John Quincy Adams (26 page)

By September 12, the troops that had burned Washington sailed out of the Patuxent River and up the Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore, landing about fourteen miles from the city. As British warships came within firing distance of Fort McHenry, troops on shore fought their way to the foot of the fort. The ships opened fire on the fort the next day, September 13, and continued the bombardment through the night. On a nearby ship, attorney Francis Scott Key watched “the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” and, to his amazement, “by dawn's early light . . . our flag was still there,” fluttering in tatters over the fort and inspiring his poem “Defense of Fort McHenry
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” A newspaper published it a few days later and renamed it “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

On September 14, the British abandoned their fruitless assault on Fort McHenry, withdrew their troops, and sailed out of Chesapeake Bay for Jamaica in the British West Indies. Their flight weakened the British negotiating position in Ghent, where John Quincy rejected the British demand for an Indian buffer zone. The United States, he argued, would not cede territorial rights to “savages, whose known rule of warfare is the indiscriminate torture and butchery of women, children, and prisoners.”
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After a month of talks with no progress, John Quincy grew frustrated. “It appears to me to be the policy of the British government,” he wrote to Louisa in St. Petersburg, “to keep the American war as an object to continue or close, according to the events which may occur in Europe or America. If so they will neither make peace, nor break off the negotiation, and the circumstances may be such as to detain us here the whole winter.”
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The British, he said in a subsequent letter, “have withdrawn just so much of their inadmissible demands as would avoid the immediate rupture of the negotiation. They have varied their terms . . . abandoned the claims which they had declared indispensable preliminaries, only to bring them forward again whenever the circumstances of the war might encourage them to insolence and . . . are now delaying their reply to our last note . . . only to receive accounts of success from America . . . to dictate new terms to us.”
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As both sides realized they had reached an impasse, negotiators fixed on a solution that would relieve them of having to solve any problems. They would simply end the war and relegate all demands of both sides to an arbitration commission to be set up at a later date.

In the end, the Treaty of Ghent represented a stinging defeat for both sides, each of which accepted nothing more than a return to the status quo ante bellum after a costly two-year war. Nevertheless, John Quincy was jubilant at having ended the bloodletting.

“My DEAR AND HONORED MOTHER,” John Quincy exulted on Christmas Eve of 1814.

The Treaty of Ghent called for release of all prisoners and restoration of all conquered territories except for West Florida, which now fell under American sovereignty. Negotiators did not include a word about the Great Lakes or disputed boundaries along the northern frontier with Canada—or about the issues that President Madison had deemed vital enough for the United States to declare war: ship seizures and impressment. On paper at least, the war had been a waste, leaving 1,877 Americans dead and 4,000
wounded and costing millions of dollars in war matériel. It had cost tens of millions of dollars in lost domestic and foreign trade and provoked the collapse of the economy—and the United States had failed to achieve any of the goals for which it went to war. The only triumph at Ghent—for either side—was an end to war and establishment of peace between the two nations—or so they hoped.

 

Agreement at Ghent. Admiral Lord Gambier, Britain's chief negotiator, holds the treaty ending the Anglo-American War of 1812 and shakes hands with John Quincy Adams, America's chief negotiator. Albert Gallatin stands to Adams's immediate left, while Henry Clay is seated on the right at the rear.
(FROM THE SIGNING OF THE TREATY OF GHENT, CHRISTMAS EVE, 1814, A PAINTING BY SIR AMÈDÉE FORESTIER, 1914; SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF THE SULGRAVE INSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN)

At the signing, John Quincy declared to the delegates of both countries, “I hope it will be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States.”
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At a farewell banquet, Adams stood to toast “His majesty the king of England,” after which an orchestra played “God Save the King”;
then Lord Gambier, the chief British delegate, rose to toast “the United States of North America,” and the orchestra played “Hail, Columbia,” which was then the American national anthem.

“I consider the day on which I signed it [the Treaty of Ghent] as the happiest of my life,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa, “because it was the day on which I had my share in restoring peace to the world.”
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On December 24, 1814, as John Quincy and the other negotiators signed the Treaty of Ghent, a fleet of fifty British ships with 7,500 battle-hardened veterans approached the Louisiana shore and glided into Lake Borgne—a large bay on the southeastern coast of Louisiana near New Orleans. Landing forty miles east of the city, a British advance guard marched to within seven miles of the city where, to their shock, General Andrew Jackson awaited in ambush with more than 2,000 frontiersmen. The Americans opened fire and sent the British reeling back to their main force. Jackson then pulled back to a point five miles from the city and deployed 5,000 men in a dry canal that blocked the only route into the city. Compared with the trim-cut uniforms of advancing British troops, the Americans were a largely unwashed, unshaven mixture of militiamen, frontiersmen, woodsmen, hunters, and farmers—to a man, fiercely independent, loyal Jacksonians. Wild, willful, reckless, and often drunk, they were like Jackson himself: fighting cocks who gave no ground in battle.

After a spectacular but indecisive artillery battle on January 1, the British pulled back and waited a week to attack again. As the redcoats advanced in traditional linear style of European warfare, the Americans pressed against the forward wall of the canal and poised their long hunting rifles on the rim. A sudden explosion of high-pitched music startled soldiers on both sides as the British line moved forward. Jackson had ordered a band to sound out “Yankee Doodle,” then thundered a command to his troops: “Give it to 'em, boys. . . . Let's finish it up today!”
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Tennessee and Kentucky woodsmen—all of them crack marksmen in the center of the big ditch—opened fire. The British troops stepped forward mechanically, suicidally pressing onward into the sprays of rifle fire, toppling one by one, each atop the other, then by the dozens. The bodies piled higher and
higher until the “horror before them was too great to be withstood: and they turned away, dropping their weapons and running to the rear.”
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After only thirty minutes, the battle was over; the British commanding general and two other generals lay dead, along with more than 2,000 British troops. Jackson's men suffered thirteen dead, thirty-nine wounded, and nineteen missing in action. British survivors limped back to their ships and, on January 27, sailed away from what proved to be the last battle of the war and the last hostile incursion by British troops on American soil.

A few days later, Secretary of State Monroe called members of Congress into the Patent Office building in Washington, the only public building the British had spared from flames. They unleashed a chorus of sustained cheers when he delivered the news of Jackson's victory. Federalists, Republicans, hawks, and doves alike slapped each other on the back, exchanged handshakes, and adjourned to soak in the news with appropriate drinks. What they did not know, however, was the utter uselessness of Jackson's victory. It had not changed the course of the war at all. Two weeks earlier, John Quincy Adams and his American negotiators had signed a treaty ending the war, but like the negotiations when the war began, news of the settlement did not arrive until weeks later, when a British sloop sailed into New York Harbor flying a flag of truce. The war the United States could have won without firing the first shot had ended before they had fired the last.

Nonetheless, Americans—almost unanimously—deluded themselves into calling the war a glorious triumph over the world's most powerful nation—a “second war of independence.” The national delusion resulted from a series of coincidences—the United States had scored the victory at New Orleans just before news of peace arrived, and in the public mind, the chronology of the victory made it seem decisive in forcing the British to sue for peace and end depredations on American shipping. In fact, it was the defeat of Napoléon that allowed Britain to harbor her warships and ended her need to impress seamen and seize ships carrying contraband.

On January 7, 1815, John Quincy's colleagues on the American peace commission left Ghent, with John Quincy, Henry Clay, and Albert Gallatin having grown especially close—socially as well as politically. One
evening, when the three returned to their hotel after negotiations, the often hot-tempered Clay remarked that one of the British negotiators was “a man of much irritation.”

John Quincy corrected his colleague's grammar:

“Irritability is the word, Mr. Clay,” said John Quincy. “Irritability.” And then fixing him with an earnest look and a tone of voice midway between seriousness and jest, he added, “Like somebody else I know.”

Two weeks later, having put his papers in order and received word of his promotion to the London embassy, John Quincy set out for Paris to await Louisa and his seven-year-old son Charles Francis. His wife had left St. Petersburg on January 26, but as each day passed with no word of their whereabouts, John Quincy regretted not having gone to St. Petersburg to accompany them. Reports soon reached Paris of pillaging by renegade soldiers and savage attacks on travelers along Louisa's route from Russia.

As the War of 1812 faded from national memory, Americans began to enjoy the greatest peacetime prosperity they had ever experienced in the more than thirty-two years since Yorktown. Secretary of State James Monroe had taken advantage of General William Henry Harrison's victories in the West to negotiate purchase of Indian lands east of the Mississippi, making the western territory between the Appalachian Mountains and Mississippi River safe for American migration. Secure from attack by British troops and Indians, tens of thousands of Americans streamed westward to carve out farms from virgin plains, harvest furs and pelts from superabundant wildlife, cull timber from vast forests, and chisel ores from rich mountainsides. The land rush added six states and scores of villages and towns to the United States. It generated wealth for almost every free white man in the nation and engendered the greatest social and economic revolution in history. Never before had a sovereign state in the modern world transferred so much land to ordinary citizens, or “commoners.” The millions of acres of land they claimed lifted them into the category of “property owners”—the landed gentry—with rights to vote, serve in public office, and govern their communities, states, and nation. To facilitate
economic recovery, Congress reestablished a central bank—the Second Bank of the United States—to issue federal currency and serve as a depository for government funds.

As foreign trade resumed with its attendant prosperity, Americans hailed “Old Hickory”—Andrew Jackson—for his victory at New Orleans, Secretary of War and of State James Monroe for his military strategy, and John Quincy Adams for his successful peace negotiations.