not but become in some respects unjust. So when the Federalists in 1814 were flooding the Legislatures of New England with memorials on the conduct of the war, they could hardly restrain themselves from overdrawing the picture of its failures, or from representing the condition of things before the war as rather more paradisiacal than anybody had suspected. And on the other hand, they were accused not only of rejoicing in defeats of the national arms, but of plotting a separation of New England from the other States, with a view of ultimately making her again a part of the British Empire. That there were some Federalists who contemplated a dissolution of the Union as a possible remedy for certain difficulties, is quite probable, for such views were at that time not confined to either party. The contingency of disunion was frequently discussed by men of both parties. But that anybody seriously contemplated a reunion with England, there has never been any evidence worth considering. The story was gotten up by the Administration party, in order to cast odium upon the Federalists; and the occurrence most freely used to give color to it was the Hartford Convention, which unfortunately sat with closed doors, and thus was easily misrepresented as a treasonable gathering.
In the third year of the war the hand of the enemy had fallen heavily upon the coast of New England, and at the same time an unpleasant feeling had arisen from the refusal of the United States Government to pay the militia that had been in service under State officers. In this crisis, the Legislature of Massachusetts, on the 16th of October, by a vote of 260 to 90, passed a series of resolutions, the fifth of which authorized the calling of a convention to confer "upon the subject of their [the New England States] public grievances and concerns; and upon the best means of preserving our resources; and of defence against the enemy; and to devise and suggest for adoption by those respective States such measures as they may deem expedient; and also to take measures, if they shall think it proper, for procuring a convention of delegates from all the United States, in order to revise the Constitution thereof, and more effectually to secure the support and attachment of all the people, by placing all upon the basis of fair representation." The letter addressed to the governors of other States set forth the general objects of the proposed conference to be, "to deliberate upon the dangers to which the eastern section of the Union is exposed by the course of the war, and to devise, if practicable, means of security and defence which may be consistent with the preservation of their resources from total ruin, and adapted to their local situation, mutual relations, and habits, and not repugnant to their obligations as members of the Union."
In response to this call, a convention of twenty-six delegates met at Hartford, Conn., December 15th, and sat for three weeks. All sorts of absurd rumors as to the purpose of the Convention were set afloat, and the President so far participated in the vague fears thus excited, or pretended to, as to station a regiment of troops in Hartford.
On the 5th of January, 1815, the Convention adjourned, and published a long report, wherein were set forth the difficulties that the country labored under, and methods proposed by the Convention for adjusting them. These were first discussed at length, and then summarized in a series of resolutions: That unconstitutional drafts of militia should be prevented; that the New England States should be empowered to defend their own territory against the enemy; that representatives and direct taxes should be apportioned among the States according to the number of their free inhabitants; that a two-third vote of Congress should be required to admit a new State; that embargoes for more than sixty days should be forbidden; that a two-third Congressional vote should be required for the interdiction of commercial intercourse, or for the declaration of offensive war; that naturalized citizens should not be eligible to Federal offices; that the President should be ineligible for a second term, and should not be chosen from the same State twice in succession; and, finally, that if these ends were not attained, and peace not concluded, another convention should be held in Boston in the following June. This ought to have been plain enough for anybody to understand; and yet allusions to "the old blue-lights of the Hartford Convention," as a synonym for treason, have come down to our own day. Its popularity as a bugbear has never been exceeded. So great was its influence in this regard, that it caused General Scott to remember something which had never taken place. In his account of the battle of Chippewa he says: "And now the New England States were preparing to hold a convention—it met at Hartford—perhaps to secede from the Union —possibly to take up arms against it. Scott's brigade, nearly all New England men, were most indignant, and this was the subject of the second of the three pithy remarks made to them by Scott just before the final conflict of Chippewa. Calling aloud to the gallant Major Hindman, he said, 'Let us put down the Federal Convention by beating the enemy in front. There's nothing in the Constitution against that.'" * There can be no question as to the intrinsic pithiness of this remark; but if Scott made it, he must have been somewhat of a prophet, for the battle of Chippewa was fought on the 5th of July, and the call for the Convention was not issued till October. This shows the danger of writing
* Scott's Memoirs, vol. i., page 133.
memoirs half a century after the events of which they treat.
The great news from the South, and the tidings of peace, followed so quickly upon the adjournment of the Convention that its labors went for nought, its members were subjected to merciless ridicule, and the new convention proposed for June was never held.
British Occupation of Pensacola—Negotiations with Lafitte—Expedition against Mobile—Capture of Pensacola—Defence of New Orleans—The Battles before the City—Defeat of the British—Losses.
Though Pensacola was a Spanish town, in Spanish territory, the British forces used it as a station for fitting out expeditions against Mobile and New Orleans. Here they gathered arms and munitions of war; here their vessels found safe anchorage in a spacious harbor, where they were afforded every facility for refitting; and here the savage allies were equipped for war and murder. The British commander sent an embassy to Jean Lafitte, at Barataria Bay, offering him a captain's commission, together with a free pardon for all his gang, and grants of land to be carved out of such territory as might be conquered from the United States, on condition that he and his men would assist with their fleet the expeditions then fitting out. The English commander also hinted darkly at something which he called "the blessings of the British constitution"—probably meaning the abundant bone and muscle of a beef-eater—as an additional inducement to the famous little Frenchman. Lafitte was commonly called a pirate, but that was not precisely his character. He was a receiver of stolen goods captured by half-piratical privateers, which he smuggled into New Orleans. But, pirate or no pirate, he seems to have been too shrewd for the Englishman. He appeared to acquiesce till he obtained the terms in black and white, and then despatched the letters to Governor Claiborne of Louisiana, together with one in which he offered his services in defending the coast against the British, on condition that the proscription of himself and his adherents be terminated by an act of oblivion. The Governor laid the letters before a council of military and naval officers, who decided that they were forgeries and Lafitte a scoundrel. Consequently an expedition under Commodore Patterson was sent against him, by which his establishment was broken up, nine of his vessels were seized, and many of his men made prisoners.
One morning in July, General Jackson was presented with a new English musket, brought to his headquarters by a friendly Indian who had received it from the Creeks at Appalachicola. This told an alarming story, which the General at once communicated to Governor Claiborne and the Secretary of War. Of the latter he asked permission to make a descent upon Pensacola. Before an answer was received, Jackson was joined by new levies of troops from Tennessee, which he hurried to Mobile.
On Mobile Point, commanding the entrance to the bay, stood a ruinous earthwork known as Fort Bowyer. Major William Lawrence, with a garrison of one hundred and sixty men, took possession of this, and proceeded to put it in shape for defence. On the 12th of September, the British landed a detachment of marines and six hundred Indians on the peninsula of which Mobile Point is the extremity, and a few hours later four war-vessels, under Captain Percy, appeared at the entrance of the bay. Two or three days were passed in feeble demonstrations on the land side, and attempts to sound the channel; but on the afternoon of the 15th the fleet sailed up in line, dropped anchor in the channel, and opened the battle. For an hour the firing was incessant; it ceased for a moment when the colors of the flag-ship Hermes were shot away; but was soon renewed, when a chance shot cut the cable of the Hermes, the current swung her bow-on to the fort, and for twenty minutes she was raked mercilessly. She drifted down the channel and ran aground, when Captain Percy abandoned her and set her on fire. Another vessel was crippled and driven off, and the other two then withdrew.
The simultaneous assaults of the marines and Indians had been met and repelled with a few discharges of grape. In this action the garrison lost four men killed and four wounded; the British official report acknowledged a loss of thirty-two killed and forty wounded.
Early in November, Jackson, with three thousand men, marched on Pensacola, where he proposed to garrison the forts till the Spanish authorities were able to maintain for themselves the neutrality of the port. This proposition being rejected by the Spanish Governor, Jackson's men charged into the town and captured a battery, and took possession. That night Fort Barrancas, commanding the entrance to the harbor, was blown up, and the British vessels sailed away.
Hurrying back to Mobile, where he feared a second attack, Jackson learned of the revelations of Lafitte and was urged to go to the defence of New Orleans. He arrived in that city on the 2d of December, was enthusiastically welcomed, and at once set to work to prepare it for defence. He called out the Louisiana militia, appealed to the free negroes, released and enrolled convicts whose terms were within two months of expiration, accepted the services of Lafitte and his men, assigning them to duty as artillerists, and ordered Coffee with his two thousand men to join him from Mobile. While looking anxiously for new levies from Kentucky and Tennessee, who were to come by way of the river, he fortified the city, and proclaimed martial law.
On the 10th of December the British fleet entered Lake Borgne, where on the 14th it defeated and captured the American gunboats. On the 23d a body of two thousand four hundred British troops reached the bank of the Mississippi nine miles below New Orleans, and with two thousand one hundred Jackson went down to meet them.
New Orleans was the largest prize which had been contended for in this war. It was a city of twenty thousand inhabitants; and a hundred and fifty thousand bales of cotton, worth two shillings a pound, were stored there. But it was not so much its immediate pecuniary value that tempted the enemy, as the commercial and strategical importance of its position, for they expected not only to capture but to hold it permanently. Lieutenant Gleig, author of "The Subaltern," who was connected with the expedition, after describing the Mississippi and its tributaries, wrote: "Whatever nation, therefore, chances to possess this place, possesses in reality the command of a greater extent of country than is included within the boundary line of the whole United States," and the London Times, announcing that all the disposable shipping had been sent from Bermuda, to the Mississippi, added that, "most active measures are pursuing for detaching from the dominion of the enemy an important part of his territory."
Wellington's veterans, fresh from their victories in the Spanish peninsula, were now before the city, and the inhabitants, knowing how hasty had been the preparations for defence, trembled for its safety. The expectation was, that, if captured, it would at once be sacked.
It was late in the day when Jackson moved to the attack. He sent Coffee and his Tennesseeans to gain the right flank and rear of the enemy, while the rest of his forces were to deploy across the narrow strip of land between the river and a morass, and attack in front. The schooner Carolina was ordered to move down to a point opposite the British left, and enfilade the position; her first discharge to be the signal for the land attack. It was half-past seven o'clock when she opened the battle with a broadside that tore through the British camp and swept down a large number of men. The moon was young and obscured by clouds, so that there was almost absolute darkness, except when the flashes of the guns momentarily lighted up one or another part of the field. The two armies soon became intermingled, and, as one of the participants wrote, "no man could tell what was going forward in any quarter, except where he himself chanced immediately to stand; no one part of the line could bring assistance to another, because in truth no line existed." The fighting was mostly hand-to-hand; few of the Americans had bayonets, but many carried long knives, and the most ghastly wounds were given and received. Officers on either side would gather little companies of men and go out into the darkness to find the enemy; but when they had come in contact with an armed party like themselves, it was often impossible to say whether they were friends or foes.
After three hours of this bloody work, the Americans withdrew to works four miles from the city. They had lost twenty-four killed, one hundred and fifteen wounded, and seventy-four missing. General Keane's official report made the British loss forty-six killed, one hundred and sixty-seven wounded, and sixty-four missing. Lieutenant Gleig, in his "Narrative," says, "Not less than five hundred men had fallen, many of whom were our finest soldiers and best officers; and yet we could not but consider ourselves fortunate in escaping from the toils, even at the expense of so great a sacrifice." A journal found upon a British officer who was killed in the battle of January 8th, puts the loss in this action at "two hundred and twenty-four killed, and an immense number wounded."
Heavy reënforcements of British troops soon arrived, and with them Generals Sir Edward Pakenham and Samuel Gibbs. Pakenham, a brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington, had won considerable distinction in the Peninsular War. He found the army before New Orleans in a pitiful plight. It was encamped on a strip of low and level land, on one side a broad river where it had no vessels, and on the other an almost impassable morass. In front were fortifications that were continually being strengthened, and of the enemy behind them almost nothing was known; while two armed vessels kept up day and night an enfilading fire. With all this, alternate rain and frost left them scarcely a comfortable hour.
Pakenham's first movement was to bring heavy guns and a furnace across the peninsula by night, and plant them on the levee; from which on the morning of the 27th he opened a fire with hot shot, and in half an hour had driven the Louisiana up stream and set the Carolina on fire, so that she was abandoned and blew up.
On the 28th he made a reconnoissance in force. As the left wing approached the American lines, a group of buildings which Jackson's men had filled with combustibles was fired by a hot shot from one of his guns, and amid the heat and smoke the British saw before them an impassable ditch, from behind which a few pieces of artillery, handled with the utmost skill, poured destruction through their ranks. The right wing found the left of Jackson's position weak, effected a lodgment within the lines, and might perhaps have changed the fortunes of the campaign, had not its leader been instructed that this was to be a reconnoissance, not a battle.
Pakenham now resolved upon regular siege operations, and brought thirty guns from the fleet, which in the night of the 31st he mounted within three hundred yards of the American lines. His troops were encamped in the midst of sugar plantations, and a considerable portion of his new ramparts was formed of hogsheads of sugar, set on end.
When day dawned, and the Americans saw thirty guns frowning down upon them from high bastions that had risen as if by magic in the darkness, the sight was rather appalling; but as soon as fire was opened upon these apparently formidable works, it was seen that the balls passed right through the hogsheads of sugar, and the whole fabric began to crumble away. There was also a vulnerable element in Jackson's works; for he had used cotton bales as his enemy used sugar, and though the cotton resisted the passage of a ball, it was easily set on fire, and the bales knocked out of position.
Commodore Patterson had erected a battery on the opposite bank of the Mississippi, to rake the ground held by the British, who at the same time had erected one on the levee to oppose it. For an hour these guns were all blazing at once; and when the firing ceased and the smoke rolled away, it was found that the British works had been completely ruined, and seventy of their men killed or wounded; the American works were not seriously damaged, but they had lost thirty-four men.
Jackson made haste to throw away his cotton bales, supply their place with earth, and construct a second line of works a mile and a half in the rear, and for a week nervously awaited the next move of the enemy. In that week he was joined by nearly three thousand Kentucky and Louisiana militia; but as they were in rags and had scarcely a firelock among them, they could hardly be considered a reënforcement. The British were reenforced by two regiments under General John Lambert.
Pakenham's final plan was to send a heavy force across the river to capture Patterson's batteries and turn them upon Jackson's lines, and at the same time push forward the remainder of his force to assault those lines in front, the advance guard to fill the ditch with fascines and plant scaling-ladders against the ramparts. Preparatory to this, it was necessary to dig a canal across the isthmus, to drag boats through from Lake Borgne to the Mississippi, and this occupied his troops nearly six days.
On Saturday, January 7th, Jackson stood upon the tallest building within his lines, and through a large spy-glass which a planter had mounted for him, saw the red-coats making fascines by binding up sheaves of sugar-cane, and constructing ladders. At the same time, Pakenham was surveying the American works from the top of a pine-tree.
The British general intended to make an attack on both sides of the river simultaneously, before daylight on the 8th. But there was great difficulty in navigating the canal, the sides of which had caved in; only enough boats were brought through to carry over five hundred troops, instead of fourteen hundred, and these were delayed several hours. A detachment under Colonel Thornton embarked in them, but were swept down by the current and reached the western shore far below the intended landing-place.
Meanwhile the sun had risen, the fog was rolling away, Pakenham was impatient, and before Thornton could get near his enemy he saw the signal rocket which announced the attack. The Americans understood the signal quite as well as he did, and were ready to meet the shock. One thirty-two pounder was loaded to the muzzle with musket-balls. A deserter had told the British commander that the weak spot in Jackson's line was the extreme left; true enough when he said it, but now that spot was strengthened by two thousand Tennessee and Kentucky riflemen. The heaviest attack was accordingly made at this point, a column of three thousand men, under General Gibbs, moving against it. They were to be preceded by an Irish regiment bearing the fascines and ladders. At the same time, a column of one thousand moved along the river road, under the cross-fire from Patterson's battery, to attack Jackson's right. These were to be preceded by a West India black regiment with the necessary fascines and ladders. Midway between stood nearly a thousand Highlanders, under General Keane, ready to support either column, as circumstances might require. The British had also a battery of six eighteen-pounders; and, drawn up behind all, a considerable reserve.
The battle was what Bunker Hill would have been if the Americans had had stronger works and plenty of ammunition. The beautiful British columns moved forward only to be mowed down. When the thirty-two pounder discharged its musket-balls, the head of one column melted away before it, two hundred men being disabled. Both the Irish and the Negro regiment failed in their duty, so that when the main columns arrived at the ditch they had no means of crossing, and the terrible blunder had to be remedied under a continuous and withering fire. The ranks were badly broken. Pakenham, trying to re-form them, was killed, falling into the arms of Captain McDougall, the same officer who had caught General Ross when he fell at North Point. General Gibbs was wounded mortally; General Keane seriously. Colonel Dale fell at the head of the Highland regiment, which was almost entirely destroyed. It went into the fight with over nine hundred men, and came out with one hundred and forty. A major and a lieutenant, with twenty men, crossed the ditch before the American left, and the two officers mounted the breastwork. The major was instantly riddled with bullets; the lieutenant demanded the swords of two officers who confronted him, and was told to look behind him. He turned, and saw, as he expressed it, that the men he supposed to be following "had vanished as if the earth had opened and swallowed them up."
On the American right, the British carried a small outwork; but the guns of the main line were turned upon it and cleared it. Of this column, only three men—a colonel, a major, and a captain—reached the breastwork, and as they mounted they were all shot and tumbled into the ditch together.
The action lasted but twenty-five minutes. Seven hundred of the British were killed, fourteen hundred wounded, and five hundred prisoners. The Americans lost four killed and thirteen wounded; in the entire campaign, three hundred and thirty-three.
The force under Thornton, on the western bank of the river, carried the American works, where but brief resistance was made, and were pursuing the retreating militia, when news of the disaster on the other bank was brought to Thornton, together with an order to return. He had lost a hundred men, killed or wounded, and inflicted a loss of but six.
The 9th was spent, under an armistice, in burying the dead and caring for the wounded. General Lambert then determined to withdraw to the shipping and abandon the enterprise, but was ten days about it, during which time his troops were annoyed by incessant cannonading by day and "hunting parties" by night. The British fleet had entered the Mississippi at its mouth, and from the 10th to the 17th bombarded Fort St. Philip, seventy-five miles below New Orleans, but effected nothing, and on the 18th withdrew.
The Treaty of Ghent—Treatment of Prisoners—Losses and Gains by the War—Conclusion.
Had there been an Atlantic cable, or even a transatlantic steamer, with land telegraphs, in those days, the slaughter before New Orleans might have been prevented; for a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent on the 24th of December, 1814. It made the usual stipulations for the exchange of prisoners and the return of property, guaranteed peace to the Indians, and provided for a settlement by commissioners of questions as to boundary and the islands in Passamaquoddy Bay,—and it provided for little else. The negotiations had been going on for five months, and more than once were in danger of being broken off on account of the insolent and supercilious bearing of the English Commissioners. So says Adams in his diary.
At the outset, the British Commissioners had insisted that the Indians should have a territory set off to them, as neutral ground between the British and the American possessions, and that the United States should have no armament on the great lakes and no fortifications on their shores, while Canada was not to be restricted. On the other hand, the American Commissioners had insisted on formal abrogation of the right of search and impressment. But all these points were ultimately given up. As early as June the American Commissioners had been instructed by the President that they might omit any stipulation on the subject of impressment, if it was found indispensably necessary to do so in order to terminate the war; and acting under this instruction they yielded to the argument that, as Europe was now at peace, there was no longer any occasion for exercising the right, and therefore no practical necessity for mentioning it.
The treaty was severely criticised and mercilessly ridiculed as a meaningless document. It might have been answered that the Federalists at least had no right to complain, since they had clamored only for peace, and the treaty brought peace. Better than this, it might have been answered that when a point has been practically settled by war, it is of little consequence whether it is conceded on paper; since every nation is likely to heed a lesson taught by force of arms, and equally likely, when interest dictates, to abrogate a treaty; and, whatever might be said of the campaigns on land, it could not be denied that American mariners had abundantly vindicated their right to an unmolested navigation of the high seas—a right which British cruisers have never since interfered with.
There had been no exchange of prisoners during the war, though many had been paroled, and there were bitter complaints of the treatment received by Americans in British prisons. This was especially true of those confined at Dartmoor, the most unhealthful spot in the dreary highlands of Devonshire. These men were not only not released, but were not even informed that peace had been concluded, till three months after the treaty was signed. There seemed to be a special spite against them because they were mostly American sailors, who had audaciously and successfully disputed England's sovereignty of the seas.
If it be a matter of pride, as an English poetess appears to think, for a nation to strew its dead over the face of the globe, * then Great Britain certainly won fresh laurels in this war; for her soldiers who fell in it found graves six thousand miles apart: in the depths of Lake Erie, about the great falls of Niagara, and along the Thames and St. Lawrence; in the Atlantic, both near the American coast and almost within sight of their own shores; in Long Island Sound,
* Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep,
Where rest not England's dead.
—Mrs. Hemans
in the Chesapeake, and beyond the western edge of civilization; before the defences of Baltimore and New Orleans, and in the waters of the South Pacific. And her expeditions had been especially fatal to their commanders: Gen. Brock had fallen at Queenstown, Gen. Tecumseh at the Thames, Ross and Sir Peter Parker before Baltimore, Pakenham and Gibbs at New Orleans, with many of lower rank but hardly less responsibility; while seven commanders of her men-of-war—Lambert, Downie, Dickenson, Manners, Peake, Barrette, and Blythe—had all died on their bloody decks. But by her sacrifice of life and property she had gained absolutely nothing. She had not acquired an inch of territory, or established any principle of international law, or purchased for herself any new privilege, or secured any old one. The war had cost the United States a hundred million dollars in money, and thirty thousand lives; and a large portion of both the money and the lives had been squandered, when with ordinary skill and care they might have been saved. But she had something to show for it. If she had not fully relieved her from tier of the atrocities of the Indians, she had at least cut off their supplies from British sources, and possessed herself of all the western posts; she had put an end to the systematic violation of her rights on the ocean, and in so doing had demonstrated the superiority of American seamanship; she had completely established her national independence.
It is to be hoped that no American youth who reads this little history will cherish any feeling of resentment or hatred toward the people whose fathers were so grievously unjust to ours. The day for that—if ever there was a day for it—has gone completely by. England has evidently passed the zenith of her power and glory; America is still rising toward hers, and how great she shall ultimately become, will be measured mainly by the breadth and generosity of the American mind. In the past sixty years we have lived down the most celebrated sneer in history. Five years after this war, the Rev. Sydney Smith wrote in the Edinburgh Review: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered, or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses, or eats from American plates, or wears American coats or gowns, or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow citizens may buy and sell and torture?" If Mr. Smith were now living, he might be answered—if it were worth while to answer him at all—that the most widely circulated of all novels was written by an American woman; that the poet most read in England was an American; that our two standard dictionaries of the English language are both American; that several American magazines count their subscribers in Great Britain by tens of thousands; that the world owes its use of anaesthetics to an American physician; that American sculptors, painters, and actors hold their own with those of other nations; that America has the largest telescopes, and the most successful astronomers; that American reapers cut the world's harvests, and American sewing machines make its garments; that the telegraph and the telephone are American inventions; that the first steamboat was built in America, and it was an American steamship that first crossed the Atlantic, while our country contains more miles of railway than all Europe; that those who eat from American plates, eat the largest and best dinners in the world; and as for American glasses, altogether too many people drink out of them. Unless we mercifully left his final question unanswered, we should be obliged to say, that the United States had gotten rid of slavery, while to-day five million British subjects, all within two days' journey of the throne, tell us they find themselves virtually slaves.
Yet with all our material and intellectual progress, we have hardly a right to be proud. For we have enjoyed peculiar advantages. The Mayflower did not land her pilgrims on a narrow island, but on the edge of a great continent. Of that continent we have the most productive zone, stretching from ocean to ocean, and a thousand miles in breadth; while within that zone our Government has given us, for the support of educational institutions, as much land as the entire area of Great Britain and Ireland. At the same time, we have not been loaded down with a standing army, an established church, a vast landed aristocracy, and all the rubbish of royalty. In America labor receives its highest wages, and pauperism finds its least excuse. It will be no special credit to us if we become in the next half century the most powerful and prosperous and generous of nations; but it will be a great shame to us if we do not.
As we read the history of our country's early struggles, it may help us to avoid any unworthy feeling of resentment if we bear in mind the fact that there is a wide and peculiar discrepancy of character between the English people and the English Government. That people perhaps at present the most enlightened on earth, are justly noted for their innate love of fair play; for their continual struggles toward liberty, and their development of the great principles of jurisprudence; but that Government, in its dealings with other powers, has been for centuries arbitrary, selfish, barbarous, and inconsistent to the last degree. Priding itself upon legitimacy, it has befriended a bloody usurpation in France, because it hated the alternative of French republicanism. It has opened the ports of China with its cannon, for the purpose of selling there a narcotic drug of which it holds the monopoly. It boasted its abolition of the slave trade; yet when our country was at war over the slavery question, its sympathies were all with the slaveholders. Seventy years ago, as we have seen, its cruisers cared nothing for the neutrality of any harbor in which a hostile ship of fewer guns was riding at anchor; but twenty years ago it could not offer its neutral hospitalities too lavishly to privateers that had not a port of their own to hail from or sail to, and were burning all their prizes at sea without adjudication. It witnessed the dismemberment of Denmark with scarcely a protest, but has sacrificed thousands of English lives to maintain the Turk in Europe. It has stood for years at the head of a great conspiracy to keep Russia shut up in the centre of a continent long after her industrial growth and commercial importance have entitled her to a broad and unobstructed outlet to the highway of nations. It has eaten India into famine, and is now laying its kleptic fingers on the great island of Borneo, and apparently making ready to consume the continent of Africa.
We must blush for these things while we execrate them; for we ourselves are Englishmen. That famous little island, with its green lanes and waving woodlands, its busy towns and historical hamlets, was the home of our ancestors, and must ever have for us the highest romantic interest of any spot on earth; and we cannot too warmly sympathize with those who are still bearing burdens of feudal days, when the bravery of feudal leadership has long since passed away. Let us never forget how near of kin we are to the English people; but God forbid that we should inherit the vices of the English Government, or copy its crimes!
If the story of a war like that we have been reading of teaches anything, it teaches the broad wisdom of dealing justly, and the ultimate folly of all chicanery, violence, and wrong.