The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict by Donald R. Hickey, University of Illinois Press, 1990
Provenance: This volume has a Half-Price Books price tag on the front cover ($8.49 as of 2/99), but comes to me from the collection of Sacnoth. It has one of his business cards as a bookmark (tagged for "Design, Editing, Research, Proofing"), which is covered with his small, tight handwriting in pencil. It ALSO has another bookmark, saying "This Book Belongs to Rich Baker". Rich was a colleague at Wizards of the Coast with both of us, and is now a colleague with Zenimax Online. So the book has stayed in our orbit all these years.
Review: I've been looking for a long time for a good book on the War of 1812, and this fits the bill nicely. Books on the subject are few and far between, and tend to focus on only one element of the conflict. Part of this is because the war is so granular and diffuse, with many very separated theaters of operation (Great Lakes, Native Nations, New Orleans, the High Seas, Burning Washington) that a high-level view is hard to make. But also because it is a war that we as Americans really want to forget about - our reasons for getting into it are a bit murky, our performance erratic, and the resolution a tie (at best).
There has been a lot of debate of about how we ended up in the war, possibly because the US usually goes to war as a result of an "inciting incident". Pearl Harbor. The Maine. Gulf of Tonkin. The Zimmerman Telegram. Fort Sumter. 9/11. Sometimes this inciting incident may prove to be fictitious or overblown, but we have it in our constitutional DNA that we don't hit first, but when we're hit, we hit back hard.
The War of 1812 doesn't really have that. The US declared war first, based on British maritime actions, known as the Orders of Council, that allowed the Royal Navy to intercept and search ships heading for Napoleon's French Ports, and also against impressment of formerly British sailors on US ships. The Orders of Council were rescinded two days before the vote to go to war, so that dropped away almost immediately. The impressment issue was much greater than it seems from this temporal distance - in the six years before the outbreak of war, some 6000 sailors on US ships were impressed by the British. Because we had a lot of Brits on our merchantmen. The Americans paid better than the British navy, and there was less chance of being shot at, so a lot of British tars came over (The administration estimated were that there were some 9000 British citizens serving on our ships at the start of the war). And there even was an "Incident" - The US Chesapeake affair, where a British fired on and boarded a US ship to capture supposed deserters, killing four. But this was in 1807, and while it could have created a foundation for war, it didn't. We were not ready, yet.
So why did we go to war? Hickey puts forward the traditional viewpoint - that the Orders of Council and Impressment were the cassus belli. More recent historians push the idea we had a secret agenda to conquer Canada and this was just a cover story. And indeed Hickey notes that we were already building roads north to carry troops before the declaration of war, and during the peace negotiations, the negotiators received instructions to have Britain hand over Canada as one of the terms. So, yeah, we have the declared reasons for war, but if we could get rid of British influence in the New World, that would have been a nice bennie.
I think we declared war because we thought we could get away with it. Britain, with the most powerful navy in the world, was fighting with France, with the most powerful army. Clauswitz said "War is a continuation of policy with other means". The US thought that its issues were not being addressed by the Brits, and declaring war would make them take us seriously (spoiler: It didn't). It should be noted that we did not throw in with the French, but considered "our war" to belong entirely to us. And if it worked, we would get the spoils.
And we did OK, from a standpoint of reducing British support of Native American tribes in territories we were trying to move into. The battles won were cases where the Brits were at the end of the logistic tether (the biggest navy didn't matter if you were fighting on a lake; one-on-one battles with over-cannoned frigates). But several attempts to invade Upper Canada came to naught, Washington was captured and burned, and the Brits grabbed most of northern Maine (to give them a better route to Newfoundland and their other coastal holdings). The final treaty restored the relationship to its pre-bellum state, and since by that time Napoleon had been contained, that was good enough for the British (No war, no need to stop ships and drag off British Nationals).
The War was also the last gasp of the Federalist party as a national force. Originally the "Party in Power", they were during this period overwhelmed by the Virginia-controlled Republican Party(also called the Democratic-Republicans or the Jeffersonian Republicans, which would later split into the Democratic and National Republican (later Whig) parties. Yeah, it's complicated) The Federalists were strongest in the Northeast, and were taking it more on the chin in the war. There was talk of New England leaving the union and seeking a separate peace with Britain, culminating in the Hartford Convention, where they did not do so, but instead sent a list of demands to Washington - which arrived a couple days AFTER the peace treaty did. That and the fact that the then-Republicans were embracing a lot of the things the Federalists stood for, like strong centralized government and economic controls (because wars are expensive), sort of spelled the end of the Feds as a major force.
Hickey pretty much lays that out in the book, but tends to be more forgiving of the Federalists, pointing out that we don't have any solid records of what went on at the Hartford Convention - as a result the Federalists come across as more hapless than rebellious. Still, like the anticipated invasions of Canada, there is enough evidence to support thoughts of secession.
Hickey's The War of 1812 is an excellent and concise history of a diverse and far-flung war. It is pretty much what I was looking for. I'd love to find something from the British/Canadian perspective, or of the Native American peoples who fought in the war (Hickey does a better job than most bringing them into the conversation). There have been new editions over the years, but you might be able to find this one at Half-Price. Or in the libraries of other friends.
More later,
