Usually when we think of the American war that best captured the capacity of Americans to indulge in militant nationalism, we think of the war that closed the nineteenth century, the Spanish American War.
While Jackson led the Battle of New Orleans that closed the war, Adams negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that settled the same conflict. Fittingly, perhaps, both would have central roles in the War of 1812. Moreover, though never a war hawk, he found himself increasingly favoring militancy towards Britain. Chosen by Massachusetts Federalists to serve as a United States Senator in 1803, he quickly broke with the Federalist Party when he felt that the spirit of faction threatened the union. The same period was also emotionally taxing for Adams. Nonetheless-despite his remarkable success in both business and politics-in the decade preceding the War of 1812 Jackson, now a militia general, felt in dire need of a war to change his fortunes. Moving to the western frontier as a young lawyer, Andrew Jackson quickly established himself as a leading figure in his adopted community of Nashville, Tennessee. This yoke-which the two felt more poignantly than most-would fuel their rise on to the national scene over these years. Born in 1767, both Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams had been only adolescents during the Revolution, and indeed over these very decades the two future presidents and political adversaries increasingly felt the burden of living up to the heights achieved by the founding generation. Unlike their fathers, these men could not lay claim to what became known as the ‘spirit of 1776.’ It is hard to find a more unlikely couple than Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, yet both were two of the most prominent men of that post-revolutionary generation and shared in common much more than one would expect. Over the first two decades of the nineteenth century a new generation of men rose to prominence in the young American republic. Perry was both a nauseating drink and the name of one of the American naval heroes in the war. Contemporary personification of the US, Brother Jonathan, pouring Perry down the throat of UK’s personification, John Bull.
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