* The continuation of the fighting into early 1815 led to one last major battle, in which a British drive on New Orleans came to bloody ruin at the hands of Andrew Jackson. The peace treaty signed at Ghent came into effect a few weeks later, much to the relief of the Madison Administration. Jackson's success at New Orleans did much to erase the government's humiliations in the war, with the conflict then played up as a stirring victory, and the Federalists denounced as defeatists and traitors. There was a general belief at the time that Britain and America would come to real blows again, but though there were tensions and spats over the following decades, the two nations never fought another war with each other.
* General Pakenham's invasion force was within reach of New Orleans, just a short march up the riverbank, the only obstacle being the defensive line that Andrew Jackson had built up in their path. Come the new year, the British decided to try to push the Americans out of the way.
On the morning of 1 January 1815, a thick fog covered the landscape. Jackson, clearly not expecting anything much to happen for the moment, had arranged for a review of his troops behind his defensive line. When the fog lifted at midmorning, the British were startled to see American troops on parade, marching to the tune of regimental bands. British gunners then inconsiderately broke up the ceremony by throwing rockets and shells over the rampart. They also directed fire on the house where Jackson had his headquarters, the general and his staff being at breakfast at the time. The occupants were all able to escape in haste without much injury, though the house ended up being thoroughly perforated.
American gunners shot back, their counter-battery fire proving professional and accurate; the exchange went on to midday, with a fair amount of damage to both sides, but the bottom line was that the American defense remained intact. By that afternoon, all had gone quiet again -- if just for a while, intermittent artillery and rifle fire continuing to be exchanged over the following days.
General Pakenham decided he wasn't getting anywhere, and came up with a new plan. Jackson had been neglecting the defenses on the far bank of the Mississippi, and so Pakenham decided he would send a force across the river to clean the Americans out there, then use captured American guns to take Jackson's line under flanking fire. British troops would then be able to advance and overwhelm the defense on the near side of the river. The problem was that all the British boats needed for the movement across the river were on Lake Borgne or its tributaries. Fortunately for Pakenham, local planters had built canals for access to their properties, and the soil being soft, it wouldn't be too troublesome to extend one to create the linkup. At the suggestion of Admiral Cochrane, Pakenham put his troops to work on it, laboring day and night, and managed to complete the canal by 6 January.
Jackson had been receiving reinforcements in the meantime, most significantly in the form of 2,000 Kentucky militiamen who had arrived on 4 January. Unfortunately, the Kentuckians were in pathetic shape, ragged and lacking weapons. Jackson was appalled at them, reportedly saying: "I have never in my life seen a Kentuckian without a gun, a pack of cards, and a jug of whiskey!" He had to make do with what he had. On observing work on the canal, Jackson had concluded the British were considering a river crossing, and dispatched about 400 of the Kentuckians to brace up the defense on the other bank. Lacking boats of his own, however, they were forced to march upriver to New Orleans to make the crossing.
Pakenham wanted to send 1,400 men under Lieutenant Colonel William Thornton across the river on the night of 7 January, but the softness of the soil meant that the canal had a tendency to fill back up quickly, and getting the boats through was troublesome. The British were only able to bring up enough boats to haul about a third of the troops across, and even at that they were way behind schedule. Jackson was aware of British activity and believed he would soon be attacked; the Americans got little sleep that night, bracing for the battle they expected in the morning.
Jackson had about 4,000 troops in the line, with about a thousand in reserve; Pakenham had about 5,300 men to throw at him. The British prepared for the assault in the darkness before dawn on 8 January. They were expecting to move out under the support of fire from the far side of the river, but all was silent from that quarter. Pakenham had also discovered that there had been a failure to prepare adequate numbers of scaling ladders to help his men clamber over the American defense; very well, they would have to climb up each other's backs.
Once the sun came up and dissipated the fog, the lines of redcoats began their advance. American gunners cut bloody swathes through the British ranks, one American describing the scene: "The atmosphere was filled with sheets of fire, and volumes of smoke." Still the British kept on coming. One company managed to make it to an American strongpoint and drive off the defenders after a nasty fight, but Jackson then threw in his reserves and sent the British back. Other British troops made it to the defenses, though they could go no farther, being shot as they tried to climb up out of the ditch in front of the American line. The failure of the British to clean out the far bank helped contribute to disaster, American gunners there tossing their shots east across the river to catch the assault in the flank.
The attackers broke and fell back, some running desperately for their lives. The British reformed, advanced again, were driven back; reformed once more to advance another time, and were driven back once more. Pakenham tried to rally his men, only to have a horse shot out from under him; he found another horse, but then another shot killed the general. General Keane was also wounded, with another British general killed, and the attack finally fizzled out. Jackson considered a counterattack, but he sensibly decided that his raggedy troops would not be up to a fight in the open with British professionals.
Across the river, even though the British hadn't been able to get a large number of men across, Lieutenant Colonel Thornton's men proved able to chase the sailors and militia out of the defenses there. Only half the guns were spiked before the position fell, putting the British in the position of making very severe trouble for Jackson. However, Thornton was too late and no longer had any attack to support. Pakenham's assault had clearly failed; General John Lambert, now in charge, called it quits and gave up the fight, ordering Thornton to withdraw from the far bank of the river. Jackson wrote Monroe: "I need not tell you with how much eagerness I immediately regained possession of the position he had thus hastily quitted."
The slaughter of Pakenham's troops had been frightful, with over 2,000 men killed or wounded. Jackson agreed to a flag of truce to allow the British to recover their casualties. One British soldier wrote later:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Within the narrow compass of a few hundred yards were gathered together nearly a thousand bodies, all of them arraying in British uniforms. Not a single American was among them; all were English, and they were thrown by dozens into shallow holes, scarcely deep enough to furnish them with a slight covering of earth. An American officer stood by smoking a cigar, and apparently counting the slain with a look of savage exultation, and repeating over and over to each individual that approached him, that their loss amounted only to eight men killed and fourteen men wounded.
END QUOTE
The exact number of casualties might be debated, but there was no doubt the Americans had won a tremendous lopsided victory, an American newspaper saying that the "vast disparity of loss would stagger credulity itself, were it not confirmed by a whole army of witnesses." Jackson had made many mistakes in the battle, but he had prevailed because the British had made more -- and in fact for all his limitations, he had all but unarguably established himself as the war's most fearsomely effective American general.
The British withdrew from the approaches to New Orleans on 25 January. Despite their injuries they continued to be a threat, able to fall on any point on the Gulf Coast -- and the British remained at Prospect Bluff, helping the Indians in continued small-scale backwoods fighting with the Americans. While there were celebrations in New Orleans on 23 January over the battlefield victory, Jackson knew he wasn't out of the woods yet, and the citizens of the city grew restless after he refused to lift martial law.
BACK_TO_TOP* The war on the Atlantic coast was also in continuation at the time. On the night of 14 January 1815, Stephen Decatur, in command of the USS PRESIDENT, bottled up in New York harbor, tried to make a run for the open sea. Unfortunately, the frigate grounded and was damaged during the attempt; the crew managed to get her free, but the PRESIDENT was then set upon by Royal Navy blockaders. In an initial exchange of fire with the HMS ENDYMION the British vessel got the worst of it, but then the frigates HMS TENEDOS and HMS POMONE closed within range; faced with certain annihilation, Decatur, who had been wounded, struck his colors.
Decatur didn't stay a prisoner for long, British forces soon learning of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. Back on the Gulf Coast, the British appeared off Mobile on 8 February and then, this time using overwhelming force, overran Fort Bowyer. The British were preparing for an assault on Mobile itself when they learned the war was over and stood down. Decatur and his crew, who were being held prisoner in Bermuda, were released.
A ship carrying a copy of the Treaty of Ghent arrived in New York harbor on 11 February, with the document rushed off to Washington, arriving on 13 February. Madison promptly passed it on to the Senate, with the Senate just as promptly ratifying it, voting unanimously to that effect on 16 February. To everyone's relief, the war was now officially over. The news didn't reach the northern frontier until later in the month, where both sides were just as relieved. American officers from Sackets Harbor visited Kingston, to be greeted collegially, being treated as guests and all drinking to the King's and Madison's health.
On 18 February, Madison delivered a message to Congress on the peace, which began on a note of grand self-congratulation that anyone with an honest knowledge of past events might have judged delusional:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I lay before Congress copies of the treaty of peace and amity between the United States and His Britannic Majesty, which was signed by the commissioners of both parties at Ghent on the 24th of December, 1814, and the ratifications of which have been duly exchanged.
While performing this act I congratulate you and our constituents upon an event which is highly honorable to the nation, and terminates with peculiar felicity a campaign signalized by the most brilliant successes.
The late war, although reluctantly declared by Congress, had become a necessary resort to assert the rights and independence of the nation. It has been waged with a success which is the natural result of the wisdom of the legislative councils, of the patriotism of the people, of the public spirit of the militia, and of the valor of the military and naval forces of the country. Peace ... is peculiarly welcome ... when the Government has demonstrated the efficiency of its powers of defense, and when the nation can review its conduct without regret and without reproach.
END QUOTE
Back in New Orleans, Andrew Jackson continued to hold the city under martial law, claiming he would not release control until the end of the war was confirmed. He went so far as to arrest a member of the state legislature who complained; when Federal Judge Dominick Hall issued Jackson an order for the prisoner's release, Jackson had the judge arrested as well on 12 March and evicted from the city. The next day, 13 March, a courier arrived with news that the Treaty of Ghent had in fact been ratified, and so Jackson returned control of the city to civilian authority. Judge Hall fined Jackson a thousand dollars, which he dutifully paid -- Jackson had his own notions of justice, but he still believed in justice. Later, the grateful American people, or more specifically the US Congress, repaid Jackson for the fine. In any case, Jackson finished up his business in New Orleans and returned to Tennessee.
General Prevost ended up being a casualty of the peace. He got the news that the war was over on 1 March, only to discover the next day that he was being replaced as governor-general by Sir George Murray, who added to the pain by informing Prevost that he was to return to Britain to face a board of inquiry. Prevost's performance had been drawing increasing fire through the course of the war, and his failure at Plattsburg had been the last straw. He left Canada in early April; after arriving in Britain, Prevost found the criticisms against him more than he wanted to tolerate and requested a court-martial to clear his name. His request was granted, but he died just after New Year's 1816, a week before his court-martial was to begin.
* The war at sea lingered on after the formal end of the war. The USS CONSTITUTION, now under the command of Captain Charles Stewart, had managed to slip out of Boston harbor through the blockade in December. On 20 February 1815, Old Ironsides ran into two Royal Navy warships, the HMS LEVANT with 34 guns and the HMS CYANE with 20 guns, a few hundred miles in the Atlantic from Madeira. Neither British vessel was comparable to the 52-gun CONSTITUTION, but their captains believed they could gang up on the American vessel -- only to be beaten up badly and forced to surrender. The CONSTITUTION managed to make it back to home port, with the crew discovering the fight was over, while basking in praise for their accomplishments. Old Ironsides ended the war on a high note of its own.
The USS HORNET, after several successful cruises earlier in the war, went back to sea in mid-November 1814 to raid the South Atlantic. The HORNET got into a fight with the 19-gun HMS PENGUIN on 23 March 1815, with the PENGUIN defeated and scuttled. The next month the HORNET, in the company of the PEACOCK, mistook the Royal Navy ship-of-the-line HMS CORNWALLIS for a merchantman; the two American vessels split up, with the CORNWALLIS chasing the HORNET since it seemed the slower vessel. The HORNET managed to escape by throwing everything that could be spared overboard.
The HORNET returned to port in late July, its days of raiding British shipping now over. PEACOCK seized several more prizes up to the end of June, when the ship's crew received evidence from the final prize that the war was really over. PEACOCK returned to port four months later.
BACK_TO_TOP* American leadership had very good reason to be grateful to Andrew Jackson, since he'd saved the government from disgrace. The news of the peace settlement followed so closely on Jackson's triumph in New Orleans that the war as a whole was popularly regarded in the United States as a great victory. The general was the hero of the hour; while there had been a debate in progress in Congress over the ratification of the Treaty of Fort Jackson, the wave of enthusiasm overwhelmed all resistance, and the harsh treaty was confirmed.
An unemotional analysis of the conflict gives little basis for American satisfaction in the conduct of the war. The Madison Administration went into the fight with uncertain political support, a military force poorly prepared for action, and no workable mechanism for funding military operations over the long run. The war was generally mismanaged and, although the Americans won a number of impressive battlefield victories, they also suffered a number of staggering humiliations -- the most memorable being the destruction of the White House and the Capitol -- thanks to incompetence that on occasion could be judged criminal.
Madison got off lucky: had the British chosen to do so, they could have pressed the Americans much harder, even driving the Union into disintegration. However, after suffering a string of defeats in the last half of 1814, the British realized they stood nothing to gain proportional to the cost, and were satisfied to call it a draw. Indeed, much of the euphoria following the end of the war was due to the fact that America had been faced with complete disaster, only being rescued by events at the last moment. A Boston merchant named Thomas Cope observed that the "public manifestations of joy are almost unbounded" while similarly noting that "continuation of the war must have ended in our political dissolution."
Who facing a hanging the next morning would not be ecstatic to find out he had received a full pardon and was a free man? Certainly, the American peace commissioners must have been relieved to discover that the "damned bad treaty" they had signed in Ghent wasn't being held against them, instead being praised to the skies.
* In the aftermath of the conflict, it was actually possible to see that America had obtained substantial benefits. The war had done much to break the resistance of the Indian tribes in the Northwest, and to limit British support for the tribes and end British attempts to make claims in what would become the American West. The Americans had won the struggle for continental dominance, confirming the nation's borders and its claims to the West. In hindsight, the war also established American security: no foreign armies would ever attempt to invade America again.
Following the war, a network of new forts was set up through the Northwest to establish control over the region, with the British doing little to object and nothing to help their old Indian allies. The fight also solidified American hold over the South; under continued pressure by the Americans and confronted with widespread rebellion in Latin American states, Spain would sell off Florida to the USA in 1819.
However, in terms of the specific rationales embraced by the Americans for going to war with Britain in the first place -- impressment and trade restrictions on one hand, the conquest of Canada on the other -- the conflict was a complete failure. Britain did cease impressments and interference with American trade, but since the Napoleonic Wars were over, that would have happened in any case. The attempt to conquer Canada ended up being a futile waste of lives and resources that had inflicted hardship and misery on the people of both sides. Tens of thousands died or were maimed in the fighting.
Despite all that, again, wars have an emotional component, and from an emotional standpoint many Americans felt that they had indeed triumphed. As noted, there was a widespread belief that the USA needed to show the British that America was to be taken seriously, and it was a simple statement of fact that America had fought the world's most powerful nation to a draw -- a feat that won America considerable respect in the capitals of Europe, the inglorious details being less visible from a distance. The war had certainly proven to those British who had believed America a temporary phenomenon that they were mistaken. Many Americans declared that they had indeed won what they called the "Second War of American Independence", fighting off Britain's attempt to re-impose its will on America.
* The truth was that Britain had never wanted to go to war with America; the Americans had simply got caught in the crossfire between Britain and France. Pretending the fight had been a noble accomplishment was putting an overblown gloss on a botched job, and the sensible knew it. John Quincy Adams wrote his father in 1816 that Americans were "rather more proud than they have reason of the war."
In fact, much of the crowing was self-serving Republican propaganda. At the time, a Federalist perceptively observed that the Republicans, having failed to win the war, would shrewdly manage to win the peace by glorifying military successes and downplaying military failures -- or, when possible, blaming them on the Federalists. The burnt-out shell of the White House was out of sight, and by 1817 it would be rebuilt anyway. A Federalist lamented:
BEGIN QUOTE:
What we have suffered and what we have lost are carefully concealed. A Treaty, which gives us peace, is represented as glorious, when it has given us nothing else. And it is attempted to make us believe that all the objects of the war have been obtained, when every thing, for which it was declared has been abandoned.
END QUOTE
Republicans invoked memories of the struggle for independence to rouse the patriotic instincts of Americans; they promoted xenophobia against Britain, easy enough to do given the destruction inflicted by the British along the Atlantic seaboard. Tales of mistreatment of American prisoners in British custody -- with basis in fact, since as noted neither side was entirely conscientious or competent in caring for prisoners -- added to the resentment. The ploy worked only too well, with the Federalists suffering permanent ruin, finding out that at the very moment they set out to press the government for the policies outlined at Hartford, an abrupt change of winds drove them onto the rocks. The Federalists thought they had strong cards to play, only to find out that they had lost the game completely. The Federalists seemed weak and defeatist, with the Hartford Convention being labeled an exercise in treason.
Madison, instead of being pilloried for his failures, ended up being widely admired in the aftermath while the Federalists were objects of sneers. A Republican newspaper gloated at the rewards the Federalists had been handed by the conflict: "Disappointment! -- Disgrace! -- Dejection! -- Despair!" Ironically, the Federalists also suffered from the fact that they had become redundant: although Republicans were not quick to admit it, the war had forced them to adopt Federalist doctrines, such as a stronger central government, heavier taxation, and a more powerful military. By the end of the decade, the Federalists would cease to exist.
* Later generations of Americans would simply forget about the War of 1812. Its causes and results were ambiguous, its execution wildly uneven, there was simply not much there for Americans to remember -- and to the extent that it was remembered by American scholars such as Teddy Roosevelt later in the 19th century, they often echoed the self-serving propaganda that emerged in the wake of the war to continue to paint the conflict as a glorious victory, in an apparently determined effort to ignore the obviously embarrassing elements of the tale.
The British soon forgot about it as well, since they had never considered the war a matter of major significance, a sideshow annoyingly irrelevant to their strategic interests, overshadowed by a generation-long war with the French. It was just another little war in the long string of wars fought by imperial Britain. Canadians, however, have been inclined to remember the matter, having repeatedly frustrated the efforts of the all-mighty Yanks to conquer their country, memorializing their heroes such as Isaac Brock and Laura Secord, on occasion even more or less claiming Canadian militiamen did all the fighting by themselves. Some suggest the conflict actually seeded Canadian nationalism.
BACK_TO_TOP* Of course, the battles of the war did establish chapters in the traditions of America's armed services. The US Army obtained little glory out of the struggle -- or to the extent it did, victories were balanced out by painful humiliations. The Army demonstrated competence in engineering and gunnery, but such virtues couldn't cancel out failings elsewhere. One of the ironies was that American militia and volunteer forces, despite their many and severe deficiencies, ended up with about as much distinction in combat as regular forces.
The war did result in the advancement of capable officers such as Andrew Jackson and Winfield Scott -- Scott would particularly distinguish himself in the War with Mexico a generation later, and help establish Union strategy at the outset of the US Civil War. However, Scott was somewhat lucky to stay on the Army's rolls, since once the war ended, the impoverished Madison Administration promptly cut back the Army. Jacob Brown, who had become commanding general of the US Army, was ordered to administer the axe; of course, officers like Scott who stood high in his esteem were spared. The purge did have its benefits: General Wilkinson, who had just survived court-martial, was retired, ending a military career of entirely negative distinction.
Fortunately, having learned the lesson of what follows in war from a lack of military preparedness, there was no attempt to reduce the Army to the crippled state it had been in before the conflict. The Army's headcount was set at 10,000 men, while efforts were ramped up to improve coastal defenses. Nobody wanted raiders to descend with near-impunity on American cities in a future war.
The US Navy, in contrast to the Army, had much to be proud of in the War of 1812, having done better than anyone expected against a massively superior adversary. To be sure, the Royal Navy remained entirely dominant on the high seas, the Americans never amounting to much more than a maritime nuisance, but the US Navy did achieve clear and substantial victories on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain, and Royal Navy men generally regarded their US Navy adversaries as highly professional. The US Navy remembers the War of 1812 as an honorable chapter in its history; the fact that the war itself brought little honor to America didn't diminish the achievements of the Navy.
Indeed, the importance of the US Navy was underscored by the fact that only a week after Congress approved the Treaty of Ghent, Madison ordered the Navy to the Mediterranean. The Barbary Pirates had used the war to resume their old bad habits of preying on American shipping, and so on 20 May 1815 Stephen Decatur left New York harbor with three frigates, three sloops, and two schooners. After capturing a few Algerian vessels to show he meant business, in June Decatur made a show of force at Tripoli, with the dey agreeing to cease and desist; a follow-up show of force at Tunis yielded the same result.
There was considerable support for an expanded Navy in the postwar period, resulting in grand plans for naval expansion. They didn't happen; there was simply no need for a big Navy. The end of the Napoleonic Wars led to a general period of peace, with the Navy not having much more to do than suppress pirates and show the flag when need be. Despite the widespread animosity towards Britain, the US Navy and the Royal Navy often cooperated, thanks to a convergence of strategic interests. To keep piracy in the Mediterranean under control, the US Navy established a permanent station at Port Mahon on the island of Majorca, obtaining the facilities through a lease from Britain; it was regarded as a pleasant duty station.
* The fact that the Treaty of Ghent hadn't really addressed any of the issues that caused the war led many to fear that it had merely established a temporary truce in what would be a longer conflict, but in reality America never came to hard blows with Britain again. If Britain had given up its ambitions in the American West, America ambitions for Canada had also been blunted -- nobody was going to quickly forget how dreams of an American conquest of Canada had come to such ruin, or how the Royal Navy had been able to wreak such damage on American coastal towns and cities. The commissions set up to resolve border disputes did so without too much trouble. Both sides quickly realized that a military buildup along the US-Canadian border was expensive and, more importantly, made no sense. The Rush-Bagot Treaty of April 1817 effectively demilitarized the Great Lakes, restricting each side to a few lightly-armed warships, a force adequate for no more than catching smugglers or other riffraff.
There was no great fondness between American and Canadian, but such squabbles as occurred later were resolved peacefully. In 1837, a Scots immigrant to Canada named William Lyon MacKenzie instigated a half-baked uprising against British rule. The rebellion was quickly crushed and MacKenzie had to flee to New York state, where he organized raids across the Niagara in 1838. Although many Americans were pleased to hear of the rebellion -- if Americans no longer had schemes for conquering Canada, they still often thought it a nice idea in principle -- MacKenzie found no substantial support among them, and there was no serious dispute among American leadership when President Martin Van Buren dispatched General Winfield Scott to New York state with 2,000 troops to put down the troublemakers. MacKenzie was captured and served 11 months in prison for violating American neutrality laws. America was going to preserve the peace along the northern border.
In the far West, where there was still competition between America and Britain over what was then known as the Oregon Territory, the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 papered over differences by declaring a joint occupation. Eventually squabbling boiled up, with the cry going up among Americans in the mid-1840s for "Fifty-Four Forty Or Fight", angrily demanding a latitude for the border that would have made what is now British Columbia part of the USA. Cooler heads prevailed, with the Oregon Treaty of 1846 extending the pre-existing American-Canadian borderline on the 49th parallel to the Pacific.
The borderline terminated among a set of islands in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, with some ambiguity as to who owned which islands. The result of this uncertainty was the "Pig War" of 1859, involving an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar, living on San Juan Island in the Juan de Fucas. Cutlar shot a Canadian pig rooting in his garden, the dispute leading to a military confrontation between American and British troops on the island. Each was ordered not to fire the first shot; each taunted the other in attempts to provoke them to do so.
Although tensions were running high, the British commander on the spot, Rear Admiral Robert Baynes, refused to take rash action, suggesting that "two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig was foolish." The central governments of the two nations agreed, appalled at how a minor incident had spiraled so far out of control, and began diplomatic discussions to cool things off. After everyone calmed down, the consensus was that Baynes was right, and nobody but the pig got hurt. Both sides left a small garrison on San Juan Island; being something of a damp backwoods posting and lacking in diverse entertainments, the two garrisons ended up getting along splendidly, engaging in athletic competitions and the troops often getting drunk together.
However, the American Civil War put antagonisms between the Union and Britain over Canada back on the boil, with US Secretary of State William Seward making threatening noises about the conquest of Canada over perceived British partisanship to the South. Britain sent troops to Canada, but the Union war machine was far more formidable than the ragtag mob that had tried to conquer Canada in the War of 1812, and there wasn't much the British could do to stop an invasion. The squabblings never went beyond talk; the Union was too preoccupied with defeating the Confederacy, and Seward's warlike rhetoric was more posturing for the gallery than much else. However, in 1864 and 1865 Confederate agents operating out of Canada conducted terrorist actions in the North that caused severe strains, due to the prospect of Union forces pursuing the agents over the border and clashing with British troops.
In 1867, Canada became fully independent, which did much to put American dreams of conquest on the fade. Threatening Canada as a means of pressuring Britain might have been good fun; threatening an independent neighbor felt much more uncivilized. Besides, all the Canadian provinces voluntarily signed up as part of the Canadian federation, when they could have, at least in principle, signed up as an American state instead. It was obvious that Canadians had little interest in becoming Americans.
The dispute over the Juan de Fucas was finally resolved in the 1870s, establishing the "longest undefended border in the world". Early in the next century, America would make common cause with Britain and Canada in the first World War -- although even into the 1930s, the US military had a "contingency plan" titled "War Plan RED" for a war with Britain. RED envisioned a 20th-century replay of the War of 1812, with frictions over international trade leading to a conflict between Britain and the US, and the US conquering Canada to secure the northern border. The plan listed Canadian military installations and other strategic targets for bombing attacks.
In reality, RED was a fiction; military staffs like to accumulate plans for almost every conceivable contingency, and though RED upset the Canadians when they found out about it well after it had been filed away, very few Americans had been seriously thinking it would be a good idea to invade Canada. In the years between the World Wars, the US military wasn't in any condition to take on such a effort anyway. With the coming of World War II, the US and Canada signed a cooperative defense agreement at Ogdensburg in 1940, enhancing cross-border collaboration after America entered the war in 1941, and laying the groundwork for US-Canadian continental defense during the Cold War.
BACK_TO_TOP* The list below provides a chronology of the War of 1812, starting with the year 1812:
War chronology 1813:
War chronology 1814:
War chronology 1815:
* It might be wondered why anyone would be interested in writing about an obscure topic like the War of 1812, but it interested me simply because it was obscure; I had long been curious of what it was all about. The official US Army history, available online, had a chapter on the war; on chancing across it, I thought I might be able to easily convert it into a set of notes for my own use. I ended up doing much more than that, though it still didn't amount to a really big job.
It doesn't deserve a lot of effort, either. Even after going through the conflict in detail, the War of 1812 remains obscure. Its causes were much more ambiguous than those of America's other declared wars, the military actions tended towards the half-baked and indecisive, and in the end there was no change in the status quo. The Americans preferred to forget it, the British never saw it as worth the bother; it is only in Canada that people feel any need to recollect it, occasionally crowing at Americans who barely have any idea of what the Canadians are talking about.
Incidentally, I have used the term "Indians" for the American native tribes, though that is frowned upon in some circles. I'm not all that particular about what term I use, I'd have no trouble using any other term if there was a consensus one was better. However, since the websites operated by the various tribes have no problem using the term "Indians" among themselves, obviously there isn't any such consensus on a better term -- and as troublesome as the term "Indians" is, for the time being it's less troublesome than anything else.
* Sources include:
* Illustrations details:
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 apr 12 v1.0.1 / 01 dec 13 / Review & polish. v1.0.2 / 01 nov 15 / Review & polish. v1.0.3 / 01 nov 17 / Review & polish. v1.0.4 / 01 nov 19 / Review & polish. v1.0.5 / 01 oct 21 / Review & polish. v1.0.6 / 01 sep 23 / Review & polish.BACK_TO_TOP
