War of 1812

The British and Canadians marched into Washington in late August, 1814. They torched the White House after a brief, one sided skirmish (The Battle of Bladensburg). The only reason the rest of the city wasn't razed was because of a huge rainstorm. The Brits were under orders not to capture any turf, so they just buggered off.

The smouldering remains of the White House were eventually rebuilt and whitewashed, and looked much like it does as of this writing.

It's probably all for the better. Before it was burnt and rebuilt, the White House was called the Presidential Palace, which is a stupid name.

After America gained its independence during the Revolutionary War, its relations with Britain were often strained at best. This was especially true when the British went to war with France starting in 1793. The British began to blockade many European ports in order to cut off American neutral shipping to France. This resulted in British seizure of much American cargo and ships and therefore was extremely unpopular with the Americans, who clamored for retaliation of some sort or another. Although the Washington and Adams administrations successfully eased tensions with the British, whose war with France ended in 1802, when Napoleon came to power in France and the wars started again in Europe America was no longer able to remain neutral. Starting in about 1805, the British began to tighten their blockades and intensified their seizures of American property until they issued the 1807 Orders of Council, a decree that severely restricted the ability of neutral nations to conduct trade with the European continent. None of the seizures of American property incited the popular imagination quite so much as the British practice of stopping American vessels in order to look for deserters from their own navy, though. They often made mistakes concerning identities of various sailors, however, and it is estimated that the British impressed around six thousand men into their navy who had never served in the British navy before.

Americans demanded that something be done. Jefferson and Madison, the presidents during this period, tried to use economic coercion on England, and a number of measures were passed limiting American trade with the British. The most extreme measure taken was the Embargo Act of 1807, which made it illegal to ship anything across the Atlantic, limiting ship traffic to the coastal variety only. This act was repealed a year later without the British having taken much notice. The British refused to change their policies, and a strong pro-war movement began to build in the United States, known usually as the War Hawk movement. This movement not only favored the American right to ship products and people without losing them all to British confiscation, but they also had other grievances with the British. They believed that the British were inciting natives around the Great Lakes (who had grievances regarding their claims to land in the American West that the United States had not addressed) to attack Americans and that Britain represented a major threat to the concept of republican government. There was also a certain amount of discussion about conquering Canada and making it into an American territory in order to reduce British influence in North America and also to expand the United States. Support for the war was not universal in the legislature by any stretch of the imagination, being limited primarily to young lawmakers of the Democratic-Republican party from the West and South, opposed by Federalists from New England whose constituency depended on trans-Atlantic trade that would be severely hurt by war with England. There were even riots in Baltimore during the summer between the two sides that didn't really end until September. Although divided on the subject, America still declared war on Britain and its Indian allies on June 18, 1812.

The first year of the war went horribly for the Americans. They had planned to invade Canada from three directions: along Lake Champlain, north from Detroit, and near Niagara. The Detroit offensive backfired badly, and Detroit itself was made to surrender to Britain on August 18th. The Americans were then defeated at the Niagara front in October, and American invasion forces at Lake Champlain withdrew without even engaging Britain. The naval war went a bit better. The American ship Constitution defeated the British Guerriere in August, followed by the American capture by the United States of the British Macedonian. The Constitution also defeated the British ship Java off the coast of Brazil. Unfortunately, in spite of these victories and successful forays by American privateers against British ships, the British blockaded the American coast and were able to raid it at their leisure.

In 1813, the Canadian invasion went a little bit better with American victories at the Battle of the Great Lakes and the Battle of the River Thames in Canada, but the Americans were still frustrated in their attempts to gain a real foothold. Things got worse in 1814, though, when France began to crumble, allowing the British to devote more of their formidable resources to crushing the American forces. Although the Americans repelled British advances from Canada at the Battles of Chippawa and Lundy's Lane, they were unable to successfully defend Washington itself, which the British occupied in August. As other authors have noted, the British burning of the public buildings of the city is the reason why the White House was renamed as such. America was generally in a bad way, with the British blockade strangling the economy, the U.S. public credit collapsed, the leadership ousted from its capital, and New England Federalists becoming more and more vocally opposed to the war. America needed victories, and it was lucky enough to get them. The British army occupying Washington was successfully driven from Baltimore when they tried to invade, and another British invasion force was routed at the Battle of Plattsburg Bay as it tried to invade along Lake Champlain. It has been said that this defeat was the one that made the British tire of the war, since they were made to believe that reconquering America would be impossible. The two countries had been negotiating a peace settlement in Ghent, Belgium, and it was signed on Christmas Eve of 1814. Word of the treaty did not reach America for quite some time, however, and Andrew Jackson had led his army to a crushing victory over the British at New Orleans by the time it did. Because Americans heard about the war ending and Jackson's victory at the same time, the two events were conflated innacurately, leading to Americans thinking that they had won a war that had in fact been stopped primarily due to the British losing interest.

Sources: http://members.tripod.com/~war1812, http://www.militaryheritage.com/1812.htm, and the History Channel.

The events leading up to the War of 1812-14 were complex, largely misunderstood, and mostly forgotten by history texts in the face of grander and more decisive occurrences. Some historians have labelled the war "a second American war of independence" while others dismiss it as the almost-irrelevant North American section of the Napoleonic Wars that had been raging in Europe for decades. Neither are entirely correct.

From a local standpoint, the war was particularly vicious because it amounted to what was almost a civil war. During and after the American Revolution, United Empire Loyalists had fled the United States to settle in the British North American colony of Upper Canada; this meant that the attackers were fighting against people who had been their neighbours and countrymen only a short time before, now rendered bitter enemies by negligible political differences.

The First Nations peoples of the interior of the North American continent had been for decades watching settlements encroach on their territory. Since the 1780s they had resisted being pushed out of their lands by settlers in the Ohio Valley; they were supported by the British colonial government, who wanted a buffer between Upper Canada and the United States in the form of Indian territory. Many of the First Nations had also supported the British during the American Revolution; the American government tended to view this relationship as being a threat to their policy of pushing back the First Nations as settlements moved west.

These tensions between British North America and the United States provided fuel for the war, once it had begun; but it was the events in Europe that sparked the conflict.

From 1802 through to 1812 in continental Europe, Napoleon and his French armies had taken control of a vast empire that covered much of the continent. All that remained to the west was Great Britain -- but Napoleon's aspirations of crossing the English Channel and overrunning the country were dashed with Britain's decisive victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, which saw the destruction of most of the French navy.

Powerless against the might of the British naval fleet, Napoleon had to resort to economic warfare to defeat Britain: by the end of 1806 he had ordered that all European ports under his control be closed to ships from Britain, followed shortly thereafter by another order decreeing that any neutral ships that had docked at a British port prior to docking on the continent be seized.

Outraged and offended, Britain replied in kind with a series of Orders in Council; these required all neutral ships destined for European ports to first dock in Britain where they were to acquire a license before sailing on.

This created a conundrum for neutral ships with goods destined for ports under Napoleon's control; Great Britain had the naval power to enforce a blockade should her Orders in Council be flouted, but to obtain a license before docking on the continent meant that any goods aboard the ship would be seized and carried off without compensation. Though it was probably not the intention of either Napoleon or Britain, the single country most affected by the conflicting trade barriers was the United States.

Still relatively new, the foreign policy aim of the US at this point was to stay out of European affairs, so as to remain studiously neutral on the world stage until it could develop an identity of its own. European interference in American trade matters, however, was not something that would be allowed to pass.

In the meantime, First Nations leaders such as Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (the Prophet) felt that a lack of unity and solidarity was the foremost weakness of their people. To reduce their dependence on the British Empire and to resist forced removal by the American government, Tecumseh felt, the tribes threatened by expanding settlements must be organised into a confederacy, ensuring their safety and freedom.

Naturally the American government viewed this as a threat to their expansionist aspirations and to Manifest Destiny. Worried about the idea of a powerful Indian confederacy, in 1811 pressure on Indian lands was drastically increased, culminating in an American army under Governor Harrison marching into Indian territory near Prophetstown in early November.

At dawn on November 7, the Indians attacked. They were vastly outnumbered by American troops, and after several hours of fighting they were soundly defeated. Their town was burnt to the ground and their food supplies destroyed.

This particular battle was a warning of sorts to the British from the United States: to support the First Nations peoples in their fight against western expansion and encroachment onto Indian territory amounted to a personal affront against America and thus would be dealt with harshly. A belief grew up among Americans in the west that the British were actually inciting and encouraging Indian attacks; this was to many reason enough for a declaration of war.

Tecumseh spoke to the Governor of Indiana in 1810 on why his people were resisting being moved from their territory:

[The Native peoples,] once a happy race, since made miserable by the people, who are never contented, but always encroaching...to check and stop this evil is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common equal right in the land....

The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first. It is theirs. They may sell, but all must join. Any sale not made by all is not valid.... It requires all to make a bargain for all. All red men have equal rights to the unoccupied land!

Getting rid of the British presence in North America would also mean that Americans could freely move north as well as west, effectively annexing Upper Canada in accordance with Manifest Destiny and bringing in a new era of prosperity. At least that is what those who agitated for war claimed would happen. The War Hawks were members of Congress, mostly hailing from the southern states, who stood firm in their convictions that a declaration of war could only be a good thing for the United States.

In a speech to Congress on December 9, 1811, a representative from Tennessee stated:

This war...will have its advantages. We shall drive the British from OUR continent. They will [no] longer have an opportunity of intriguing with our Indian neighbours and setting on the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and children. That nation will lose her Canadian trade, and, by having no resting place in this country, her means of annoying us will be diminished.

This expansionist view of the causes of the war stemmed mostly from Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and some of the western areas of settlement, where expanding territory for agriculture was a primary concern. On the eastern seaboard, however, support for a declaration of war came from the idea that Great Britain had violated American maritime rights.

The British Navy was stopping neutral ships from entering ports under Napoleon's control. Because most of the ships were from the United States, the American government concluded that Great Britain was intentionally interfering with the extremely profitable American shipping and trade industry, adding to the tensions that already existed in North America.

Worse still was the British practise of boarding neutral ships at sea to search for contraband and deserters from the Royal Navy. There were a number of these; conditions aboard British ships were considerably less than comfortable and the pay was poor, and many deserters took jobs on American ships instead, where the American government would protect them by providing them with certificates proving American citizenship. Under British law, however, the deserters could be and were removed from their new ships and brought back into British service against their will. Often, American-born sailors were taken along with British deserters.

Any nation whose citizens can be taken by another country and pressed into military or other service in a form of near-slavery cannot possibly consider itself entirely independent. This presented another reason for war: proving American sovereignty to arrogant Great Britain, and demonstrating that the United States would not allow its law and authority to be defied and insulted.

Incentive to attack Britain in North America came with the knowledge that the Canadian colonies were sparsely-populated with little more than poorly-organised local militias for defence. Much of the population of the United States was concentrated along or near the border; with British troops tied up in Europe fighting Napoleon, it would be almost laughably easy for the United States to march into the Canadas and take them over.

Great Britain, however, had no intention of fighting a war in her colonies. Wisely, the Orders in Council that had angered the American government were repealed -- but before the move could be effected, British Prime Minister Spencer Percival was assassinated. By the time a new government was formed and the Orders hastily removed, it was too late.

Votes in Congress and the Senate came out in favour of war, though opposition to it was considerable; the vote in the Senate was won by only a slim majority of 19 - 13.

On June 1, 1812, President James Madison cited the following reasons for declaring war on Great Britain:

• Impressment of Americans into the Royal Navy
• Searches of American ships by British vessels on open water
• The British blockade, which precluded American ships from reaching Europe
• The Orders in Council
• British violation of maritime rights
• (fictitious) British incitement of Indian violence in the west

Several weeks later, on June 18, Congress passed a bill which Madison signed, officially beginning the war. Great Britain, still attempting to evade conflict, avoided making its own declaration for six months; not until January 9, 1813, had war been declared by both sides.

The assertion that the war was a continuation of the Revolutionary War that culminated in 1776's Declaration of Independence is true in the sense of economic autonomy, but falls down when the expansionist view of the war's causes is considered. It is true that through the war America was able to assert her independence -- but territorial claims and the First Nations' involvement make very clear that independence was not the only concern of the United States.

To say that it was the North American chapter of the Napoleonic Wars is again a narrow view of what the war constituted. Certainly, it grew out of Britain's Orders in Council and naval policies, which themselves were a result of Napoleon's economic warfare. However, the agitations of the War Hawks, without which not enough popular support for the war effort would have materialised, prove that the issues involved were different and often discrete from those in Europe.

Instead, most of the motivation behind the war can be traced to nationalism and the patriotic belief that something must be done to vindicate damaged honour. As such, the territorial aggrandisement involved becomes nearly irrelevant. Its underlying causes prove that it was one of the most uneconomic wars ever fought by the United States.

Sources:
Coles, Harry Lewis. The War of 1812. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965.
Ouellet, Fernand. Lower Canada 1791-1840: Social Change and Nationalism, trans. Patricia Claxton. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980.
Stanley, George F.G. The War of 1812: Land Operations. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1983.
Suthren, Victor. The War of 1812. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999.
Turner, Wesley. The War of 1812: The War that Both Sides Won. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1990.
Historical Documents All Relating to the War of 1812. Toronto: Canadiana House, 1968.

With mad props to RPGeek for finding and eliminating a typo, and Gorgonzola for locating a wrong word and replacing it with the right one.