War of 1812: Anglo‑American war in North America (1812–1815)

The War of 1812 culminated years of tension between the United States and the United Kingdom. In a speech delivered on June 1, 1812, U.S. President James Madison listed the following reasons that he believed justified a declaration of war:

• The forced enlistment (impressment) of US sailors into the British navy (Royal Navy).
• Attacks by British warships against U.S. ships.
• The British blockade of U.S. ports to prevent trade with Napoleon-occupied Europe.
• The British government's refusal to lift a ban that prohibited the neutral United States from trading with European nations in light of Napoleon's Continental Blockade.
• The alleged incitement of Native American peoples to acts of violence against the United States.

Even in current accounts, these points are repeated uncritically to this day. In fact, these points had led to sometimes considerable tensions between the two countries, especially the forced recruitment of US seamen and the attacks on US merchant ships.

A significant number of Americans served on the ships of the Royal Navy, whether voluntarily or under duress. For example, 22 of the 663 crew members of HMSVictory during the naval battle of Trafalgar in 1805 were citizens of the United States. The actions of the British always sparked outrage in the US. Reportedly, about 1000 sailors from US ships - British, but in many cases also US citizens - were victims of forced enlistment each year. However, the question of who was a US citizen was not as easy to answer as it might seem from today's perspective. From a British perspective, the procedure for issuing a US certificate of citizenship was so superficial as to invite abuse. For one thing, all that was required to issue one was an affidavit before a notary public that the individual had been born in the United States; for another, the descriptions of persons were so vague that they could apply to many men. It was therefore easy for British seamen to obtain identity cards that were formally genuine but substantively false. Given this abuse, and given the chronic shortage of seamen, it was natural for many British officers to distrust U.S. identification cards on principle, even if they were in fact U.S. citizens. It was said to be common for British officers to take so many men off U.S. merchant ships that they were barely able to get to port. Another reason for a crackdown was the fact that as many as 2,500 British sailors signed on to U.S. ships each year. From the British point of view, these men were obliged to serve in the Royal Navy, which is why they claimed the right to assign them to this service.

Massive obstruction and damage to U.S. maritime trade resulted from British warships establishing a de facto blockade of U.S. ports on the Atlantic coast after the start of the Coalition Wars with France. They searched all merchant ships they could get their hands on for contraband and seized hundreds of them, many within sight of the coast. What from the British point of view was a legitimate means of preventing trade with wartime enemies, the Americans felt was arbitrary and a continued attack on their state sovereignty, especially since some of the British warships were directly off U.S. ports; moreover, the economic damage weighed heavily. For the United States, these restrictions were a violation of international law.

A particularly scandalous case from the US perspective occurred in 1807, when the British warship HMS Leopard forced the frigate USS Chesapeake at gunpoint to endure a search for Royal Navy deserters, killing, wounding or abducting 21 sailors. This act of violence created a storm of indignation in the USA, but President Thomas Jefferson preferred a (ineffective) trade embargo to a declaration of war.

Indeed, there had also been considerable tension with the Indians in the run-up to the war, culminating in the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 between US troops under William Henry Harrison and the Shawnee. While the British certainly had an interest in protecting Canada through a buffer zone of friendly Indian peoples, the hostilities were not - as the US claimed - due to British influence. Rather, it was triggered by encroachments and treaty breaches that turned many Indian peoples into enemies of the Americans.

That there were also other nationalist and imperialist reasons for the war was shown by the fact that the war was relatively unpopular in the coastal states most affected by British encroachments (until the first US successes), because Great Britain and also Canada were important trading partners. The June 18 declaration of war passed in the House of Representatives by 79 to 49 and in the Senate by only 19 votes to 13. The main proponents of the declaration of war were the representatives of the interior states (the frontier states), the so-called war hawks. For them, the British incursions were a welcome pretext for the conquest of Canada, in which little resistance was expected, since most of the British army was tied up by the fighting in Spain. These expansionist plans are often placed in the context of the Manifest Destiny ideology (the belief in a God-given right to conquer the entire continent), which was not formulated until later. Other historians reject this, seeing it as an attempt to remove the threat of attack on the United States by eliminating the British colonies in North America, i.e. a more defensive motivation. Another aspect was the Warhawks' hope that states emerging on Canadian soil in the future would adopt the political colouring of the Frontier States and thus counter the perceived political preponderance of the Southern states. Here, the internal division of the United States was already beginning to emerge, eventually leading to the Civil War in 1861. In any case, aggressive nationalism and strong anti-British resentment are characteristic of the War Party's omissions. Viscount Robert Stuart Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary at the time of the war, wanted to avoid war. A sizable portion of the population, especially in New England, was opposed to the war.

Despite the preceding years of diplomatic tension, neither side was prepared for war. The United States Navy consisted of only 16 combat-ready ships (other units were either laid up or simply unseaworthy at the time), which included seven frigates, one corvette, and a number of smaller warships. Amazingly, the same Congressmen who supported the war had rejected a fleet building program for twelve liners and 20 frigates. Later U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, author of a history of the naval war of 1812-1815 (The Naval War of 1812), called this inconsistent behavior criminal stupidity and a national disgrace. With a fleet of this size, the United States could at best hope for token successes against the Royal Navy with no effect on the course of the war.

The ratio was reversed for the troops on land. The United States had an army with a nominal strength of 35,000 men, to which militia could be added. The regular troops, however, were in fact only a third of their supposed strength when the war began and suffered from a shortage of competent officers. Some of them, moreover, owed their ranks to merit from the War of Independence, others had gained their positions through political protection. The (additional) militia also proved to be undisciplined in many cases and reliable only to a certain extent, and (as in the War of Independence) in some cases refused to serve outside their home state. The British, on the other hand, had only 5,000 soldiers in Canada, only some of whom were regular troops, but otherwise territorial units (units set up in the country) and militias. Some compensation for the British numerical inferiority was the good training and discipline of their line troops and professional, war-experienced officers, of whom John Harvey, Joseph Wanton Morrison and Charles-Michel de Salaberry are outstanding examples.

A number of advantages favored British defensive efforts. For one thing, lakes and inaccessible forests in the border region between Canada and the United States formed natural barriers, and overland routes were poor or non-existent, necessitating partial recourse to rivers and especially the Great Lakes as transportation routes. On the other hand, the British had the support of most of the Indian peoples in the border area, from which the Shawnee war chief Tecumseh stood out as one of the most important leadership figures of the North American Indians. Further, in Major General Sir Isaac Brock, Governor of Upper Canada, the British had an energetic and competent commander to whom his U.S. counterparts were no match. Finally, unlike many U.S. units, some of the Canadian militia units-particularly those raised in Lower Canada-showed high combat morale. This was because the Anglo-Canadians were in many cases descendants of Loyalists expelled from the United States and therefore deeply detested it, while the French Canadians, while having no particular love for the British Crown, valued the extensive religious tolerance granted to them and distrusted the United States because of its strongly Protestant and anti-Catholic character. The willingness of the French Canadian militia to fight, for example, in the Battle of the Chateauguay River, was a nasty surprise to U.S. forces, as their support, or at least passivity, had been expected. The situation was different in Upper Canada, where many of the inhabitants were from the United States. The militia troops formed from them proved to be unreliable, but the encroachments of the US troops in their invasion attempts caused an increasing solidarity also of these parts of the population with the defenders.