The Federalists did not hesitate to speak their mind.  Their loss of power had sharpened their tongues; and they were often no more generous to the Democrats and to France than the Democrats were to them and to the British.  But, on the whole, they made for goodwill on both sides; as well as for a better understanding of each other’s rights and difficulties; and so they made for peace.  The general current, however, was against them, even before the Chesapeake affair; and several additional incidents helped to quicken it afterwards.  In 1808 the toast of the President of the United States was received with hisses at a great public dinner in London, given to the leaders of the Spanish revolt against Napoleon by British admirers.  In 1811 the British sloop-of-war Little Belt was overhauled by the American frigate President fifty miles off-shore and forced to strike, after losing thirty-two men and being reduced to a mere battered hulk.  The vessels came into range after dark; the British seem to have fired first; and the Americans had the further excuse that they were still smarting under the Chesapeake affair.  Then, in 1812, an Irish adventurer called Henry, who had been doing some secret-service work in the United States at the instance of the Canadian governor-general, sold the duplicates of his correspondence to President Madison.  These were of little real importance; but they added fuel to the Democratic fire in Congress just when anti-British feeling was at its worst.

The fourth cause of war, the desire to conquer Canada, was by far the oldest of all.  It was older than Independence, older even than the British conquest of Canada.  In 1689 Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, and the acknowledged leader of the frontier districts, had set forth his ‘Glorious Enterprize’ for the conquest and annexation of New France.  Phips’s American invasion next year, carried out in complete independence of the home government, had been an utter failure.  So had the second American invasion, led by Montgomery and Arnold during the Revolutionary War, nearly a century later.  But the Americans had not forgotten their long desire; and the prospect of another war at once revived their hopes.  They honestly believed that Canada would be much better off as an integral part of the United States than as a British colony; and most of them believed that Canadians thought so too.  The lesson of the invasion of the ’Fourteenth Colony’ during the Revolution had not been learnt.  The alacrity with which Canadians had stood to arms after the Chesapeake affair was little heeded.  And both the nature and the strength of the union between the colony and the Empire were almost entirely misunderstood.