r which they were utterly unprepared, and
which it had been the chief object of commercial reprisals to avoid.
Thus considered, the triumph was barren.

On June 1, 1812, President Madison sent to Congress a message,[384]
reciting the long list of international wrongs endured at the hands of
Great Britain, and recommending to the deliberations of Congress the
question of peace or war. On June 4 the House of Representatives, by a
vote of seventy-nine yeas to forty-nine nays, declared that a state of
war existed between the United States and Great Britain. The bill then
went to the Senate, where it was discussed, amended, and passed on
June 17, by nineteen yeas to thirteen nays. The next day the House
concurred in the Senate's amendments, and the bill thus passed
received the President's signature immediately. The war thus began,
formally, on June 18, 1812, five days before the repeal of the British
Orders in Council.

While the Declaration of War was still under debate, the Secretary of
War, Eustis, on June 8 reported to the Senate that of the ten thousand
men authorized as a peace establishment, there were in service six
thousand seven hundred and forty-four. He was unable to state what
number had been enlisted of the twenty-five thousand regulars provided
by the legislation of the current session; a singular exhibition of
the efficiency of the Department. He had no hesitation, however, in
expressing an unofficial opinion that there were five thousand of
these recruits. It is scarce necessary to surmise what the condition
of the army was likely to be, with James Wilkinson as the senior
general officer of consecutive service, and with Dearborn, a man of
sixty, and in civil life ever since the War of Independence, as the
first major-general appointed under the new legislation. The navy had
a noble and competent body of officers, in the prime of life, a large
proportion of whom had seen instructive service in the Barbary
conflict; but, as has been seen, Congress had no faith in a navy, and
refused it any increase. In this distrust the Administration shared.

Mr. Monroe, indeed, probably through his residence abroad, had
attained a juster view of the influence of a navy on foreign
relations. He has already been quoted in this connection,[385] but in
a letter to a friend, two years before 1812, he developed his opinions
with some precision. "I gave my opinion that our naval force ought to
be increased. In advising this, I