Was this a defeat?

For America it was certainly a disaster. Although Madison consistently ranks as a middling to better than average President overall,[i] his decision to promote the war is regularly cited as one of the worst political decisions ever.[ii]

One review by a panel of presidential scholars put Madison’s war high on the list of blunders being placed at number six. This puts it in the same league as Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, not as bad as Watergate but worse than the Bay of Pigs.

To judge whether it was a defeat of not, we need to look at the aims the war attempted to achieve, or what it is reasonable to accept given our knowledge and hindsight. Despite endless speculation, it is not unreasonable to accept that America’s fourth president and a Founding Father was basically telling the truth about his objectives (see “Why America Attacked”). In addition there is significant evidence to believe that a further opportunistic war aim existed which was of forcing regime change in Canada from Imperial Loyalist to at least neutral.  Based on these, it is very difficult to portray the outcomes as anything other than failure on all points. A reasonable test is to ask how the outcome would have been accepted at the outset. By this test, had the final accepted peace terms been suggested as a possible outcome before the war was declared it would have been branded a shameful retreat from principle.

To be specific, the American delegates to the peace negotiations in Ghent gave way on all points settling for the “status quo ante” or the situation before the declaration of war in the first place The British Empire made no concessions to American neutrality, the conflict with the Native Americans would increase to the point of virtual genocide through the rest of the century and Canada remained both intact and loyal to the Empire.

To take a step back and look at the impact of the war on American sovereignty in terms of international status and trade, it is easy to make a case that America rapidly surrendered to the power of explosive British capitalism and became to a large extent an economic colony whose major economic initiatives were around defensive tariffs rather than development. It was still possible for leading American financiers to say at the end of the 19^th century that the paramount goal of the American economy was still to keep the confidence of the British investment community. [iii]

Internationally, America quickly disappeared from the world stage turning its attention towards the subjugation of the native peoples and the absorption of the former Franco Spanish territories following the Louisiana Purchase

Another way to look at the issue of defeat is to ignore the stated claims of what the war was all about and to address the basic question of whether America could have kept on fighting. Most historians and military strategists would accept that Prussian soldier and thinker von Clausewitz defined the question and its answer most clearly in his seminal work “On War”.

Three things are essential for the ability to wage war:

• Physical capacity
• Leadership
• Public support to the point where armies do not mutiny wholesale

The American navy could no longer operate as a force capable of inflicting strategic meaningful damage to the blockading British. Individual American “raiders” could attack British merchant ships and occasional military vessels, but this in no way impacted their enemy’s ability to both fight and trade. America ships were in many cases literally rotting at their berths while British blockaders sat, sometimes in view of the harbor, waiting to pounce.

Simply put in military terms the United States had virtually lost the capability to take the war to their enemy and lacking the resources to pursue their war aims, the government in Washington was faced with the dismal choice of continuing an unwinnable war it could not afford or surrender on the points which it went to war on in the first place.

Commercially, the American economy was disintegrating to the point where it defaulted on domestic and international debts and had an almost complete currency collapse.

In terms of leadership, the fact that President Madison began to seek for a negotiated settlement so soon after the start of the hostilities argues that the desire for sustained war was not deep and that the peace faction continued to gather strength. 

Public support had always been questionable to the point where many could reasonably claim not to understand why the war was being fought. As was noted in the Congressional record during the final days of peace: “Mr. Milnor presented petitions from sundry inhabitants of the city and county of Philadelphia and the county of Delaware in the State of Pennsylvania, stating their firm and unqualified conviction that the United States are not impelled to war against Great Britain by necessity, nor invited to it by expediency.”[iv]