In 1812, the courts were again thrust into the center of international conflict. Decades of resentment over British domination prompted the United States to embark upon what many Americans thought of as the nation’s “second war for independence.” It was one the United States was unprepared to fight. Longstanding distrust of permanent military establishments left the nation unable to counter British armed might, especially on the water. Privateers were a potential solution, but Congress and the Madison administration were unequal to the task of regulating the United States’ private navy. Responsibility fell to the judiciary, even though Jeffersonians had spent the previous decade attacking the courts for their supposed undermining of republican principles. As the revolutionary generation had learned, judicial enforcement of the laws of maritime war was critical to maintaining the nation’s international credibility. And the courts’ disposition of ships and goods captured by American privateers kept the nation’s war machine running. By marrying government authority to private enterprise, judges made it possible for the United States to reassert its standing as a sovereign and independent nation.

Joseph Story thought that the United States needed more than courts to vindicate its independence in the War of 1812. The youngest justice on the Supreme Court also believed that the nation needed legal doctrines that would support its aspirations to global power. For decades, American policymakers – and especially the Court under John Marshall – had defended the rights of neutral nations to trade peaceably in wartime. That approach made sense when a militarily weak but commercially vigorous United States sought to profit from trade with European powers embroiled in conflict. But now that the United States itself was at war, Story envisioned a different national future, in which a robust military and strong central government were the foundation of American sovereignty. The split that emerged on the Court over neutral and belligerent rights reflected a generational divide over how to preserve and extend American independence, and it fractured the Marshall Court’s prior unanimity. Despite Marshall’s resistance, Story persuaded his colleagues to adopt doctrines that favored the rights of nations at war, pushing the courts – and the country – to assume a more assertive presence at sea.

During wartime, the Constitution requires the president to lead the nation as commander-in-chief. But what about first ladies? As wives, mothers, and co-equal partners, these “first ladies-in-chief” have found themselves serving as field companion to the commander-in-chief, mother-in-chief to sons on combat duty, steward of national resources, and caretakers to the nation’s wounded. This chapter considers six prominent first ladies during major American conflicts: Martha Washington and the Revolutionary War, Dolley Madison and the War of 1812, Mary Todd Lincoln and the Civil War, Edith Wilson and World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II, Lady Bird Johnson and Vietnam, and Barbara and Laura Bush during the first and second Gulf Wars. Taken together, they paint the first lady as a vital contributor to the nation’s military efforts who deserve our recognition and respect.

The maritime aspects of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire were asymmetric, between a British seapower empire of oceanic connectivity and a French dominated European system that focussed on territorial control and economic restriction. The inclusive British political system privileged naval strength, the defence of trade, and sea control. This position was based on battle fleet dominance, which remained undefeated across two decades. British identity became ever more closely linked to naval success as Nelson, the Nile and Trafalgar added new names to national culture. This sustained long-term funding for major infrastructure projects, new ships, and high levels of skilled manpower. Superior ships and men enabled the Royal Navy to defeat naval rivals, and attacks on commercial shipping by national warships and privateers. Naval dominance sustained a hard-line economic war that broke the Russian economy, and seriously damaged that of France, while the City of London and the British economy more generally continued to support the national war effort through extensive capital loans, and private measures, such as those of Lloyds Patriotic Fund. Seapower could not defeat Napoleon, it supported a grand alliance that would achieve that aim. By 1815 Britain had become a global seapower empire of unrivalled wealth and influence.

Often depicted by historians as a ‘forgotten’ war in the United States and unwanted distraction for Britain and its empire (with the exception of Canada), the Anglo-American War of 1812 for contemporaries was a conflict with high states. For the divided United States, the war was fought for a myriad of reasons, including outrage over British impressment of American sailors and infringements free trade, fear of American Indians, and a desire to re-assert American independence and lay claim to the position of pre-eminent power in North America. While victory offered tangible and moral prizes, defeat risked the shattering of the already-frail political unity of the young republic and relegation to secondary status in North America. For the British Empire, the war meant conflict with its primary overseas trading partner, which risked economic ruin for its manufacturing and shipping industries and resulted in severe opposition in some parts of the country. Victory, however, presented the tantalizing opportunity to avenge the embarrassment of the American Revolution and reaffix the young republic to the British sphere of influence. While the conflict itself resulted in few casualties and a treaty that recognized no victor, it ultimately shaped the future of North America and the direction of the British Empire.

Presidents Jefferson and Madison’s Republican-backed policies prompted new waves of state interposition. Federalist-dominated state legislatures in New England passed interposition resolutions that protested:Jefferson’s Embargo Acts (1807–1809); United States v. Peters (1809) emphasizing the Supreme Court’s finality over constitutionality; the recharter of the Bank of the United States; and Madison’s efforts to mobilize state militias before the War of 1812. After the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts and Jefferson’s election in 1800, Americans might have expected Republicans to advocate strict construction of national powers under the Constitution while Federalists would urge broader powers. However, defenses of states’ rights never belonged exclusively to one political viewpoint or party. Americans debated whether sounding the alarm resolutions and state interposition were legitimate state actions – and some asked if and when they would be justified in more forcefully resisting federal law, notably during the Hartford Convention in 1814 that called for constitutional amendments to reduce the power of Southern states and the repeal of the Three-Fifths Clause.

This chapter opens the first part of the book that presents the background of the First World War. It deals with the emergence of the concept of “enemy alien” in the debate among international lawyers. Starting with the Law of Nations published by Emer de Vattel in 1758, it analyzes and discusses what the foundational texts of international law in the century-and-a-half preceding the First World War said on the rights of foreigners in peacetime and on the conduct toward these same foreigners when they became enemies in wartime. It then compares legal doctrines and practices analyzing the behavior of belligerents towards enemy aliens in a string of interstate wars that occurred between the end of the eighteenth century and 1865, namely the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1793, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The chapter follows the changes in the attitude toward enemy aliens that mass conscription and the post-French Revolution concept of citizenship and nationality triggered.