A Nation In Denial

The USA and its myth of the war of 1812-14

Origins

On June 1, 1812, President Madison sent a message to Congress recounting American grievances against Great Britain. After the message, the House of Representatives quickly voted (79 to 49) to declare war, and the Senate agreed by 19 to 13. On June 18, 1812 Madison signed the measure into law.

This was the first time that the United States had declared war on another nation, and the Congressional vote would prove to be the closest such vote in American history. None of the 39 Federalists in Congress voted for war. Critics of it subsequently referred to it as “Mr. Madison’s War.”

How had it come about?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.With Britain striving to contain Napoleon, a system of mutual blockades saw both the French and the British seek to damage the economy of the other by preventing and reducing its international trade. Due to the strength of the Royal Navy, the British blockade of continental Europe was reasonably effective. French trade suffered, and their more primitive industrial development was set back. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, actually increased trade with its overseas colonies over the period.

The recently-born US state was caught in the middle, seeking to protect its neutrality and gain the maximum commercial and economic benefits – from both sides. However, precisely because of British naval power, the USA found the British the more vexing. In fact the British were just repealing the Orders in Council which permitted the actions which the US opposed, at the moment Mr Madison went to war. But in an age before even a transatlantic cable, the news came too late.

Early action

The war clearly had 2 elements: war at sea and on land, though these were drawn together later by the British in some complex and largely successful amphibious operations.

At sea, there was early US success. With the British navy stretched by Napoleon, new US ships crewed by experienced mariners enjoyed early success in a number of one-to-one actions against patrolling British frigates.

On land, the American invasion of Canada by some 6,000 men was met by just 1300 British, and native irregulars, commanded by Major-General Isaac Brock. At the Battle of Queenston Heights, the British under Brock inflicted over 1000 American casualties of which more than 800 US invaders were captured.

Tragically of just 21 British who were killed, one was Brock himself, a great commander who like Wolfe at Quebec and Gustavus Adolphus at Lutzen died in battle at his moment of triumph – in Brock’s case against overwhelming odds.

Because it was so spectacularly repulsed, the Americans have long since tended to downplay this operation, even suggesting it was not a serious invasion: this is simply not so: to quote Thomas Jefferson: “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us the experience for the attack on Halifax, the next and final expulsion of England from the American continent.”

The tide turns

In the context of the Napoleonic wars, for the British, this was all an irritating, resource-sapping sideshow they could really do without. They were only in a position to take the initiative, as Napoleon’s Empire crumbled and resources became free to take the offensive.

At sea, the Royal Navy blockaded much of the US coastline. The blockade devastated American agricultural exports, but it helped stimulate local factories that replaced goods previously imported. The American strategy of using small gunboats to defend ports was a fiasco, as the British raided the coast at will. The most famous episode was a series of British coastal raids in Chesapeake Bay including an attack on Washington that resulted in the British burning the White House and the Capitol. The embarrassment of this led to the dismissal of the US Secretary of War.

After Napoleon abdicated in 1814, the British could send veteran armies to the U.S. At this point the British had to decide on their own war aims, bearing in mind these had never properly been formulated as the British had been subject to a US declaration of war and attack at a time when they were seriously engaged elsewhere and their resources were stretched.

Perhaps the decisive influence was Wellington who when asked to take command, observed that, whilst he would, “I think you have no right, from the state of war, to demand any concession of territory from America …

With the decision not to take territory at the expense of the US and with Napoleon defeated, the war had become an irrelevance – and one which damaged trade. Lord Liverpool’s government effectively decided to let the Americans off the hook and peace was restored by the treaty of Gent.

Britannia rules the Waves

Americans like to describe the war as a ‘draw’ or inconclusive. This probably owes more to national pride than to the facts:
- the USA was the aggressor, it declared war but, in so far as it had war aims, they were not achieved;

- the US invasion of Canada was serious and it was repulsed, despite overwhelmingly superior US forces:

- their nascent capital was sacked and burnt;

- although the USA did win a number of actions at sea, these were largely one-to-one vessel engagements in the early phases and the British proved well able to confine the American marine to port and sack the coastal towns of the eastern seaboard at will;

- the war was ended when the British took the decision not to use their vastly superior forces to pursue it – with Wellington as the decisive voice against doing so;

- the British Empire went on to exercise global naval supremacy for the next 100 years: it was British forces and irregulars who helped to dismember the Spanish American empire and turn much of it into a very cost-effective because informal economic empire, well illustrated in Joseph Conrad’s novel, Nostromo. Ironically, this form of economic colonisation was perhaps the model for US economic hegemony in the 20th century!

The one area where the war was probably genuinely decisive in the formation of the United States is the consequence of the face-saving US victory at New Orleans. This action, which took place 3 weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Gent, saw US General Jackson repulse an assault by British peninsular veterans inflicting significant British loss of life. It gives rise to the US myth.

The forgotten consequence of British success

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.In the long-term, the outcome has another forgotten and over-looked consequence, linked to British naval supremacy, some 50 years later in 1863. The American civil war was at its height with the north having spectacularly failed to make its vastly superior resources count on the battlefield.

Lincoln was concerned that British recognition of an independent Confederacy would be the decisive nail in the coffin of Northern hopes to preserve the Union, the ‘casus belli’ up to that point. How to appeal to the British? The result is the Gettysburg Address and a change of the North’s war aims to include Emancipation for, as Lincoln reasoned had not the British, starting with the Somerset case, spent the previous 100 years ridding the world for the first time of the institution of slavery. It made British support for the Confederacy morally repugnant and therefore almost impossible to justify.

How different history might have been if the British Prime Minister, Viscount Palmerston, has decided otherwise? And how many Americans understand just how much their country owes to the decency of the British, to Wellington and to the British Prime Minister usually caricatured as the arch-imperialist?

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