History of the United States Volume Ii Part 22
Triumph far more complete might have attended the war but for the perverse and factious federalist opposition to the administration. Some Federalists favored joining England out and out against Napoleon. Having with justice denounced Jefferson's embargo tactics as too tame, yet when the war spirit rose and even the South stood ready to resent foreign affronts by force, they changed tone, harping upon our weakness and favoring peace at any price. Tireless in magnifying the importance of commerce, they would not lift a hand to defend it. The same men who had cursed Adams for avoiding war with France easily framed excuses for orders in council, impressment, and the Chesapeake affair.
Apart from Randolph and the few opposition Republicans, mostly in New York, this Thersites band had its seat in commercial New England, where embargo and war of course sat hardest, more than a sixth of our entire tonnage belonging to Ma.s.sachusetts alone. From the Ess.e.x Junto and its sympathizers came nullification utterances not less pointed than the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, although, considering the sound rebukes which the latter had evoked, they were far less defensible.
Disunion was freely threatened, and actions either committed or countenanced bordering hard upon treason. The Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature in 1809 declared Congress's act to enforce embargo "not legally binding." Governor Trumbull of Connecticut declined to aid, as requested by the President, in carrying out that act, summoning the Legislature "to interpose their protecting shield" between the people and "the a.s.sumed power of the general Government." "How," wrote Pickering, referring to the Const.i.tution, Amendment X., "are the powers reserved to be maintained, but by the respective States judging for themselves and putting their negative on the usurpations of the general Government?" A sermon of President Dwight's on the text, "Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord," even Federalists deprecated as hinting too strongly at secession. This unpatriotic agitation, from which, be it said, large numbers of Federalists n.o.bly abstained, came to a head in the mysterious Hartford Convention, at the close of 1814, and soon began to be sedulously hushed--in consequence of the glorious news of victory and peace from Ghent and New Orleans.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Five men in a small boat on the ocean. They are surrounded by smoke and bursting sh.e.l.ls.]
Perry transferring his Colors from the Lawrence to the Niagara.
While the Congregationalists, especially their clergy, were nearly all stout Federalists, opposing Jefferson, Madison, and the war, the Methodists and Baptists almost to a man stood up for the administration and its war policy with the utmost vigor, rebuking the peace party as traitors. [Footnote: The writer's grandfather, a Baptist minister, was as good as driven from his pulpit and charge at Templeton, Ma.s.s., because of his federalist sympathies in this war.] Timothy Merritt, a mighty Methodist preacher on the Connecticut circuit, has left us from these critical times a stirring sermon on the text, Judges v. 23, "Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not up to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty." Meroz was the federalist party and England's ministry and army were "the mighty."
Czar Alexander, regarding our hostility as dangerous to England, with whom he then stood allied against Napoleon, sought to end the war. The Russian campaign of 1812 practically finished Napoleon's career, so leaving England free to press operations in America. In April, 1814, Paris was captured. The United States therefore accepted Alexander's offices. Our commissioners, Adams, Clay, Gallatin, Marshall, Bayard, and Russell met the English envoys at Ghent, and after long discussions, in which more than once it seemed as if the war must proceed, the treaty of Ghent was executed, December 24, 1814, a fortnight before the battle of New Orleans.
It was an honorable peace. If we gained no territory we yielded none.
The questions of Mississippi navigation and the fisheries were expressly reserved for future negotiations. Upon impressment and the abuse of neutrals, exactly the grievances over which we had gone to war, the treaty was silent, and peace men laughed at the war party on this account, calling the war a failure. The ridicule was unjust. Had Napoleon been still on high, or the negotiations been subsequent to the New Orleans victory, England would doubtless have been called upon to renounce these practices. But experience has proved that such a demand would have been unnecessary. No outrage of these kinds has occurred since, nor can anyone doubt that it was our spirit as demonstrated in the war of 1812 which changed England's temper. Hence, in spite of our military inexperience, financial distress, internal dissensions, and the fall of Napoleon, which unexpectedly turned the odds against us, the war was a success.
End of Volume II.