4.4 America on the World Stage

Congress declared war in June 1812 at President Madison's request. Most New England Federalists voted against it.

• Neutral rights: Britain and France were at war, and both seized American merchant ships. Britain also practiced impressment, forcing sailors off American ships into the Royal Navy, claiming they were British deserters. In 1807 a British warship fired on the USS Chesapeake and took four sailors.
• Failed economic pressure: Jefferson's Embargo Act (1807) banned American ships from trading with foreign ports. It hurt American merchants, especially in New England, far more than it hurt Britain, and it was repealed in 1809.
• Native resistance: the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) built a confederacy to resist American expansion in the Northwest. Americans believed the British in Canada were arming them. William Henry Harrison attacked their town at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.
• War Hawks: young congressmen from the South and West, such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, demanded war to defend national honor, end Native resistance and possibly take Canada.

American invasions of Canada failed. Oliver Hazard Perry won control of Lake Erie in 1813, and Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames, which broke the Native confederacy. Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and forced them to give up millions of acres. British troops burned Washington, D.C., in August 1814, but failed to take Baltimore, where the defense of Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key's 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.

The Treaty of Ghent (signed December 1814) restored prewar conditions and ignored impressment. Before news arrived, Jackson won a huge victory at New Orleans in January 1815, which made him a national hero and made Americans feel they had won.

Meanwhile, New England Federalists met at the Hartford Convention (1814–1815) to protest the war and propose constitutional amendments. When the war ended, they looked disloyal, and the Federalist Party collapsed.

Results: a surge of nationalism, the end of effective Native resistance east of the Mississippi in the Northwest, a boost to American manufacturing because British imports had been cut off, and a new national hero.

• Rush–Bagot Agreement (1817): limited US and British warships on the Great Lakes.
• Convention of 1818: set the US–Canada border at the 49th parallel from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains and agreed to joint occupation of Oregon.
• Adams–Onís Treaty (1819): after Jackson invaded Spanish Florida in 1818 while chasing Seminoles, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams persuaded Spain to give Florida to the United States and define the border of the Louisiana Purchase all the way to the Pacific. The United States gave up its claim to Texas.

As Spain's colonies in Latin America won independence, Americans worried that European powers might try to retake them. In his 1823 message to Congress, President Monroe, with ideas largely from John Quincy Adams, declared that the Western Hemisphere was closed to new European colonization, and that the United States would stay out of European affairs and not interfere with existing European colonies.

The United States had no navy strong enough to enforce it; Britain's navy, which wanted Latin American markets open, did that in practice. The doctrine mattered more later, when it was used to justify US involvement throughout the Americas (7.2).