* Following the establishment of the modern American state in 1789, political factions argued the merits of maintaining strong standing military forces -- the Federalist Party being in favor of it, the Democratic Republican Party being against it. With the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the Democratic Republican Party was ascendant, with military preparedness downgraded accordingly. However, in the meantime Britain's war with Napoleonic France was creating a hostile environment for American overseas trade, with Americans perceiving Britain as the source of most of the hostility; the anger was greatly amplified by the inclination of the British to seize sailors from American vessels who had deserted from British vessels.
In the Northwest frontier around the Great Lakes, there was also considerable American anxiety over the threat posed by the Indian tribes, with a strong perception that Britain was supporting the tribes in their attacks. Seize British Canada, so the idea went, and the tribes would no longer have such support; it would also give America a strong bargaining position in pressing other grievances against Britain. Diplomacy and attempts to apply economic pressure failing, in the spring of 1812 American President James Madison declared war on Britain.
* After the founding of the modern American Republic in 1789, the new nation found itself generally at peace with the rest of the world. Even the outbreak of war between Britain and Revolutionary France in 1793, beginning a conflict that would last more than 20 years, didn't affect the Americans all that much -- at least at first -- and the fact that both combatants needed American goods helped drive a boom in American maritime trade. In 1794, the USA signed the "Jay Treaty" with Britain, which addressed territorial disputes in North America and attempted to set up a trade relationship between the two nations. The British made few concessions, though it did ease tensions, at the cost of antagonizing France.
The political debate in America ranged between the Federalists -- associated with Alexander Hamilton, focused on a strong central government and an assertive foreign policy backed up by a strong military -- and the Republicans -- not the same as the modern American Republican Party, more formally known as "Democratic Republicans", associated with Thomas Jefferson, focused on a minimalist central government and a dislike of standing military forces. President George Washington avoided associations with political parties, feeling his position required that he be above partisanship, though his instincts leaned towards the Federalists.
The Republicans were unhappy with the Jay Treaty, regarding France as a more desireable friend to America than Britain, but they were not able to overcome Federalist policy, nor were they able to resist the push to establish a formal navy. Wide-ranging American merchantmen made an attractive target for bandits, with the "Barbary Pirates" -- Muslim freebooters from North Africa, mostly operating out of the ports of Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers -- making a particular nuisance of themselves. The debate in the United States was whether it made more sense to pay protection money to the pirates, or invest the money into a fleet to take them on. In 1794, Congress decided to fight back, authorizing the construction of a half-dozen frigates:
These vessels were seen as adequate to take on any pirate vessel at even or better terms. However, construction was put on hold, since the willingness of the Americans to resort to force gave American diplomats enough leverage in Algiers to reach an agreement to stop pirate attacks on American shipping.
As often happens, however, with the fading of one threat, another rose in its place. From 1795 the French, angry over the Jay Treaty, began ramping up attacks on American shipping, particularly in the West Indies. Work on the six frigates was resumed, and a naval "Quasi-War" with France took place from 1798 to 1800. The Department of the Navy was established in 1798 to direct the war effort, with the first civilian Navy secretary, William Stoddert, proving a highly competent administrator.
* George Washington had been followed in the presidency by his vice-president, John Adams, who mostly continued the policies of his predecessor, and indeed retained Washington's cabinet. In the face of the naval conflict with France, the USA planned to continue its military buildup, working towards the construction of a powerful fleet.
Then the wind went out of the push for military strength. The "Convention of 1800" ended the fighting between America and France, eliminating the immediate need for a big navy, and in 1801 Thomas Jefferson became president, with the Republicans eclipsing the influence of the Federalists -- as it would turn out, permanently. The Federalists had become unpopular, there being no great public enthusiasm for paying taxes required to support a strong central government; the Federalists had also alienated much of the public with the "Sedition Act" of 1798, on the face of it a measure to deal with subversion, but more generally seen as a measure to allow the government to suppress Republicans and other political enemies.
The Republicans had little liking for a standing army and not much more for a formal navy, and so the big naval construction program was halted by the new Republican administration. Ironically, at that time the Barbary Pirates became a nuisance again, leading to a naval struggle that lasted from 1801 to 1805, with the Americans able to impose a settlement in the end. Jefferson decided there was a need for a formal navy after all, and in fact authorized the construction of small shallow-draft vessels that could operate in North African coastal waters to support the fight.
Jefferson still had no enthusiasm for a big navy. The US government didn't have the resources for it, and what would the point of it have been? Fighting pirates didn't require it; the only serious rationale would have been to challenge Britain on the high seas, and it was hard to see that made any sense. It would have been very expensive to build up a fleet that could take on the British Royal Navy on anything resembling equal terms, and Britain would regard any attempt to do so as almost an act of war and react accordingly. Still, the US Navy was not well-supported on even a minimal basis, and Jefferson hardly had an army worthy of the name. However, by this time events were beginning to drift towards a fight with Great Britain that would, like it or not, demand a functioning army and navy.
BACK_TO_TOP* Thanks to the war between Britain and France, the benign trade relationship between Britain and America gradually deteriorated. With French merchantmen generally driven off the oceans by the Royal Navy, American vessels began to operate in their place, particularly in the trade between France and French possessions in the Caribbean. The British regarded American vessels trading directly between those two locales as in violation of the Royal Navy blockade of French ports, making the vessels liable to seizure, but there was no formal objection to trade between America and France or America and France's West Indies colonies -- and so an American merchantman could avoid the blockade simply by making a stopover in an American port while on voyages between France and the French West Indies.
The British were willing to look the other way on the "re-export" trade, at least until 1805. British merchants had complained that American traders were taking advantage of the blockade rules to enrich themselves; the British government was finally forced to intervene. American ships were then required to provide documentation -- precisely what documentation wasn't specified -- to show that they were actually engaged in trade between America and France or its colonies, and not simply making a stopover in America on a voyage between France and its colonies. If American ships were engaged in "re-export", the Royal Navy would then seize them, though most were released on the judgement of British courts.
In 1806, under the declaration of the "Fox blockade" -- named after its author, a government minister named Charles Fox -- Britain imposed a blockade of Northern European ports that implicitly abandoned British attempts to restrict the re-export trade. However, the blockade still resulted in the seizure of American vessels by the Royal Navy. The American government did regard blockades, as long as sensible and consistent rules were applied, as a legitimate military practice, and in fact had assented to the legitimacy of proper blockades in the Jay Treaty. Besides, the Americans knew fully well and acknowledged that Britain's blockade of France was a great benefit to American shipping. The seizures of ships were still an annoyance, particularly in cases where the Royal Navy appeared to be acting arbitrarily. The Americans perceived that Fox blockade exceeded the bounds of legitimacy.
The worst provocation to America from the conflict, however, was "impressment". With American maritime trade booming, the pay was good on American vessels and so many British sailors jumped ship to sign on with American traders or the US Navy -- roughly a quarter of the sailors on American ships at the time were of British origins, including large numbers of Irishmen. The Royal Navy, in desperate need of manpower, felt the need to demonstrate to sailors that they would not be able to hide behind the Stars & Stripes if they decided to change employers; the British often boarded American vessels, searching for deserters among the crew, and dragged them off. The total number of sailors impressed by the Royal Navy would ultimately run to over 6,000.
Sometimes American citizens were seized. What made the impressments particularly troublesome was the fact that the British still saw naturalized American citizens who had been born in Britain as still British. The Americans issued identity papers to their sailors in hopes of preventing the impressments, but the papers were a joke, easily and often forged, and the British ignored them. Impressments had been going on since early in the previous decade -- the fact that the Jay Treaty hadn't addressed impressment was one of the reasons the Republicans hated it -- but they ramped up considerably after 1803.
Impressments were annoying in the first place, and became more annoying when the Royal Navy boarded American ships in US coastal waters to snatch up sailors. Many Americans labeled the exercise an attempt to reimpose British control over America, one sailor at a time. Indeed, there were Britons who believed American independence was a passing illusion, seeing the American government with some good reason as an incompetent and ramshackle affair, certain to simply collapse of its own dead weight before too long. Americans, so such thinking went, would then realize the foolishness of their rebellion against the British Crown and return to the fold.
Jefferson had limited interest in diplomacy with the British over American grievances. He was skeptical of the benefits of the American diplomatic initiatives of the Washington and Adams Administrations, describing the Jay Treaty as a "millstone round our necks", and in fact Jefferson refused to renew the Jay Treaty's commercial clauses, a particularly sore point to Republicans, when they lapsed in 1803. Jefferson was willing to discuss issues of the freedom of the seas, working through the American minister in London, James Monroe, though Jefferson did not want to extend the talks to cover commercial issues.
However, Congress leaned on Jefferson very hard to do something. In response to the pressure, he set up a special mission to discuss the full range of Anglo-American differences, dispatching a Baltimore lawyer named William Pinckney to Britain to work with Monroe in the negotiations. Their primary objectives were to restore the re-export trade and to put an end to impressment. The British proved willing to live with the re-export trade, stipulating merely that American merchantmen pay a small transit duty during their stopover in America -- a smaller duty, in fact, than shipowners were used to paying. Unfortunately, as far as impressment went, the British refused to budge, saying no more than that they would exercise "the greatest caution" in the matter and perform "immediate and prompt redress" if any Americans were mistakenly seized.
The American delegation was unhappy with Britain's refusal to concede on the impressment issue. However, the British were agreeable on other issues, so the American delegation decided they could make a deal. The result, the "Monroe-Pinckney Treaty" of 1806, was actually more favorable to America in some ways than the Jay Treaty. Along with the concession on the re-export trade, Britain agreed:
All the Americans really had to do in return was maintain an attitude of benign neutrality towards Britain.
Jefferson rejected the treaty; he refused to submit it to the Congress for ratification, effectively killing it. Jefferson could not accept Britain's unyielding attitude on impressment, and he also believed that Britain was likely to lose the war with France, with America regaining its maritime rights in the aftermath. Jefferson also had a great, in fact extreme, faith in the power of American commercial sanctions to force the British to see reason.
BACK_TO_TOP* With nothing resembling a settlement, relations between America and Britain continued to deteriorate. Matters came close to explosion on 22 June 1807, when the 50-gun Royal Navy "fourth-rate" ship-of-line HMS LEOPARD approached the 38-gun US Navy frigate USS CHESAPEAKE outside of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and ordered the American vessel to accept a boarding party. The captain of the CHESAPEAKE, Commodore James Barron, refused, so the LEOPARD fired broadsides into the American vessel that killed three sailors and injured 18. The CHESAPEAKE was then boarded, with four sailors taken away as deserters.
All four sailors had in fact been in the Royal Navy, but only one of them -- Jenkin Ratford -- was born a British citizen; the other three -- David Martin, John Strachan, and William Ware -- were American-born. Ratford had deserted from the Royal Navy to Norfolk only a few months earlier; he had been publicly outspoken about his escape to the "land of liberty", and the Royal Navy had been trying to get their hands on him through diplomatic channels, so they could make an example of him. Diplomacy having gone nowhere, the British chose more direct action. The four sailors were hauled off to Halifax in Nova Scotia to stand court-martial; the three Americans were sentenced to five hundred lashes, though the punishment was suspended, while Ratford dangled from the end of a yardarm in August.
The incident outraged Americans. Grabbing sailors off a merchant ship was one thing; snatching them off a US Navy warship, after blasting it with cannon fire, was another. A wave of fury swept through America over the incident, with Jefferson commenting in a private letter dated 14 July 1807: "Never since the Battle of Lexington have I seen this country in such a state of exasperation as at present, and even that did not produce such unanimity." Since Commodore Barron hadn't fought back, indeed the CHESAPEAKE was completely unprepared for battle, he was court-martialed, to be suspended from the service for five years.
Despite the public outrage, Jefferson wasn't eager to declare war on Britain. Of course, he issued a stiff protest; the British government, focused on the war with Napoleon, didn't want to get into another fight, and so Britain disavowed the action, removed the captain of the LEOPARD from command of the vessel -- though to then quietly reassign him to the command of another -- and offered to pay reparations. The three Americans were ultimately repatriated. However, the discussions over the issue became complicated and the matter took almost four years to resolve, with the incident raising bad feelings among Americans in the meantime. The British also showed no sign of budging on impressment, only drawing the line at yanking men off of US Navy vessels; since the US Navy was so small, that wasn't much more than a cosmetic concession.
* Along with the ongoing problem of impressment, the frictions over trade between America and Britain were also becoming more severe, thanks to an escalation of the trade war between Britain and France:
Napoleon's "Continental System" and the British Orders in Council weren't recognized as legitimate under international law by anyone, and the Americans were furious. To be sure, not too surprisingly the seemingly emphatic declarations of the British and French were full of loopholes, with the two nations granting licenses and exemptions liberally; although both sides were trying to manipulate trade to hurt the other, they also wanted to manipulate it to benefit themselves, leading to gross inconsistencies in policy. Still, hundreds of American ships and cargoes were seized, with the ratio of seizures running about 2:1 between the British and French.
Jefferson wanted to fight back, believing that commercial sanctions would also serve American interests. A limited "Non-Importation Act" had been passed in 1806, blocking imports of a selected list of British goods into the United States, but it really amounted to nothing much more than a warning shot, a lever in the Monroe-Pinckney negotiations. As a more emphatic means of pressuring Britain, Jefferson pushed through the "Embargo Act", which was signed into law in December 1807. It amounted to a "Non-Exportation Act", addressing with the situation by the simple if drastic measure of shutting off all American international trade.
In hindsight, it is hard to understand how Jefferson could have thought the embargo a good idea; such a measure would be absolutely unthinkable now, and even then there were loud protests, one observer comparing the act to curing corns by cutting off one's toes. A closer examination of the Embargo Act and the thinking behind it does little to clarify matters, revealing an eye-glazing tangle of subtleties and ambiguities. It is apparent that it was, to an extent, a measure of desperation: Jefferson had to take action against Britain, war wasn't an attractive option, and the Embargo Act was the only thing that he could do that had a chance of being effective. A slogan made the rounds among Republicans: "War, Embargo, or Nothing."
As it turned out, the Embargo Act really wasn't a good idea. New England shipowners were outraged, since they had all but been put out of business, and there were widespread violations of the Act. The British obtained alternate sources of imports, with shipments from Canada increasing substantially and British shippers benefiting greatly. Heavy-handed government actions to enforce the act only added to the fury. Cartoons mocked the embargo as a snapping turtle named the "O-grab-me" -- "Em-barg-o" spelled backwards. The ultimate absurdity was that Republicans didn't like to impose "internal" taxes, preferring to rely on import duties for revenue -- and no imports meant no government revenue.
The Embargo Act was clearly impractical and even more clearly unpopular, doing much to generate public resentment against Jefferson and the Republicans, which the Federalists didn't hesitate to exploit. After James Madison, who had been Jefferson's vice-president, was elected president in 1808, Congress replaced the Embargo Act with a "Non-Intercourse Act", which shut down American trade with Britain and France, giving the president discretionary powers in the matter. The Non-Intercourse Act was just as much a nonstarter as the Embargo Act, and was just as widely violated; once an American ship left home port, the US government had no very effective means of controlling its movements.
In 1810 the Non-Intercourse Act was replaced in turn by "Macon's Bill Number Two", proposed by Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, which formally dropped all embargo measures, but gave the president the discretionary right to selectively impose embargoes against nations that enforced a blockade that interfered with American shipping. In practice, the bill was confused and ineffectual; not only did Madison dislike it, but even Macon had ended up voting against it.
Napoleon found the measure entirely convenient for manipulating the Americans with false promises, while he made no real changes in policy himself; Republicans were easy to manipulate in such a way, since they leaned towards the French and were very Anglophobic, willing to tolerate French offenses while flying into rages over British affronts. Federalists sniped that America was supporting the despotism of Napoleon. In 1811, going full circle after five years, the US returned to a policy of non-importation -- a tacit admission that it was the only measure of economic coercion that seemed at all workable.
As the government staggered from one clumsy policy to the next, relations between Britain and America continued to deteriorate. In early May 1811, the Royal Navy frigate HMS GUERRIERE halted a brig off the US Northeast coast and seized a passenger; in response to the public outcry, Madison ordered the US Navy to confront the GUERRIERE. The frigate USS PRESIDENT, under Commodore John Rodgers, left dock at Annapolis, Maryland, on 12 May, and on 16 May observed what he thought to be the GUERRIERE off of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
The PRESIDENT caught up with the vessel in the dark, and an exchange of fire followed; each side later accused the other of shooting first. Rodgers had actually engaged the 20-gun brig HMS LITTLE BELT -- originally the Danish Navy LILLEBAELT -- killing nine of the British ship's crew and wounding 23 others. Now the British howled for action; most Americans, however, thought the incident nothing less than perfect justice.
BACK_TO_TOP* While the US government publicly focused on the provocations dealt out by Britain on the high seas, there were tensions between the US and Britain over territorial claims in North America. Put in a blunt fashion, there were Americans who wanted to conquer Canada, believing that the USA had a "Manifest Destiny" to control all the continent. This was not pure greed for conquest, however, a security issue being involved as well.
In the "Northwest" -- the "Old Northwest" in modern terms, now the US Midwest along the Ohio River -- settlers had been engaged in running feuds with the Indian tribes of the region for decades. There had been fighting between settlers and tribesmen in the Old Northwest in the early 1790s, with the tribes yielding to the settlers in 1795, conceding Ohio and drawing back across new boundaries. Settlers continued to encroach on their lands, and so in 1805 two Shawnee brothers, the war leader Tecumseh and the prophet Tenskawata, began to organize the tribes to form a common front against the invaders. As fighting broke out again from 1810, the settlers acquired a deep fear of Tecumseh -- not without reason, since almost all who met him found him striking in appearance, a man of great intelligence and determination. However, they exaggerated Tecumseh's ability to unify the tribes, whose relations were often marked by long-running blood feuds between each other.
In August 1810 William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, met with Tecumseh at Vincennes, the territorial capital. The meeting did not go well, Tecumseh listing the many injuries inflicted on the tribes by the white settlers, with the chieftain telling Harrison: "You are continually driving the red people ... at last you will drive them into the great lake." When Harrison replied that the United States had treated the tribes with "fairness and justice", Tecumseh denounced him in a fury, calling him a liar, the two men nearly coming to blows. Restraint prevailed; the next day Harrison told Tecumseh that he would pass on a report of the meeting to President Madison. Tecumseh accepted that, if grudgingly, suggesting that the "Great Spirit will put some sense" into Madison's head.
Tecumseh clearly did not think the Great Spirit would do so, since in 1811 he traveled to the American Southwest to spread his message to the tribes there. While he was absent, Harrison led a force against Tecumseh's base at Prophet's Town in the region, resulting in a clash on 7 November 1811 at Tippecanoe. Harrison's troops got the worst of it on the battlefield, but they were able to burn Prophet's Town and disrupt Tecumseh's alliance -- though the settlers were under no illusions that the threat had been put down for good.
Tecumseh led his warriors across the border into Canada, to strike up alliances with Canadian tribes in preparation for further moves. Such was his reputation among both Indians and whites that when the region around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers was rocked by tremendous earthquakes in December 1811 -- rerouting the Mississippi in places, and creating lakes where there had been none before -- some attributed the fury to the power of Tecumseh, claiming that the chieftain would stamp his foot and shake the earth to destroy his enemies. Tecumseh was too sensible to say such things himself, but he didn't do anything to discourage them either.
In any case, the British had been friendly to the tribes in the region, which had the inevitable result of tying Britain to the tribesmen in their attacks on American settlements, with the tribesmen often armed with weapons obtained from British traders and friendly British officials. Americans tended to believe that when the Indians went on the warpath, it was at British instigation; in reality, much more often than not, the British tried to restrain their Indian allies. Still, wild tales went around that the British were paying the Indians to collect American scalps. Access to the Great Lakes gave the British reach throughout the region, amplifying their ability to cause trouble; run the British out of Canada, so the thinking went, and they would no longer be a threat.
It didn't seem like it would be too hard to do. There were about 7.7 million Americans at the time, compared to half a million Canadians, concentrated in Upper and Lower Canada -- now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec respectively. British military strength in Canada was minimal, and many of the settlers in the Canadian frontier region had come from America; to be sure, the Loyalists who had fled to Canada in the wake of the Revolution had no love for the Union established by their old Patriot enemies, but many of the new settlers on the frontier were more recent arrivals from America, drawn by cheap land, and there was an assumption that these "Late Loyalists" would be more loyal to America than to Britain. American preconceptions on the loyalty of Canadians were not unreasonable, since British authorities had just as many worries over the loyalties of their subjects there.
The French-speaking Canadians in Lower Canada were seen as unlikely to come to the aid of the British Crown, one line of thinking suggesting that the French speakers might be persuaded to come over to the American side if they were promised independence. American control over Upper Canada was the critical issue, since it would block British movement in the interior region.
While the western "War Hawks" pushed for war against Britain, in the American Southwest -- at the time, that meant the western half of the modern South then in American hands -- the people of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory had similar ambitions for the conquest of Florida, a Spanish possession. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had brought the Americans into contact with West Florida, the region on the western part of the Florida panhandle, around Mobile and Pensacola, with border disputes following. American settlers squatted into the area, and Madison sent in troops to occupy the region in 1810. The fact that Spain and England were allies against Napoleon presented the Southern War Hawks with an excuse for grabbing more of Spanish territory in the Southeast.
However, although there were clearly imperialistic elements in American thinking, the frontier people didn't have the political clout to bring the country into war on their own, and so in hindsight the precise mix of motives driving the USA towards a confrontation remains ambiguous. The complaints of the Americans against Britain over the blockade and impressment dominated the public discussion, the slogan being "free trade and sailor's rights". Some historians see them as inadequate motives for war, but there was a perception at the time that the USA needed to stand up to Britain and prove that America was to be taken seriously. The Republicans tapped into patriotic excitement against Britain, seeing it as a means of reinforcing their political power and marginalizing the Federalists, who were smeared as "Tories" and traitors.
War fever tends to have an emotional component that may well be more important than cold calculations of the bottom line, and in hindsight not necessarily sensible. Besides, the imperialistic drive and the resentment against Britain weren't mutually exclusive motives: if the United States wanted to send a message to Britain, seizing Canada would be a very emphatic way of doing it -- and the vulnerability of Canada made it the most attractive target. By posing a threat to Canada, the British might even make concessions that would make war unnecessary.
BACK_TO_TOP* Despite the counterproductive aspects of American attempts to exert pressure on Britain, the British still decided to alter their policies -- Britain still had no wish to get into a distracting fight with the USA while struggling with Napoleon. Royal Navy captains were given orders to be much more cautious in impressing sailors off American ships, and on 16 June 1812, the British foreign minister announced the Orders in Council affecting American shipping would be dropped, though there wasn't the slightest yielding on impressment. The failure to officially renounce impressment, the primary American complaint, seriously weakened the effect of the British concessions; they were further weakened by the fact that the British were maddeningly reluctant to admit they were actually making concessions.
It was too late in any case, the American government having already put the wheels in motion towards war. Even as the British government was reconsidering policy, Madison was working towards following up half-baked measures at economic coercion with a half-baked "get tough" military adventure, having sent a message to Congress on 1 June listing all the complaints against England, and asking for a declaration of war. He got it: the House of Representatives voted for war on 4 June by 79 to 49, with the Senate following on 18 June, the vote running 19 to 13.
Madison made an unimpressive war leader. Although he had undoubted intellectual capabilities, being the primary architect of the US Constitution, he was a small man, only 163 centimeters (5 feet 4 inches) in height, soft-spoken, polite, reserved, and non-confrontational; overshadowed physically and in presence by his wife Dolley, a popular and vivacious Washington hostess. He had married late, and there was considerable surprise that it had been to a catch like Dolley. Even some of his admirers thought him too civilized to be very warlike, while his detractors sneered at him as "Little Jemmy".
Madison's war policy did not get off on a good foot politically. His cabinet was notably divisive -- one observer noting the "most deadly animosity raging between its principal members" -- and Madison simply did not have the force of character to maintain control over it, nor the judgement to select competent cabinet secretaries. Madison's leverage over Congress was not encouraging either, as the mixed vote for war had demonstrated. The president had obtained comfortable majorities, of course, but the majorities weren't overwhelming by any means -- and the motives among those who wanted the war were clearly mixed, appearing confused in hindsight.
The vote was split very strongly along party lines, with the Republicans voting for war, while the Federalists opposed it. The Federalists were not happy about going to war at all, but given that war seemed inevitable they had pushed to restrict the conflict to naval operations, seeing the conquest of Canada as an imperialistic exercise, mere banditry. The Federalists had been shouted down, but they were hardly resigned to events; they would continue to consistently vote with extreme party solidarity against the war.
Despite inadequate political support, Madison was entirely confident that America would prevail. There was a burst of public enthusiasm over the declaration of war, with agitation against Federalists getting out of control in Baltimore: a Republican mob attacked the building of a Federalist newspaper on 27 July, with the Federalists firing on the mob, killing one of the crowd and injuring several more. The Federalists ended up in protective custody in jail -- but the next day, the mob demolished the building and then stormed the jail, snatching the Federalists to beat and torture them, killing one and permanently maiming others.
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