Madison sends Congress a list of British wrongs; he stops short of asking for war
After years of British seizures of American ships and the forced impressment of sailors the United States considered its own citizens, President James Madison sent a war message to Congress on June 1, 1812 — pointedly not calling for a declaration, but laying out grievances and letting Congress draw its own conclusion. Four days of closed-door debate in the House produced a 79-to-49 vote for war; the Senate followed at 19 to 13. Madison signed the declaration on June 18. The vote was the closest margin of any war declaration in American history, and not a single Federalist in Congress supported it.
The war declaration split the country along party and regional lines in ways that would haunt its prosecution — New England states threatened secession at the Hartford Convention, private bankers in the Northeast refused financing, and multiple state militias refused orders to cross into Canada. The Federalist Party's blanket opposition to "Mr. Madison's War" ultimately destroyed it: when victory at New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent arrived in quick succession, the party's antiwar stance was permanently discredited and it collapsed, ushering in the Era of Good Feelings.
QWhy did Britain repeal its most provocative trade restrictions the same week America went to war — and what kept that news from stopping the conflict?
Lord Liverpool's government repealed the Orders in Council on June 23, 1812 — five days after Madison signed the war declaration. The repeal addressed the central complaint in Madison's war message. But transatlantic communication moved at the speed of sailing ships, and the news took three weeks to reach the United States. HMS Colibri, dispatched from Halifax under a flag of truce, didn't anchor off Sandy Hook until July 9, by which time hostilities were already underway. She left three days later carrying a copy of the declaration and British ambassador Augustus Foster. The war that might have been avoided by a few weeks of faster mail ran for another two and a half years.
QHow did the War of 1812 inadvertently fund the founding of a Canadian university?
When British forces under John Coape Sherbrooke occupied the town of Castine, Maine in September 1814, they governed it under martial law and collected customs duties on trade passing through the port. When the British left in April 1815 under the terms of the Treaty of Ghent, they took with them £10,750 in tariff revenue collected during the occupation. This money — known afterward as the Castine Fund — was carried back to Halifax and used to establish Dalhousie University, which opened in 1818. An American customs port, briefly administered as a British territory, seeded one of Canada's major research universities.
QWhat happened in Baltimore the week after Congress voted for war, and why did it take more than a month to stop?
Just days after the declaration of war in June 1812, a small group of Federalists in Baltimore printed anti-war views in a newspaper. They were attacked by a mob for it. What began as a brawl over a newspaper editorial escalated into more than a month of deadly rioting in the city — one of the ugliest episodes of domestic political violence in early American history. The violence illustrated how raw the partisan divide over the war already was before a single battle had been fought. The same city would, two years later, hold out against a British bombardment and inspire Francis Scott Key to write what became the national anthem.
