Interesting reading in today’s Wall Street Journal from OHPRI Advisory Board member John B. Hattendorf:
JANUARY 28, 2012
The War Without a Loser
By JOHN B. HATTENDORF
The War of 1812 used to be called the forgotten war. The bicentenary of the three-year conflict between the United States and Britain, now upon us, has finally begun to inspire historians to shed more light on it. For even after 200 years it is not agreed who won—or, rather, there are still significant differences in national viewpoints.
Among the participants, the Canadians have typically seen the war as their heroic stand against American aggression, during which they turned back repeated invasion attempts by President James Madison’s army and American militiamen. The British, when they have not overlooked the conflict entirely because of their preoccupation with the concurrent Napoleonic wars, have seen the war as a British victory that prevented America from incorporating Canada. American historians have often looked back on the war as a glorious naval event, highlighted by a series of frigate victories under the leadership of heroic captains such as Joshua Barney, Isaac Hull, John Rodgers and Thomas Truxton and by the two fleet victories in miniature on the Great Lakes led by Thomas Macdonough and Oliver Hazard Perry. Indeed, the War of 1812 was long regarded by Americans as a victorious second war of independence from Britain.
A stream of recent books on the war shows that each of these viewpoints contains some truth, but the books also suggest that the re-evaluation of “the forgotten war” is just beginning. A sampling of new research and interpretation shows some clear development and progress toward a broader and deeper understanding of the war and its place in history, but it will be years before historians establish an accepted interpretation of the war as a whole.
President Madison’s war message to Congress in June 1812 accused Britain of a series of hostile acts against the United States: illegally searching American ships, impressing American seamen into British service, harassing American commerce, cutting off legitimate markets from American trade and even inciting Native Americans to attack settlers in the west.
Important battles would be fought on land along the border between America and Canada, on the shores of the Great Lakes, and around Chesapeake Bay, where British forces eventually captured Washington, D.C., and burned the White House itself. But the war at sea was crucial, for the effects of the British blockade of the American coast were swift and severe. Brian Arthur’s “How Britain Won the War of 1812″ examines Britain’s strategy as a form of economic warfare against the United States. After a detailed analysis of economic policies and practice, the British historian concludes that the strategy was so effective that it created a major budget deficit in the U.S. and forced the American government to become dependent on public credit, an increasingly unreliable source as the economy shrank.
The blockade interfered with American foreign trade and thus customs revenue, then the principal source of tax income. Agricultural exports were curtailed to such a degree that newly introduced taxes could only be paid with difficulty from diminished earnings. The inability to operate cheap coastal shipping drove up the price of overland transport so that farmers had to sell in local markets at prices depressed by glut or sell to distant urban customers at such high prices that demand fell.
In this situation, the absence of a national bank and the proliferation of local banks with poor control over printing paper money reduced the acceptability of notes and contributed to inflation. While the blockade created a temporary expansion of domestic manufacturing, this was short-lived. The experience of the war showed that the United States had bankrupted itself by its failure to create a wider tax base before the war. The country needed a permanent national bank, and the Second Bank of the United States quickly followed in 1816.
Mr. Arthur’s work elaborates on one aspect of Jon Latimer’s broader study of the British perspective on the war, “1812: War With America” (2007). Taking a much wider view of British strategy and operations, Mr. Latimer described the British war effort as a distraction from the larger effort in defeating Napoleon but showed how Britain was able to meet the additional demands that the war in North America created. There was an initial breathing period for the Americans while the British government concentrated on the campaigns in the Peninsular War, but this reprieve lasted only a year. During this period, most of the dramatic American frigate victories occurred.
Mr. Latimer suggested that the War of 1812 was no second war of American independence but rather a failed war of conquest. Britain invaded the United States and occupied and controlled the coast of northern Maine, parts of upstate New York, and a vast stretch west of Lake Michigan, as well as launching an amphibious attack from Chesapeake Bay. At the same time, Canada remained intact, after British troops repelled several American troop thrusts along the border of present-day Ontario. The United States obtained no redress for any of the objectives for which Madison’s administration had gone to war.
The bright spots for the Americans were few: the frigate victories, the prevention of a major British land invasion by maintaining control on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain, and the defense of Baltimore from a major amphibious assault. That action is still remembered today in the national anthem: “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” Additionally, there was the American victory over the British forces at New Orleans in 1815, which had no effect on the outcome of the war because the peace had already been signed.
Among American historians, an increasing knowledge of British scholarship on the war has led to more nuanced accounts. In comparison with works by earlier American authors, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan, Stephen Budiansky’s recent “Perilous Fight: America’s Intrepid War With Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815″ (2011) shows a deeper sense of the limitations of American power in facing British superiority. Kevin D. McCranie’s “Utmost Gallantry: The U.S. and Royal Navies at Sea in the War of 1812″ (2011) draws extensively on British archival sources to correct factual errors and nationalistic perspectives that mar previous accounts of individual sea engagements.
One of Mr. Budiansky’s conclusions is that “if there was one unambiguous victor of the war, it was the United States Navy. American hostility to a standing navy vanished with scarcely a trace, and never again would there be any doubt that a permanent navy was the backbone of American security.” George Daughan’s new “1812: The Navy’s War” expands on this theme: He reveals that Madison’s administration was completely unprepared to fight and had no effective strategy of how it could win a war against the world’s foremost naval power.
But the book is much more than the title suggests. Mr. Daughan shows how the war at sea fitted into the American war effort and how the Navy—and the country—came out of the war better for the experience. The virtues of the war for America, Mr. Daughan suggests, were actually more civic than strategic. Madison assiduously conducted the war within the confines of the Constitution, guided by the strict republican principles that he championed. He immeasurably strengthened American democracy by avoiding any increase in presidential power and resisting the temptation to crush his opponents through the use of sedition laws. The president’s policy of depending on militia forces raised locally would lead, in the postwar period, to a relaxation of property qualifications for voters, thus expanding the electorate.
Although the U.S. Navy could not match the British, it emerged from the war having won widespread respect for what it did achieve. Mr. Daughan argues that America’s naval victories led to a changed British attitude toward the United States after 1815. In the wake of the war, he writes, “the new unity and strength of the republic freed her for a century from European entanglements and allowed her people to prosper in spite of the vicissitudes that would continue to challenge her.”
Mr. Daughan suggests that the War of 1812 was indeed a second war of independence, completing what had been started in 1775, strengthening the nation’s democratic principles, and establishing a new and positive relationship in which Britain recognized America’s place in the world. Perhaps we can conclude that it really was a war in which all sides gained something significant.
—Mr. Hattendorf is the Ernest J. King Professor of maritime history at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
Copyright 2011
Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
