A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming Page B

Tennessee, led by a gifted orator named Henry Clay, began calling for war with Britain. They were infected by a disease of the public mind that has led to many of America’s wars: the illusion of an easy victory.
    The British were locked in global combat with Napoleon Bonaparte, the ruler of Europe. The Congressional “War Hawks” argued it would be a simple matter to declare war and seize Canada’s vast, mostly empty acres, which had only a miniscule British army to defend them. In 1812, Congress agreed—with almost every New England Federalist representative and senator voting against the declaration. As the Federalists saw it, Britainwas defending the values of liberty and human rights against Napoleon Bonaparte’s military dictatorship.
    Within a few weeks, the Federalists in Congress, most of them New Englanders, issued “an address . . . to their Constituents on the subject of War with Great Britain . ” It was a blast of vituperation and condemnation of President Madison’s government that might as well have been written by the prime minister of Britain. An abridged version of this ferocious document appeared in every major newspaper in the nation. The denunciation portrayed the Federalists as the party of peace, and the Jeffersonian Republicans as reckless warmongers.
    On the heels of this assault came a broadside from the legislature of the state of Massachusetts, voicing even more hostile sentiments. The war was denounced as “outrageous to public opinion, [and] to the feelings and interests of the people.” The conflict was motivated, the legislators declared, by President Madison’s intent to “aggrandize the southern and western states at the expense of the Eastern section of the Union.” The governor of Massachusetts followed this accusation with a call for a fast day, giving the state’s clergymen a chance to join the chorus of deprecation and contempt. Connecticut’s governor promptly imitated the Bay State.
    Huge meetings in Boston and other towns and cities endorsed “without a single dissenting vote” the searing opinions voiced by the legislature. In Essex County, home of Timothy Pickering and other “high” or ultra Federalists, a new danger was denounced: a standing army. For good measure they threw in “mob rule.” 6
    In Baltimore, Republicans soon validated the latter charge. They attacked a Federalist newspaper whose editor was equally vituperative in opposing the war. A handful of Federalists tried to protect the editor from physical harm. One of them was the editor’s close friend, Henry Lee, the man President Washington had chosen to help suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. Lee had served three terms as the Federalist governor of Virginia.
    Baltimore city officials persuaded the editor and his protectors to give up their weapons and retreat to the local jail before the mob erupted. A few hours later, an even bigger mob invaded the jail and beat and kicked theFederalists, killing one of them and seriously injuring Henry Lee, leaving him a semi-invalid until he died in 1818. His son, Robert E. Lee, undoubtedly never forgot this example of how American politics could explode into mindless violence. 7
    Massachusetts Federalists called for the formation of committees of correspondence in all seventeen states to coordinate resistance to the “wanton, impolitic and unjust war.” But the opposition to the war remained almost entirely in New England. There it soon became a serious matter. The governor of Connecticut refused to place the state’s militia under the command of a federally appointed major general to defend the seacoast against an attack from a British fleet offshore. Massachusetts soon followed this example, refusing to summon forty-three companies of militiamen to defend the seacoast of their state and Rhode Island. 8
    The performance of the three federal armies that President Madison ordered to