Trusting to ’the Chapter of Accidents’: Contingency, Necessity, and Self-Constraint in Jeffersonian National Security Policy

James Madison faced a difficult war because of Republican antipathy to taxation, debt, standing armies, federal aid to infrastructure, and a national bank. Many Republicans shared Thomas Jefferson’s faith that an untrained militia could easily conquer Canada, but they did not improve militia training or administration. Indeed, Jefferson gutted the army’s fledgling supply organization in 1802, an act far more significant for the War of 1812 than the creation of the Military Academy. Jefferson boxed himself and his successor into a corner by refusing to negotiate with Britain on realistic terms and by relying on commercial sanctions that damaged the economy and devastated revenues. Reactive and backward-looking, the Jeffersonian Republicans refused to match ends and means and failed to create a viable deterrent or alternative to war.