 Willard Stern Randall is the author or co-author of 14 books during a 17-year journalism career in Philadelphia. He received numerous awards for investigative reporting, including the National Magazine Award for Public Service from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. After graduate studies in history at Princeton University, he turned to writing biographies of revolutionary war figures. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benedict Arnold, and Ethan Allen. His Benedict Arnold Patriot and Trader was a notable book of the New York Times. His Washington biography was included in Reader's Digest collection, World's Greatest Biographies, in 2000. He is a professor emeritus at Champlain College. Randall is a C-SPAN Presidential Scholar. He has three times participated in C-SPAN's survey of presidential leadership. He has appeared on the Today Show, PBS, and the History Channel. His commentaries have aired on National Public Radio and Vermont Public Radio. He has co-authored four volumes of history with his wife, Nancy Narrow. Today's talk is based on his latest book, Unshackling America, How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution. Please welcome, Willard Randall. Thank you, Dan, and thank you all for coming. We have so few days that are so beautiful, and I'm grateful for giving some of them to come here. When I was in high school, and I was told about the War of 1812, I was told three things. It was caused by the British impressing American sailors. How do you impress an American sailor? I was told that the War of 1812 was won by Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. But I was also told that that was after the peace treaty at Ghent. But nobody told me where that was. So I was confused. As recently as a few years ago for the bicentennial of the War of 1812, we were told that the War of 1812 was the second American War of Independence. Well, how do you have two Wars of Independence? Still confused. And when they teach American history, you have a hard time finding a textbook that gives it much more than a few paragraphs. Sort of a hiccup in history. One of my favorite textbooks, well, it was my favorite until I got to the War of 1812, had the Duke of Wellington dying before Waterloo. And after, or before the Battle of New Orleans, I'm lost. So what I did was decide to find out for myself what really happened. And that's what I've been doing for the last six years. It's a longer story because it was a longer struggle that lasted for half a century from the end of the French and Indian Wars. And we learned a lot about that in high school, about a whole page about the French and Indian Wars. But we helped the British throw out the French and they gave us the bill. And they started taxing us. They taxed everything. And we didn't like that. So we fought them. And we defeated them in the Revolutionary War. No, they said in the Revolution. They made no distinction between the Revolutionary War and the Revolution. Well, we had a peace treaty at the end of the Revolutionary War. That was in Paris, not to be confused with Kent. Everything seemed to happen over there. And in the peace treaty, we were assured we had complete independence. But did we? As I dug into this, I found that we only had political autonomy. But for 50 years, what the founding fathers could never have imagined, I think, was that the struggle went on because we were not given the means of survival, economic independence. For those 50 years, the British blockaded us, taxed us, collected customs, set our rules for international trade, refused our new doctrine of naturalization, our new doctrine of neutrality, as if we were still colonists. And I don't think the founding fathers saw that coming. So there are some benchmarks along the way. And I want to talk about them today. First of all, 1791, we're Vermonters. We know what happened in 1791, don't we? Oh, good. I can go on then. Well, in 1791, right after Vermont became a state, the man who signed the papers, and in fact, who wrote most of them, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, came here with James Madison, who had just written the Bill of Rights, on vacation. I was very happy to find that out. Of course, the weather was awful. They had never seen such black flies. They had never seen such sudden heat around Memorial Day, we would call it. But they found out over dinner that the British were building a fort on North Hero Island. And this is almost 10 years. This is 10 years after the end of the Revolutionary War, and the British were building a fort on Lake Champlain, on North Hero. And they were stopping American ships and searching them, and one had capsized, killing its crew. So Jefferson hurried back to the end capital of Philadelphia to confer with Washington. Well, that was 1791, but by then, for almost 10 years, the British had blocked our trade. They re-invoked a law from the 1750s called the Navigation Act that said only the English could sell goods to Americans, and only Americans could sell to the British and use English ships. English goods on English bottoms, as I put it. So supposedly, we were not allowed to trade here in Vermont across the border to Canada. Of course, that never stopped us. One-third of Americans at that time lived by smuggling. One-third of them were Monters, not Americans. Well, maybe that was generally true, too, I think of John Hancock and a few others who were smugglers. But also, the British had their allies, Spain and Portugal, ban us from commerce in their territories and their colonies. So we were like a string of banana republics not allowed to trade with any of our neighbors. Shortly after Jefferson and Madison were here, the French Revolution came along, and it divided the world into pro-French or pro-English. That's what happened in America. In American politics, you were either pro-English, as was Alexander Hamilton, and because of that, George Washington, or you were pro-French, like Jefferson and Madison, etc. So from the very beginning, we've had political discord at the highest level. But what the French Revolution also did was send us our first refugee crisis. You think nothing has changed. 25,000 royalist refugees from France came to Philadelphia and Baltimore alone. Then there was a slave uprising in Caribbean, which sent more to our coastal cities. And so we had about 50,000 French refugees in towns. If you put Baltimore and Philadelphia together, it wasn't 70,000 people, but you inject another 25,000, and it was a crisis. And so you have President John Adams passing the alien and sedition laws, which were to crack down not on aliens per se, but on journalists. You had the Supreme Court justices roaring around in their carriages, reading newspapers, and locking up the printers. Something politicians have wanted to do from time to time. So you have some of the same crises already beginning. But then both sides, the French and the English, decided to keep us from trading with their enemies. The French seized 400 of our ships in the Caribbean. The British would try to outdo them, and eventually they would seize 400 of our ships. As if that weren't bad enough. Because we weren't colonies of England anymore, they stopped paying Bakshish to the Algerian pirates. And so they began capturing our ships. So we had our first crisis in that part of the world by 1800, and that introduces us to the man that we're going to be talking about next. There he is. He's already here. Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was a pacifist who founded West Point. I mean, how do we get our minds around this? He inherited our first navy from John Adams and used it to fight the Algerians. Here's a view of Tripoli Harbor with the American navy. Circling Tripoli, attacking it. Here's the first American war hero since the revolution. This is Stephen Decatur. What Decatur did was capture an Algerian ship, use it to board the Philadelphia and American warship that had run aground, and blow it up so the Algerians couldn't use it. So this is our earliest diplomacy with the Middle East. Well, Jefferson didn't let that go on. He dismantled the navy, replaced it with a coast guard, made up of boats that had one gun and oars and weren't much use outside of a shallow harbor because he didn't believe that if you had a navy, you could have world peace. Well, the British saw us as pretty much a source, a recruiting office for sailors for their navy fighting Napoleon in the Napoleonic Wars. So you get that word impressment. We finally find out what it means. That means we have British officers stopping American ships and coming aboard and picking out the sailors that they say were deserters from the British navy. Well, in fact, the problem was they didn't believe that we could naturalize British subjects. Born English, you die English. And so they would pick out either what they said were Irish sailors or British sailors, the Irish being part of the United Kingdom then. Now, what was the test? How did they determine if you were an Irish sailor? They would ask you what you had for lunch. And if you said pies and you had had peas, they had you. But here's a drawing from the 1902 from one of the chats for painters of an impressment crew coming aboard and picking out Americans. 40% of America's sailors were born in the British Isles. And of the others, quite a few had purchased their citizenship for a dollar. You could get forged papers for a dollar at the time. Well, the impressment crisis really did bring along the War of 1812 very quickly because the British took 9,917 sailors off our ships. And finally by 1807, they stopped and searched an American warship, the Chesapeake. And that was an international crisis because the captain of the American ship refused to let him come aboard. The British opened fire with cannon, killing several of the Americans, and then the Americans surrendered ship and crew. So the Chesapeake crisis brings us much closer. Well, our friend, President Jefferson, tried diplomacy, but that failed. And so he tried an economic boycott. We hear of those today. So what he did was cut off all American trade with any foreign country. It's called the Embargo Act of 1807, which hit Vermont very hard because our trading partner was right across the border in Canada, which was a British possession. We weren't deterred in a lot of ways. Vermonters are very ingenious when they're forced to be in such a situation. So one story I've heard from an historian was the British were buying pork. And Vermonters dressed up women in shawls and bonnets and put them in the back of a sled. They dressed up pigs in shawls and bonnets, put them in the back seat while their swains rode in the front seat right across the border selling frozen pork to the British army. That comes from a reputable historian. You can't make up stuff like this. We also basically were cutting down our forest as fast as we could, not only to clear farmland, but to make something called potash, burning the tree stumps and limbs, et cetera, because potash could be sold for gold to the British in Canada, which they sent to make sulfuric acid and to help treat textiles. So Vermonters ignored the embargo, which set off several crises here, and I don't have time for all of them, but if you're taking a walk down past Ethan Allen's house, there's the Black Snake historical marker where there was a shooting war here on these grounds. Between revenuers, they would have been called, I think, by some people, the first custom service, and the Black Snake and its crews were smuggling potash through the embargo to Canada. What the embargo did generally was make Jefferson horribly unpopular. Americans spelled the word backward, and they called it the ograbme. There's Jefferson portrayed as a very large turtle taking a bite out of Americans to prevent their trade. People got a lot of their information from cartoons even at that time and their political views. Well, the embargo was a failure and it ended in one year because it had managed to destroy 80% of American commerce, our import-export trade. There were soup lines in Portland and Boston. The whaling trade died because they were not allowed to go anywhere for a whale or sell the oil. New England suffered especially hard, and New England never recovered from Jefferson. There's a place we have our state capitol that used to be in Jefferson County, and as a result of the embargo, the name was changed to Washington County. After Jefferson came his sidekick neighbor, closest friend, James Madison. Now, Madison had to deal with another crisis. Other than impressment, he had to deal with trouble on the frontier. The American settlers were streaming west. Irish immigrants were coming in thousands because of a failed insurrection in Ireland. They couldn't afford the land in the east, so they were heading for Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, for cheap farmland. They ran into an Indian by the name of Takamsa, a brilliant military and political strategist who was organizing an Indian confederacy to block any more western migration. He happened to be away on a recruiting trip all the way down to Alabama, all the way up to the Great Lakes. When he left his half-wit brother in charge at the capitol of Tippecanoe, Indiana, I say half-wit, it's hard to tell. You have to judge people by their actions sometimes. He decided to attack the American Army before the American Army could attack him, and the result was the destruction of Takamsa's base at Tippecanoe and the slaughter of hundreds of his warriors and their families. Takamsa went over to the British for arms and support and to give them military support. Our army was only 3,000 men. He had 10,000 warriors. At no time were there more warriors organized for any struggle. Along comes Henry Clay, one of our giants. He's known as the Great Compromiser, but he hadn't grown into the part yet. He was elected Speaker of the House in an off-year election in which the Warhawks, the pro-war party, captured control of Congress. And in the closest Senate vote in our history on a declaration of war, the country split, 19 for war, 13 for peace. New England dissenting, New England against the war, the South and the West for it. And President Madison felt compelled to declare war on England. Remember that army, 3,000 Americans? The British had 250,000 experienced troops from fighting Napoleon and 8,000 veterans in Canada alone. We had 20 warships, including five frigates, and from there on down smaller. They had 900, including 651 battle-ready men of war with three decks of weapons. But we declared war on them. They never forgot us or forgave us really. They considered it a stab in the back because we declared war in June of 1812 at exactly the moment Napoleon with 600,000 men was invading Russia. So, sooner or later, that great imbalance in force was bound to happen. Well, we were up for war though. We really wanted war. Thomas Jefferson the pacifist put it this way. To capture Canada would be a mere matter of marching. Goddy had a gift for the language. We tried three times. We failed each of the three times. In that first year of war 1812, we had one startling success. And that was the Constitution, the USS Constitution. We know it better as old iron sides. I show this scene because it shows you something that sailors did that the British really didn't like. They called it a Yankee trick. Now, here's old iron sides being chased by an entire squadron of British ships. And the wind has died. And the British ships are be calmed. Well, Isaac Hull, the captain, puts out long boats with crews of men and small anchors that are known as cage anchors, usually used for maneuvering in a small harbor. And they throw out the cage anchors. And then on the deck of the ship, on the old iron sides, the men are turning a big wheel of the capstan that tightens up the rope and actually pulls the ship along to the next anchor when they throw the next anchor in. So they actually went cageing. And for a day and a half, those men in those boats rode and rode and rode and left a British fleet behind. We'll come back to what happened to that captain. But old iron sides was the first success, the only success in the war of 18, in the first year of the war of 1812. Here it is in its famous battle with a guerriier, a British frigate. This so excited the Americans that it tipped the election of 1812. Madison was running for reelection against Dwight Clinton who wanted peace. The North wanted peace. The South wanted war. But the news of that victory convinced a lot of Americans that they could win against the British. In London, the news sent the price of insurance up 600%. It was a shock to the British as well. It was a proud moment for the Americans when old iron sides led the rest of our ships into Boston Harbor. In my imagination, it's like a goose leading her gozzlings proudly into the nest after the battle. But they never could get out after that because the British had all those ships and began blockading our coastal harbors. One ship tried to escape and within 20 minutes it was destroyed. So news wasn't very good along the coast. At the same time, we were building a fort and a naval base on Lake Ontario. And we were building up an army here. Imagine Burlington and Plattsburg as the twin military capitals of the United States. 4,000 men on each side. It was the largest concentration of troops in the US at that time. So over here we had guns, ships, barracks. You can go down by the old post office building on George Street. Those are what's left of the war of 1812 barracks. There are graves sprinkled around Chittenden County. So many of them died from a smallpox epidemic. On the Plattsburg side, you have this gentleman building his base. His name is Zebulun Pike. You may recognize that name. There is a mountain named after him, Pike's Peak, which he never got to climb, but he saw it once while he was climbing Long Peak. But it was named after him for his role in the war of 1812. Not for his discovery, I think. He built up an army in the wintertime at Plattsburg and let it overland through the snow once the ground was frozen enough. He took an army in sleds to Sackett's Harbor in New York on Lake Ontario where they drilled on the ice in the winter while they built ships. And some of the unsung heroes of this war are shipbuilders who came from New York in the worst of weather and built fleets on the lakes. So the Brown Brothers, Noah and Adam Smith and 140 shipwrights went through the snow to Lake Ontario and built a fleet by the spring of 1813. And Pike had trained his regimen of infantrymen on the ice and we attacked Canada for the first time. Here's a map. Let's see if I can show you some of our... If I don't trip over one or two cords. Let's go back where we were. This is very sensitive. So here are the places I'm talking about. Here we have an army base at Burlington. We have a base at Plattsburg. The men go through the snow. If they stayed on the sleigh, they made it. If they got off, they froze to death. Okay. But here's Sackett Harbor where we built a fleet in the winter of 1812, 1813. And by the spring, we attacked... Let's see if we can reach it from here. No, we attacked what we called Toronto. They called it York at the time. They called it Upper Canada which also confused me because it's right next to Lower Canada. It takes a while to learn what was going on back then. But we attacked York and destroyed what would become Toronto. Pike was doing pretty well. You can see here's a map of the landings. We had our navy in the lake, the fleet. We went into the woods and fought the Indians who were on the side of the Canadians and the British. We drove them back and then we attacked toward the center there and we took their outer fortifications. Now, the British were not ready for an attack. One of their cannons had been used by Cromwell in the 1640s and had been handed around farther and farther from England ever since. The other cannons were left over, captured in the Revolutionary War. So we were taking their fortresses and they piked, stopped for a break. Two hundred some men leaning on their muskets. He was there with his officers interrogating a prisoner. When the commander of the British decided to withdraw and gave the order to destroy the powder magazine, that was 500 barrels of gunpowder right underneath where Zebulun Pike was sitting on a tree stump. So the man who has Pike's Peak named after him was killed by a boulder when it fell on his head. The men went wild. There was a rampage for three days. When people came back to their houses afterwards, all that was left was the walls. One American decided to crush the alder silver in the Anglican church to make it fit better in his backpack. They found that there was more taverns than they had ever seen in one place but it was the legislative capital of Upper Canada. So they drained all the whiskey and all the rum and went on a looting rampage. They were so drunk that when they got into the assembly chamber of Upper Canada they must took the wig of the speaker of the house for a scalp and then they really had blood in their eye. Even the commander of our ships, Admiral Chauncey decided to take out some library books, all of them, and take them away. He went back to finish the job the next year and he returned the books. Can you imagine? But the first invasion of Canada was another failure. Unlike Erie, that year we had our first great military success and that was Oliver Hazard Perry with the Smith brothers again building him a navy, taking on a superior British fleet and defeating it right off Presgyle, offshore from Erie, Pennsylvania. And sending back to Washington the famous message, we have seen the enemy and he is ours. That's all he said. But we had taken over the Great Lakes and we never relinquished them for the rest of the war. But it didn't end very well because the British wouldn't listen to him. He had all those warriors. He knew how to fight. He actually took Detroit with very few shots. He took Detroit helping the British with his warriors because the commander in Detroit was old and feeble and scared to death. He had a stroke. He had a problem standing up after drinking all night. He had his daughter and grandchildren along in the fort on the frontier and he was afraid they would get scalloped. So without consulting his officers, he surrendered Detroit to the British in Tecumseh. While he was at it, he threw in Chicago and Minnesota. So in one bad day, we lost the Midwest and we didn't get it back for the rest of the war. This is at the same time that his adopted son, Isaac Hall, is defeating the British on old iron sides. The war is very small. But there was great news. Tecumseh was leading the rear guard action into Canada during the second American invasion. The British would not listen to him and stand and fight. He headed for the nearest fort and he stood and you can see this depiction of him fighting to the death against the Kentucky militia cavalry. Kentucky had mounted cavalrymen with rifles able to fire accurately from horseback. So here's the colonel. This is a heroic depiction that colonel would run for vice president one day. He was so popular for killing Tecumseh. Although we don't know that Tecumseh died, they never found the body. The Indians aren't sure he was killed. And we always have ghost figures. The war changed in April of 1814 when Napoleon capitulated, that is surrendered for the first time, in Paris. Now the British could turn loose their army in their navy in North America and they began sending over whole regiments of battle, seas and troops and scores of ships. And the strategy became looting, burning and pillaging all along the American coast. This man gets the prize. There are two ways to pronounce his name. It's spelled C-O-C-K-B-U-R-N. Scottish pronounce it Coburn. You can decide which pronunciation you would use especially if you lived along the Chesapeake. Where they looted and pillaged for 200 miles, raiding every plantation especially. And here he is. This is the family portrait. They're so proud of what he did. They have him standing over the fireplace with burning Washington behind him. We'll call him Admiral Coburn. We're on television. But what he did typically was raid the homes of any American who was known to have fought against the British. And here he is in Havard de Grace. They pronounce it there. Looting the home of the captain of one of our frigates. Going to his home. Here we see the looting going on in the cartoon. This is in the Marilyn Historical Society. Everything down to the cradle. The linen. The furniture. Coburn actually took the harpsichord. So his wife could give concerts on it in Bermuda in the wintertime while the fleet was resting. And while he roared around Bermuda in the ship captain's carriage. On the way out of town, Coburn burnt the captain's father's house, his tavern. And they looted that angle. Now this is the British army looting the Anglican church. I guess they figured we'd already broken with them. But this is what was going on. They were taking cows. And the officer would have fresh milk aboard ship. It was big business because the British admiral and all the way down to the crew of a ship got prize money, it's called. Whatever they captured, they could sell off. And the admiral in charge of the North Atlantic Station of the British Navy was able to retire after one strenuous year of counting his money because his cut had been 100,000 pounds sterling from all the ships that he had taken and refitted and resold. So it was a new kind of war, fire and plunder. New kind for Americans anyway. This is Joshua Barney. You won't find him in most history books. This was an amazing fellow. He was in the Revolution. Then he became a Commodore in the French Navy of Napoleon. Then he became a Privateersman building ships that would attack the British during the War of 1812. Here's one of his ships attacking a payroll ship of the British. That was a special plum. But then when the British attacked the Chesapeake he got permission from the Maryland Assembly to build a fleet of 24 gun boats and barges armed with his crews of experienced Privateersmen. And they fought the British for almost a year. Going into shallow rivers and then coming out and striking. But soon the British sent an armada. 50 warships. 5,000 veterans to the Chesapeake. And it was left up to the commanding generals and the admirals whether they would attack Washington D.C. or not. Their orders were to pillage and ravage the coastal towns of America. But the three leaders got together one night in the tavern and decided sort of what the heck were here anyway. And they marched over land. Quick marched in the August heat. And they burned Washington. Now their pretext, their reason is in a letter from the Governor General of Canada asking them to do it in reprisal for the destruction of Toronto. So it was retaliation. They had orders not to burn any private property or do any looting. Mostly they followed that. So they burned all the public buildings. They burned the capitol. They tried to burn it but it was made out of iron and steel. So they emptied their rockets. In the Star Spangled Banner you hear the rockets red glare. These were more dangerous to the guy who fired it than anybody else. So they did little damage. They drained all the gunpowder from the rockets and they managed to finally blow up the capitol building. Then they marched up Pennsylvania Avenue where the last one to leave is Mrs. Madison, Dolly Madison. Now her part in this has become mythology. She wouldn't leave until the portrait of George Washington was cut down. Well it had to be cut down because it was bolted to the wall. Which she probably didn't know it was a copy but she didn't want the image of Washington marched through the streets of London like a conquered hero. So she waited until a slave cut it off out of its frame, rolled it up and handed it to a citizen who happened to be there to get this out of here. She also saved the presidential papers and the original Declaration of Independence which she's usually not given credit for. And then she left in one of the last carriages. It was hard to get a taxi in Washington on that day. And so a lot of people who couldn't get one stayed and looted much of Washington, including the White House. The British didn't do everything. There were a lot of people who resented the fact that the government did absolutely nothing to defend Washington D.C. from attack. But this is Dolly Madison and she'd been watching all day through her telescope from the roof of the White House because she could see the battle going on in Bladensburg. It was called Bladensburg, Maryland on the outskirts of Washington where the main British army attacked and a hodgepodge of American militias lined up against them. Our friend Barney, the privateer, was the only one who stood in flight with his men and would stand in flight with his cannons. Part of the confusion was that President Madison became the only president in our history to go into battle with his troops, which sounds heroic, except he countermanded orders and his mere presence there caused confusion among the other generals until his militia, who had turned out from Maryland, earned the nickname for the battle as the Bladensburg races because they left the battlefield so fast. So Madison was on the run looking for Dolly and Dolly was on the run looking for him for a couple of days. The only government building that survived was the post office building. We should have special affection for the post office for that reason alone. But it survived only because it's where the patent office was and the manager of patents who had designed the capital building, William Thornton, persuaded the British general to spare it because the models were private property, they weren't public property, so that building was spared. But the rest burned a huge fire that was only put out by a hurricane that came along a few days later and you could see the fire and the smoke from 30 miles away. In the next target of the British here's a woodcut of the burning of the capital, a 19th century woodcut for the burning of the White House. And the next attack by the British was at Baltimore, which was really the prize. There was no loot in Washington except the ham and the ice cream that Dolly had left out for the commanding officers. But in Baltimore, 524 privateering ships had sailed and many of them were still in the Inner Harbor and the prize was those ships and their car goes loot if the British could take Baltimore. They did what the British had done often after battles. They took a vacation. They took a month off. It was hot. Which gave Baltimore a chance to build fortifications. 11,000 people, black and white, night and day, working in shifts with picks and shovels, built two mountains at either end of the city, Federal Hill, which is still there to defend the rear of Fort McHenry, their main fortifications. But also if you go to Fort McHenry National Historic Park, you can see that they left and they were impregnable when the British fleet arrived. Now, this is the Battle of North Point, which I didn't know about until one of the benefactors of this homestead, Dr. John Heise, told me about it. He was from Baltimore. He was very proud of knowing about this. And Dr. Heise said, North Point, you wouldn't know to go there now because it's the toughest part of town. Always was. The Maryland militias stood on one side of an open field and fought the British on the other side of an open field just the way they would do it in England. Just firing volleys at each other and trying to get around each other. The Americans might not have won except for this gentleman, the British commander of the expedition, General William Ross, one of the Duke of Wellington's favorite generals who wrote around into battle looking like that with nice white stripes for his sword and his binoculars. Target practice time. Two brothers from Maryland shot at the same time. And that was the end of one of the best British generals, William Ross. And when that happened, the British army folded. The second in command would not continue the attack. They went back on their ships and went off to their real prize, which was New Orleans. Which was even more loot. The best estimate was 4 million pounds sterling in loot in the ships in New Orleans harbor. So if you have any question about the motivation of these officers, the only thing that stopped them was our sharpshooters. When Wellington heard what happened to Ross after hearing what happened to other generals he said, I don't think I want the command in America. I must not die. And so he refused it. This was September of 1814. September 13th. And what was going on here? Well, we can't skip. Fort McHenry. If you read the second of the Star Spangled Banner, I recommend reading it over singing it. It was originally a 14th century English drinking song. And that's the only way in which you can usually sing that song. But if you read the second stanza, bombs bursting in air. The rockets red glare. The bombs were bursting in air because the Americans had French cannon with longer range artillery and the British had to back up and stay more than two miles away. So they fired 2,000 shells overnight into the air that burst and made a lot of noise only making 20 American casualties. Killing three British rocketeers who had the misfortune of trying to fire the things was a new weapon. They didn't take time to practice where they came. But bombs bursting in air. And so by the dawn's early light Francis Scott Key, who was an anti-war protester but also was a lawyer and he had a client who had been captured by the British so he happened to be there negotiating his exchange. He becomes a history figure because he couldn't get away. And he described it in first, it's the second version of the poem he wrote it the first time after the Battle of Tripoli but he tried it again and this one caught on. It was distributed free. And he became one of our folkloric figures. But Baltimore held and exactly at the same time there we are, there's the actual Star Spangled Banner before we put music to it. That flag that you could see waving proudly was about 36 feet long and had been made to hoist up above the fort as a signal to the people of Baltimore that the fort had survived. And when that flag went up the morning after the battle the British also took it as a signal to leave. Now at exactly that time the British are invading with their largest army since the Revolutionary War down Lake Champlain. The plan the plan was to take Platsburg and destroy the army base there and then to go on and take at the bottom of the map Virgins. Because at Virgins we were building our first Navy on Lake Champlain. Now I urge you to read this section of the book if you get a chance it's too long for me to go through in this talk but basically it's an amazing story but in the woods behind Virgins and below the falls Americans built five ships and twelve rogue alleys and gun boats in a matter of 60 days once the word came that the British were attacking. Hundreds of men went into the forest and cut down tall white pines three on the third of May it was the keel of the Saratoga the American ship on the eighth Smith brothers had a contract to build one ship in 60 days they built five in 40 and the man who did most of this in charge of all this is a 28 year old lieutenant who had been next to Cater on that ship that went into Tripoli Harbor 10 years before this is William McDonough now the war was so unpopular here that when McDonough came a year before nobody would rent his wife a house or even a room she had to live in a tavern until her baby was born until he found a place for much of New England was against the war but McDonough was put in charge of this navy he was supposed to get control of Lake Champlain and with the help of the Smith brothers he put together a fleet the Canadians were coming down the idea of a Canadian invasion is we only think of it hopefully as tourism but it was a Canadian army many of them were loyalists there were three brigades of Canadians and British many of whom had fought against Napoleon in Europe the commander of one of the brigades was the son of the man who sent the letter to Ethan Allen asking him to turn traitor during the Revolutionary War now he was the head of a brigade of British troops so this is General Prevost he's the one who told the other generals to burn Washington he was told to take Platsburg and then destroy the shipyards of Virgin and with 9000 veteran troops they marched across the border into New York on September 1st 1814 one of the places that we use is an observation post to see them coming down the lake was the original building of the University of Remont I've had a hard time finding a drawing but there it is because the original building burned not too many years after that but the highest spot around was the cupola of UVM the telescope you could see the British ships being assembled and the troops coming down the lake now why did they attack the New York side instead of the Vermont side well one hint isn't a letter from General Prevost back to London saying don't worry about giving us any money for food that's all taken care of by our friends the Vermonters there were trail drives of cattle through the Vermont side of the forest so they don't meet so unpopular was the war to the British and the New Yorkers were cooperating by sending rafts of timber the mass of the British ships were coming up on the current going down on the current across into Canada so Americans expressed their dissatisfaction with going to war by and away cooperating on a large scale that is what they were making at for gents they had iron mines forges blast furnaces fulling mills grist mills wire mills it was an industrial city of 850 people the gunners had come down from Burlington 22 miles and as the guns were made a fort was built along Lake Champlain called Fort Cassin out of Creek because they knew the British sooner or later would try to attack this is called a long gun this is what the British preferred you wanted to stay far away and blast away long range the Americans on the other hand like this this was short fired at close range and fired a 42 pound explosive shell these are both from the grounds of the Institute at Washington DC and this is what they're building here in Vermont as well as making one thousand 32 pound cannon balls on the Platsburg side we have this gentleman who is from the first graduating class of the West Point and he is building fortifications south of the Saranac river three block houses a high grade cannons ditches, moats in case the British decide to attack by land which they did so we'll see that this is the actual battle 19th century depiction it's a little bit telescoped because it has Platsburg represented on the left and has the British coming across the Saranac river and somehow the naval battle is behind it which is kind of hard to picture but this is from the memories of people who were there this is more accurate this is also from the 1830s and this is McDonough in the battle on a ship the Saratoga is going to read the passage but it's very, very long details of the battle but essentially what happened is the British were not ready they took too much time they changed commanding officers they sent a captain who was not familiar with the lake the crews were soldiers who had never sailed a ship they didn't know where the gunlocks were for their cannon they dragged their feet and thanks to an 18 year old boy named Joseph Baron B-A-R-R-O-N Junior of Burlington who was a pilot in New the Lake McDonough went into Platsburg Bay and stayed close knowing the British Navy would have to come down and they would be sailing against a strong current so McDonough McDonough 28 listened to a teenage boy and they took their stations inside Platsburg Bay the ships were lined up from northeast to southwest two miles offshore where British guns could not reach them again they knew the range of the enemy weapons so when the British Army came it got stalled at the Saranac they tried an end run and 200 British soldiers were cut down by 15 year old boys led by Captain John Wool of Vermont the battle finally happened on 9-11 18-14 that isn't always a cursed day because on 9-11 18-14 the British finally came down came around Cumberland Head and McDonough and his fleet refused to come out and fight the British wanted to fight in the open where they could use their long guns McDonough listened to Baron and stayed behind the headland knowing that the wind would change and when the wind did change the British could not maneuver they had planned to rake the Americans out in the open lake instead they had to try to get around them and as they went past their ships were clobbered for 2 hours and 20 minutes I mean we can't imagine the noise but this is from the Vermont shore this is the water color from the Vermont shore and those fighting ships are clustered in the middle one observer said it was constant thunder you couldn't hear nothing else for 2 hours nothing but the roar like thunder no interruption everything covered with smoke on the outside you can see on the left are row galleys with that kind of Arab sail on the back of it they made them very maneuverable either as row boats or as sailing ships on the right you have British gun boats you can't see people on shore the islands were lined with people as if they were going to a baseball game if they'd had baseball yet sitting and watching as spectators the British came down in row boats just for the spectator sport and were bobbing around and watching as this went on within 20 minutes the British commander Captain George Downey was killed the firing was that intense at close range the first British volley raked the gun deck along the gun deck of the American ship the Saratoga killing 40 men right away including the first lieutenant who was supposed to aim the guns so it was McDonough himself who wound up aiming the guns until one of the guns was hit and knocked him down he actually was decked literally twice he was knocked down by a cannon somehow survived and then one of his own spars came down and hit him in the head he must have been a very tough man he survived the British commander George Downey had an entire cannon land on him the cannon worked if it fired forward but if it became a projectile itself it weighed hundreds of thousands of pounds so this went on one ship after another drifted away Saratoga used the Yankee trip trick that's why I showed you old iron sides in the first place Kedge anchors McDonough had fitted the Saratoga with long cables so that he could pivot and turn his ship around at close quarters if all his guns were knocked out on one side and the other fellows guns were almost all knocked out and when that happened the men pulled on the cap stand pulled on the Kedge anchors pulled on the cables the Saratoga came around and blasted away finishing the battle in a matter of about 20 more minutes so the Yankee trick and a 28 year old lieutenant and an 18 year old pilot from Burlington won the most decisive battle of the war of 1812 I didn't just say that Winston Churchill said that Admiral Mayan a historian said without doubt it was the most decisive action of the war of 1812 and the Duke of Wellington said that when the news reached France where Wellington had defeated Napoleon but was worried about his comeback Wellington said we don't have the lakes we cannot win and he refused to come over and negotiate we had wonderful diplomats and famous for something else there they are John Quincy Adams already bald in the middle Henry Clay already bald on the right and the British negotiators but these men lived for a year in that city of Ghent that you didn't know about or I didn't anyway it was the first place we went to work on this book it was charming but at the peace negotiations there we both sides decided to call it quits it was a stalemate the diplomatic turn is status quo antebellum let's give it all back and go back to where we were the day before the war well we had no choice we were broke the French and the Dutch turned us down for loans to cover the expenses of our diplomats the man who supplied the copper to the mint the United States to make pennies refused the US government further credit so there is no 1815 penny we were broke we didn't have a penny and so were the British their taxpayers had had enough so the war ended on Christmas Eve in a palace in Ghent they had a lovely party the negotiators headed for London and signed a treaty of amity and trade we have been a first favored nation with the British ever since and that's how that happened and that is how the American Revolution finally ended oh I forgot Andrew Jackson oh oh yes yes yes can he won he won he said so Wellington didn't want to come so he sent his brother-in-law his brother-in-law let the attack into Andrew Jackson's marksman artillery etc his brother-in-law and 2000 were killed and maimed in about 20 minutes and that was after the war was over but in the psyche of Americans Andrew Jackson won and in the psyche of Americans we had beaten the British the revolution was over we were ready to go on the march again thank you very much this is one I usually say fire will if you have any questions yes no the question was if you go to Virgin's can you see the remains of the shipyard no you can see the falls there are yes yes yes you can that's not where the ships were built but yes the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum has quite a lot of exhibits as well of ships I guess you could go to Virgin's and then take the road to the Maritime Museum it's really worth doing questions sir well it's tricky because mostly what are the political considerations of why Provost went down one side of the other well at some level probably in London that Provost didn't necessarily know about the British were hoping that England would defect from the United States because the war was so unpopular but when anybody counts on Vermont behaving like the rest of New England he is misinformed the motives were more I think pecuniary and basically also Vermonters didn't like being told by their governor who had one turn as governor that they shouldn't participate in the war because the things I had to go over very quickly is the militias of the states refused to cross borders or cross into Canada and sometimes it caused terrible consequences for the first forces to cross over into Canada but they had signed up for their state's militia it was not a strong idea of a federal government yet or a federal responsibility so when this attack came at the end there were a lot of Vermonters who ignored their governor 200 got into a lawyer's office in Middlebury together it made cartridges all night and then they marched over to Platsburg who was the governor? Martin Chittenden Martin Chittenden is one term I think son of Thomas Chittenden but in Middlebury an old revolutionary war captain on a cane went around the town with a fiffer drummer honest to God and lined up two thirds into the men of fighting age and they took their cooked pots and their bed rolls and their muskets and got themselves to Burlington and St. Albans and across into the trenches in time so the men individually volunteered something like 2200 Vermonters three times the number of New Yorkers were in the trenches at Platsburg so sir Washington aligned with the British and Jefferson with the French and Jefferson being the pacifist could you say that being a pacifist allowed him to gain the Louisiana Purchase? the question is Jefferson being a pacifist allowed him to gain Louisiana Purchase I think I would have to say it was Napoleon's propensity for squandering fortunes and his being out of money during a truce in 1803 the piece of MEN he didn't money and Washington used illegal funds sequestered for congress without congressional approval to get the money over to Talleyrand to pay off Napoleon so that's how he got the Louisiana Purchase if you want to go to a deeper level Jefferson believed in the west he grew up on the farthest ridge of settlement in Virginia and he always believed in going west and the people who believed in him politically were the ones who were willing to fight the Indians to take more land and more land and more land he believed in land as much as anything good question in the back of the doorway please yes well it would take I had an hour and I could take another hour just on that but very briefly he went over because of the commander of the American army who was in contact with him the most William Henry Harrison kept taking land from the Indians by force or by trickery in treaties and to come so wanted his people to stop backing away and form a confederacy to hold their land their heritage and stop the Americans from going farther west and Tecumseh was negotiating with Harrison very tensely there's a scene in the book and finally Tecumseh asked to go and talk to Madison himself and so Harrison sent a long word that Madison would see Tecumseh but then a White House aide said yes but you have to come alone Tecumseh said I never go alone I like 500 of my friends to be with me so it was a White House aide I'm sorry to draw any analogy who screwed up peace between Tecumseh and Americans and when Harrison wouldn't stop taking land then Tecumseh said well then I will go to my English father and went over not knowing that the war of 1812 was going to happen you can't answer some of these questions I'll take somebody else over here I was amused to hear about the spectators of the Battle of Platsburg we lived in a stone house in South Hero built in 1890 by Menager Phillips Menager Phillips was reputed to have been at the Battle of Platsburg to watch it which I found strange at first and was the last surviving American who actually saw the battle you know more than I do I know I have to cut my when the battle is over I don't get to follow through on a lot of the family history and it's really a loss, I love these talks because I learn more from these talks I have to say sometimes that you do as I go around Vermont I find out so if you give me more information on that I would promise you I'll use it in the future and anybody else too by the way I'm going to have cards on the book table in there that have my website and contact information and any ideas you have about your history or our history I'm grateful if you send me an email I always follow through well thank you so very much