Guest Post: War of 1809

This post first appeared on Today in Alternate History with input from Allen W. McDonnell, Robbie Taylor, and Jeff Provine.

October 31, 1809: Atlantic Slave Trade leads to War

New Prime Minister Spencer Perceval offered the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer to twenty-five-year-old Viscount Palmerston, but the latter declined in favor of the office of Secretary at War, charged exclusively with the financial business of the army.

Palmerston knew that at this defining moment, the nation was on the road to conflict in North America. Because he was pro-abolition, the timing of this appointment was particularly auspicious because the U.S. Congress had recently failed to pass an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. The British Empire had just banned slavery and decided to enforce this abolitionist policy upon the United States, sabre-rattling against the prevailing Jeffersonian party's pro-French leanings. With a vastly superior naval force, Great Britain had the opportunity to bully her former colonies while she imported cotton from Egypt. The Americans had developed a very profitable industry based upon the institution of slavery, a matter that had been questioned as early as the Declaration of Independence. This clash of interests brought the two countries to war during the final months of Thomas Jefferson's second term as US President. As a Virginian plantation owner that had gained wealth from indentured servants and chattel slaves, he personally had wanted the same compensated emancipation that the UK had instituted, but the cotton gin had made slavery very profitable after its introduction in 1794.

So, into these circumstances were sown the seeds of a second conflict between the nascent United States and Great Britain, engineered by two men whose personal views on slavery were not so very different. But, if not the Atlantic Slave Trade, then most likely some other related commercial issue would likely have been the cause of war. Although the United States Navy lacked the strength to triumph in the Atlantic, war hawks thought perhaps her militia had a better chance of invading Canada, and so these were the plans that were hatched in Washington. Proverbs 11:29 tell us that "Whoever troubles his household will inherit the wind" and surely this terrible conflict would bring widespread destruction, involving First Nations and slave uprisings as all parties threatened to tear up the fabric of the nascent United States. Instead, Jefferson became the first three-term President to be re-elected because of war fever when the Royal Navy started seizing slave ships off the coast of Africa.

Though the USA gained Upper Canada, the loss of the Louisiana Purchase until the War of 1848 returned it to American control had a profound impact on slavery in the United States. The famous 1838 case of Manuel vs North Carolina was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court where the justices ruled that free persons of color born in the USA and its territories were citizens under the US Constitution [1]. Slaves imported to the USA were not, but, after the War of 1809, very few slaves were successfully brought into the USA. By 1838, the vast majority of freed people were born in and thus now citizens of the USA.

Author's Note:

In reality, the U.S. Constitution permitted the Federal Government to ban importation of slaves by law starting in 1808 but did not require such a ban; separate legislation had to be passed to enact the ban. Abolitionists in the USA OTL passed said ban as effective in 1808, the first year Congress was permitted to do so. In this alternate timeline, the ban failed to pass.

[1] The court case extending freed persons citizenship preempts the Dred Scott decision of OTL that declared no African descended person could be a U.S. citizen. By making it established law a couple decades earlier, it makes removing citizenship a much tougher precedent to break.