Tecumseh and Brock (8 page)

The impressment of British sailors seized from U.S. ships was the sharpest wound endured by Americans before the War of 1812, the wound that would not heal. But in the interior, another struggle was underway, and this struggle also sharpened American antagonism toward Great Britain.

If embargo and impressment were front of mind for American statesmen, a new group of American politicians with a different set of priorities came to the fore during this dangerous time. Land-hungry politicians exerted growing influence in the corridors of power of the United States. The goal of these new power brokers was the expansion of the American Republic. As the years passed, they whipped up sentiment in favour of a war that would drive the old imperial power out of its remaining holdings in North America. Deeply hostile to Britain, they became known as the War Hawks.

Henry Clay, the young politician from Kentucky nicknamed “the Western Star,” personified the new breed. He spoke for the America of the early nineteenth century, the America that had left the eastern seaboard behind in favour of the rising power of the West. His America pointed beyond the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi and west of the great river into the Louisiana Territory. Expansion west, south, and north was Clay's agenda for the future of his young country.

Henry Clay was born on the Clay family homestead in Hanover County, Virginia, on April 12, 1777. He studied law at the College of William and Mary, and in 1797 he was admitted to the bar. That same year, he relocated to Lexington, Kentucky, where he set up a law practice and soon became renowned for his courtroom oratory. Tall, gaunt, even cadaverous, the ambitious Clay married Lucretia Hart, the youngest daughter of the wealthy Colonel Thomas Hart, in 1799. This alliance connected him with the leading business elements in Kentucky.
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He became a successful lawyer and a shrewd investor with a knack for speculating in land.

Clay soon developed political ambitions. In 1803, he won the election to become the representative of Fayette County in the Kentucky General Assembly. Three years later, the Kentucky legislature appointed him to complete the term of a U.S. senator who was forced to resign his seat. On his return to the state in 1807 after serving in the upper chamber in Washington, he was elected Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives. During these years he made himself the voice of Kentucky, whose population nearly doubled to four hundred thousand in the first decade of the century.

Clay was an economic nationalist who from the first days of his career set out to foster a national economic design that would forge ties of mutual interest between manufacturers in the East and agrarian interests in the West, and between the industrializing North and the frontier West. He later called this concept the American system.
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Clay made himself the leading spokesman of a band of young politicians from the West and the South whose belligerence toward Britain was a defining sentiment. With Henry Clay and others like him, the popular image of the United States morphs from the days of the American Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to the age of the frontiersmen. The late-eighteenth-century figures seem antiquated in their fussy wigs and fancy garb; they appear in the guise of philosophers who are soberly and disinterestedly creating a new country based on a constitution intended to fashion a new beginning for mankind. From there, America bolts forward in the popular imagination as a land of plain-spoken individualists living on a vast continent and leaving the old ways behind them.

Both of these images are simplifications and distortions. They do contain a glimpse of the truth, however. Between the days of the Revolution and the drafting of the Constitution, on the one hand, and the epoch of migrants heading west on riverboats and horse-drawn wagons, America ceased to be an affair of the East Coast and instead became a continental project. The United States became markedly less European and more specifically American.

The Americans who led the Revolution were very much at home in both Europe and America. Although they regarded his clothing as odd, the French were happy to fete Benjamin Franklin as a philosopher cut from the same cloth as they were. Thomas Jefferson fitted in easily in Paris. He made sense of the world through the eyes of the European Enlightenment. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was as much a product of European thought as it was of American thought. In fact, he wrote it for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. While the document roused Americans to the righteousness of their cause, it explained the need for independence — “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation” — to a European audience.

The Revolution severed the link in political identity between America and Europe. After the Treaty of Paris of 1783, immigrants to America could no longer see themselves as transplanted Englishmen. They had to become Americans. A large part of the formative background of the Thirteen Colonies fell away with the Treaty of Paris, and those residents were already looking west while they fought for their independence from the mother country. Their future, revolutionary leaders such as George Washington believed, lay in the lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains.

Washington's appetite for new land could only be satisfied through the demolition of the barriers Britain placed in the way of western settlement. The War Hawks, in particular, had their eye on the desirable farmlands of Upper Canada. And those from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio were intent on ending what they saw as the Indian menace along the frontier of American settlement. As a result, they detested the alliance between the native peoples and the British Crown, an alliance of convenience to be sure, but an alliance that still stood in the way of the movement of settlers onto native lands.

In the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the War of 1812, Henry Clay managed to make himself a key power broker in national politics. In 1810, the Kentucky legislature picked him to complete the term of a senator who had resigned to serve as a judge on the United States Circuit Court. In 1811, he was elected to the national House of Representatives, where he was chosen as Speaker of the House on the first day he sat in that body. Never had Washington seen such rapid elevation to the high office of Speaker, and it has never happened since.

Clay was a staunch adherent of the Republicanism of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and as Speaker of the House he learned how to wield immense influence. Despite Napoleon's interference with American shipping, Clay had not the slightest temptation to go to war with France. Instead, he saved his considerable bellicosity for the British. In Clay's mind, war with Britain would resolve a host of problems. For one thing, it would help resolve the economic downturn that for half a decade had plagued the regions of the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains. The British blockade of Europe had barred the farm produce of the Ohio Valley from the markets of the continent.
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The disruption of the trade that flowed down the Mississippi to New Orleans and from there to Europe contributed to the strong anti-British sentiments of the West.

In addition, Clay and other western advocates of a showdown with Britain perceived that the British were constantly stirring up the native peoples against the settlers. In the minds of westerners and their political representatives in Congress, the best way to end the native threat was to drive the British out of Canada.

As Speaker of the House, Clay packed key committees with members who were equally antagonistic toward the British. One of them was John C. Calhoun, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1810, after having served as a member of the South Carolina legislature. He and Clay would be associated with each other for decades. Later in his career, Calhoun served as vice president of the United States, first under John Quincy Adams and then under Andrew Jackson.

Calhoun was born in 1782, into a family that owned a farm in the backcountry of South Carolina. When his father, a Scots-Irish immigrant from Ulster, fell ill, Calhoun quit school to devote himself to the family farm. Later, his brothers supported him financially so that he could resume his studies. In 1804, he graduated from Yale College, and then he studied law at the Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1807, he was called to the bar in South Carolina.

With a hawk-like countenance, piercing eyes, and, as the years passed, an ever more unruly head of hair that took on the appearance of ruffled feathers, Calhoun wielded an eloquence and sharp intelligence that made him more feared than loved. During the early years of his political career, Calhoun was a nationalist who promoted American expansion and the use of the power by the federal government to promote internal development. However, as the slavery issue became ever more prominent, Calhoun became a fierce proponent of states' rights, and he advanced the notion that
slavery was a “positive good.” Convinced of the self-evident supremacy
of whites, he argued that slaves benefitted from the paternalism of their masters. In a speech in the United States Senate in 1837, Calhoun spelled out his case: “I may say with truth, that in few countries [other than the United States] so much is left to the share of the labourer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his [the slave's] condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe — look at the sick and the old and infirm slave on the one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.”

Twenty-nine-year-old Calhoun voted for Henry Clay's elevation to the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives. He shared Clay's hostility to Britain and was convinced that the United States and the old mother country were on the path to war. To those who warned of the costs of such a war, Calhoun retorted: “We are next told of the expenses of war, and the people will not pay taxes. Why not? Is it from want of means? . . . No; it has the ability, that is admitted; and will it not have the disposition? Is not the cause a just and necessary one? Shall we then utter this libel on the people? If taxes should become necessary, I do not hesitate to say the people will pay cheerfully.”
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For Southerners such as Calhoun, the alliance with the rising political power of the West was about land. While the lust for new land pointed west and north, it also pointed south. Although the Louisiana Purchase had carved out an empire for the United States west of the Mississippi, the Floridas remained in the hands of Spain. Southerners believed support for war with Britain would lubricate their effort to possess the Floridas.

Clay backed the drive for the Floridas. In 1810, while still a senator, he defended the Madison administration's military occupation of a part of Spanish-ruled West Florida that had not been included in the Louisiana Purchase. Looking north, he declared ebulliently, “The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”
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It has often been said that money is the mother's milk of politics. In the early nineteenth century, land was the surest route to money and thereby to political influence. In turn, the state was the instrument of force and coercion through which more land could be obtained. The hunger for land was the appetite that bound the War Hawks together, whether they were southern slave owners or western settlers.

One man who understood the game and its objectives better than most was John Randolph, the maverick congressman from Virginia who coined the epithet “War Hawks” to describe Clay, Calhoun, and company.
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Many believed Randolph was deranged. If so, there was an analytical method to his madness. In the House, Randolph charged that what drove the War Hawks was “a scuffle and scramble for plunder,” and that a large chunk of the land they sought would come through the conquest of Canada. To the discomfiture of the war party, Randolph shrilled, “Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs came into the House, we have heard but one word — like the whip-poor-will, but one monotonous tone — Canada! Canada! Canada!”

He warned, with remarkable prescience, that territorial expansion would be perilous to the American Union, that it would bolster the anti-slavery forces and would ultimately compel the South to secede. Randolph opposed the conquest of Canada for that reason.
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In a head-to-head debate with Calhoun, Randolph cautioned that war with Britain could result in American slaves, inspired by the French Revolution, rising up against their masters. To this, Calhoun replied that while Randolph “may alarm himself with the disorganizing effects of French principles, I cannot think our ignorant blacks have felt much of their baneful influence. I dare say more than one-half of them have never heard of the French Revolution.”
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The House of Representatives elected in 1810, ever after to be known as the War Congress, included 59 freshmen members, among them Henry Clay and John Calhoun, out of a total of 142. The Republicans — who had begun to label themselves Democratic-Republicans — had 108 members to 36 Federalists. In the Senate, they outnumbered the Federalists 30 to 6.
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The presence of the War Hawks in Congress tilted the national debate toward war with Britain. And those in charge of British military and political strategy were acutely aware of the rising tensions with the United States.