Andrew D. Lambert - The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812

Every nation needs a history, a unifying narrative that explains and justifies the present.

This book is about a war and the way it became part of two very different narratives. Wars have been a central concern for historians for close on three thousand years, their causes, conduct and consequences conveying everything from divine judgement to moral lessons. In a crowded field the War of 1812 occupies a curious position. Although often referred to by Americans as a victorious Second War for Independence, it is also considered a success north of the border, where a very different view of the outcome has helped shape Canadian identity. In Britain, 1812 is the year Napoleon marched to Moscow; the war with America is a long-forgotten sideshow. The British define the very essence of Britishness by reference to another, contemporaneous conflict, one in which they fought for their very existence against the greatest military genius of the modern age.

In June 1812 the United States, not yet fifty years old, challenged the greatest naval and economic power of the time, invading Canada and attacking British ships. It would be a curious war, fought in the shadow of a far greater conflict. At first the British simply did not believe that the Americans meant to fight about issues of principle, issues which they had no hope of upholding. Eventually they accepted the need to respond, but only after Napoleon began his terrible retreat from Moscow. Eighty years later a great American historian gently reminded his fellow citizens that the War of 1812 had been a disaster; after a litany of defeats all along the Canadian border, the capture and destruction of Washington, bankruptcy and the loss This begs the question: how could a defeated nation, one that suffered such devastating losses, declare a victory and remain in occupation of the literary battlefield for two centuries?

The answer lies in the smokescreen of words that obscured American aims and objectives throughout the conflict. President Madison went to war demanding that Britain end the practice of stopping and searching American merchant ships and impressing seamen on the high seas. Yet these aims were not even mentioned in the treaty that ended the war; the peace process was dominated by questions of land and the rights of Indians. While this mismatch between rhetoric and reality was hardly unusual, examining British war aims and strategy reveals a very different war. Both sides considered the war in the context of the European conflict. In the summer of 1812 Napoleon was about to invade Russia with over half a million men. The American administration expected that Napoleon would win. They planned to seize British North America modern Canada and hold it while Napoleon defeated the British. Former President Thomas Jefferson expected that the Canadians, anglophone and francophone alike, would be happy to join the American Republic, indeed Jefferson opined that conquest would be a mere matter of marching. Instead, invading American armies were repulsed by a handful of British regulars, Canadian militia and their Indian allies.

In fact the only battles the Americans won in 1812 were at sea, despite the Republican administration effectively ignoring the Navy. In three frigate actions that year substantially larger American ships captured smaller, less powerful British opponents. Desperate for good news to bolster their flagging grip on political power, the Republican Party latched on to the sea of glory, claiming these victories had been won in fair and equal combat, and linked the claim to the idea that war had been declared as response to British treatment of American ships and sailors. In reality the seafaring communities of New England and New York, who suffered most from pre-war British actions, consistently voted against war, a fact which reinforces the charge of partisan opportunism. War was popular with Republican voters in the agrarian Central Atlantic states, and especially in the West, because it offered a golden opportunity to seize land from the British and the Indians.

Although the war would drag on until the end of 1814, its outcome was decided by the failure of the American army to conquer Canada, the defeat of American attacks on British merchant shipping and a devastating British economic blockade that left America bankrupt and insolvent. In case anyone in America had missed the utter helplessness of their government, 4,000 British troops captured and burned Washington DC. The Presidential mansion, where the decision for war had been taken, was one of the public buildings to be torched. In the rebuild it acquired a coat of whitewash. The idea that the British lost the war in which they secured their war aims by compelling the Americans to stop invading Canada, destroyed their capital city and reduced them to insolvency in the process is one that requires explanation.