An American Perspective on the War of 1812

by Donald Hickey body_essays_warof1812_1.jpg
The War of 1812 is probably our most obscure conflict.  Although a great deal has been written about the war, the average American is only vaguely aware of why we fought or who the enemy was.  Even those who know something about the contest are likely to remember only a few dramatic moments, such as the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the burning of the nation’s capital, or the Battle of New Orleans.


A British Perspective

by Andrew Lambert   body_essays_warof1812_2.jpg
The War of 1812 has been referred to as a victorious “Second War for Independence,” and used to define Canadian identity, but the British only remember 1812 as the year Napoleon marched to Moscow. This is not surprising. In British eyes, the conflict with America was an annoying sideshow. The Americans had stabbed them in the back while they, the British, were busy fighting a total war against the French Empire, directed by their most inveterate enemy. For a nation fighting Napoleon Bonaparte, James Madison was an annoying irrelevance. Consequently the American war would be fought with whatever money, manpower and naval force that could be spared, no more than seven percent of the total British military effort. 


A Canadian Perspective on the War of 1812

by Victor Suthren body_essays_warof1812_3.jpg


A Native Nations Perspective on the War of 1812

by Donald Fixico body_essays_warof1812_4.jpg
The War of 1812 was an important conflict with broad and lasting consequences, particularly for the native inhabitants of North America.  During the pivotal years before the war, the United States wanted to expand its territories, a desire that fueled the invasion of native homelands throughout the interior of the continent.  [Miller, p.47] Tribal nations of the lower Great Lakes, including the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ojibwa, and others saw their lands at risk.  The same was true for the Muscogee Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Cherokee and Chickasaw in the south.


Black Sailors and Soldiers in the War of 1812

In 1813 Charles Ball, an escaped slave and self-declared “free man of color,” had a choice.  He could row out to the British fleet, moored in the Chesapeake Bay, and offer his services to the King --  or he could volunteer for the fledgling American navy and defend his country.  Ball, whose dramatic bid for freedom is chronicled in The Life of Charles Ball, A Black Man, chose the latter  and he was not alone. 


Military Medicine in the War of 1812


Tiger Dunlop, British surgeon to the 89th (The Pricess Victoria’s) Regiment of Foot, War of 1812.


Naval Battleships in the War of 1812body_essays_warof1812_8.jpg

When the United States declared war on Great Britain in June 1812, the U.S. Navy was an eighteen-year-old institution with barely a dozen ships to its name. The British Royal Navy, by contrast, had been operating for centuries, and could boast over five hundred active warships.  Eighty-five of these ships were sailing American waters at the time war broke out.


Prisoners of War in 1812

body_essays_warof1812_9.jpg Military captives in the War of 1812 posed a particular problem for both sides.  Neither the British nor the Americans could maintain large prisons – they lacked the military facilities and the manpower to hold soldiers for long periods of time.  And, in a war that stretched along half of North America, prisoners posed a logistical nightmare – prisoners taken in battle were often hundreds of miles away from the nearest military garrison.

The British often paroled captured militiamen and army officers, releasing them after they’d made a pledge to stay out of the war for the duration.


Personal Journals from the War of 1812


rr_personaljournals_warof1812_4.jpg For some of the participants in the War of 1812 the conflict was the defining moment of their lives, and they were well aware of it.  A number of young soldiers penned brief diaries and journals that show how the war began for them as an adventure, but ended in many cases with injury, imprisonment and grief. For women, too, the war was a trial, a test of their fortitude and resourcefulness, but it was also a window onto a wider world.  Their journals in turn have become our window onto a war that took place two centuries ago.


The Treaty of Ghentbody_essays_warof1812_11.jpg

James Madison had an opportunity to end the War of 1812 almost as soon as it began. The British had repealed the Orders in Council – rules that curbed American trade with Europe – and thus one of Madison’s major reasons for war was now moot.  If the British had foregone the right to impress American sailors, Madison could well have gone back to Congress with the suggestion that hostilities cease immediately.  However, the British considered impressment their right by custom, and believed it essential to their naval might. And so James Madison took his country to war.


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