When James Madison stepped into the presidency, America was a nation wrestling with its identity, facing huge challenges both at home and across the sea. The lingering problems with Great Britain wouldn’t fade, and deep divisions began to appear among the American people themselves. Join us on Our American Stories as Professor Bill McLay, author of the inspiring book “Land of Hope,” guides us through this pivotal era in our “Story of Us” series, revealing the complex forces that led to the defining conflict of the War of 1812.
From the ambitions of frontier settlers and the formidable efforts of Native American leaders like Tecumseh, to the fiery resolve of the “War Hawks” and the shocking burning of Washington D.C., early America faced immense trials. But out of this turmoil emerged an unforeseen glimmer of hope: the stunning victory at the Battle of New Orleans. Here, General Andrew Jackson rose as a legendary national hero, uniting a diverse force against overwhelming odds. Discover how this iconic win, even as a late-stage battle of the War of 1812, ignited the American spirit and forged a stronger sense of purpose for the struggling young nation.
đź“– Read the Episode Transcript
00:01:07 Speaker 2: Jefferson’s two terms as president ended in 1809.
00:01:14 Speaker 3: But America’s problems with the British did not end. As James Madison took
00:01:19 Speaker 2: office, he found himself no match for the forces gathering on all sides to overwhelm him. He couldn’t marshal a policy resolution with forces outside the country.
00:01:36 Speaker 3: But he was also struggling with growing divisions inside the country.
00:01:42 Speaker 2: So it may have been an era of good feelings, as historians sometimes say, but it was mixed feelings at best. Frontier settlers were ambitious and restless. They wanted to expand; they wanted to move westward into new territory. And when they did so, when that push came, increasing resistance and resentment came from the Indian tribes occupying those areas, and this prompted Tecumseh, the Great Shawnee leader, to attempt a unification of his own—a unification of all the tribes east of the Mississippi into one large Indian confederation of power, one unified army of tribes. Much of the Indian hostility was blamed by Americans on the British. At the very same time, a gaggle of Republican congressmen, who were known as the Warhawks, were hell-bent on invading Canada. Poor James Madison, he was in the middle of all this irreconcilable and fervent mess. By 1812, war was declared, despite the fact that the British had decided ounce to the Americans to end its efforts dis ward American shipping and commerce. Luckily for America, the British were still preoccupied with the French and with Napoleon. His ambitions in Europe, or the War of 1812 as it became known, would have had a much different and much worse outcome for America.
00:03:27 Speaker 3: And things changed.
00:03:28 Speaker 2: After Napoleon was finally defeated in 1814, the British compiled a series of wins against the new nation.
00:03:37 Speaker 3: One of which included the sacking and burning of Washington, D.C.,
00:03:41 Speaker 2: a humiliating, catastrophic loss.
00:03:47 Speaker 3: It must be noted also that A.
00:03:48 Speaker 2: Madison faced real pressure from the Federalists in the Northern.
00:03:53 Speaker 3: States, who had a different name for the War of 1812.
00:03:57 Speaker 2: They called it Mr. Madison’s War, and they were so disgruntled, these opponents of the war, that they contemplated a.
00:04:06 Speaker 3: Gathering of the New England States to secede from
00:04:08 Speaker 2: the Union, nearly fifty years before the Southern States did just that. The nation continued to be frail, divided, with a future in peril. There was only one unforeseen glimmer of light. That was the American victory in New Orleans. The British plan was simple: take New Orleans and cut the West off from the rest of America. General Andrew Jackson assembled a rag tank army filled with the combination of militiamen, free Blacks, French Creoles, and others. The British viewed it as obviously inferior to theirs. That would prove to be an error on their part.
00:04:54 Speaker 3: Jackson’s army and Jackson himself were more than equal to the task.
00:04:58 Speaker 2: They won a resounding through superior firepower both the legendary hunters of Kentucky. It would become the central people in a campaign song of Jackson, so he ran for president. So it was a great victory. The ironic thing is that this important victory had no direct military political consequence. The war was over; the treaty again had been signed. Across the ocean, peace had been restored. It’s just that the people in New Orleans
00:05:31 Speaker 3: didn’t know about it.
00:05:32 Speaker 2: Transatlantic communication being what it was, there was no transatlantic telegraph or cable been laid. Nothing like that existed, so there was a lengthy delay of information going back and forth. So really, the victory in New Orleans made no difference in the terms of by which the War of 1812 was set, but it made a huge difference in the outlook of the American people.
00:05:59 Speaker 3: They saw as a great victory.
00:06:01 Speaker 2: They saw Jackson as arguably the first great national military hero.
00:06:08 Speaker 3: The first, perhaps, is Washington himself.
00:06:15 Speaker 1: Man, you’ve been listening to Professor Bill McLay tell the story of James Madison’s presidency, and he’s caught. As you’re finding out here, almost every president stepped into a mess with competing interests, conflicting interests that seemed irreconcilable. Does that sound familiar? And what we learn in the end is that war breaks out once again with the British, and it’s Andrew Jackson, the first national military hero to arise in our ranks since George Washington, comes to the rescue. A huge victory for America, but it didn’t make that big a difference in Madison’s presidency.
00:06:50 Speaker 4: When we come back, more of the remarkable Story of the Story of America. Here on Our American Stories.
00:07:16 Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. And we returned to Our American Stories and the Story of America series with Professor Bill McLay, author of the terrific book, Land of Hope, and also the author of the Young Reader’s Edition version. Buy both of them at Amazon or wherever you get your books. When we last left off, the War of 1812 had rocked America, and although our nation’s capital would be burned to the ground, we still had a rapidly changing nation. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Bill McLay, with.
00:08:38 Speaker 3: The War of 1812 behind America,
00:08:40 Speaker 2: the new nation was for the first time free of any entanglements with the European nations, and
00:08:46 Speaker 3: it could finally focus on its own ambitions, its own issues, its own
00:08:50 Speaker 2: internal troubles, without being distracted by foreign foes or meddlers or disturbances.
00:09:00 Speaker 3: So the moment had come that had been awaited since America’s birth, and the nation was now nearly fifty
00:09:07 Speaker 2: years old, but it was finally able to control its own destiny. This would reach fruition of sorts in a U.S. policy, a doctrine that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, associated with the presidency of James Monroe.
00:09:30 Speaker 3: It was a simple doctor.
00:09:31 Speaker 2: And went like this: going forward into the future, that America would consider any effort by Europe to colonize any part of the Western Hemisphere an attack on the United States, an affront to the United States, off limits.
00:09:48 Speaker 2: Now, along with that came a complementary promise to Europe.
00:09:53 Speaker 3: Is short, we would keep our
00:09:55 Speaker 2: nose out of Europe’s business, and Europe would keep its nose out. There’s an underlying message in the Monroe Doctrine; it’s consequential as it was profound. The new nation was declaring to the world, and particularly to Europe, that we were there east.
00:10:13 Speaker 3: It was a bit bold.
00:10:16 Speaker 2: After all, America had no legal standing to assert these claims.
00:10:20 Speaker 3: And no real military power to back them up. We didn’t have a navy to speak of. Thus, the principles embodied in the Monroe Doctrine were shaky.
00:10:38 Speaker 2: But they prevailed. They prevailed. In the longer they prevailed, the stronger they became.
00:10:38 Speaker 2: They eventually became the bedrock of our nation’s foreign policy well into the 20th century, which is a remarkable thing in and of itself.
00:10:48 Speaker 3: Now, the most important and urgent
00:10:50 Speaker 2: underlying claim of the Monroe Doctrine was this idea that the nation could now pursue its own destiny, its own identity, unfettered, undus stirred
00:11:00 Speaker 3: by outside influences.
00:11:02 Speaker 2: This was a great encouragement to national self-consciousness. It gave you a great deepening to the growing sense of national pride, of nationalism, national identity, and an American identity and economy. And it had become clear that it was going to be a national economy. And given that—given the national economy of a geographically rather large nation—what would be the best way to foster growth? A Representative Henry Clay had some great ideas about it, and though a member of Jefferson’s Republican Party at that time, his ideas had much more in common with Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton. Among them, tariffs to protect the American industry and what we would today call a big infrastructure project that would include the building of roads, canals, railroads all over and eye between, improving commerce among
00:12:06 Speaker 3: and between the states and the world. There was support for
00:12:19 Speaker 2: these federal improvement projects in the West, which stood to benefit from them, but the older Eastern states were less pleased. Madison himself vetoed a bill for the establishment of a large transportation fund, citing its unconstitutionality. Only one road, the Old National Road, resulted from the efforts to improve American infrastructure at this time. That’s the road now known today as old the U.S. Route 40.
00:12:51 Speaker 3: This left the states and the voters in those states, along
00:12:54 Speaker 2: with private business, to get done the work of business and commerce. Those infrastructure projects too, and there was an explosion of waterway construction projects. One such project worth discussing in detail: the construction of the 363-mile-long Erie Canal, a work of engineering genius. Until then, the longest canal ever built was 27 miles long. Just to give some context to the scope of the project and the ambition behind it was a politician with real vision, Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York.
00:13:38 Speaker 3: He convinced the New York State Legislature to commit $7 million, and that was a lot of money in those days—a lot of money to
00:13:46 Speaker 2: construct what many of the time thought was a very expensive ditch. And the eight-year project was popularly known at the time as Clinton’s Folly.
00:13:57 Speaker 3: But Clinton had a vision.
00:13:59 Speaker 2: He predicted that the building of the canal would turn New York City into, and I quote, the
00:14:05 Speaker 3: granary of the world, the emporium
00:14:08 Speaker 2: of commerce, the seat of manufacturers, and the focus of great money operations. The whole of Manhattan, covered with habitations and replenished with dense population, will constitute one’s vast city.
00:14:26 Speaker 3: Well, that’s pretty prophetic.
00:14:28 Speaker 2: The Erie Canal started construction in 1817, and by 1825 it connected the American interior with its coasts, which would lead to remarkable growth all over America, and the destination for most of the canal’s traffic, New York City, would soon become America’s greatest center
00:14:49 Speaker 3: of commerce, just as Governor Clinton had predicted. But it was not just canals being built.
00:14:57 Speaker 2: The first railways were being built in the 1820s, and they would compete with the canals as shipping lanes; had platforms all their own, and they would turn Western towns like Chicago into commerce powerhouses.
00:15:10 Speaker 3: Along with canals and realized or other significant developments.
00:15:19 Speaker 2: There was Samuel Slater, whose factory innovations and systems changed textile made effect; Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which made short-staple cotton into a commercially viable product and would make cotton king in the South. John Fitch and Robert Fulton’s in innovations and steam technology and other inventions like that would usher in an era of economic growth unrivaled in American history. There were also big innovations in law and finance, the biggest of them being state laws that created corporations—legal entities that allowed for the pooling by multiple individuals of the vast sums of capital required to build factories and commercial enterprises of a growing nation.
00:16:16 Speaker 3: All of this was transforming American life.
00:16:19 Speaker 2: Changes in law, technology, transportation, and commerce; Jefferson’s ideal of a nation of small, independent farmers and the independence and self-reliance that such a way
00:16:31 Speaker 3: of life would engender. Eh, this was changing.
00:16:35 Speaker 2: America was becoming a nation of growing economic interconnectedness. The combination of these things made the nation unique and exceptional and would help to create a national spirit, national ethos. But there were still important unresolved problems.
00:17:03 Speaker 3: One of them, a huge unresolved this suit, and you
00:17:10 Speaker 1: know what it is: slavery. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery. And a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay, who teaches at Hillsdale College. What a story Bill McLay was telling about the development of the American identity, American commerce. It’s still that one lingering sin sitting there, waiting to be addressed, and that’s slavery. The Story of Us with Bill McLay here on Our American Stories.
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