War was declared against the British in what Americans call the War of 1812. The declaration of war was a partisan affair in itself, the Federalists did not back the war.
The war itself revealed the folly of Thomas Jefferson's program of building gunboats rather than men-of-war, as the gunboats were swept aside by the Royal Navy, which pretty much controlled the seas, to the extent that they could. In that pre-radio, pre-telegraph time, news traveled as fast as a man could-- privateers roamed the seas and decimated the British merchant marine. The Royal Navy, for its part, was able to land forces and carry out raids pretty much at will, extorting tribute from coastal towns in exchange for not burning them.
On the whole, it is probably fair to say that the United States entered a war for which it was not at all prepared and under a very dubious set of assumptions.[1] As a result, the Americans pretty much got their asses kicked, other than in single-ship fights and on the Great Lakes. Fortunately for the Americans, as far as the British were concerned, the War of 1812 was a sideshow, as they were engaged in a death-match with Napoleon's France.[2] By the time the British thought that they had finished with Bonaparte,[3], they were rather tired of fighting large conflicts (the rich were fed up with paying war taxes) and the Americans had gotten better at land conflicts.
The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on Christmas Eve, 1814. Due to the slow speed of communications, there were battles for months afterwards, including the Battles of New Orleans and Ft. Bowyer.[4]
The enduring after-effect of the war was the demilitarization of the Great Lakes.
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[1] Sounds familiar.
[2] The Americans were essentially co-belligerents with France in the next-to-last Napoleonic war, which was the first that Napoleon lost.
[3] The War of the Sixth Coalition.
[4] The news of the treaty came just in time to stop the British from following up on the Battle of Ft. Bowyer with a planned torching of Mobile, Alabama.
The Last Gamble
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Meanwhile up in Canada, the federal government announced in late 2011 that it would be spending $28 million over the next four years to commemorate the War.
There will be funding for re-enactments of battles (e.g. Fort George and Queenston Heights) and significant events (e.g. the burial of Sir
Isaac Brock, the journey of Laura Secord, the occupation and burning of Newark), as well as commemorative events, restorations or improvements to 40 historical sites in the Niagara Peninsula, an educational campaign and of course, websites (e.g.
www.eighteentwelve.ca).
The irony of spending this amount of money on bicentennial celebrations of the start of the War (normally, don’t we commemorate the ends of wars?) has not gone unnoticed, when recent “austerity” budgets by the current neoconservative government have cut funding for
the national library and archives, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Statistics Canada, research councils that fund historical inquiry, Parks Canada, and the development of Canadian Studies programs in countries outside Canada.
October 2012 will be declared a national month of commemoration for the war, capped somewhat later by the unveiling of a permanent monument to the War in a prominent position before the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. No word yet on whether the monument will be in the form of a triumphal arch, but the choice of site is curious – Ottawa did not exist in 1812 and its founding was actually a byproduct of the War, as it is on one end of canal built to go around the stretch of the St. Lawrence bordered by New York.
Though some American states have established War of 1812 Bicentennial Commissions, and the US Navy plans some events, currently the U.S. Government has no formal organization or committee to coordinate commemorations of the War of 1812. The "Star-Spangled Banner and War
of 1812 Bicentennial Commission Act" passed Senate at the end of 2005 but was not passed by the House.
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