The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor

Author:Alan Taylor [Taylor, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American History, Not Read
ISBN: 9780307594594
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

William Johnston (1782–1870), engraving by an unknown artist. From Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (New York, 1869), 662. (Courtesy of the New York State Library.)

Commodore Chauncey sought to make an example of Samuel Stacy, a trader who often visited Sackets Harbor to examine the warships and to ask probing questions. Arresting him on July 1, 1813, Chauncey declared: “It would be very desirable to hang this traitor to his country, as he is considered respectable in the country in which he lives; and I think that it is full time to make an example of some of our countrymen, who are so base and degenerate as to betray their country by becoming the spies and informers of our enemy.” But the secretary of war ordered Stacy released because, he explained, “a citizen cannot be considered as a spy.” Set free, Stacy promptly crossed the border at Prescott to sell his information to the British.71

In Congress in January 1814, Maryland’s Robert Wright, an especially partisan Republican, proposed a law to allow the military to try citizens for espionage. Federalists howled in protest. New York’s Thomas P. Grosvenor warned that the proposed law would “subject every man in the United States to be dragged before the military tribunals and tried by martial law.” Moderate Republicans also balked at the resolution, which died in committee. Not until 1863, during the next (and far bigger) civil war, would Congress make citizens liable to conviction as spies.72

In the northern borderland during the War of 1812, the American military apparently executed only one spy, and he was a Briton. An apparent deserter from the British army, William Baker was “found lurking about the encampment of the American Army at Plattsburgh as a Spy.” In March 1814 a court-martial convicted and hanged Baker. The Plattsburgh Republican observed, “At length, … one spy of the hundreds who roam at large over the frontier, has been detected, and sentenced to Death.”73

Lacking the legal power to punish spying citizens, the Madison administration instead treated immigrants from Great Britain as the chief threat to the republic. Enforcing the Alien Enemies Act of 1812, federal marshals ordered enemy aliens to remove at least forty miles into the interior to prevent them from helping the Royal Navy to attack American ports. Removal posed a severe hardship to artisans and merchants who relied on maritime commerce, but most posed no threat to the republic. Indeed, most were Irishmen caught by a blunt law, for the Alien Enemies Act did little to defend the republic but much to hurt recent immigrants who wanted to become citizens. “Mortified” at being “ranked as an enemy,” Thomas Burke declared, “That there may be many persons in the United States who ought to be watched, I have not a doubt, but I believe that few if any of them are Irishmen.” An inventor of explosive naval mines (called “torpedoes”), Robert Fulton denounced the suspicion of immigrants: “Indeed, I believe the British have no

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