Western Land Hunger and the War of 1812: A Conjecture

Abstract

A study of the prevailing accounts of the war of 1812, at least as far as the west was concerned, leaves one with many misgivings. The student is compelled to confess that it has not been easy to follow the way mapped by historians through what at once proves to be an uncertain country. In fact, investigation discloses that it is all still unknown land. Henry Adams, for instance, had to make, though with some hesitancy, a circuitous journey. He accepted the impressment of American seamen as a cases belli. But the evasion, as he confessed, was really plain. Here was a war fought by the American people ostensibly for the attainment of their mercantile independence. Yet the seaboard merchants of New York and Massachusetts, denying that the war was of their seeking, pointed out candidly enough that hostilities on such grounds meant their economic ruin. On the other hand, the west, hot champion of the war, was farthest removed from the scene of injury; its economic integrity was untouched because it was still in the early stages of an agricultural society and it had therefore little to gain by the establishment of a free sea. Historians, nevertheless, have maintained that this backwoods rural society was the protagonist in a conflict waged over ships, seamen, and cargoes. This is something of the dialectical scene on which we have been ushered. The seafaring east was hostile to a war that was heralded as a war of independence from English commercial domination. The agricultural west forced the nation into a war for motives whose play and interplay could not possibly touch the life of a people removed from the sea by the barrier of a mountain range. It is all, as one can see, a disturbing and unconvincing situation.Before abandoning the usual approach one other factor must be considered. The contention that the rural west, transcending material ends, aroused the American people to war because of national honor -that is to say, that it advocated a war with England because the American nation as a whole had been made the sport of the world, while a more weighty consideration, is, still, an untenable one. Had the war been, barely, one over the honor of the nation, it would have been fought in 1807 or in 1809, when the United States felt most the heavy hand of the English restrictive system. Again, national honor only being at stake, the appeal to arms could as easily have been made against France on exactly the same grounds. For really the decrees of Napoleon had gone to the heart of national selfesteem as truly as had the English orders in council.Such is this unknown country. What, the question is to be asked, is the certain way that can link the west with the war against England? Possibly it can be discovered if the assumption is accepted that the west as a sectional unit desired war for reasons peculiarly its own. Such a starting point having been conceded, certain preliminary observations may be made. In the first place, as far as the west, the articulate war-maker, was concerned, the freedom of the seas played only ...