War of 1812

War of 1812. The War of 1812 is often referred to as the United States's second war of independence because, like the Revolutionary War, it was fought against Great Britain. The Conflict resulted from the clash between American nationalism and the war Britain and its allies were waging against the empire of Napoleonic France. Many Americans believed that England sought to humiliate the United States, limit its growth, and perhaps even impose a quasi‐colonial status upon its former colonies.

Background.

Throughout the wars between Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and Great Britain (1793–1801 and 1803–15), the belligerent powers of Europe repeatedly violated the maritime rights of neutral nations. The United States, endeavoring to market its own produce while also asserting the right to profit as an important neutral carrier in the Atlantic commercial system, was particularly hard hit. In order to man the Royal Navy, British naval officers impressed seamen from American vessels, claiming that they were either deserters from British service or British subjects, irrespective of whether they had been naturalized by the United States. The United States defended its right to naturalize foreigners and rejected Britain's claim that it could legitimately practice impressment on the high seas. Relations between the two countries reached breaking point on this issue in June 1807, when the frigate HMS Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake inside American territorial waters in order to remove, and later execute, four of its crew.

The exact number of Americans affected by impressment is difficult to ascertain—American newspapers on the eve of the war claimed that it was in excess of 6,000—and Great Britain and the United States were never able to resolve the dispute. Over time the issue became the most flagrant example of Great Britain's reluctance to respect the sovereignty of the United States, and this was one of the reasons why President James Madison cited impressment in his 1 June 1812 message to Congress as the first major grievance that had to be settled by war.

Equally offensive to the United States was the British practice of issuing executive orders in council, particularly those of November 1807 and April 1809, in order to establish blockades of the European coast. The Royal Navy then seized neutral vessels bound for the Continent that did not first call at a British port to pay duties and unload cargo. By these means, Great Britain could simultaneously wage economic warfare against France and control American trade to its advantage. British ministries justified these tactics as fair retaliation against Napoleon's equally antineutral Berlin and Milan decrees, promulgated in December 1806 and December 1807, respectively; but American merchantmen suffered more heavily from British seizures than from French, and the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison never accepted British blockading practices as valid under the law of nations. It was the seriousness of this dispute that ultimately raised the question of whether the United States should go to war to defend its neutral rights.

At first, the United States responded with policies of economic coercion rather than war. At the suggestion of President Jefferson, Congress passed a series of embargo laws between December 1807 and January 1809. These laws prohibited virtually all American ships from putting to sea and eventually banned any overland trade with British and Spanish colonial possessions in Canada and Florida. Because the legislation failed to change British policy and seriously harmed the U.S. economy as well, it was replaced by the Non‐Intercourse Act in March 1809. This measure forbade trade with European belligerents until it was replaced in May 1810 by Macon's Bill No. 2. This law reopened American trade with all nations subject to the proviso that in the event of either France or Great Britain repealing its antineutral policies, the United States would then enforce nonintercourse against whichever nation failed to follow suit by lifting the remaining restrictions on trade.

In August 1810, Napoleon announced he would repeal the Berlin and Milan decrees on the understanding that the United States would also force Great Britain to respect its neutral rights. President Madison accepted this as proof that French policy had changed, and in November 1810 he imposed nonintercourse against Great Britain. He then demanded the repeal of the orders in council as a condition for the resumption of Anglo‐American trade. When Great Britain refused to comply, Madison, in July 1811, summoned the Twelfth Congress into an early session in November to prepare for war. After eight months of debate, Congress responded to the president's initiatives by declaring war on 18 June 1812. The decision was bitterly controversial and was carried by Republican Party majorities alone. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 79 to 49 for war; in the Senate, 19 to 3. The Federalists, whose constituents (especially in New England) depended heavily on trade with Great Britain, believed that France had equally offended against American neutrality; they opposed the declaration of war and, thereafter, its prosecution.

Military and Naval Events.

The principal theater of operations in the war was the American‐Canadian frontier between Detroit and Lake Champlain. Upper and Lower Canada were the closest British imperial possessions that were vulnerable to U.S. military and naval power. The rapid growth of their economies in the early nineteenth century, particularly in the timber trade, had transformed them into a significant resource for Great Britain during its protracted maritime struggle against France; this reinforced the American desire to seize them, and fostered a strategy of invasion. To the extent that the British were able to carry the war to the Americans, it was by sea; thus, especially after the summer of 1814, the theater of operations expanded to include the mid‐Atlantic coast and the American territories around the Gulf of Mexico. For this reason, a war that commenced as an invasion of Canada in 1812 concluded in a defense of the city of New Orleans in the early months of 1815.

Over the summer and fall of 1812, U.S. forces, under the commands of Brigs. Gen. William Hull, Alexander Smyth, and Stephen Van Rensselaer, and Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn, were directed to invade Canada at Detroit, Niagara, and Montréal; but inadequate preparations, poor leadership, and untrained troops undermined the invasions. The British general Sir Isaac Brock, together with Tecumseh and the Shawnee, Delaware, and other northwestern Indians who had their own complaints about American territorial expansion, captured Detroit in August 1812. In September and October, Brock and Maj. Gen. Roger Sheaffe defeated two American invading armies on the Niagara peninsula, while Dearborn's invasion of Lower Canada was called off after only one minor engagement in November. American efforts made at the same time by Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison and Brig. Gen. James Winchester to retake Detroit were also unsuccessful; the latter officer surrendered his army to British and Indian forces on the Raisin River in Michigan Territory in January 1813.

The only American victories in the opening months of the war occurred on the ocean as the heavy frigates of the tiny U.S. Navy took to the seas to protect American trade and to harass the vastly superior naval forces of their enemy. In August 1812, the USS Constitution, under Capt. Isaac Hull, destroyed HMS Guerrière; in October, Capt. Stephen Decatur's USS United States captured HMS Macedonian; and in December, the Constitution, now under Capt. William Bainbridge, defeated HMS Java in an engagement off the coast of Brazil.

Between May and November 1813, the U.S. Army attempted to invade Canada across the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence River. American forces were successful inasmuch as they captured Fort George and York (now Toronto) in Upper Canada in May, but subsequent efforts to extend American control in the province were thwarted by British victories at Stony Creek and Beaver Dams in June. A major thrust from Sacketts Harbor down the St. Lawrence toward Montréal under Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson was also aborted, first by British resistance at Crysler's Farm in November 1813, then by Wilkinson's decision to end his offensive after learning that he would be unable to join forces with U.S. troops below Montréal. On the northwest frontier, American naval forces under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British squadron at Put‐in‐Bay on Lake Erie in September. Thereafter, Harrison and his U.S. and Kentucky troops were able first to retake Detroit, and then, in October, to destroy the alliance between the British and the Indians with a victory at the Battle of the Thames.

There were no other major American victories in 1813. The Royal Navy avenged the defeats of 1812 by capturing the USS Chesapeake in June 1813, and throughout the year British frigates steadily extended their blockade of U.S. ports, annoying coastal communities and disrupting trade. Yet another setback for the American war effort came in the fall of 1813 when “Redstick” factions in the Creek Nation, who like the Shawnees and Delawares had ample grievances against the United States, attacked forts and settlements on the southwestern frontier. Georgia and Tennessee mobilized troops in response and Tennessee forces under Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson eventually defeated the Creeks at Horsehoe Bend, Mississippi Territory, in March 1814.

By 1814, American land forces had improved in both quality and leadership. Disciplined troops under Maj. Gen. Jacob Brown and Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott resumed efforts from the previous year to expel the British from Niagara, and between July and September they fought the enemy on even terms in three major engagements at Chippewa, Lundy's Lane, and Fort Erie. But the defeat of Napoleon in Europe in the spring of 1814 allowed Great Britain to send more troops to North America, and by late summer, the United States had to contend with invasions by combined army and navy forces at Lake Champlain and in Chesapeake Bay. Capt. Thomas Macdonough's victory over a British squadron on Lake Champlain in September compelled one invading army to withdraw to Canada. Meanwhile, another British force had taken and burned the White House, the U.S. capitol, and most other government buildings in Washington, D.C. (in August), and a third had occupied the northeastern section of the District of Maine. Efforts to seize Baltimore failed as Maryland militiamen inflicted heavy losses on the British regulars of Gen. Robert Ross, and the harbor defenses of Baltimore withstood a heavy naval bombardment. It was during the shelling of Fort McHenry on 13–14 September that the poet Francis Scott Key composed the work that became The Star‐Spangled Banner as a tribute to the American defense.

Conclusion.

Efforts to end the war lasted almost as long as the conflict itself. Great Britain, in fact, repealed its orders in council in June 1812 before it had learned of the declaration of war, but President Madison decided to continue the struggle in order to obtain a comprehensive settlement of American grievances. For this purpose, he accepted in March 1813 a Russian offer to mediate the conflict and dispatched a five‐man negotiating team to St. Petersburg. Britain rejected mediation in July, but later offered to open separate peace negotiations. Madison accepted this offer in January 1814; the opening of the talks was delayed until July, however, because of changes in venue resulting from the defeat of Napoleon. At Ghent, Belgium, Great Britain initially made unrealistic demands, seeking not only to establish a neutral Indian buffer state in the American Northwest but to revise both the Canadian‐American boundary and the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that had established the United States as an independent nation. The United States, which had originally wanted an end to all objectionable British maritime practices and cessions of Canadian territory as well, forbore to press any claims at this time. Its diplomats parried Great Britain's demands until the British ministry, rebuffed by the duke of Wellington (who refused to take command in Canada) and fearing the expense of a long continuation in hostilities decided to settle for a peace based on the status quo ante bellum. Between the signing of the treaty, on 24 December 1814 and the time the news arrived in the United States, the last major battle, the Battle of New Orleans, had been fought on 7–8 January 1815.

Neither the War of 1812 nor the Treaty of Ghent secured American maritime rights on a firm basis; but a century of peace in Europe after 1815 meant that they were not seriously threatened again until World War I. Nor did Great Britain pursue its future disputes with the United States to the point of risking war. And though the United States failed to obtain any Canadian territory, the campaigns of the war destroyed Indian opposition to U.S. expansion on the northwestern and southwestern frontiers. Both the United States and Canada emerged from the war with a heightened sense of national purpose and awareness, and particularly in the American case, the war consolidated the nation's military and naval establishments on more secure bases than before 1812.

In other respects, though, the war was as much a mixed blessing as an unqualified gain for the United States. The immediate domestic impact of the conflict was to heighten tensions between the northern and the southern states, on the one hand, and the Federalist and Republican parties, on the other. These strains became so serious that in November 1814, New England Federalists met in convention at Hartford, Connecticut, to consider measures to nullify the war effort. The ending of the war shortly afterwards left the Federalists marked with the stigma of disloyalty, and this undoubtedly contributed to the party's rapid demise after 1815.

The economic impact of the war was equally complex. The disruptions it entailed on America's international commerce were, to some extent, offset by greater governmental expenditures, an increased demand for domestic manufacturing, and the deflection of capital from shipping to the first large‐scale American industries, especially in New England. Yet not all of the resulting gains survived the unstable economic conditions of the postwar period; and even the American belief that the war marked a significant stride toward cultural, economic, and political independence would ultimately be overshadowed by the Civil War, which profoundly altered the meaning of all America's earlier conflicts in the shaping of the nation's identity and purposes.
[See also Neutrality; Rush‐Bagot Agreement; Trade, Foreign.]

Bibliography

Henry Adams , The History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 9 vols., 1891; 1986.
Alfred T. Mahan , Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812, 2 vols., 1905.
Frank Updyke , The Diplomacy of the War of 1812, 1915.
Bradford Perkins , Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812, 1961.
Bradford Perkins , Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823, 1964.
J. C. A. Stagg , Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830, 1983.
George F. Stanley , The War of 1812: Land Operations, 1983.
Steven Watts , The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820, 1987.
Donald Hickey , The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, 1989.

J. C. A. Stagg