1812

War and the Passions of Patriotism

Nicole Eustace

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812206364
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

As military campaigns go, the War of 1812 was a disaster. By the time it ended in 1815, Washington, D.C., had been burned to the ground, the national debt had nearly tripled, and territorial gains were negligible. Yet the war gained so much popular support that it ushered in what is known as the "era of good feelings, " a period of relative partisan harmony and strengthened national identity. Historian Nicole Eustace's cultural history of the war tells the story of how an expensive, unproductive campaign won over a young nation—largely by appealing to the heart. 1812 looks at the way each major event of the war became an opportunity to capture the American imagination: from the first attempt at invading Canada, intended as the grand opening of the war; to the battle of Lake Erie, where Oliver Perry hoisted the flag famously inscribed with "Don't Give Up the Ship"; to the burning of the Capitol by the British. Presidential speeches and political cartoons, tavern songs and treatises appealed to the emotions, painting war as an adventure that could expand the land and improve opportunities for American families. The general population, mostly shielded from the worst elements of the war, could imagine themselves participants in a great national movement without much sacrifice. Bolstered with compelling images of heroic fighting men and the loyal women who bore children for the nation, war supporters played on romantic notions of familial love to espouse population expansion and territorial aggression while maintaining limitations on citizenship. 1812 demonstrates the significance of this conflict in American history: the war that inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner" laid the groundwork for a patriotism that still reverberates today.

Chapter 1

Celebrating Love, Liberty, and Progeny

UNITED STATES, CIRCA 1811

Hezekiah Niles nurtured a visceral antagonism toward the British. The founder and editor of the Niles Weekly Register, who began publishing out of Baltimore in 1811, claimed that, back during the American Revolution, British soldiers had menaced his pregnant mother and almost killed him in utero. As he told the story in the pages of his paper, he “nearly perished with his mother a short time before he was born. A British grenadier gallantly attacked her with his bayonet, but she was saved as though by the interposition of Providence.” In relating this episode, Niles no doubt hoped, as he did with every article he wrote, that he had “done a good deal to . . . rouse . . . a national feeling and [to] buil[d] up [a] pride of character hitherto too much neglected.” Born in 1777 to Pennsylvania Quakers, by 1811 Niles was himself a family man in his prime, a Republican newspaper publisher with firm nationalist views, and—his religious roots notwithstanding—a steady promoter of renewed war with Britain.¹

Niles’s tale of his near miss with feticide carried significant political charge. Like many of his fellow Republicans, Niles had come to believe that population strength provided the key to American national power. Beyond inflicting personal tragedy, disrupting reproduction imperiled the nation. Niles’s concern with population questions ran deep. He recounted his own story in March 1812, just three months before the United States declared war on Britain, and in the same weekly issue in which he also featured an installment of an article he titled “An Analytical Review of the ‘Essay on the Principle of Population, by T. R. Malthus, A.M.’ with Some Remarks More Particularly Applicable to the Present and Probable Future State of the United States.”²

Niles presented Malthus to the public only to contradict him. His “analytical review” of the Essay on Population aimed to explain why the British theorist’s arguments in favor of population restriction were not “particularly applicable” to the United States. Perhaps Niles’s remembrance of his family anecdote was spurred by his close engagement with contemporary political economy. Or perhaps his interest in the role of reproduction in national progress stemmed from the knowledge of his own prenatal danger. Either way, Niles took it upon himself to increase public awareness of the interconnections between individual reproduction and national population, the better to inspire his fellow Americans with patriotic fervor at a moment of national crisis.

All wars put population strength at a premium and create strong public interest in personal attachment to the nation. Resident populations must be mobilized, neutralized, and/or defended. Wars always ask people to give themselves to their country. But in America, in 1812, the very idea of entering into open battle remained highly controversial. Since the constitutional founding of the United States in 1789, the nation had never yet made a formal declaration of war. The decision to do so generated intense debate. Members of President James Madison’s Democratic-Republican Party, predominant in the South and West, broadly supported military action against Britain, from challenging the Royal Navy at sea to mounting a conquest of Canada. Members of the opposition Federalist Party railed against war from their New England base. Wide swaths of the population remained more or less open to persuasion. Interlinked arguments about family generation and national expansion were at the center of these vigorous discussions. The population practices and patriotic emotions that emerged during the United States’ inaugural war would shape the nation for many ages to come.³

Growth-oriented Republicans embraced a polarizing vision of national progress in which people would become endeared to the nation through unfettered freedom to reproduce. Procreation functioned simultaneously as a fundamental right and an essential obligation. A nation that protected the natural human drive to beget children deserved the love and loyalty of its inhabitants. In return, those who enjoyed these liberties owed their offspring to the nation, the very embodiment of patriotic love.⁴

Even before the American Revolution, local commentators and international observers had remarked on the fantastic fecundity of North America. Its lands were fertile and so were its people. Ironically, the English had first established colonies in part out of concern over perceived population excesses in their small island nation. But on the vast continent of North America, population came to be appreciated as the basis of national potency. In what many Euro-Americans saw as a virtuous cycle, but many Native Americans and their British and Canadian allies viewed as a vicious circle, the continent’s wide-open grounds supported demographic expansion even as the increasing U.S. population enabled the seizure and settlement of new land. The resultant divergence in British and American attitudes toward the merits of population significantly increased tensions between the two nations.⁵

Throughout the first quarter century of U.S. independence, Britons and Americans had chafed each other about questions of population: its regulation, limitation, or optimization. Even as white Americans claimed to need enslaved Africans and African Americans to people their labor force, they coveted Indian lands to support the ever-growing number of the nation’s people. The British interfered with U.S. plans on both counts. On the continent, the British continued to cultivate diplomatic and economic partnerships with Indians, supporting the rival population from whom the United States perceived the greatest immediate threat. On the ocean, Britain controlled Atlantic shipping, forbidding the African slave trade after 1807 and harassing U.S. merchant vessels. Meanwhile, at sea, Britain’s traditional goal of population limitation was reversed. The Royal Navy needed every hand it could find on deck. The consequent British practice of boarding American ships to round up vagabond British seamen provoked enormous controversy, the more so since these efforts could sometimes sweep Americans into British nets.⁶

In the midst of such moral and political confusion, both Americans and Britons made scattershot efforts to maintain the better claim to virtue. Though the United States boasted of being the land of the free, it drew sharp distinctions between the citizenship rights of native-born, property-holding, white men and the options available to all those national denizens not recognized as formal citizens. The British lambasted Americans for the way their practices constricted liberty—even though their own impressment tactics flouted the rights of American citizenry and their dominion of the seas supported their own imperial efforts in India and beyond. The rising crisis with Britain compounded every element of the promise and problems of population in the United States. As they argued the ethics of population increases and the merits of territorial expansion, Americans debated the implications of allowing family formation to play a key philosophical and practical role in the building of the nation.⁷

Polemicists such as Hezekiah Niles brought the abstractions of political economy to the entertainments of popular culture. Print was a key arena where public and private intersected, where personal behavior could be glossed with political meaning. In this context, even those with no formal voice in government could be asked to lend their weight. Maximizing the number of people who could be mustered for the country meant relaxing barriers to public participation, finding new ways to inspire loyalty to the nation, and encouraging reproduction. With the stress of war making every person’s contribution count, personal feelings and patriotic feats became connected in new ways.⁸

Thomas Robert Malthus, who would grow up to become an Anglican clergyman and celebrated British theorist of political economy, was ten years old in 1776 when civil war first broke out between Great Britain and its North American colonies. Throughout the formative years of his adolescence, his ears must have echoed with American cries for liberty. For many Britons, the idealistic rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence could not have been more jarring. American hypocrites trumpeted a new universal philosophy of natural rights, scorning the traditional rights of Englishman rooted in the Magna Carta, even as they continued to practice racial slavery. British commentators, such as Samuel Johnson, demanded to know, “how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Coming of age just as the British signed a peace treaty in 1783 and ratified American Independence, Malthus would eventually take British skepticism of American liberty to new heights.⁹

Malthus first set forth his ideas in 1798 in a book-length treatise, Essay on the Principle of Population, that is now widely regarded as a direct precursor of Darwin’s work on evolution. His central hypothesis was that populations increase geometrically, while the means of subsistence increase arithmetically. Expanding populations inevitably outstrip food supplies. Yet despite his modern reputation, Malthus was a political economist before he was a biologist. His main interest in studying population was not to understand ecological patterns, but rather imperial ones. And by the time Malthus published in 1798, the Napoleonic Wars of France were already in full swing. From his English island redoubt, Malthus cast one critical eye across the Atlantic at America, another baleful glance over to France on the continent.¹⁰

Malthus offered his model of population not as a scientific abstraction but rather as a concrete analysis of geopolitics. The often-omitted full title to his famous work signals his intentions. He began in 1798 by calling it An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society. Yet just five years later, in 1803, he was subtitling the second edition of his study of population An Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which It Occasions. Viewing overpopulation as the main cause of famine and suffering, Malthus censured unrestrained reproduction as one of the main moral “evils.” Efforts to stave off starvation by staking out new territory would only create new misery. The occupying population could only prosper at the expense of the natives. Meanwhile, once the invaders’ numbers multiplied to the point that they again overran available resources, as they inevitably would, the final number of suffering people would have increased exponentially.¹¹

By the time Malthus issued a third edition of his essay in 1807, Britain had formally declared war on France, while the United States had purchased from France the right to claim the vast tract of the North American interior known as the Louisiana Territory. Meanwhile, the United States, according to its own calculations, had sustained dramatic increases in population begun in the eighteenth century. From the first national census taken in 1790 to the second taken in 1800, the nation’s numbers expanded from approximately 3.9 million to approximately 5.3 million. They continued to rise sharply, reaching 7.2 million by the third official census of 1810. In total, the nation’s numbers increased nearly twofold in just two decades. With no rival European claims to contend with, nothing stood in the way of a doubling of U.S. lands, and a redoubling of the U.S. population, save the thousands of Indians who continued to live on their native ground. The United States thus provided the perfect object lesson for Malthus’s claims that excess population fueled territorial aggression.¹²

Taking a hard look at U.S. ambitions to exert ever greater control over the continent, Malthus concluded, “if America continue increasing, which she certainly will do . . . the Indians will be driven further and further back into the country, till the whole race is ultimately exterminated.” How could the United States claim to be the globe’s strongest defender of freedom when it denied the basic right of survival to Native Americans? Malthus declared: “the right of exterminating, or driving to a corner where they must starve, even the inhabitants of thinly peopled regions, will be questioned in a moral view.” Though the British army had not beaten American revolutionaries on the battlefield, British commentators could reverse the triumph of American liberty through moral critique.¹³

Many Americans of the era rejected Malthusian analysis and instead tracked the nation’s population gains with pride. The official national census ensured widespread awareness of America’s remarkable demographic success in its first decades of existence. Americans did not view census reports as dry documents, of concern to only a few government policymakers. On the contrary, they took avid interest in the nation’s numbers. Census totals were reported in countless regional and local newspapers as soon as returns came in. Complete census reports were printed, with county-by-county compilations, and made available for public purchase. Census numbers featured in most standard almanacs, part of the basic information that even ordinary farm folk wanted to have at their fingertips. Some people went so far as to purchase decorative certificates in which census data was presented in ornamental graphic form suitable for framing and viewing (Figure 1). For many people in the United States, then, Thomas Malthus’s work represented a stunning rebuke of a signal American success. As U.S.-British frictions began to rub raw at the turn of the century, he was advancing an analysis of American demography that amounted to a stinging critique of American society.¹⁴

American reproductive boasts reached back to the previous century. Benjamin Franklin, printer, politician, and thinker, started things off by including among his wide-ranging ...