I

Sometime in late May 1812, James Madison began drafting a “war message” that he would send to Congress on 1 June. As he did so, his mind ranged over the troubled history of Anglo-American relations following the establishment of American independence in 1783. Indeed, Madison even went so far as to allege in his draft that Great Britain had been unjustifiably hostile toward the United States from the very first moments after the end of the Revolutionary War. As proof he adduced the many difficulties the new republic had encountered in establishing diplomatic and trade relations with the former mother country. Matters had only become worse, Madison continued, after Great Britain became a party to the wars of the French Revolution between 1793 and 1801. Those conflicts had been characterized by serious British violations of American neutral rights, as Madison understood those rights according to the eighteenth-century law of nations, and Great Britain had resorted to such unjust conduct again in 1803, on the occasion of the resumption of its war with France, now under the rule of the most formidable general of modern times, Napoleon Bonaparte.