War of 1812

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WAR OF 1812

The War of 1812 is undoubtedly America's least known war. The average American cannot name the two participants, the United States and Great Britain, let alone discuss what prompted President James Madison and Congress to declare war on 18 June 1812. In contrast, Canadians regard the war as among the most important events in their history. The underlying reasons concerning how the War of 1812 is regarded at the start of the twenty-first century is based not only on the failures and successes of the conflict, but also on events that followed decades later. For America, the vast majority of the war was characterized by dismal failure. Not only was the nation's capital put to the torch by British forces in August 1814, but campaign after campaign was lost due to either blunder, poor military leadership, lack of supplies, or the refusal of militias to cross into Canada, the occupation of which was the one strategic objective of the United States. In the wake of the U.S. Civil War, the War of 1812 seemed a minor affair to Americans. Canadians, on the other hand, successfully defended their homeland and in the process built a strong sense of nationalism. The one saving grace for Americans was the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, an unparalleled victory led by General Andrew Jackson that allowed the young Republic to walk away from the War of 1812 with a sense of accomplishment in an otherwise lackluster performance.

american grievances

The war's causes were rooted in the Napoleonic Wars. This European struggle between Great Britain and France was essentially a world war that bridged the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Engaged in a death struggle for supremacy, these two colossal powers embroiled their many neighbors, as well as the United States, in the conflict. The United States attempted to avoid involvement, but the lucrative trade to be had as a neutral nation enticed American shipping to brave the dangers of war. The end results were violations of neutral trade rights, illegal blockades, and extensive impressments (the seizing of sailors from American vessels to serve on foreign war ships). Both England and France engaged in these practices, though impressment was largely a British policy.

These varied maritime issues had been of concern in the 1790s but became even more problematic during and after 1803 when Britain and France disputed provisions of the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, which had ended the previous war between 1793 and 1801. Britain released a significant portion of its armed forces in the expectation that the peace would last more than a year and as a result was in a difficult position when the war resumed. Fighting for its very survival, Britain stepped up violations of neutral trade and impressments. Some of the trade violations were veiled in classic English legal tinkering. The Rule of 1756, a holdover from the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), decreed that any nation failing to have a trade agreement with a nation in time of peace did not have one by virtue of a war. This essentially meant that America could not act as a neutral in the French carrying trade between its West Indian colonies and the French mainland. Americans worked around this with the 1800 Polly case, in which British admiralty courts determined that goods taken from French colonies and returned to America, then re-exported to France, were considered "naturalized" American goods. The British closed this loophole with the 1805 Essex decision, which held that all such goods must be off-loaded and must have duties paid on them in America. Much of this was legal game playing, but it was a game backed by the firepower of the British navy, and thus Americans had to play by British rules.

Further trade violations came from both France and Great Britain. In 1806 Napoleon issued the infamous Berlin Decree, which announced a blockade of the British Isles and the right to seize all British goods even when on a neutral vessel. The British responded in January 1807 with an Order in Council requiring all vessels bound for certain ports in Western Europe to stop in Britain and pay a duty. Napoleon retaliated later in the same year with the Milan Decree, in which he declared that any ship paying the British

duty would be considered an enemy and treated as such. These varied orders and decrees resulted in the seizure of some nine hundred American ships between 1807 and 1812.

Impressments were also a major source of American dismay. On 22 June 1807 they reached an extreme when a British warship, the HMS Leopard, attempted to stop and ultimately fired on the USS Chesapeake, killing three sailors and wounding another eight. The British subsequently boarded the vessel and removed four sailors who, they claimed, were English citizens. The British did not normally violate a nation's sovereignty by impressing sailors from a war vessel, and the crown offered to pay reparations and later returned three of the four impressed sailors. Nonetheless, Americans were outraged by this affront to their liberties.

the road to war

There is little wonder why America determined that immediate action was necessary. What, however, should be done? President Thomas Jefferson believed that war was hardly an option and instead decided upon a fifteen-month embargo that shut down American ports from 22 December 1807 to 1 March 1809. The idea was to hurt Britain and France economically by refusing them American goods and thereby forcing a respect for U.S. rights. Though the embargo hurt both nations, it was not enough to alter their policies, and Jefferson was faced at home with intense hostility to the embargo, which ended just days before James Madison's inauguration.

The new president did little to change British and French policy toward America. The young Republic was merely a pawn in a much bigger chess match. Violations of trade and impressments continued

throughout Madison's first term, and on 16 May 1811 a new clash between an English and American ship fanned anti-British sentiment. This time, however, the recipient of the pounding was the HMS Lille Belt. This incident, combined with the continuation of the Orders in Council and the belief that Indian depredations on the western frontier had been encouraged by the British, caused Americans to look for satisfaction from their former mother country.

In reality, the French were as guilty of neutral trade violations and illegal blockades as were the British; however, there remained lingering hostility against the British from the Revolutionary War. Moreover, with Britain's command of the seas, it was its warships that plied the U.S. coast. Thus, the June 1812 decision to engage in war was based not only on very real violations of American sovereignty, but on an emotional animosity as well. The irony is that the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh had announced on 16 June, just two days prior to the American declaration of war, that the Orders in Council would be rescinded. Even when this information became known in the early days of the war, the United States was in no mood to engage in further diplomatic dickering. The Second War for Independence, as some called it, was designed to make Britain stop treating America like a colony.

The declaration of war focused primarily on maritime issues, though historians for many years have asked a very basic question about the war's causes: If it was fought to defend maritime rights, why did the Northeast, the area most affected by violations of those rights, oppose the war so vehemently? Scholars have theorized that a number of additional factors may have been at play: western land greed and the potential conquest of Canada; an attempt to end British influence over Native Americans; Republican Party hostility to Great Britain; and preservation of national honor and a desire to prove the strength of republican institutions. It is likely that all of these factors had some influence on the American decision to engage in war, but foremost were the maritime violations.

Congressional War Hawks may have been eager for retribution, but America was no more ready to prosecute a major war in 1812 than it was in 1807, when Jefferson imposed the embargo. During the intervening years the nation's leaders had done little to prepare for conflict. America had achieved success in the Revolution only through the help of France and had failed to reform a militia system that George Washington criticized on many occasions. Part of the hope, no doubt, was that British forces would be tied up in Europe fighting Napoleon, and that Americans would therefore have an easy time of it. Additionally, many wrongly believed that Canadians would quickly unfurl American flags and jump at the chance to join the Union. Nothing was further from the truth, and the reality of war hit the nation hard. The War Department was badly organized and weakly staffed, the system for the pay and supply of troops was manifestly inadequate, and the army was littered with incompetent and geriatric officers. Most troops lacked discipline and had no real military experience, and a number of militia units in the North argued that they were solely a defensive force and therefore refused to march across the border into Canada. Finally, just when the nation needed a national bank most in order to finance the war, Alexander Hamilton's embattled institution ran the course of its charter in 1811. It is doubtful that the nation could have been less prepared for war.

the conflict

Nevertheless, Americans prepared for an offensive into Canada. The plans called for attacks all along the border. Yet in the Northwest, William Hull, fearing an Indian massacre, surrendered Fort Detroit on 16 August 1812 to a smaller British force and was later found guilty of cowardice and neglect of duty by a court martial. At the Raisin River on 22 January 1813, some three hundred Americans were killed by a superior British and Indian army. Thirty Americans who had surrendered were slaughtered by Indians after the battle. The massacre was so ghastly that Americans later attempted to excite troops by announcing, "Remember the Raisin!" Military action in the East was equally bad. Campaigns on the Niagara front at Queenston Heights (13 October 1812) and Fort Erie (27 November 1812) were also failures. The planned attack on Montreal never achieved any kind of meaningful momentum. In most of these actions militiamen refused to cross the border into Canada. William Henry Harrison had better luck in September 1813 when he defeated the British in the Battle of the Thames, in which the infamous Indian Prophet Tecumseh was killed. Though this was a victory for the United States, it was fleeting. Just two months later General James Wilkinson's attempt to capture Montreal ended unsuccessfully when his army was defeated by a smaller British force at Chrysler's Farm.

American navy sailors did far better than the army soldiers. American ships were faster and sturdier, though certainly fewer in number than the British, and U.S. sailors were second to none. On 19 August 1812 Captain Isaac Hull, commanding the USS Constitution, defeated the HMS Guerrière, and on 15 October 1812 Captain Stephen Decatur of the USS United States captured the HMS Macedonian. On 29 December the Constitution, this time under the command of William Bainbridge, once again vanquished a British ship, the Java. The American navy also performed well the following year, when victory on the Great Lakes inspired Captain Oliver Perry to utter his famous words, "We have met the enemy and they are ours." Unfortunately, the American army failed to capitalize on the navy's control of the lakes by once again botching its forays into Canada.

The American campaigns in the South were more successful. In 1813–1814 an American army engaged the Creek Indians and a little-known but tenacious general named Andrew Jackson defeated the hostile Red Sticks, known for the red clubs they carried, in several successive battles—Tallushatchee (3 November 1813), Talladega (9 November 1813), Emuckfau (22 January 1814), and Enotachopco (24 January 1814)—before virtually annihilating them at Horseshoe Bend (27 March 1814).

On the East Coast, things went badly in 1813–1814. Using their superior naval power, the British blockaded the entire seaboard south of New England. That region was at first excluded because of its opposition to the war and because it was a source of supplies for British troops in Canada. But as the war progressed New England, too, felt the wrath of British might. Also, early in 1813 British raids on Chesapeake Bay and on Hampton, Virginia, struck fear in the American countryside. By 1814 the British had the opportunity to unleash their full force on the United States. Napoleon had been defeated and a wave of battle-hardened veterans sailed across the ocean. Americans nevertheless held their own in battles on the Canadian border, such as Chippewa (5 July 1814), Lundy's Lane (25 July 1814), and Plattsburgh (11 September 1814) but the year would be noted more for its losses than gains. The Chesapeake region was once again invaded, and although Baltimore was successfully defended, inspiring Francis Scott Key to pen the words to the "Star-Spangled Banner," Washington City, the nation's capital, was put to the torch.

The highlight of the war for Americans came with a major British offensive against the Gulf Coast. Expecting to roll into New Orleans virtually unimpeded, the British army met the formidable General Jackson and were summarily slaughtered on the field. Jackson's troops sent forth such a hail of fire on 8 January 1815 that some 2,500 British troops were killed and wounded. With only 6 Americans losing their lives and another 7 wounded, the victory was remarkable and touted as the greatest moment in the young nation's military history.

Ironically, the battle actually occurred after the peace treaty, the Treaty of Ghent, had been signed on Christmas Eve 1814. Once ratified in February 1815, the treaty ended all hostilities, but it said virtually nothing about the maritime issues that had triggered the war. For the most part, those issues had disappeared with the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars. There was no longer any reason for Great Britain to harass American ships, and the U.S. delegates at Ghent, like their counterparts, simply wanted to end the conflict. Thus, matters of impressments and violations of neutral trade were swept under the rug. Some historians state that as a result, America failed in the war. Yet one could argue that standing up to Britain and not suffering utter defeat was success for a fledging Republic attempting to steer a course around monarchical giants.

The War of 1812 lasted for nearly three years and cost the United States $158 million. Total American deaths amounted to 17,000, though only 2,260 of these were combat deaths, the remainder caused by disease. Another 4,505 were wounded. The ultimate results of the war were myriad: the conflict revealed the limited nature of the Republican Party's policies and encouraged it to adopt many Federalist views; Republicans suddenly favored a national bank, internal improvements, and tariffs; the war marked the end of the first party system with the demise of the Federalist Party, which had opposed the war at every point and whose hostility culminated at the Hartford Convention in December 1814–January 1815; the war broke the Indian power in the Northwest and the South; and the Battle of New Orleans generated significant American nationalism—military, political, and economic. This nationalism, combined with their stance on the war, carried several politicians, such as John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay, to national prominence. The success at New Orleans also carried Andrew Jackson to the White House in 1828.