It is difficult to overstate James Madison’s contributions to the history of the United States. Over the course of his many years of public service, the diminutive Virginian served in his state’s legislature and in the governments of three national bodies. When the limitations of the Articles of Confederation became clear, he worked first to amend them, then to replace them with a new governing document – an effort that subsequently earned him the title “the Father of the Constitution.” Upon its ratification, Madison emerged as a key figure in the new Congress by introducing the constitutional amendments that became the Bill of Rights and becoming a prominent leader of the new Democratic-Republican Party. With the election of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson as president, Madison became the country’s fifth Secretary of State, in which capacity he facilitated the vast westward expansion of the country with the Louisiana Purchase.

All of this was prelude to Madison’s eight years as the fourth president of the United States. Yet Madison’s presidency has long been regarded as a low point in his long political career, largely because of his administration’s extended confrontation with Great Britain. Years of struggles over British trade restrictions and the Royal Navy’s impressment of sailors on American ships culminated in 1812 in a war in which Madison’s lofty territorial ambitions were frustrated. John Stagg’s book provides a critical history of his administration’s handling of the conflict, one that details the motivations that led to war and the political and military obstacles that frustrated the achievement of the goals in waging it.

Central to Stagg’s interpretation of events is the role Canada played in the administration’s thinking. The desire to annex Britain’s remaining colonies in North America dated back to the American Revolution, and served as a persistent goal for expansionists during the first decades of the new country’s existence. To this was added Canada’s growing importance as a source of timber and other naval stores during Britain’s ongoing war with Napoleonic France, which disrupted their access to their traditional sources of such supplies in the Baltic. Stagg argues that the administration saw the conquest of Canada as an opportunity to place further pressure on the British to respect the neutrality of American merchants trading with Europe, though whether such additional justification was necessary is a debatable point.

Despite the years of tension and controversy leading up to Congress’s declaration of war in June 1812, the United States entered the war ill-prepared for it. Madison’s hopes that quick action by American forces would result in an easy conquest of Canada were frustrated by the disorganization of the military effort, with haphazard recruitment and limitations on the use of the state militias inhibiting the concentration of sufficient numbers of troops. This was exacerbated by constant disputes between the leading commanders, whom all too often seemed more interested in fighting with each other over questions of strategy, status, and rank than they were on defeating the British and their native allies. The combination proved fatal to the invasion attempts in 1812, and it continued to plague military operations for the remainder of the war.

Many of these problems reflected the fractured domestic politics of the war. Though Madison’s Democratic-Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the party itself was riven with disagreements that the opposition Federalists could exploit. Central to many of these disputes were questions of how to finance the war, with the higher taxes needed a source of contention. Madison’s cabinet was no less divided, with ambitious members of it using the war to position themselves in anticipation of the next presidential election. At the heart of all of this, of course, was Madison himself, whose loose departmental control and inability to manage his own administration proved the ultimate obstacle to developing the sort of strong centralized war effort necessary to achieve his goals. With Napoleon’s defeat and exile in 1814, ending the war became an urgent priority, with only Andrew Jackson’s belated victory at the battle of New Orleans providing any sense of victory for the nation in its aftermath.

By detailing the political history of the war, Stagg provides a sharply critical assessment of Madison’s limitations as commander-in-chief. It’s one that not only describes events at the national level, but how political disagreements played out in the various regions and within the states themselves. This he bases on an enormous range of primary sources that reflect an impressive amount of archival research, as well as a solid grasp of the secondary literature on the era. While the narrowness of his focus often excludes key elements of the war – such as the British blockade and its effect on public attitudes in coastal areas towards the conflict – it’s nonetheless a masterpiece of political history that anyone interested in James Madison, his troubled presidency, the history of the War of 1812, or the politics of the early republic will find richly rewarding. ( )