America on the World Stage in two minutes
- From 1803 Britain and France seized neutral American ships, and Britain impressed sailors. After the Chesapeake–Leopard attack of 1807, Jefferson's Embargo Act cut exports from about $108 million to $22 million.
- War hawks such as Henry Clay wanted Canada, and settlers blamed Britain for arming Native resistance led by Tecumseh. Congress declared war in June 1812 on a divided vote, over Federalist opposition.
- The British burned Washington in 1814 but failed at Baltimore. The Treaty of Ghent (December 1814) restored prewar borders and ignored impressment; Andrew Jackson's New Orleans victory came afterward.
- The Hartford Convention discredited the Federalists, and nationalism grew. Tecumseh died in 1813, and Native nations east of the Mississippi lost British support, then land, including millions of Creek acres.
- Rush–Bagot (1817) limited warships on the Great Lakes, the Convention of 1818 set the 49th parallel border and shared Oregon, and the Adams–Onís Treaty (1819) transferred Florida from Spain.
- As Spain's colonies won independence, James Monroe warned in 1823 against new European colonies in the Americas and promised to stay out of Europe's wars. Britain's navy backed it.
- On the exam: expect causation (why the United States went to war) and continuity and change in foreign policy since Washington's neutrality, linked to later uses of the Monroe Doctrine.
Topic 4.4 key terms
- War of 1812
The United States declared war on Britain in June 1812 over British seizures of American ships and sailors, British trade rules, and British support for Native resistance in the West. The treaty that ended it, signed in December 1814, said nothing about them.
- Burning of Washington
On August 24, 1814, British troops entered the capital and burned the Capitol, the President's House and other government buildings. British officers called it payback for American raids in Canada, including the burning of York (now Toronto) in 1813.
- Impressment
The Royal Navy's practice of seizing sailors from other ships and forcing them to serve, often on the claim that they were British deserters. It took thousands of men from American ships.
- Sovereignty
A nation's supreme authority over its own territory, ships and people. Other countries have to respect it, and the young United States spent its first decades fighting to make them.
- Barbary states
Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli: the North African states whose rulers licensed raiders to seize ships from countries that hadn't paid them. Textbooks call the raiders 'Barbary pirates.' Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were Ottoman regencies with their own governments and navies.
- Tribute
Regular payments to a foreign ruler in return for peace or protection. Washington and Adams paid the Barbary states rather than fight, and Britain and France paid them too. Jefferson refused Tripoli's demand for more.
- First Barbary War (1801–1805)
Four years of on-and-off fighting between the United States and Tripoli. Neither side won outright, but the Navy and Marines earned some respect in the Mediterranean, and the U.S. still paid to end it.
- Tripoli Monument (1808)
The first U.S. monument to the American military. Naval officers paid for it, and it honors six officers killed in the Barbary War. It was carved in Italy and first stood at the Washington Navy Yard.
- Neutral rights
A country at peace claims the right to trade with countries at war. Britain and France both ignored it and seized American ships bound for the other side’s ports.
- Chesapeake–Leopard affair (1807)
Off Virginia in June 1807, the British warship Leopard fired on the American frigate Chesapeake and took four sailors off her. It roused Americans to fury but not to war, and it pushed Jefferson toward the Embargo Act.
- Embargo Act (1807)
Jefferson’s law, passed December 22, 1807, banning American ships from sailing to foreign ports. It aimed to force Britain and France to respect neutral rights without a war, but it hurt American merchants, sailors and farmers most.
- Non-Intercourse Act (1809)
The law that replaced the Embargo. It reopened trade with every country except Britain and France and promised to reopen it with whichever one stopped seizing American ships. It did little to change either nation’s policy.
- Treaty of Greenville (1795)
Signed after the U.S. victory at Fallen Timbers. Native nations of the Ohio country gave up most of Ohio to the United States.
- Tenskwatawa (the Prophet)
Shawnee religious leader and Tecumseh's brother. His revival told Native people to give up alcohol and American goods, and to stop selling land.
- Tecumseh's confederacy
Tecumseh's plan to unite Native nations against U.S. land sales. The land belonged to all of them together, so no single nation could sell it.
- Battle of Tippecanoe (1811)
Harrison's army beat back a dawn attack by the Prophet's followers near Prophetstown, then burned the town. Americans blamed Britain for arming the warriors.
- War hawks
Young Democratic-Republican members of Congress, mostly from the South and West, elected in 1810 and led by Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. They pushed for war with Britain to defend national honor, win Canada and end British support for Native resistance on the frontier.
- Macon's Bill No. 2 (1810)
Law that reopened U.S. trade with Britain and France and promised to cut off whichever one refused to respect neutral shipping if the other agreed to. Napoleon promised to comply, so Madison restored trade limits against Britain in 1811. France kept seizing American ships anyway, and Britain would not budge.
- Opposition to the war
No Federalist in Congress voted for war. They and some “Quids” (Old Republicans like John Randolph) warned it would wreck New England's trade and help Napoleon. Pennsylvania and Vermont joined the South and West to make a slim majority.
- Battle of Lake Erie (1813)
American naval victory on September 10, 1813. Perry's squadron captured the whole British squadron on Lake Erie. Without the lake, the British could not supply Detroit or their Native allies, and they pulled out of the region.
- Battle of the Thames (1813)
American victory on October 5, 1813, in Upper Canada. William Henry Harrison's army broke Procter's British line, and Tecumseh was killed. His confederacy collapsed, and Native resistance in the Old Northwest never again had one leader and one alliance.
- Colonial Marines
A British corps raised in May 1814 from Chesapeake men who had escaped slavery. Admiral Cochrane's proclamation offered anyone who came over a place in British service or a free new home.
- Battle of Bladensburg
August 24, 1814. British regulars routed a larger American force, mostly militia, just outside Washington. Joshua Barney's sailors held their ground longest. The road to the capital lay open.
- Sourcing (HIPP)
Ask four things about any source: its historical situation, its intended audience, its purpose, and its author's point of view. Then ask who else could have told the story.
- Battle of Baltimore (1814)
September 12–14, 1814. British troops landed at North Point and pushed back the militia but lost General Ross. They halted before Baltimore's defenses, and the fleet's 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry could not force the harbor. The British withdrew, and the city stayed in American hands.
- "The Star-Spangled Banner"
Francis Scott Key's poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry," written in September 1814 and set to the tune "To Anacreon in Heaven." Congress made it the national anthem in 1931.
- Nationalism
Pride in and loyalty to one's nation, often expressed through shared symbols such as flags, patriotic songs and war heroes. Historians link its growth in the early republic to the War of 1812.
- Battle of Lake Champlain (1814)
On September 11, 1814, Thomas Macdonough's American squadron beat a British squadron at Plattsburgh Bay on Lake Champlain. Without control of the lake, Britain's invading army turned back to Canada and gave up its invasion of New York.
- Treaty of Ghent (1814)
Signed December 24, 1814, it ended the War of 1812 by restoring things to how they were before the war (status quo ante bellum). Captured territory went back, and the treaty said nothing about impressment or neutral trade.
- Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814)
On March 27, 1814, Andrew Jackson's army, with Cherokee and Lower Creek allies, destroyed a Red Stick Creek force in present-day Alabama. It broke the Red Sticks' power and led to the Treaty of Fort Jackson.
- Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814)
Signed August 9, 1814. Andrew Jackson forced the Creek Nation, including Creeks who had fought beside him, to give up more than 21 million acres in what became Alabama and Georgia, opening the land to white settlement.
- Battle of New Orleans (1815)
On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson's mixed army of regulars, militia, free men of color, Choctaw and Baratarian gunners beat a British assault below New Orleans. The peace treaty had been signed two weeks earlier, but it took effect only after the Senate ratified it in February.
- Free men of color
Free Black and mixed-race Louisianians, many of them property owners. Jackson recruited them in 1814 with a promise of the same pay as white soldiers, and two battalions of them held part of the line at New Orleans.
- Hartford Convention (1814–1815)
A secret meeting of 26 New England Federalist delegates in Hartford, Connecticut, that protested the war and drafted constitutional amendments to limit Southern power. The report did not call for secession, but the party was blamed for disloyalty when peace and victory arrived together.
- Federalist Party
The party of Hamilton and John Adams, strongest among New England merchants. It opposed the War of 1812, and after Hartford its critics called it disloyal. Its last presidential candidate, Rufus King, ran in 1816.
- Rush–Bagot Agreement (1817)
A U.S.–British agreement that limited each navy to a few tiny armed vessels on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. Still in force, it became the model for a mostly demilitarized U.S.–Canada border.
- Convention of 1818 (Treaty of 1818)
A U.S.–British treaty that set the border on the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, fixing the Louisiana Purchase's northern edge. It put Oregon under joint occupation for ten years and shared fishing rights off Newfoundland.
- First Seminole War (1817–1818)
Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida, launched to stop Seminole raids and to recapture people who had escaped slavery. It showed that Spain could not control Florida, and it pushed Spain toward selling.
- Adams–Onís Treaty (1819)
Spain ceded East Florida and its claims to West Florida to the United States, and the U.S. gave up its claims to Texas. The border ran along the Sabine, Red and Arkansas rivers and the 42nd parallel to the Pacific. The U.S. took on $5 million in claims by its own citizens against Spain.
- Monroe Doctrine (1823)
President Monroe's declaration that the Americas were closed to new European colonization, and that the United States would stay out of Europe's wars. Britain's navy, not U.S. power, enforced it for decades. The name came later.
- Status quo ante bellum
Latin for 'the way things were before the war.' The Treaty of Ghent, signed December 24, 1814, restored prewar borders and said nothing about impressment, blockades or neutral rights.
- Loss of British support
Britain had backed Native resistance to American expansion for decades. After Ghent it stopped. Native nations east of the Mississippi now faced the United States without a European ally, and were pressed to give up more land.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
By the Dawn's Early Light
Sept 13–14, 1814
Key terms: War of 1812, Burning of Washington, Impressment, Sovereignty
Night · September 13, 1814 The Patapsco River, below Baltimore
Francis Scott Key was a Georgetown lawyer who wrote poems for fun. Tonight the British navy wouldn't let him go home.
He'd come to free a friend the British had arrested. They agreed, then kept everyone until the attack was over.
All night, British ships threw bombs and rockets at Fort McHenry. Three weeks earlier, the same force had burned Washington.
In the rain, Key could see the fort only when something exploded over it.
Early in the morning, the guns stopped. Nobody on the sloop knew why.
Robert J. Barrett
…the Americans hoisted a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery, and fired at the same time a gun of defiance.
That's a British officer, describing the same flag.
Francis Scott Key
O! say does that star-spangled Banner yet wave, O'er the Land of the free and the home of the brave?
For twenty years, foreign navies had treated the American flag as a suggestion. How did a small, weak country get the world to take it seriously?
Tribute
1801–1805
Key terms: Barbary states, Tribute, First Barbary War (1801–1805), Tripoli Monument (1808)
The Mediterranean, 1801. Bring money.
In May 1801, the ruler of Tripoli wanted more money. He declared war by chopping down the flagpole at the American consulate.
Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli licensed raiders to seize ships from countries that hadn't paid.
Britain paid. France paid. So did the United States.
Jefferson thought navies cost too much and made presidents too strong. He sent one anyway.
In 1803 the frigate Philadelphia hit a reef off Tripoli. Three hundred and seven Americans were captured.
So the Navy burned its own ship. Stephen Decatur, 25, slipped into the harbor by night in a captured ketch and set her on fire.
In 1805, a few Marines and several hundred hired soldiers crossed five hundred miles of desert.
They took the town of Derna: the "shores of Tripoli" in the Marines' Hymn.
In June 1805, Tripoli made peace. The United States paid sixty thousand dollars to get its sailors back. Four years of war, and it paid anyway.
Navy officers paid for a marble monument to their dead, the first to the American military. Europe hardly noticed. It had a bigger war to fight.
Caught Between Giants
1803–1809
Key terms: Neutral rights, Impressment, Chesapeake–Leopard affair (1807), Embargo Act (1807), Non-Intercourse Act (1809)
In 1803 Britain and France went back to war, and they fought for twelve more years. Each tried to strangle the other’s trade. Both seized American ships.
Worse, British officers took sailors off American ships to serve in the Royal Navy.
Britain had a case. It was fighting for survival, and thousands of its sailors had deserted to better-paid American ships. But its officers took Americans too, by the thousands.
In June 1807, HMS Leopard ordered the USS Chesapeake to stop and be searched for deserters. Her captain refused. The Leopard fired, killing three men. The Chesapeake fired one gun and lowered her flag.
The British took four sailors. They hanged one, Jenkin Ratford, a deserter. The other three said they were Americans. One of them, Daniel Martin, was a Black sailor.
Thomas Jefferson
Never, since the battle of Lexington have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present.
He chose an experiment instead of a war.
The Embargo Act of 1807 kept American ships out of foreign ports. Britain, the theory went, needed American trade more than America needed Britain’s.
Exports fell from about 108 million dollars in 1807 to 22 million in 1808. Britain bought elsewhere.
A cartoonist spelled Embargo backward: O grab me.
Jefferson, who had feared a strong federal government, sent soldiers to the Canadian border to catch smugglers.
Congress repealed the Embargo three days before Jefferson left office. Trade reopened with everyone but Britain and France. Some of the money that had stopped going to sea went into cotton mills.
Prophetstown
1805–1811
Key terms: Treaty of Greenville (1795), Tenskwatawa (the Prophet), Tecumseh's confederacy, Battle of Tippecanoe (1811)
West of the mountains, the fight was over land. Treaty after treaty pushed settlement across Ohio and into Indiana.
In 1809, Governor William Henry Harrison bought about three million acres at Fort Wayne. The chiefs who signed did not speak for everyone living there.
Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, told Native people to give up whiskey and American goods, and to stop selling land. Followers came from many nations to his town, Prophetstown.
His brother Tecumseh turned the faith into a plan: one confederacy, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. No one nation, he said, could sell what belonged to all of them.
Tecumseh
Brother. This land that was sold and the goods that was given for it was only done by a few.
William Henry Harrison
…one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.
Harrison meant it as a warning.
Tecumseh was already traveling south, to the Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek.
While Tecumseh was away, Harrison camped an army outside Prophetstown. Before dawn on November 7, the Prophet's warriors attacked his camp and were driven off.
Harrison's men burned the town and its winter food. Frontier settlers blamed Britain for arming the Prophet's warriors.
Tecumseh came home to ashes. He took what was left of his confederacy to the one power that might help: Britain.
Mr. Madison's War
1810–1813
Key terms: War hawks, Macon's Bill No. 2 (1810), Opposition to the war, Battle of Lake Erie (1813), Battle of the Thames (1813)
In Washington, everyone was talking about Canada.
In 1811, young war hawks made Henry Clay Speaker on his first day in the House.
Henry Clay
The militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.
Not everyone was charmed.
John Randolph of Roanoke
We have heard but one word—like the whip-poor-will, but one eternal monotonous tone—Canada! Canada! Canada!
Congress tried Macon's Bill Number Two. Napoleon played along, and Madison cut off only Britain.
James Madison
Thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country…
That was impressment. He added seized ships and British help for Native warriors.
Congress declared war: 79 to 49 in the House, 19 to 13 in the Senate. New England's Federalists called it Mr. Madison's War.
Five days later, Britain dropped the trade orders behind the quarrel. The news was still at sea.
Thomas Jefferson
The acquisition of Canada this year… will be a mere matter of marching.
Instead, General William Hull surrendered Detroit and his army after a short shelling.
Three days later, the general's nephew Isaac beat HMS Guerriere in the frigate Constitution. British cannonballs bounced off her oak sides, sailors said. They called her Old Ironsides.
On Lake Erie, Perry's flagship was shot to pieces. So he rowed half a mile to another ship, and won.
He scribbled his report to General Harrison on the back of an old letter.
Oliver Hazard Perry
We have met the enemy and they are ours: two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.
Without the lake, Britain could not hold Detroit. General Procter chose to retreat.
Tecumseh answered him, remembering 1783.
Tecumseh
Our father took them by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at this time.
At the Thames, Procter's line broke almost at once. Tecumseh stayed and fought, and was killed. No one knows where he is buried.
Dinner at Three
April–August 1814
Key terms: Colonial Marines, Battle of Bladensburg, Sourcing (HIPP), Burning of Washington
In April 1814, Napoleon gave up. Britain sent its spare ships and veterans to America.
In Chesapeake Bay, hundreds of men who had escaped slavery joined the British as Colonial Marines. They knew the roads and the rivers.
At Bladensburg, the militia defending Washington broke and ran. People called it the Bladensburg Races. President Madison was on the field.
Dolley Madison
Since sunrise I have been turning my spy glass in every direction and watching with unwearied anxiety, hoping to discern the approach of my dear husband…
Downstairs, dinner was ordered for three o'clock, as usual. Paul Jennings, fifteen, enslaved by the Madisons, had set the table.
Late that night, British officers walked in.
Paul Jennings
…they ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines, etc., that I had prepared for the President's party.
They piled up the furniture and set the house on fire. The Capitol was already burning. The British called it payback for York.
The next day, a storm tore through the city. That night, the British marched back to their ships. Three weeks later, the same army came for Baltimore.
The Rockets' Red Glare
September 12–14, 1814
Key terms: Battle of Baltimore (1814), "The Star-Spangled Banner", Nationalism
Three weeks later, the same army came for Baltimore.
Near North Point, American riflemen killed its general, Robert Ross.
At the fort, four defenders died in about 25 hours of bombardment. Baltimore held.
Francis Scott Key
O! say can you see by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Within days it was printed, and sung to a London club song, "To Anacreon in Heaven."
Key had used that tune in 1805, for a dinner honoring the heroes of Tripoli. That song had a "star-spangled flag" in it too.
Almost nobody sings the third verse.
Francis Scott Key
No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
Some of the men Baltimore faced had escaped slavery that year. Historians still argue whether Key meant them. Key himself enslaved people.
Christmas Eve
1814
Key terms: Battle of Lake Champlain (1814), Treaty of Ghent (1814), Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814), Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814)
A British army marched south from Canada. Its governor-general had already written home about dinner:
Sir George Prevost
Two thirds of the army in Canada are at the moment eating beef provided by American contractors.
At Plattsburgh, Thomas Macdonough's fleet beat the British squadron on Lake Champlain. Without the lake, the army went back to Canada.
London offered Wellington the American command. His advice:
Duke of Wellington
I think you have no right from the state of the war to demand any concession of territory from America.
At Ghent, Britain opened by demanding a Native buffer state. By October, it dropped the demand.
On Christmas Eve, both sides signed. Every border went back. Impressment wasn't mentioned.
Article Nine promised to restore Native nations' lands and rights to what they were in 1811. Tecumseh had warned about exactly this.
Tecumseh
Our father took them by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at this time.
In the South, the Red Sticks, Creeks inspired by Tecumseh, had gone to war. At Horseshoe Bend that March, Jackson's army and its Cherokee and Creek allies killed about 800 of them.
In August, Jackson made the Creek Nation give up more than 21 million acres, nearly the size of Indiana. Millions of those acres belonged to Creeks who fought on his side.
The United States said Ghent's promise didn't cover that land.
The treaty sailed for America. The news would take seven weeks.
The Battle After the War
January–February 1815
Key terms: Battle of New Orleans (1815), Free men of color, Hartford Convention (1814–1815), Federalist Party
Two weeks after the treaty was signed, a British army sat in the cane fields below New Orleans. Nobody there had heard of it.
Jackson's line was a mud wall behind a canal. Behind it stood regulars, frontier riflemen, Louisiana militia, free men of color, Choctaw warriors and Jean Lafitte's smugglers.
Andrew Jackson
But you surpass my hopes. I have found in you, united to these qualities, that noble enthusiasm which impels to great deeds.
In less than an hour, the British lost about 2,000 men, among them their commander, Edward Pakenham. The Americans lost about seventy.
In Hartford, New England Federalists spent three weeks drafting amendments against Southern power. One would end the three-fifths rule. Another would require two-thirds of Congress for any offensive war.
Three delegates took the demands to Washington. They arrived in a capital that was celebrating victory and peace. The Federalist Party never recovered.
Americans heard about the victory first and the peace second. It felt as if New Orleans had won the war.
Hands Off
1815–1823
Key terms: Rush–Bagot Agreement (1817), Convention of 1818 (Treaty of 1818), First Seminole War (1817–1818), Adams–Onís Treaty (1819), Monroe Doctrine (1823)
In 1815 the navy went back to the Mediterranean. Within weeks, Decatur made Algiers stop demanding tribute.
In 1817, Britain and the United States nearly disarmed the Great Lakes.
Then they drew the border west along the 49th parallel and shared Oregon.
Spanish Florida sheltered Seminoles and people escaping slavery. In 1818, Jackson invaded, burned Seminole towns, executed two British subjects and took Pensacola.
John Quincy Adams defended Jackson and pressed Spain to sell. In 1819 Spain gave up Florida, and the border ran to the Pacific.
By 1823, most of Spain's American colonies had broken free. Europe's kings talked of helping Spain take them back.
George Canning proposed a joint warning. Jefferson urged Monroe to accept.
Thomas Jefferson
With her on our side we need not fear the whole world.
Adams disagreed.
John Quincy Adams
It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.
Monroe sided with Adams and spoke alone.
James Monroe
The American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
And the United States would stay out of Europe's wars.
Europe's kings mostly shrugged. Britain's navy kept them out anyway, and Canning took the credit.
George Canning
I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.
CODA: Still There
1815–1823
Key terms: Nationalism, Status quo ante bellum, Loss of British support
This 1815 print shows how Americans wanted to see themselves. Wisdom guides America. Washington's statue looks on. An armed ship carries trade. A woman spins at her door.
Albert Gallatin
The war has renewed and reinstated the national feelings and character which the Revolution had given, and which were daily lessened.
The war won nothing on paper. It made Americans proud and Europe careful. For Native nations east of the Mississippi, it ended the last serious hope of a European ally.
Key's first verse ends with a question mark. The answer depended on who was asking.