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I T WAS A time of omens. The greatest comet in memory stretched a million miles across the night skies. The most powerful earthquakes in recorded history twisted the great Mississippi at will, swallowing communities, spitting up islands, and ringing church bells from New Orleans to Boston. With the heavens and the firmament in conflict with each other, Shawnee mystics foretold a war between the living and the dead.
In an atmosphere redolent of Revelation’s forecast of “woe for the earth,” it was fitting that men make war among themselves, even a small war for little reasons. In 1783, when Great Britain bid grudging farewell to thirteen colonies in North America, it still had an empire in the vastness of Canada, the islands of the West Indies, and elsewhere. Nine years later, when Britain began two decades of war with France, success depended on sustaining her thriving mercantile economy to fund the contest, and that meant holding supremacy on the seas, both of which threatened the Americans, whose burgeoning carrying trade depended heavily on France. Heavily committed in Europe, Britain neither needed nor wanted a conflict with the infant United States. Still, if Yankee trade or alliances threatened its efforts on the Continent, John Bull would accept a war with America better than lose a war with France.
The new nation across the Atlantic sailed an uncertain course through waters peppered with political shoals and reefs, trying to safeguard its flowering commerce and growing national pride. It flirted with neutrality, an alliance with France, and an implicit alliance with Britain, but sitting on the fence in a world at war only makes a better target. For three years the United States and France even fought a so-called naval Quasi-War that hard-pressed Napoleon soon enough halted. A brief peace in Europe in 1802 could not hold, and a year later they were fighting again, each striking at the other by acts to curtail its trade with America. That only aggravated other issues, chief among them the “impressment” policy of British naval captains who forcibly removed seamen from American vessels on the pretext that they were deserters from the Royal Navy. The number actually taken was small, but it was an emotional issue that outraged national pride exaggerated dramatically.
The United States responded to this and other provocations by barring all British imports, and then by a total embargo on all American foreign trade that fathered a thriving smuggling enterprise. In 1809, Congress allowed trade with all nations but Britain and France to resume, and two years later removed the ban on France. No matter how America tried to use its foreign trade as a weapon, it failed, harming Yankee merchants and exporters more than it did the European combatants.
Watching and condemning all of this was Thomas Jefferson’s new Democratic Republican Party, and especially a wing of younger congressmen mostly from the southern and trans-Allegheny states called “War Hawks.” They took office in November 1811. Their inflammatory rhetoric reflected the comet still blazing overhead, even as their incessant hammering on commerce and national honor echoed stresses just weeks away from fracturing the earth’s crust. Backed by Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, they ultimately persuaded Congress to take a more aggressive stand toward Britain. In June 1812, as the waning comet still fluttered faintly above continuing aftershocks of the great quakes, Madison and Congress declared war on Britain. 1
The War Hawks’ biggest—indeed only—weapon was posing a threat to Canada. The colonists had tried without success to take it into their embrace during the Revolution. Now, with a new war on their hands, Madison’s generals seized the initiative by sending three “armies” north to try again, only to have two of them forced to surrender while the third retreated without a fight. The following year the Yankees tried again with more success with a naval victory on Lake Erie that secured their hold on most of future Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, territory west of Lake Michigan, and even a bit of Canada itself. Elsewhere, however, the British drove invading forces out of Ontario and Quebec and then followed them into New York.
Hundreds of miles to the south, a portion of the Creek tribe allied itself with the British in hopes of regaining tribal lands and pushing the Americans out of the Alabama country. That launched a war within a war, but a series of Yankee victories over mostly outnumbered Indian forces culminating at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814, effectively ended the Creek conflict. Elsewhere the Americans were not so successful. Two more invasions of Canada came to little or nothing, ending the Canadian dream and allowing the British to call the tune thereafter, especially as the fall of Napoleon in April allowed them to focus more attention and manpower across the Atlantic. An attempt to take upper New York failed, but they took possession of eastern Maine. Far worse, another army drove Madison’s forces from Washington long enough to take it on August 24 and put the government to flight, burning the Capitol, the Executive Mansion, and many other buildings. The British were only prevented from taking Baltimore three weeks later by the death of their commander, Major General Robert Ross, and their naval auxiliary’s failure to eliminate Fort McHenry.
A fortnight before Washington’s fall, commissioners from the warring nations opened peace discussions on August 10 at Ghent, Belgium. The close of the war with France essentially removed Britain’s reasons for fighting the United States. She needed now to concentrate on building a Europe suited to her interests. The Americans wearied of a war that had gained them nothing worth its cost in blood and treasure. Both nations wanted an end to fighting and the disruption of trade, yet their diplomats faced a third and common enemy as they commenced deliberations.
It took at least five weeks for news from the Atlantic coast to reach Ghent. Two consequences loomed, neither desirable. They might agree on terms only to learn later that the dynamic in America had changed, one party now having such advantage that it could have dictated more favorable terms had it but known. Indeed, had they settled before the end of September, the subsequent arrival of news of the victory at Washington might have done just that. Worse yet, fighting could continue for weeks after a treaty was agreed upon, and weeks more before ratification in London and Washington actually ended the conflict.
Therein lay opportunity, especially with Bonaparte out of the way. Treaty or no, the war would not be over until the fighting stopped. Even as Washington smoldered and peace commissioners argued in Ghent, British commanders in America and leaders in the Admiralty and War Office in London planned another campaign in a new theater. With no guarantee that Ghent would produce an agreement, they needed to maintain momentum. Should they be successful, the gain to Britain might be of epic proportion.
Their target was the Americans’ soft underbelly, the Gulf coast of Louisiana, and New Orleans, the key to an inland empire of more than 800,000 square miles fed by the Mississippi and its tributaries. The wealth flowing from that system was measured by the tens of millions. New Orleans itself was the emporium of the Gulf, with the West Indies and Caribbean islands largely dependent on its exports and its markets for their own goods, not least slaves. The nation commanding it held the back door to Canada and the Pacific and controlled the future westward expansion of the United States.
Moreover, even an agreement at Ghent might leave Louisiana in play. As the commissioners began their meetings, prevailing wisdom said they would settle on a basis recognizing the prewar status quo. Any territory changing hands through conquest by either side during the conflict would be returned to its prewar owner. In that diplomat’s game, Louisiana could be a wild card, for its title was as muddy as the Mississippi. Spain held dominion there for almost forty years, until 1801, when a powerful France virtually dictated a treaty that traded the vast territory to it for several promises it never kept. Napoleon also engaged never to sell Louisiana to a third party, an undertaking he honored for two years and forty days before he sold it to the United States in 1803.
What did that mean if a British expedition should take New Orleans and much or all of Louisiana before, or even after, a Ghent conclusion on a status quo basis? It would not be unheard-of to keep such a conquest despite the treaty, although it would risk renewing a war Britain did not want, but otherwise to whom should she give it back? France all but took it from Spain, broke its own treaty by not paying for it in full, then violated another commitment in selling it to Jefferson. Meanwhile, even after 1803, the Yankees left Spanish officials in de facto control of substantial portions of the territory. So, just who was the lawful prewar owner, the Americans or Britain’s ally Spain? It was a question fraught with baffling uncertainties and tantalizing possibilities. Whoever walked away with Louisiana would have an empire that reached to the Pacific, covered a third of the continent below Canada, and controlled the destiny of the adolescent United States.
It was a question that challenged even lowly mapmakers. That fall an Englishman stepped into the shop of a London cartographer to buy a map of the United States. The proprietor suggested that he wait a few weeks and then return. Events occurring across the Atlantic were about to change boundaries, he explained. Being prudent, he would not be completing any new maps of North America just now, for he expected that a considerable part of the Union would soon be returning to Britain. 2 Like so much in time of war, it would all depend on a battle.