Stats

The Battle of Queenston was a terrible American defeat: 2250 U.S. soldiers lost their lives and 700 became prisoners of war. The British lost 14 men, with 96 wounded. However, the brilliant General Isaac Brock was among the slain.

Main Event

The Hartford Convention met in Hartford, Connecticut, from December 15, 1814, to January 5, 181 S. Twenty-six delegates from five New England states gathered to protest the disastrous Democratic-Republican conduct of the war. The secret convention raised alarms that the delegates were plotting secession; however, the resolutions they actually formulated were quite tame—principally a call for amending the Constitution to weaken the influence of the South on the federal government. Indeed, some recent historians suggest that the Hartford Convention was actually a (successful) attempt by moderate Federalists to head off radical Federalist attempts to bring about a secession movement. Whatever its intention, the Hartford Convention turned out to be a bad public relations move for the Federalists. They were generally regarded with deepening suspicion and, outside of New England, the party rapidly collapsed.

Main Event

Key penned “The Star-Spangled Banner” on September 14, 1814, but the music for it had been written in 1777 by the Englishman John Stafford Smith. The music was a setting for another poem, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which was a favorite of a London drinking club called the Anacreontic Society. Smith’s original is a celebration of the pleasures of music, love, and wine. The melody soon became popular in the United States—both before and after Key made up the new words for it. In fact, by 1820, at least 84 different poems were being sung to the “Anacreontic melody.”

“The Star-Spangled Banner” instantly became a popular patriotic air and was the informal anthem of the Union Army during the Civil War. The U.S. Army adopted the song officially during World War 1, but it did not become truly the national anthem until March 3, 1931, when President Herbert Hoover signed it into law.

Word for the Day

The Latin phrase status quo antebellum is common in treaties and underscores the utter futility of much combat. The phrase means literally “the way things were before the war.”

Stats

The British lost 2, 100 men at the Battle of New Orleans, including commanding general Edward Pakenham. Jackson’s badly outnumbered troops suffered fewer than 100 casualties.

Fanfare for the Common Man

(1814-1836)

In This Chapter

President Monroe’s misnamed “Era of Good Feelings”

The Monroe Doctrine

Economic crisis: the Panic of 1819

The Missouri Compromise

Jacksonian Democracy

Casualties of the War of 1812 included many soldiers, settlers, and Indians. Casualties also included the U.S. economy, which declined sharply during the war, bottoming out in the Panic of 1819. Also slain in battle was the British desire to fight any more wars with its erstwhile colonies. No, Great Britain certainly didn’t lose the War of 1812, but it didn’t win it, either. Britain came away convinced that fighting the United States just wasn’t worth doing. A final casualty was the Federalist party. Federalists, all of whom bitterly questioned the wisdom of the war and some of whom even advocated dissolution of the union because of it, were seen as unpatriotic and lacking in resolve. In 1816, Democratic-Republican James Monroe, presented to the electorate as the heir apparent of James Madison, handily won election to the presidency.

Good Feelings

The history of the American democracy is filled with contradictions, and one of the great misnomers that describes this nation in the years following the War of 1812 is the “Era of Good Feelings.” The famous phrase was coined sarcastically by a Federalist newspaper following the reelection of Monroe in 1820, when he stood unopposed and was ushered into office by an electoral vote of 231 to 1. Monroe himself was popular, revered by the people as the last of the “cocked hats”—an affectionate name for the Founding Fathers. However, Monroe presided over a country that, although proud of its nationhood after the war, was seriously torn by bitter sectional rivalries and disputes over the interpretation of the Constitution.

Monroe tried to salve sectionalism by appointing a stellar cabinet that included the best political minds of the day, among them John Quincy Adams (Secretary of State), John C. Calhoun (Secretary of War), and William H. Crawford (Secretary of the Treasury). But these leading lights soon disputed with one another, not only over philosophical and sectional issues, but over who would succeed Monroe as president.

A Democratic-Republican, Monroe nevertheless broke with Thomas Jefferson and supported the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, which had been the brainchild of Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The bank was popular with the East Coast “establishment,” because it effectively gave them control of the nation’s purse strings. The bank was bitterly opposed by Westerners, however, who needed easy credit to expand and establish themselves.

Those Westerners also argued for a loose interpretation of the Constitution, particularly the phrase in the Preamble, “to promote the general welfare.” These words, Calhoun and Henry Clay (powerful Congressman from Kentucky) argued, mandated the federal government to build the roads the West badly needed to develop its commerce and economy. Monroe consistently vetoed road-building bills, but did support a high tariff on imports, which aided the industrialized Northeast. This tariff heightened sectional strife.

Erie Canal

Monroe’s opposition to federally built roads for the West did not stop-and may even have spurred—development of the nation’s first great commercial link between the East Coast and the vast inland realm. Gouverneur Morris, U.S. Senator from New York, proposed in 1800 the construction of a great canal from New York City to Buffalo on Lake Erie. The project was approved by the New York legislature in 1817, and it was completed in 1825. Running 363 miles, the Erie Canal was a spectacular engineering achievement and a testament to American labor. The project was also a stunning commercial triumph, which quickly repaid the $7 million it had cost to build and soon returned an average of $3 million in annual profits—all without the assistance of the federal government.

The success of the Erie Canal, which truly inaugurated the commercial opening of the West, touched off a canal-building boom, linking the Northeast with the western system of natural waterways. By 1840, the United States boasted 3,326 miles of canals. The result was a trend toward commercial strength that helped pull the nation out of its postwar economic funk. The canals also tied the Northeast more securely to the West, thereby making deeper the growing division between the North and South, which had few east-west connections.