Economic conflict

For both sides, the economic war was central to the struggle particularly given the relatively small and inconclusive nature of the land conflict and the almost ad hoc nature of many of the forces engaged in it.  Neither army was very impressive compared to their contemporaries engaged in conflicts elsewhere in the world. Neither could probably have dealt the other any kind of decisive blow on its own.

The American army had never recovered from what many judge to be the government's betrayal of the troops, particularly the officer corps that gave so much to win the War of Independence[i]. The offensive spearhead of the American forces assembled at Detroit for the invasion of Canada was far from inspiring as the fiasco of its first and only engagement displayed.   

In contrast to the French army which displayed a revolutionary ability to wage offensive warfare which was probably unequaled until Hitler's Blitzkrieg, the British army, with the exception of Wellington's forces fighting in Spain was neither particularly large nor well regarded.  A great deal of Britain's fighting was done by mercenaries such as the Hessians of the war of Independence, funded allies such as the Portuguese or by private sector forces such as the army of the East India Company which largely conquered and garrisoned the huge Indian Empire.

Whilst the French may have launched their armies furiously into the heartlands of their enemies and their victims, the British way was largely to stick to their boats and find other means to grind down their foes. It was through the aggressive use of these boats that Britain projected global military force and its relationship with the army is summed up by its frequently used name: "the Senior Service.”

Britain's navy saw a significant part of its role to deliver expeditionary armies, often in support of an ally's forces. In offensive terms, the British army had much in common with an amphibious marine unit best suited for large scale punitive commando raids.   

The other, far more strategically relevant part of the British Navy’s role was to ensure the safe running of British trade to ensure a thriving tax base and to exert a suffocating stranglehold on enemy commerce.

All this was to be done in the face of the endless penny-pinching of the Treasury so in the ability of the British forces to buy up valuable supplies from American collaborators was a significant aid to their campaign.

America and the world economy

Given that many of the Founding Fathers were still active politicians in 1812 and that the War of Independence was first and foremost a war of Enlightenment principle, it can be reasonably claimed that America’s leadership were capable of making political decisions based on how it felt things ought to be rather than how they actually were.  This allowed for an amount of ethical naivety in how the American political class viewed the world and created an environment for a number of dangerous errors in decision making during the Republic’s early years.

Despite the clarity of thinking that allowed John Adams to state that “America is unique only in the matter of geography”[ii], there was a widespread misunderstanding of America’s position in the world. Few things demonstrate this more clearly than Jefferson’s attempt to effectively blockade the rest of the western world in the Embargo Acts.

Jefferson’s Embargo Acts of 1807 were probably America’s first real attempt to impose her will through using the leverage of the economic power when they were faced with constant interference of their commerce by both French and British navies in their mutual blockade. This had driven an exasperated President Jefferson to try and reverse the position by trying to cut Europe off from American exports through the Embargo Act which banned British ships from American ports but succeeded only in devastating the US economy causing exports to fall from $108 million to only $22 million[iii].

The same errors were partly echoed in Madison’s war of 1812, namely to misunderstand the nature of their enemy and the weapons they were electing to fight against. Whilst land forces and Great Lakes gunboat fleets played an essential, if fairly small part in the conflict, the real weapons the United States faced were unique and uniquely powerful, namely the Bank of England and the Royal Navy. At the time of Madison’s declaration of war the British were using their navy to effectively blockade the whole of Europe and simultaneously maintain their own level of trade and taxation to a level where they could bankroll anyone willing to fight back against French invasion and occupation.

Britain’s response to the declaration of war by America was to fall back on a standard set of strategies, namely to strangle the enemy’s seaborne economic activity, encourage smuggling and trade with the enemy to take advantage of cheap local supplies whilst simultaneously deny desperately needed tax revenue, use her relatively small army to attack targets of opportunity and wherever possible pay other people to fight for them.

The power of blockade was far from being a new concept. Alexander Hamilton, the visionary military and economic strategist had noted during the war of Independence: “all that England needs to have done is to blockade our ports”[iv]

Was this a defeat?

For America it was certainly a disaster. Although Madison consistently ranks as a middling to better than average President overall,[i] his decision to promote the war is regularly cited as one of the worst political decisions ever.[ii]

One review by a panel of presidential scholars put Madison’s war high on the list of blunders being placed at number six. This puts it in the same league as Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, not as bad as Watergate but worse than the Bay of Pigs.

To judge whether it was a defeat of not, we need to look at the aims the war attempted to achieve, or what it is reasonable to accept given our knowledge and hindsight. Despite endless speculation, it is not unreasonable to accept that America’s fourth president and a Founding Father was basically telling the truth about his objectives (see “Why America Attacked”). In addition there is significant evidence to believe that a further opportunistic war aim existed which was of forcing regime change in Canada from Imperial Loyalist to at least neutral.  Based on these, it is very difficult to portray the outcomes as anything other than failure on all points. A reasonable test is to ask how the outcome would have been accepted at the outset. By this test, had the final accepted peace terms been suggested as a possible outcome before the war was declared it would have been branded a shameful retreat from principle.

To be specific, the American delegates to the peace negotiations in Ghent gave way on all points settling for the “status quo ante” or the situation before the declaration of war in the first place The British Empire made no concessions to American neutrality, the conflict with the Native Americans would increase to the point of virtual genocide through the rest of the century and Canada remained both intact and loyal to the Empire.

To take a step back and look at the impact of the war on American sovereignty in terms of international status and trade, it is easy to make a case that America rapidly surrendered to the power of explosive British capitalism and became to a large extent an economic colony whose major economic initiatives were around defensive tariffs rather than development. It was still possible for leading American financiers to say at the end of the 19^th century that the paramount goal of the American economy was still to keep the confidence of the British investment community. [iii]

Internationally, America quickly disappeared from the world stage turning its attention towards the subjugation of the native peoples and the absorption of the former Franco Spanish territories following the Louisiana Purchase

Another way to look at the issue of defeat is to ignore the stated claims of what the war was all about and to address the basic question of whether America could have kept on fighting. Most historians and military strategists would accept that Prussian soldier and thinker von Clausewitz defined the question and its answer most clearly in his seminal work “On War”.

Three things are essential for the ability to wage war:

• Physical capacity
• Leadership
• Public support to the point where armies do not mutiny wholesale

The American navy could no longer operate as a force capable of inflicting strategic meaningful damage to the blockading British. Individual American “raiders” could attack British merchant ships and occasional military vessels, but this in no way impacted their enemy’s ability to both fight and trade. America ships were in many cases literally rotting at their berths while British blockaders sat, sometimes in view of the harbor, waiting to pounce.

Simply put in military terms the United States had virtually lost the capability to take the war to their enemy and lacking the resources to pursue their war aims, the government in Washington was faced with the dismal choice of continuing an unwinnable war it could not afford or surrender on the points which it went to war on in the first place.

Commercially, the American economy was disintegrating to the point where it defaulted on domestic and international debts and had an almost complete currency collapse.

In terms of leadership, the fact that President Madison began to seek for a negotiated settlement so soon after the start of the hostilities argues that the desire for sustained war was not deep and that the peace faction continued to gather strength. 

Public support had always been questionable to the point where many could reasonably claim not to understand why the war was being fought. As was noted in the Congressional record during the final days of peace: “Mr. Milnor presented petitions from sundry inhabitants of the city and county of Philadelphia and the county of Delaware in the State of Pennsylvania, stating their firm and unqualified conviction that the United States are not impelled to war against Great Britain by necessity, nor invited to it by expediency.”[iv]

Barely a generation after winning her independence from Great Britain, America stumbled into her first major war in what could now be viewed as a futile military adventure which brought ruin to the economy and failed to achieve any of the stated aims.

The causes of the war seem depressingly familiar to us: bad intelligence, the expectation that American troops would be treated as liberators, flawed understanding of the economic consequences of the conflict and a marked failure to effectively assess the type of war their enemy would fight. This allied with a lack of exit strategy and domestic opposition to the war from the earliest stages make the War of 1812 one of the most painful phases in the growth of the new Republic.

The focus of this blog is to look at the issues surrounding the conflict rather than the events and personalities which shaped it. With the benefit of perspective it can be said that it didn’t really matter to either side that the British took Washington DC and burned the public buildings, just as it didn’t have any lasting impact that New Orleans was saved from the same fate by Jackson. It probably does matter to the world we live in that Canada was not annexed by the US and it would doubtless have mattered if the British were distracted enough by the war to divert essential resources away from the struggle with France allowing Napoleon to survive and consolidate his hold on Europe

For that reason this site has is no discussion of generals, admirals and battles and with the sole exception of the naval blockade, no discussion of specific campaigns. The blockade was a physical enforcement of the critical economic war which the British Empire unleashed and was genuinely pivotal so should be understood.

There are a number of excellent sites which give detailed information on the many engagements fought and the people involved some of which are given in our resource section.

What wars are for

War is the ultimate political sanction, used to achieve aims that peaceful means will not produce and it is reasonable to accept the truism that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”[i]. The objectives of war are often deliberately obscure and through the duration of the conflict the aims may change.

The genuine war aims of belligerents in any conflict can be open to almost endless speculation which fuels an extensive publishing industry. At various times there has been speculation that Churchill wanted the second world war to start so that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia could destroy each other which doubtless contains a large amount of truth and that Roosevelt wanted Japan to attack in order to have unlimited American hegemony across the Pacific which is certainly false. The Allies made their objectives in World War ll explicit: total victory and destruction of the Nazi state without condition even though this was done well after hostilities began.

Even in the far murkier conflict of the Cold War, the aims of both sides were clear: The Soviets wanted nothing short of adoption of their state communist model and the West wanted the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. 

There is a body of writing which aims to establish that America won the Vietnam War. Similarly there are claims that America and the UN actually lost the Korean War. Both are demonstrably false since South Vietnam fell to the Communist north and South Korea did not. The victors in these wars were not defined by battles won and numbers of enemy killed, but by whose political aims triumphed. War is about the achievement of aims. Like all human endeavor it is about getting things done. For this reason there is no real focus in these pages on individual actions, battles or even campaigns since war is not the result of any points system. America lost most of the battles of the War of Independence, and won the war, it won virtually every engagement in Vietnam but lost.

The rebellious colonists’ aim in the War of Independence was to remove Great Britain from having any say in the running of their political affairs. The aim in that war of the French government of Louis XVl was to inflict as much pain and cost on their British nemesis as possible, largely in revenge for their humiliation in the global conflict which was known as the French and Indian War in the American theater and elsewhere are the Seven Years War. In these aims they were both successful, although the cost to France would soon lead to national bankruptcy and savage revolution.

The American colonists had no desire to invade Britain, overthrow the King and create a pan-Atlantic republic. Republicanism was an American objective and probably a global ideal, but it was not necessarily for export and was certainly no constraint to having an absolute monarch such as Louis as a paymaster and military ally. Once the British government recognized that the war was unwinnable and brought their troops home, no American voices were raised demanding that a vengeful US navy should follow the British troopships to Portsmouth. Having achieved their war aims, the citizens of the new republic turned their attention to the healthier pursuits of making money and political wrangling.

If these “big wars”, wars of conquest and survival have any benefit it is the clarity of their aims, but what of the situations where national or political continuation is not immediately at stake? What if there is no compelling obligation which forces a nation to come to the defense of an ally such the one which forced France and Britain to declare war on Hitler’s Germany in an attempt to save Poland from invasion in 1939?

The 18th century “War of Jenkins’s Ear” between Britain and Spain is a good case in point. It had little to do with the wound suffered by a British naval officer during an inspection by a Spanish coast guard ship. No one then or since gave Capt Jenkin’s pickled ear much of a thought but the desire to break the Spanish Empire in the Americas had strong supporters in the British House of Commons. Similarly, Vietnam could have been called the “War of USS Turner Joy” after one of the two American ships allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese forces 1964, but Vietnam was not about the Tonkin Bay Incident. President Johnston needed a reason to enter the war in defense of South Vietnam. The reasons produced may have been both shallow and false, but their real aims were serious and clearly understood, both by themselves and their enemies.

Were America’s 1812 war aims those stated by Madison or were they a sham for murkier objectives? Why did America attack?

Why America attacked

The stated aims of the Madison government were clear and unambiguous to any reasonable person reading them today. Both the British and French governments were inflicting serious damage to American commerce by interfering with their shipping in pursuit of their own European war as both navies tried to blockade the other into submission.

Worse than this, Britain’s Royal Navy was causing constant and outrageous insult to the young republic by boarding her ships and conscripting seamen who it deemed to be British subjects and often when they had no reason to believe that they actually were. In more than one occasion British ships had fired on American ships who failed to submit to search.

These complaints were given overwhelming precedence in Madison’s “War Letter” to Congress, June 1, 1812 where he set out for America’s legislators his reasons for the call to war.

“British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it…. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels in a situation where no laws can operate but the law of nations and the laws of the country to which the vessels belong….

…under the pretext of searching for these (British subjects), thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation …to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors….

…our commerce has been plundered in every sea, the great staples of our country have been cut off from their legitimate markets, and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural and maritime interests….

Whether the United States shall continue passive under these … accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events,  is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberations I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free, and a powerful nation.”

The first thing of note in this letter is the absolute clarity that the naval issue was at the front of the President’s mind. Since the letter was aiming to sway his Congressional audience’s mind to declare war, it can be accepted that he chose to highlight the issues that would resonate most strongly to them and therefore what he felt to be the nation’s priorities. The second reference is to the need for national self esteem, to be “a free and a powerful nation” and third in order of priority comes the support which Britain offered to the Native Americans. The letter then appears to make the interesting assertion that it is “difficult to account for” the hostility of the Native Americans except for British intrigue.

“In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United States our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers - a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity. It is difficult to account for…their hostility…without recollecting the authenticated examples of such interpositions (British intrigues with the Indians)….

The suggestion that the naval issue was a pretext for war with the Native Americans is now widely accepted by many as one of the main real causes. Some bold claims to this effect have been made such as the one made by Davis in his book “Don't Know Much about History” that the war was started by “Land crazed war hawks”^[ii].  Even bolder is the statement made by Loewen that “The largest pressure group behind the War of 1812 was the slave holders who coveted Indian and Spanish land and wanted to drive Indian societies farther away from the slave holding states to prevent slave escapes”.^[iii]

This begs the question as to why America should have felt the need to have any excuse to wage war on the Indian nations. On many occasions before and after 1812, America went to war with the Native Americans without a fig leaf of a pretext. Certainly it did not require a declaration of war with one of the few global powers to launch a land grab against the Indian nations on the border. If America had wanted to launch a war on the Indian nations it could cobble an excuse to do so quite easily.

The similar suggestion sometimes offered that the war on Britain was a cover for a land grab on Franco Spanish territories is equally frail. America could have as easily created an excuse for war with either of those failing empires as it later did with Mexico.

Canada was undoubtedly on the minds of America’s leadership, particularly given the belief by many that it would be a war of liberation for the oppressed Imperial subjects north of the border, but there is no evidence that America created any real plans for absorbing a liberated Canada, no interim government, nor even proposed governor general were considered: there was no nation building plan. Given that the US invading army was eliminated by a small scratch force of British regulars, volunteer Canadian militia and Native American allies at the Battle of Detroit it became a moot point almost immediately.

The lack of any realistic alternative makes it far more credible for any reasonable observer to accept that the war was launched pretty much for the reasons given by Madison, contempt for American sovereignty, particularly at sea, by the British Empire. Had Britain complied with American demands to stop impressments and to respect their neutrality, the war would have been over and victory declared.