A Treaty of Peace

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 350.

By then there was news that made any hairsplitting over the circumstances of one frigate’s surrender barely worth notice. GLORIOUS NEWS read the headline of an extra edition of the Commercial Advertiser that hit the streets of New York early on the Sunday morning of February 12, 1815: “A Treaty of Peace was signed by the American and British commissioners at Ghent, on the 24th of December.” The previous evening at eight o’clock a copy of the treaty had arrived in New York aboard the British sloop of war Favorite. When the news reached Hartford two days later, cannons were fired and bells rung throughout the night in rejoicing. In Albany 130,000 lights lit up the public buildings and fireworks filled the night sky. An express rider galloped to Boston in a record thirty-two hours, and schools closed, businesses shut, the legislature adjourned, and a parade of citizens with the word PEACE on their hats wound though the city. The Senate unanimously approved the treaty on February 16, and the next night at 11:00 p.m. Madison formally exchanged ratifications with the British envoy who had arrived to accept them. The following day in Washington the British and American flags flew side by side, and that night the impromptu celebration included the firing of a number of rockets, “some of them made, by one of our citizens, in imitation of the British Congreve.”

[snip]

Only Federalist newspapers had the temerity to observe, in reading the actual terms of the treaty, that it offered nothing about free trade, sailors’ rights, or any other compensations for an expensive and bloody war.