uthwest, who
hailed the war with enthusiasm, were ardently aroused to redress wrongs
inflicted upon their seafaring countrymen. Their enmity towards Great
Britain was compounded of quite different grievances. Behind the recent
Indian wars on the frontier they saw, or thought they saw, British
paymasters. The red trappers and hunters of the forest were bloodily
defending their lands; and there was a long-standing bond of interest
between them and the British in Canada. The British were known to the
tribes generally as fur traders, not "land stealers"; and the great
traffic carried on by the merchants of Montreal, not only in the
Canadian wilderness but also in the American Northwest, naturally drew
Canadians and Indians into the same camp. "On to Canada!" was the slogan
of the frontiersmen. It expressed at once their desire to punish the
hereditary foe and to rid themselves of an unfriendly power to the
north.

The United States was poorly prepared and equipped for military and
naval campaigns when, in June, 1812, Congress declared war on Great
Britain. Nothing had been learned from the costly blunders of the
Revolution, and the delusion that readiness for war was a menace to
democracy had influenced the Government to absurd extremes. The regular
army comprised only sixty-seven hundred men, scattered over an enormous
country and on garrison service from which they could not be safely
withdrawn. They were without traditions and without experience in actual
warfare. Winfield Scott, at that time a young officer in the regular
army, wrote:

The old officers had very generally sunk into either sloth,
ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking.... Many of the
appointments were positively bad, and a majority of the remainder
indifferent. Party spirit of that day knew no bounds, and was of
course blind to policy. Federalists were almost entirely excluded
from selection, though great numbers were eager for the field....
Where there was no lack of educated men in the dominant party, the
appointments consisted generally of swaggerers, dependents, decayed
gentlemen, and others "fit for nothing else," which always turned
out utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever.

The main reliance was to be on militia and volunteers, an army of the
free people rushing to arms in defense of their liberties, as voiced by
Jefferson and echoed more than a century later by another spokesman