War is hell, but as far as popular memory is concerned, the War of 1812, provoked by Britain and declared by America, is something worse: a bad story. The setup drags; the plot is messy; the heroes lack agency; the villains are distracted; and the ending leaves things almost exactly where they started. Yet the stakes were enormous, with America as we know it in the balance.
Hence the War of 1812 is one of those events we know about but don’t know anything about—even here in New Haven, where the conflict and its causes were especially costly. Among our city’s many war and peace monuments, I’ve only found one that remembers what some historians have called “America’s second war for independence”: the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument above East Rock, where, on a sunless backside most visitors will never examine, oblique bits of text and an illustrated bronze plaque honor New Haveners who died in the fighting. On the plaque, a naval commander flanked by rowers holds an American flag by the fabric, its furls caught in the same wind as his aiguillettes. Beneath him, the water swirls and swishes, licking the boat as if eager to gobble it up. Behind him, two frigates rear like warhorses, their keels raised on a collision course. Exposed to the elements since 1887, the bronze’s patina is now a deep, delicious aquamarine—a great color for this glorious maritime scene, itself an accidental reminder of the thing the war and its antecedents stole from New Haven: the “heyday of New Haven shipping,” whose glory would never be restored.
That’s how Rollin G. Osterweis, in his 1953 history Three Centuries of New Haven, describes the city’s bustling maritime trade of the late 1700s and early 1800s. As of 1807, he writes, New Haven was a “thriving seaport with as many as a hundred foreign-bound ships leaving its wharves each year,” returning with imports the city taxed to an average of 150,000 post-colonial dollars—impressive numbers for a population of roughly 5,000 people. “The Long Wharf was lined with commercial houses, and the life of most of the citizens bore some relationship to the busy harbor,” Osterweis notes. Ships might carry “grain, butter, meat, vegetables, cattle, horses, and lumber” to the British and French West Indies (the Caribbean islands), which might then load the vessels with “sugar and molasses to be made into rum.” Among New Haven’s commercial fleet were 20 or so ships that traded as far away as South America’s Pacific coast.
Times were good, even if seas were choppy. England’s 1803 declaration of war against France, part of the Napoleonic Wars, had progressively impinged on American traders. As they jockeyed for control of Europe and beyond, the British, still led by King George III, and the French, under Napoleon Bonaparte, each declared it illegal to conduct business with the other, putting New Haven in the absurd and dangerous position of breaking the laws of its major trade partners simply by trading with them. Cargoes and even whole ships could be seized if they were discovered en route to an enemy port, though this threat was greater from the superior British navy. Meanwhile, British warships had adopted the outrageous habit of “impressment”: boarding American merchant ships, snatching English-born Americans and conscripting them to fight in the mother country’s war.
These factors compelled the federal government, led by Thomas Jefferson, to pass legislation cutting off trade with England and France, starting with the Embargo Act of 1807. The idea, according to Osterweis, was to “quickly starve both Napoleon and the British into a proper respect for American neutrality.” Instead, the legislation “destroyed the very trade it was designed to protect.”
Abroad, the more diversified European powers hardly seemed to notice the loss of American goods. Locally, however, “farmers’ markets disappeared; sailors and shipwrights were idle; merchants were in despair,” Osterweis writes, adding that “no place suffered more acutely” from the embargo than New Haven. By the end of 1809, the city’s collected import duties had plummeted by two thirds, as “the Long Wharf… took on a ghostlike appearance.”
Anger at the policies of Jefferson and his like-minded successor, James Madison, rippled through the city. Starting in 1808, meetings were held and committee members named (including the pioneering lexicographer Noah Webster and future mayor David Daggett) to draw up petitions and resolutions aimed at convincing Washington to reopen trade. In 1810, entrepreneur and engineer William Lanson was commissioned to extend the Long Wharf hundreds of feet farther into the harbor, perhaps on the hope that the city’s protests had been heard. Yet the lobbying efforts, Osterweis writes, were “all in vain,” and as national tensions with Britain continued to mount, “together with the rest of the country New Haven drifted into the War of 1812, still smarting under the realization that her foreign shipping business had been destroyed.”
Little did she know that her domestic shipping business was next. But that’s a chapter for another day, when the little-known war itself will emerge from the inky depths.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image depicts the War of 1812 plaque on the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Monument.
