1812: Conservatives, War Hawks and the Nation's Honor

Abstract

Tt SHE modern tendency to seek materialistic motives and economic factors in all human relations has greatly obscured one of the basic causes of the War of i812. A generation of historians, brought up on the disillusionment that followed the failure of the attempt to make the world safe for democracy in i9i9, has persistently searched for the hidden economic factors behind all wars. Yet a cursory glance at the statistics of American commerce in the first decade of the nineteenth century will show that the War of i8i2 was the most uneconomic war the United States has ever fought. A casual search through the letters and speeches of contemporaries reveals that those who fought the war were primarily concerned with the honor and integrity of the nation. Students of the period are familiar with the standard explanation for the war: the election of i8io, by providing 63 new faces in a House of I42, represented a popular disillusionment with the Jeffersonian system and supplied the new Twelfth Congress with a number of young war hawks, such as Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Felix Grundy, who were determined to assert America's position in the world. Since the loudest demand for strong measures, as well as some of the ablest of the war hawks, came from the West, historians have been channeled into a search for reasons why the West should have demanded a war for free trade and sailors' rights; the historiography of the period has been almost exclusively concerned with Western war aims. The desire for land, Canadian or Indian, fear of a British-backed Indian conspiracy, concern over the declining prices of agricultural products and the restriction of markets abroad-all at one time or another have been represented as basic causes of the war.'