Thereafter Perry found himself commanding flotillas of small gunboats, each armed with a single cannon. These warships manqu would supposedly defend American ports and rivers against enemy attack. The gunboats were Jefferson’s idea of a defensive navy. Every sailor knew the wallowing creatures were worthless, but the oblivious president had had 240 of them built. The British navy, meanwhile, continued to outrage the American public by searching and seizing U.S. merchant ships and impressing seamen as part of its worldwide blockade of Napoleonic France. Not even an unprovoked attack on the American frigate Chesapeake, killing three men and wounding eighteen, aroused the Sage of Monticello’s fighting blood.

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Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, reversed the policy of nonresistance to British arrogance. A new generation of young politicians followed his lead, and soon congressional ‘war hawks’ such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun were calling for a declaration of hostilities and an invasion of Canada. But the new president had inherited a shrunken, demoralized Regular Army and minuscule navy and had done nothing to repair the damage. The War Department consisted of eight clerks; the army did not have either a quartermaster or an ordnance department. Only four American frigates were seaworthy. The British already had a ship of the line and seven frigates off the Atlantic coast. Worse, the populous commercial states of New England regarded the war with distaste and declined to call out their militia. Worst of all, the army was led by a bevy of aged generals left over from the American Revolution. The result was a series of military disasters.

The most unnerving of these reversals took place at Fort Detroit in August 1812, when Battle of Saratoga veteran Brig. Gen. William Hull surrendered sixteen hundred men to a besieging British-Indian force of roughly equal numbers. With Detroit went the vast Michigan Territory — the current states of Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin — of which Hull was the governor. The British immediately began formulating plans for a client state in the heart of the American continent, led by the most gifted Indian warrior-statesman of the era, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh. The whining Hull’s chief excuse was British control of Lake Erie, which had enabled the enemy to transport cannons and an army to waylay him.

Only at sea did the Americans find anything to cheer about. Frigates such as United States and Constitution won ship-to-ship slugfests against British counterparts, while dozens of privateers took to the deep to wreak havoc on English merchantmen. But the British, with more than one thousand ships in their battle fleet, were confident that their overwhelming numbers would soon correct this spate of saltwater impudence.

The Northwest remained a crucial theater. As thousands of Indians joined their side, the British saw a chance to disable the entire American westward enterprise. Seeing what was at stake, hundreds of fighting men in Kentucky rushed to enlist. Major General William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, who had defeated Tecumseh and his Indians at the Battle of Tippecanoe shortly before the war began, was given command of this new militia army. He soon found he was unable to advance because his long supply line was tenuous to the point of nonexistence. With the British in Detroit and in two other former American forts, King George III’s men and Tecumseh’s braves could strike at this lifeline at will.

When a thousand Kentuckians took it into their heads to lunge forward and capture the British fort near Frenchtown (present-day Monroe, Michigan) on the River Raisin, they were wiped out to a man by a British-Indian counterattack from the allies’ Lake Erie main base, Fort Malden. A similar attack on Fort Meigs on the Maumee River was beaten off only after desperate fighting. A chastened Harrison obeyed orders from Secretary of War John Armstrong to go on the defensive until Perry gained control of the lakes.

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