The War of 1812 against Britain tended to be favored by westerners and southerners more than by representatives of New England seafaring communities. Many westerners and their congressional representatives believed that Canada could be readily conquered, and they also resented British support for hostile Native American tribes on the frontier. New England merchants had more to fear from British raids, blockade, and interference with seaborne commerce; maritime New England almost seceded from the Union over opposition to the war after it had begun. The Federalist leanings and the generally pro-British views of New Englanders also played a role in the lack of support there for the War of 1812. Furthermore, both then and later, southerners and westerners showed more concern with issues of honor than New Englanders; this perhaps reflects the different religious and cultural origins of the regions’ settlers.40
When President James Madison finally asked Congress to support war measures against Britain, he explicitly did so in order to “maintain the honor of the flag.”41 While such a turn of phrase might seem so conventional as to go unnoticed, in fact it reflects the deeper and widespread honor code attached to the flag as the symbol of the nation.
By the War of 1812, the issue of respect shown to the U.S. maritime flag had become deeply entrenched in the U.S. psyche. Certainly, the rhetoric reflecting the honor code permeated all public discourse about the issue of U.S. shipping abroad and U.S. relations with Britain, France, and other nations. The honor code, as noted by several historians, became the basis for political rhetoric when dealing with maritime and international affairs.42
The vocabulary of honor surrounding maritime issues had several levels of meaning and usage: at one level, the language had practical functional value in regulating affairs at sea; at another level, it evoked deeply held emotional values reflecting the social usages of the era; at the political level, it represented a tool for enlisting broad support for economic and power goals. The American merchant flag had become an emblem of the nation, and its recognition by diplomats had been one of the first orders of business of the new nation. With the Quasi War, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812, the United States had gone to war three times in defense of that flag in the first three decades of the nation’s existence. In domestic politics as well as international affairs, the merchant flag on board privately owned trading vessels had become, like the Stars and Stripes over Fort McHenry, a symbol of the nation.
At the diplomatic level, the central issues leading to the War of 1812 were in fact maritime. The blockades of Britain against France and France against Britain affected U.S. commerce and shipping. The U.S. effort to remain neutral collapsed, and the country was drawn into war against Britain. The impressment, right of search, and blockade issues were presented and conceived as matters of honor.1
For many prominent politicians, the issues that led to the War of 1812 were, simply put, matters of national honor. For example, Congressman George Bibb from Kentucky echoed the national view that the only honorable course in the face of British actions was “a most base and disgraceful submission” or war. John C. Calhoun used similar rhetoric: “God grant that the people may have spirit to maintain our interest and honor in this momentous period.” Henry Clay argued, “Not a man in the nation could really doubt the sincerity with which those in power have sought, by all honorable pacific means, to protect the interests of the country.” Quoting these men and others, historian Roger H. Brown argues in The Republic in Peril, “A concern for national honor also led Republicans toward war. Many anticipated that failure to resist would degrade and demoralize Americans. They could reason from their own sense of honor.”2
Republicans had largely opposed the construction of a large navy, and most navalists were found in the Federalist camp, even though Republicans tended to support the war and Federalists opposed the war. Historian Craig Symonds has argued that “emotional navalism,” seeking a greatly expanded navy based on appeals to national honor, had not won great support in the period; the practical view that the world’s seas could be better patrolled by the British navy prevailed in the years following the War of 1812. What Symonds identifies as “emotional navalism” was not revived until the 1880s. As we will see, the more strident navalism that emerged in the post–Civil War era was intimately wrapped up in, and expressed in terms of, national honor.3
In the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy had a distinguished record of victories against the British, in striking contrast to the Army’s failure to effectively fight land battles. Among notable U.S. naval victories were the following: The frigate Essex accepted the surrender of the HMS Alert on August 13, 1812, off the Azores. The Constitution captured the HMS Guerrière on August 19, 1812, about five hundred miles southeast of Newfoundland. The Wasp accepted the surrender of the HMS Frolic on October 18, 1812, about three hundred miles north of Bermuda. The United States defeated the HMS Macedonian on October 25, 1812, after a two-hour battle about five hundred miles west of the Canary Islands. The Constitution so damaged the HMS Java on December 29, 1812, off the coast of Brazil that her master ordered her scuttled. The two sloops the Hornet and the HMS Peacock met on February 24, 1813, off South America; the Hornet sank the Peacock, rescued most of the Peacock survivors, and took them to the United States as prisoners. Differences in size and rigging in several of these engagements were part of British complaints that the actions were not between equivalent ships.
In contemporary news accounts, these major naval battles, as well as others, provided a vindication of U.S. honor, with the reports couched in exactly that language. In later historical accounts, U.S. historians continued to portray these victories as properly fought duels in which the U.S. victory resulted from superior seamanship and valor. By contrast, several U.S. naval defeats were depicted as due to the superior armament or fighting condition of the British ship, the result of an “unfair” match. The body of historiography on these battles is as redolent of the maritime code of honor as contemporary accounts, from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century.
For example, in repeated treatments of naval engagements, Edgar Stanton Maclay, in his A History of the United States Navy from 1775 to 1898, carefully enumerated the number and weight of cannon on board the opposing vessels in two-ship encounters, or duels, and recorded to the extent possible precise casualty figures in the U.S.-British naval encounters of the War of 1812. An undercurrent of such a presentation was the “manhood” displayed by U.S. sailors, especially when they emerged victorious from an encounter in which they operated at a disadvantage in armament or size and weight of ship. Maclay repeatedly described a success in such battles as “gallant.”
The language of Maclay, writing in 1893–1898 about affairs eight decades earlier, might be thought to reflect the jingoistic sentiment of the 1890s, with all its sensitivities, values, ideas, concepts, and rhetoric. The full-blown “cult of the flag” had taken hold by the 1890s, and perhaps Maclay represented that era, not the earlier one, with his interpretation and focus. However, Maclay’s concern with “indignities,” “insults,” and “outrages” suffered by the U.S. flag and their role in causing conflict was not simply an imposition of a later point of view on evidence from an earlier era. Although that historiographic perception is correct in that Maclay did reflect values of his own era, the same rhetoric had been applied in precisely the same fashion in the first decades of the 1800s and had taken root in that period. The primary documents that Maclay and other later historians cited, as well as Maclay’s and other historians’ own text, used language reflecting ship duels, gallant officers, and dozens of turns of phrase and descriptions of incidents that reflected the honor code values.
Maclay provided mind-numbing detail on the equality of armament of the Frolic and the Wasp and the Wasp victory. He went to great lengths to detail manpower, tonnage, armament, and casualty figures in each encounter, generally in order to demonstrate that U.S. sailors fought in equal encounters or in encounters in which they were outgunned with great success.4