The war over federalism: The constitutional battles in the war of 1812

The United States has declared war five times. It did so for the first time in 1812, and Americans immediately recognized that declaring war put them in an unprecedented constitutional no-man's-land. They were right. The Constitution had provided the means for the United States to declare war, but how the United States would mobilize to wage war was far less certain. In more than two years of warfare, Americans saw the federal system pushed to the breaking point. Along the way, they repeatedly argued about the very meaning of the republic. Understanding just how challenging the War of 1812 would become begins with recapturing a definition of federalism that was, in certain key ways, very different from our own. In contemporary terms, federalism refers to a complex but highly specific set of relationships between the federal government, the states, and the federal courts. In the early republic, Americans invoked the notion of federalism more broadly. It was defined not only by the specifically enumerated powers of the states and the central government but by a set of relationships that connected states to one another and to a national leadership in which the presidency and Congress played very different roles from the roles that they play today. Within that context, the function of the federal court system remained ambiguous, but it was far less powerful than it is now. In addition, the United States included a half-dozen federal territories, polities that were on track for eventual incorporation as states but that were temporarily under the direct supervision of the central government in Washington. Finally, there was a more abstract, diffuse way that Americans used the term "federalism." In addition to the relationships between government institutions, federalism was supposed to embody the relationship among American citizens, who were at once residents of a state and citizens of a nation. What follows is a story of federalism in the United States, a story that explains not only how Americans conceived of their country but also how its constitutional system shaped the outcome of the war. It is a story told through four men-James Madison, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and William Clark-and best understood not by looking at the beginning of the War of 1812 but by looking at the four very different endings to the war experienced by these four men. Most accounts of the War of 1812 describe the war as coming to an end on December 24, 1814, when negotiators from the United States and Great Britain, meeting on neutral ground in the Belgian town of Ghent, signed a treaty. Even if the treaty would not go into effect until ratified by the U.S. Senate, the negotiators saw its signing as the end of the conflict. Yet one of the most well-known facts of the War of 1812 is that the Battle of New Orleans, the greatest American battlefield victory of the conflict, came almost two weeks later. If the victory at New Orleans became a symbol of American military prowess, the timing of the battle and the Treaty of Ghent has become a symbol of everything that went wrong with the war, at least from an American perspective. The conflict was ill conceived and poorly executed from the start. Now that two centuries have passed and the trauma of warfare has faded from memory, the American effort to manage the war is, quite literally, laughable. But the timing of the treaty and Battle of New Orleans is hardly so telling a metaphor for the war as people might think. The fact that such a major battle came after the conclusion of peace negotiations was not unique. The War of 1812 was like most wars before modern communications, when violent conflict continued long after a peace treaty or cease-fire was signed. So if this is not to be simply a story of miscommunication, we need to look at the War of 1812 differently. The experiences of Madison, Clay, Jackson, and Clark provide the means to do so. Clay was one of the negotiators at Ghent. He also had played a key role in the declaration of war, only to learn from personal experience that the federal structure itself made conducting war extraordinarily difficult. Meanwhile, Jackson, the hero of New Orleans, had achieved his fame only by capitalizing on the very ambiguities of federalism that would prove so frustrating to men like Clay. If Clay and Jackson could claim to have witnessed the end of the war, so, too, could Clark. In September 1815, Clark attended a gathering at Portage des Sioux. Located near the banks of the Mississippi near present-day St. Charles, Missouri, Portage des Sioux was transformed into a place of grand diplomacy, where an American delegation under Clark's leadership met with some of the most powerful Indians of the trans-Mississippi West. Together, they negotiated a series of agreements no less important than the Treaty of Ghent. But Clark's wartime experience was the product of the parallel system of federalism that operated in the Western territories, a system that may seem entirely alien to contemporary Americans but one that quite literally shaped the United States. In December 1815, James Madison attempted to put a positive gloss on the outcome of the War of 1812. The White House was still in ruins after Washington was burned by the British in 1814, and Madison was living at the nearby Octagon House. The invasion had been humiliating for Madison, just as the British intended it to be. Yet there were no signs of that in his annual message (the term used to describe what is now known as the State of the Union address). Instead, Madison claimed that "we can rejoice in the proofs given that our political institutions, founded in human rights and framed for their preservation, are equal to the severest trials of war as well as adapted to the ordinary periods of repose."2 Presidents are apt to make lemonade out of lemons, but that was quite a stretch for Madison, who repeatedly throughout the war was forced to face the reality that the political institutions of the United States were, in fact, not equal to the severest trials of war. The four endings to the War of 1812 experienced by these four men-at Ghent, at New Orleans, at Portage des Sioux, and in Washington, D.C.- offer powerful lessons about the federal system, not as an abstract concept but as a lived reality. Clay, Jackson, Clark, and Madison are all familiar names, but how we think about the men changes when we situate them squarely within the context of federalism during the War of 1812. Madison ceases to be the master constitutionalist of the 1780s and becomes instead a president frustrated by what he perceived as the limitations of the federal system. Clay and Jackson cease to be dueling antagonists seeking to dominate the national politics of the antebellum era and instead become subordinates who shared a commitment to the war. Clark ceases to be the explorer in the far West that he is known as today and becomes instead a federal administrator based squarely in the Mississippi Valley. Finally, the South that produced all four men ceases to be the source of resistance to federal power that it would become only a few decades later and stands out instead as the root of some of the most powerful arguments for centralized authority in time of war. These four men also serve as stand-ins for the four institutions of federalism that would play such a profound role in the war. Within the central government in Washington, Madison led the executive branch while Clay sought to control Congress. Jackson's participation in the war showed how the states could shape the U.S. Army. Finally, Clark's Western territories constituted a vital component of the federal system. These men-and the institutions that they represented-shaped not only the failures but also the successes of the War of 1812. My point is not simply to say, "Look, the war really wasn't a disaster." It certainly was a disaster. Instead, by thinking broadly, by looking at successes as well as failures, by looking beyond both the U.S.-British conflict and the U.S.-Canadian borderlands, we can see the War of 1812 not just as a military conflict with Great Britain but also as one campaign in a protracted war among Americans about the very meaning of the republic. The war was not simply about federalism; it was fought with federalism. The federal structure provided the protagonists with the weapons to engage one another. Federalism also would often serve as a justification for battle that had less to do with grand questions of constitutionality than with local interests or long-standing partisan disputes. As Clay, Jackson, Clark, and Madison reached the end of the war, they certainly understood the conflict as a struggle about federalism, and they were not alone. Americans believed that launching the war exemplified the government's capacity under the Constitution to generate resources, organize action, and achieve goals that the states could not. But this collided with the belief, often held by the same Americans, that war required them to call on the Constitution to restrain centralized power and adopt a more participatory, distributed decisionmaking process. These issues were at the heart of the American war effort. They emerged in a time very different from our own, but they remain with us to this day.