The fact that these new and
inexperienced members, known as "war-hawks," were able to secure the
leadership may have been due to the accidental conjunction of natural
leaders; but a larger view would see in it a shifting of political
power with the advance of the people. The grievance of these Southern
and Western people against the Indians could neither be appreciated
nor believed by the New England and Middle Atlantic States, far removed
from the frontier and the savages. To their minds, the broader
accusation of preying upon American commerce was more real. Yet so
profitable had grown the monopoly of trade secured by them as neutrals
in the Napoleonic wars that they could well afford to lose occasionally
by foreign orders and decrees for the sake of the profit as a whole.
The War of 1812 from a sectional standpoint presents, therefore, the
unusual aspect of an inland, agricultural people forcing a war upon
the country for the protection of a marine, commercial people, who
were for the most part opposed to it. When Clay, in the lofty style
common to the time, declared the Americans unconquerable, and that if
the enemy should lay in ashes New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, and
should devastate the whole Atlantic coast, the people would retreat
beyond the Alleghenies to live and flourish there, a member from New
Jersey protested that this was too high a price for him; that he had
no inclination to go beyond the Alleghenies; and that even the
Mississippi valley would be a poor consolation to him after everything
that was near and dear to him and his people had been destroyed.
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