A Truly Pointless War ... The War of 1812

In their Beginner’s Guide to Canadian Humour, Lynne Stokes and Pamela Chichinskas list 15 reasons why ‘We Can’t Stand Americans.’ Reason number 8 is: ‘Because they don’t know the first thing about Canada, like who our Prime Minister is - or even that we have a Prime Minister, or a different currency. And they glaze over if we try to explain them.’

Covering an area far greater than the United States with barely one-tenth of the population, one might indeed wonder why an independent nation exists north of the 49th parallel, with its own prime minister and a currency bearing the head of the British monarch. But the reason is given at number 12: ‘Because before Vietnam they used to claim they’d never lost a war even though we stuffed them in the War of 1812.’

Well, it wasn’t really Canada that ‘stuffed them,’ but the sole oceanic superpower of the day: Britain. But the Canadian contribution was essential, and Canada proved her loyalty and her value to Britain. Because the only really decisive and lasting result of the war was Canadian independence, one that reverberates through history to 1914 and again to 1939 when in her darkest hours of need, Canada stood proudly by Britain’s side.

So this wasn’t a 'war that both sides won.' Only Britain achieved her aims as they stood in 1812; the United States achieved none of hers, and on that basis it can only reasonably be accounted a British victory. But in truth it was a ‘war that nobody won’; certainly not the dead, or the bereaved, or the maimed, or those rendered homeless.

For it was a pointless war, entered into with expectations that would prove hopelessly unrealistic. Neither was war inevitable in 1812; it almost came in 1794, 1807 and 1808, and it could have been avoided again through diplomacy as in these earlier crises. In truth, ‘free trade and sailor’s rights’ was a poor cause: ‘Never before in the history of enlightened nations,’ declared one 19th century American historian, ‘did such ... an absurd issue result in war.’

And just as Britain was unprepared for war in 1939, so the United States was totally unprepared in 1812. Among those pushing for it - the so-called ‘War Hawks’ - was Henry Clay, quick to invoke the spirit of ’76 but no soldier himself, and with no experience of the horrors that war entails. When Madison protested that America wasn’t ready, Clay insisted he declare war and then prepare for it. It was a recipe for military disaster as the US Army performed woefully throughout 1812 and 1813.

By its end the United States economy was grinding to a halt, the US Navy was blockaded in port, and the US Army faced increasingly hostile odds on land. But construction of reassuring myths in the immediate aftermath helped transform a futile and humiliating adventure that aimed to conquer Canada into one of defending the republic.

Although the reimposition of British rule had never been in the cards, choosing to regard it as a ‘second war of independence’ helped usher in the ‘Era of Good Feelings’ that followed. And Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, which placed him firmly on the road to the presidency, gave him and his supporters grounds to mythologize it into the greatest military engagement of the war, and the entire conflict into a stunning American triumph; a version of events effectively carved in stone by George Bancroft and Henry Adams.

In some respects all subsequent histories of the conflict remain in the shadow of this interpretation. But it ignores both America’s military failure and the wider context of what Victorians called ‘the Great War.’ Because when considered in world terms it comes as no surprise that, as nineteenth century Canadian historian William Kingsford noted, events in North America between 1812-15 were not forgotten in Britain 'for they have never been known there.'

By 1812 Britain had already been fighting republican and Napoleonic France for almost 20 years; fighting, in fact, for her very survival. North America was a mere sideshow, an annoying distraction while Britain was wrestling with a critical world situation. And who in Europe now cares about the battle of New Orleans when there is Salamanca, Borodino, Leipzig and Waterloo to consider? If it’s difficult enough today to find a Briton who knows that a British force landed on a hostile shore, marched 50 miles inland, beat a force three times its size then burned down the White House, try asking a continental European!

In 1815 the young United States wasn’t worth two bits in global terms, and contrary to another widely promulgated myth, the war didn’t make the world take notice of America. It was not the Monroe Doctrine, but British diplomacy, backed by the irresistible might of the Royal Navy, that prevented the ‘Holy Alliance’ of France, Russia, Prussia and Austria from intervening to restore Latin America to Spain after the war was over.

So what does this tell us today? Well, that wars of choice are profoundly dangerous things. On the night before the British parliament voted for war in Iraq in 2003, Tony Blair told his children that the decision was the hardest one of his life. But it shouldn’t have been anything of the sort: it should have been the easiest, because he should have had no alternative left open to him, just as Neville Chamberlain had no alternative in 1939. Since Blair made his choice, practically nothing has gone according to expectations, either for Britain or America.

Like most wars, that of 1812 lasted longer and cost far more in both blood and treasure than its instigators expected, for as Piers Mackesy noted, wars ‘rarely achieve the political goals that might justify the risks, the cost and the pain.’ James Madison had an alternative in June 1812; he chose not to take it, and almost led his country to catastrophe.