I

Madison's decision to seek a declaration of war against Great Britain suggested that he had ideas about how he might defeat his enemy. This was certainly true, but it was to be more than unusually difficult for the president and his administration to translate their plans into effective action. The resulting conflict was a ragged one, marked on the American side more by military fiascoes than successes on land and interspersed with occasional naval victories at sea that, though gratifying to the nation's tender sense of pride, were inconsequential in terms of its larger outcomes. By the end of 1814 the prosecution of the war had become so fraught with obstacles that it would be no exaggeration to say that the American republic had reached the effective limits of its capacities as a war-making state. The nation was then rescued from an embarrassing predicament not so much by divine providence – as many of its clergy claimed – as by the skills of its diplomats, who were able to negotiate a not unsatisfactory peace treaty in the new international environment that emerged with the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. As a consequence, the fact that the United States had survived the war at all without incurring any significant losses became a good enough result to permit Americans to transform it into a triumph in its own right.