gically of more importance than the unbroken wooded solitudes of northern Maine or New Hampshire.

Our tiny navy, on the other hand, was well trained and waiting. Within an hour of receiving official notice of hostilities. Commodore Rodgers put to sea with his five ships. Even the way in which victories seemed to roll out from this nucleus toward every quarter of the globe is not so mysterious, after all, for as in the case of the children of Israel at the Red Sea, the forces of nature took sides, and "a strong wind" helped the weaker party.

One glance at the map that shows ocean currents makes this clear. Our frontier was very long. Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi, skipping Florida, which still belonged to Spain, it began again at the southern limit of Georgia, extending from there to the Bay of Fundy, and then westward as far as population existed or hostilities might reach.

The British owned two points from which to attack us: Bermuda and the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles gave them a base from which to menace New Orleans and the Southern coast; while Halifax, their main base in the Western Hemisphere, furnished them the point from which to attack our Northern harbors, strike at the fisheries of New England, and provision Quebec, England's principal depot for the Canadian waterways. But all British war-vessels ordered to America, no matter whether their destination was Halifax or the South, were obliged to sail directly toward our shores.

that had managed to survive the Embargo, but it released American merchant ships and their well-trained crews for other work, and they speedily entered the navy or took out letters as privateers and began to prey upon British trade. The English reached our shores in numbers large enough to threaten and burn as far inland as guns could carry, but they were never rich enough in secrets of inlet and harbor to prevent dozens of such vessels slipping out to sea, manned by a class of sailors that Great Britain had already paid the unwelcome compliment of gathering into her own navy to the number of six thousand or more.

So the "fir-built things with a bit of striped bunting at their masthead," as the English press derisively called our ships at the outset, grew under the stimulus of British guns into a very efficient navy that was heard and felt not only on our own Atlantic seaboard, but off the coasts of England, Ireland, and Portugal, the West Indies, the shores of British Guiana, at the easternmost point of Brazil, the Canary Islands, Chile, the Galapagos Islands, even in the Marquesas group in far-off Polynesia-a confusion of hemispheres and continents unaccountable until it is seen how all were bound together not only by patriotism, but by ocean currents and the winds of heaven.

Our navy's tasks were three: to keep British ships and supplies from reaching Halifax or entering the St. Lawrence; to intercept those bound to the West Indies; and lastly, to harass British commerce wherever found. The declaration of war put an end to the small remnant of trade

As was the case in our war with the Barbary pirates, these encounters might have taken place in the Middle Ages. Steam had indeed been harnessed to move upon the waters, but it had not been adopted for the battles of life. The one steamer on Lake Champlain was speedily remodeled with schooner rigging because its machinery gave endless trouble. The Fulton, prototype of modern ironclads, with its ram and its few heavy guns, was launched only toward the end of the conflict, too late to influence the character of the fighting; and torpedoes, tried and

found wanting during the Revolution, were frowned upon not only because they failed in their purpose, but because they were a new and "dishonorable" mode of warfare.

Sails were still the motive power, and seamanship was a matter of superlative skill nowhere shown to better advantage than in the three-days' chase that Captain Hull led five British commanders, using every artifice and expedient, venturing into perilously shallow water, kedging and towing when the wind failed him, and escaping at last in a heaven-sent squall of wind and rain. A month later he sought out one of the five and closed with him in the fight between the Constitution and the Guerrière. The battles were for the most part duels of the old sea-rover type, echoes of which reach us across the century in words fast becoming obsolete and actions already consigned to melodrama. The fighting was no child's play. The clash of cutlasses and grappling-irons, the falling of masts and entangling rigging, fierce courage, and a fiercer regard for the gallantry of war, as when the British Captain Dacre sent his ten Americans below so that they need not fight against their countrymen-all these things went into it. A heart-warming amount of courage went

into it, and a heartrending amount of carnage, too. When the Americans from the Wasp boarded the Frolic after forty minutes of fighting in tremendous seas, they found only four men alive, one seaman still at the wheel, and three officers, all wounded. War was indeed hell then as now, but it was a more showy and picturesque hell than the cold-blooded, machinemade, mathematically calculated inferno. of twentieth-century battle.

With the same long ancestry of searovers behind them, British and Americans acquitted themselves, man for man, equally well. The difference lay in their training. As a rule the Yankee sailors had practised their calling in varied forms since childhood, and could turn from setting sails to firing guns, from ship's carpentry to hand-to-hand fighting, as occasion demanded. The British, trained to only one kind of sea duty, were less versatile. The greatest difference lay in marksmanship; and in this English gunners. were scarcely to blame, since a conservative and economical Government limited the number of shot that could be "wasted" in mere practice, making it so small that it amounted to none at all; while the Americans, with reckless extravagance, were continually aiming and firing their

guns and practising at close range with small arms and single-stick. In the few cases where the preponderance of training and discipline was on the other side, as it was in the fight between our Chesapeake and the British Shannon, whose commander loyally disregarded hampering orders of Government, victory remained with the best gunners.

The Americans fought and captured, and fought again until in turn they were captured. Porter on the Essex, losing his consorts hundreds of miles from a friendly harbor, pushed on rather than turn back, doubled the Horn, broke up the British whaling industry in the Pacific, and lived. for a year and a half upon the enemy, capturing all his supplies, even the money. with which to pay his officers, before the hour came when the Essex had to strike her flag. In the first six months of such warfare America captured from England as many ships as the latter had lost to the whole world in the previous twenty years. On the Canadian frontier the contest grew into one of ship-building as well as of ship-fighting. The problem there was to get complete control of the inland waterways, and this could be done either by capturing the enemy's vessels or by forcing them into port and keeping them blockaded. When one side launched a ship, the other tried to outclass her by a larger and better one. The falls of Niagara made it necessary to maintain separate fleets on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, thus doubling the labor. On Lake Ontario, where this preliminary warfare of planes and saws was carried to the greatest length, Kingston and Sackett's Harbor were the respective headquarters of the British and the Americans. On Lake Erie the Americans were at Erie and the British at Detroit, which had been surrendered by General Hull at the beginning of the war.

All supplies except timber for such contests had to be brought from a great distance. For the British they came from England; for the Americans they were hauled by wagon from towns on the Atlantic coast by way of the Mohawk

valley, over roads so bad that in effect the source of supply was farther removed than England itself. Crews also had to be provided on both sides, since trees never grew that could be fashioned into sailors. British tars could indeed be moved from place to place, but Americans could not be ordered to the lakes against their will, since at that time men enlisted in our navy only for duty on particular ships. Population on our side of the Canadian border was sparse, and the service was one of hardship and small pay. Americans who took part in the battles in which these shipbuilding contests ended were therefore a strangely mixed company, coming from a distance, often at great personal sacrifice. It is said that of the 430 men under Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie over one fourth were negroes, and many more belonged to state militia. On his side Barclay had Indian sharp-shooters and British regulars as well as the lake sailors and frontiersmen who made up a large proportion of both fleets.

That these fresh-water sailors fought with as much gallantry as their brothers on the high seas the story of the lake contests fully testifies. Perry, erect in his little cockle-shell of a boat, with his flag floating over him and shot plowing the water on all sides, is a picture that has stirred the blood of American school-boys for the last hundred years; and there were other lake battles as creditable and picturesque, if not so dear to school historians.

On salt water and fresh the sailors acquitted themselves well, and won the stakes for which they played; but rarely has there been greater discrepancy between prophecy and fulfilment than in the land operations of this War of 1812. The Young Republicans boasted that they would carry hostilities into Canada, capture it without an army, and dictate peace at Halifax. They counted upon the sympathy of Tories who had departed from among us during the Revolution and also on help from French-Canadians-vain hopes both. The French-Canadians showed that they felt themselves of an alien race, and loyal subjects of King

George had seen nothing to change their minds since the battle of Bunker Hill.

The American army proved as fruitful in disappointments as the navy was prodigal of glorious surprises. Here, also, fortune was merely logical. Musters and training-days had degenerated into seasons of carousal or at best into political rallies. Each independent American prided himself on knowing how to shoot and was confident that he had courage to defend his home; but he strongly objected to having any other man, particularly a neighbor whom he knew in the damaging light of horse-trades and prayer-meetings, order him to do either. The militia, therefore, while made up of the best fighting units.

was also court-martialed, and though acquitted, was never again trusted with a command. Things were going very badly. Madison proposed to make Clay a general, since his ringing speeches for "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights" had power to rouse patriotism and inspire hope.

"But what shall we do without Clay in

Congress?" was asked in remonstrance, and the question was justified. Clay was needed in Congress and had a wider field of usefulness outside the army than within it. In time the war developed officers of true metal, like Jacob Brown, who was a born general although a Quaker farmer; young Winfield Scott, equally predestined to military glory; and William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson, whose exploits in this war carried them far on their road to the White House. But temporarily the outlook was not cheerful.

in the world, was yet woefully deficient.

The small regular army was a mere skeleton, with many necessary parts missing. These were supplied by Congress with all possible speed. One of President Madison's letters mentions "a very large batch of nominations for the army, of twenty-five thousand, which must be followed by others." As invariably happens when so many are called, few are divinely chosen to lead in battle. As Jefferson once said, "The Creator has not thought proper to mark those on the forehead who are of stuff to make good generals." Instead of gaining victories, most of them lost reputations. The few older officers who had served in the Revolution fared rather worse than the untried men. General Hull opened the ball by surrendering Detroit and the whole of Michigan Territory without firing a shot, was courtmartialed and sentenced to be shot for cowardice, but pardoned because of his fine record in the earlier war. A second attempt at invading Canada a few months. later, while not so disastrous, was equally barren of victory. General Wilkinson, squandering in ill-considered and fruitless movements the little honor he managed to bring out of his entanglement with Burr,

Stonington, Connecticut, and Lewiston on Delaware Bay were bombarded. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was burned. Cape Cod saved its salt-works only by paying a ransom. In the Northwest the situation was seriously complicated by Indian troubles, Tecumseh, the powerful Shawnee chief, having made an alliance with the British in the hope of ending once for all American encroachments upon Indian lands. It was against these partycolored allies that Harrison won his victory and his military reputation at the battle of the Thames. In the South also, in that wild region into which Burr had fled after his arrest, there were Indian uprisings. The Creeks lived wedged in between growing American settlements and the semi-hostile Spanish frontier, while to the south of the border were the troublesome Seminoles. These likewise seized the opportunity to regain, if possible, lost ground. Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia were sent to cope with them. Jackson had almost as much difficulty with his troops as with the savages, but, show

ing himself as fiercely impetuous in dealing with mutiny and famine as in striking the foe, gained a notable victory at Horseshoe. Bend, and established once for all his character as a general to be obeyed.

After all, only the very edge of the country suffered from the English. We were holding our own, though apparently doing nothing more. In truth, however, experience and careful drill were improving the army. The best men at this imperative, if monotonous, duty was the handsome General Scott, the most showy product of the war. A lawyer by profession, not one of his rather spectacular early experiences was more spectacular than the way he turned soldier, as heroines of ghost-stories turn gray, in a single night. It happened, according to his own account, at Richmond, whither the budding lawyer had gone to attend the Burr trial, looking on it as a fine professional study, and by no means oblivious to the dramatic interest of the crowded court-room. The proclamation issued by President Jefferson after the Leopard's bold attack upon the Chesapeake reached Richmond late one night and threw the town into a state of excitement. It forbade British war-ships entering American rivers or harbors for water or provisions, and called for volunteers. Scott belonged to no military organization, but the next morning found. him in the ranks of the Petersburg troop of cavalry, fully equipped, "having traveled twenty-five miles in the night, obtained the uniform of a tall, absent trooper, and bought the extra fine charger" upon which he rode. The uncertain course of the Government made him hesitate for some years between law and arms, but there was never any doubt of his real vocation, and the War of 1812 gave him experiences in active service ranging all the way from that of prisoner to successful general, not omitting an excursion. into regimental medicine. In this he dealt with a threatened outbreak of cholera, supplanting the efforts of a scared and drunken surgeon by his own heroic, if irregular, methods and literally forced his men to keep well "by command." But

the greatest service he rendered was through persistence in drill and discipline. The Government trusted such matters entirely to Providence, furnishing no textbook or manual to its officers. Scott improvised one from a French work on infantry tactics, formed his officers of all grades into squads, and drilled them mercilessly ten hours a day, weather permitting, and gave attention at the same time to sanitation and other details of camp life, of which his soldiers were as innocent as babes. The value of his work was appreciated, and his became the recognized system of the Government, remaining in use until the Civil War, when new inventions in guns and ammunition made changes necessary.

Matters dragged along with no decisive result until the summer of 1814, when a lull in the fighting on the continent of Europe enabled England to send to this country a larger force than she had hitherto been able to spare. In August the British Admiral Cockburn arrived off the coast of Virginia with twenty-one vessels, bringing with him General Ross and three or four thousand veterans of the Napoleonic wars. Unable to prevent a landing of this force, Commodore Barney of the American squadron disembarked, to make what feeble resistance he could, with the aid of militia, at Bladensburg, a few miles from Washington. He was taken prisoner, and the invading force marched on toward the capital. Such of its inhabitants as could get away fled, taking their most precious and portable valuables with them. The archives of the state department were hastily bundled into linen bags and carted off to Leesburg, thirty-five miles distant; and President Madison and his cabinet disappeared into the Virginia woods. The spectacle was not inspiring, yet it would have done the country no good had these high officials waited patiently at their desks to be taken into custody.

Of the subsequent burning of Washington, the less said the better for American pride or British glory. Ross of Bladensburg, to use the title conferred on the