Impressment and the Road to War

The War of 1812 was born at sea. For nearly a decade before the first shot was fired, the Royal Navy had been stopping American merchant ships on the high seas and impressing sailors it deemed British subjects into naval service.

The wars of Napoleon had made Britain desperate for sailors, and the Royal Navy's press gangs showed little regard for the distinction between British subjects and American citizens. By 1812, an estimated six thousand Americans had been seized and forced to serve in the British fleet.

No insult could have stung more deeply the pride of a nation that had fought its revolution over the principle of individual liberty — and whose commercial prosperity depended entirely on free navigation of the oceans.

The crisis came to a head in 1807 when HMS Leopard fired upon the American frigate USS Chesapeake just outside Hampton Roads, Virginia, after the Chesapeake's captain refused to allow a search for deserters. Four men were removed, the Chesapeake limped back to port with three dead and eighteen wounded, and the American public erupted in outrage.

President Jefferson responded not with war — for which the country was wholly unprepared — but with the disastrous Embargo Act of 1807, which prohibited American ships from trading with any foreign nation.

The Embargo annihilated American commerce without coercing Britain in the slightest, and was replaced by the equally ineffectual Non-Intercourse Act of 1809. These economic experiments only deepened American frustration.

Along the frontier, a parallel grievance was building. American settlers pushing into the Old Northwest — present-day Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois — faced fierce resistance from Native American nations who rightly saw their lands and sovereignty at stake.

The brilliant Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, were forging a pan-tribal confederacy to resist further American expansion, and there was abundant evidence that British agents in Canada were encouraging and supplying them.

When General William Henry Harrison burned the Prophet's Town at the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811, frontier settlers blamed British meddling. To western War Hawks in Congress — Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C.

Calhoun of South Carolina foremost among them — the solution was obvious: conquer Canada and end the British threat once and for all.

President James Madison sent his war message to Congress on June 1, 1812. He cited impressment, interference with American trade, and British incitement of Native American violence on the frontier.

Congress voted for war on June 18, 1812 — but the vote was closer than any previous American declaration of war, with strong opposition from New England Federalists who depended on British trade. The country was divided, the army was small and poorly led, the navy was tiny, and the treasury was nearly empty.

Canada, the presumed object of conquest, was defended by British regulars, Canadian militia, and Tecumseh's warriors. The confident prediction that taking Canada would be 'a mere matter of marching' — attributed to former President Jefferson — would prove catastrophically wrong.