Treaty of Ghent: Wellington's Refusal and the Lost Indigenous Buffer State

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The War of 1812 saw Washington burned, yet the treaty that ended it moved no borders at all. The British brushed off Tsar Alexander I's offer to mediate in late 1813 and stalled over talks in Gothenburg, Sweden. Then Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, and with no French war to fight, Britain no longer needed to blockade American trade or impress American sailors. President James Madison quietly dropped his demand to end impressment, the main stated reason for the war. When talks opened in Ghent in late June 1814, the United States sent heavyweights: John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard and Jonathan Russell. Britain, with its top diplomats busy at the Congress of Vienna, sent Lord Gambier, Henry Goulburn and William Adams, who had to wait weeks for instructions from Lord Liverpool's cabinet in London.

Britain opened by demanding an independent Indigenous buffer state stretching from Ohio to Wisconsin, a move aimed at blocking American expansion and shielding Canada. Adams argued there was no precedent for including Indigenous nations in such a treaty, and Britain settled for Article 9, a vague promise to restore Indigenous rights to their 1811 status. Not yet knowing of their defeat at Plattsburgh, the British negotiators then demanded that the U.S. remove its naval forces from the Great Lakes and grant British access to the Mississippi. Madison leaked those terms and united even antiwar Federalists. When Liverpool asked the Duke of Wellington to take command in Canada and win the war, Wellington declined, citing uti possidetis: Britain could not claim land it did not hold. The treaty was signed on December 24, 1814, restoring the borders of June 1812, and news of it crossed the Atlantic too slowly to prevent the Battle of New Orleans.

• The treaty was signed in a former Carthusian monastery that had become a textile mill and the home of a Belgian industrialist.
• Britain refused to return the people it had freed from slavery during the war and in 1826 paid the U.S. just over $1.2 million in compensation instead.
• Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, about two weeks after the treaty was signed.
• Historian James Carr argues Britain negotiated in good faith and did not plan to tear up the treaty after taking New Orleans.
• The HMS Favorite brought the treaty to New York in mid-February, and the Senate ratified it unanimously on February 16, 1815.