What kind of issues do the Americans have at the beginning of the war of 1812?

Answer 1

The US had almost no Navy, and the Royal Navy was the most formidable in the world. The British had more than sixty line-of-battle ships, and the US had none. The next largest ships were frigates, and the US had six built in the 1790s, very fine ones, but they had been neglected, several "laid up in ordinary" (that era's equivalent of mothballing) and had much rot in the planking that had to be repaired before putting to sea could be contemplated. Individually the large US frigates were more than a match for British frigates, which were smaller and usually carried a few less guns, but the British had dozens and dozens of frigates. Of smaller ships the British had many multiples in every classification as compared to the few the Americans had. Jefferson was president from 1801-09, and his protege Madison was now in office. Neither had served in the Revolution in the military, and neither understood much about military matters, other than that they wanted no more than the irreducible minimum of it. This was what led Jefferson to embrace the idea of gunboats, which were basically overgrown rowboats, mounting one or two cannon, safe to operate only on the protected waters inside harbors. While the fine frigates rotted in ordinary the Navy acquired gunboats. This offered the dual advantages of ensuring the Navy lacked any seagoing offensive capability to go starting any trouble, and they were cheap. They also proved to be completely worthless in the war.

Madison's Secretary of War was John Armstrong. His policy was that any commander in the field who wanted to expend more than $50 had to first write to his office and obtain permission, which of course could take months just for the letters to go back and forth, and meanwhile the troops did without the food or the medicine or whatever it was some spendthrift colonel wanted to buy to coddle the troops.

During most of the decade before the war the Commanding General of the US Army was James Wilkinson, who liked to call himself a "scientific soldier". He was also a traitor, though it did not come out until long after he was safely dead, he was a paid secret agent in the service of Spain. Wilkinson had been Jefferson's main witness against Aaron Burr, when Jefferson had his former Vice President indicted for treason - in Virginia, Jefferson's home state, and the trial was held in Richmond, where Jefferson had been governor, with the jury picked from Jefferson's fellow Virginians, and the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Jefferson's cousin, John Marshall on the bench (though to be fair Marshall did not much like Jefferson). The jury heard what Wilkinson had to say about Burr, then acquitted Burr and wanted to lock Wilkinson up. As late as 1809 Wilkinson took the entire US Army with him to New Orleans, all 2200 men, and encamped them in a malarial swamp and defrauded them of their rations, while he spent his time in town courting a Creole belle. By the time the dying from disease and the desertions ended from that fiasco, the US Army numbered 900 men. In the next few years as tensions with Britain increased congress did authorize a few dozen new regiments, but these had hardly begun recruiting when Madison obtained his declaration of war against the most powerful empire on the planet. Neither Madison nor Jefferson cared much for Andrew Jackson, so the most able officer in the US languished at home through most of the war, while individuals such as the peaceable, doddering old Henry Dearborn commanded on the northern front.