The 210th anniversary of America’s declaration of the War of 1812 against Great Britain, which falls on June 18, will not inspire much in the way of celebration or commemoration. It had, at most, a minor impact on American and world history. Yet that distant conflict is worth remembering, if only as a cautionary example: it stands as the most misbegotten war the United States has ever fought.
It was an offshoot of the great conflict between Great Britain and France that grew out of the French Revolution of 1789 and ended with the defeat of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In what came to be known as the Napoleonic Wars, Britain sought to use its maritime supremacy to stop other countries’ trade with France. The United States declared itself neutral and claimed the commercial rights that international law accorded to countries with that status during wartime. This led to a conflict with Great Britain over just what those neutral trading rights were. The Americans embraced an expansive definition, which afforded wide latitude for profitable trade. The British insisted on more restrictive terms and began seizing and searching American ships in the Caribbean and confiscating cargo that they regarded as contraband. President George Washington sent the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate with the British government on the issue, where he reached a compromise agreement. In 1795 the Congress reluctantly ratified what became known as Jay’s Treaty.
The Anglo-French war continued, however, and the Anglo-American dispute over neutral rights flared again during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. The Americans objected in particular to the British practice of seizing British subjects manning American vessels and forcing them into the Royal Navy, a practice known as impressment. Jefferson, too, sent a delegation to London to negotiate and it, too, produced an agreement with the British; but Jefferson rejected it because it did not, in his judgement, fully satisfy American principles. Instead, in an attempt to compel the British to accede to the American definition of neutral maritime rights, he signed the Embargo Act of 1807, which made sending goods to other countries illegal and barred American ships from leaving port. Jefferson believed that American trade was so important to the British that the government in London would make major concessions to restore it. Blockades of enemy countries had long been part of warfare. Thomas Jefferson blockaded his own country.
Jefferson's blockade fiasco
The embargo proved to be a fiasco. It had no effect on British policy but did do considerable economic damage to the United States, by one estimate costing the country five percent of its gross domestic product. The measure became increasingly unpopular and in 1809 Congress repealed it. By that time, James Madison had become president and he and his Republican Party felt they had to do something about what they deemed British maritime outrages. Based on an entirely unrealistic assessment of their military prospects, they declared war.
The war went badly. Before it started, Madison had failed to persuade the Congress to supply funds for increasing military preparations. At the outset of the fighting American forces attacked Britain’s North American possession, Canada, but the attack failed. The British imposed a maritime blockade on the United States that inflicted serious harm on the American economy. Then things got even worse.
When they declared war in 1812, the Americans had been able to count on the diversion of British military power to wage its war against France. The French defeat in Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign at the end of 1812 freed the British to concentrate their attention on North America. They occupied eastern Maine, defeated American troops at Bladensburg, Maryland, occupied Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public buildings in the capital including the White House.
The war ended with a treaty signed in Ghent, Belgium, on Dec. 24, 1814. Its terms restored the prewar status quo. Two and one-half years of fighting, at a cost to the United States of 2,260 killed and 4,505 wounded, not to mention the destruction of much of its capital city, had changed nothing.
War of 1812 a lesson in bad foreign policy
The war might have cost the country even more than that. It became so unpopular in New England, which was already alienated from Jefferson and Madison’s Republican Party on a number of issues, that it stirred talk of secession. In December 1814, five New England states sent representatives to a meeting in Hartford to discuss their grievances. The report they drafted did not include secession from the country, but the fact that the meeting took place at all denoted serious disaffection with the federal government, which could have jeopardized New England’s membership in the union had the war continued.
Beyond serving as an example of how not to conduct foreign policy, the War of 1812 illustrates, in several ways, the ironic turns that history can take – the way, that is, that it can produce outcomes that are unexpected, or contrary to what was intended, or both. Of all America’s 45 presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were the two most resolutely opposed in principle to engaging in war. Yet their policies led to war with Great Britain. Moreover, that war was, strictly speaking, unnecessary: the British revoked the decrees the Americans found most objectionable before the declaration of war, but news of this decision reached North America only after it.
The United States resorted to arms to stop the British practice of impressment, but the American negotiators at Ghent did not demand that it be ended. Soon thereafter, however, the British ended impressment unilaterally: with the final defeat of Napoleon, they no longer had a military need for it. Thus, the United States did receive satisfaction on its principal reason for going to war through the military victory of the country that it was fighting.
The War of 1812 had two ironic domestic political consequences. General Andrew Jackson won a battle against the British on Jan. 8, 1815, which made him a national hero and set him on the path to becoming president in 1828. The war had ended 10 days before the battle, however, but word of the Treaty of Ghent had not yet arrived when it took place. In the wake of the war, Jefferson's and Madison’s Republican Party, which had initiated what turned out to be a fruitless, dangerous conflict and had then presided over it incompetently, came to dominate American politics for a generation. The Republicans’ rivals, the Federalists, who had warned against and then opposed armed conflict with Great Britain, faded out of existence.
The War of 1812 does have one enduring legacy. A Baltimore lawyer, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in his home city and wrote a poem celebrating the American flag’s survival during the attack. The poem was set to music and ultimately adopted as the national anthem. The “Star-Spangled Banner,” the song sung every day around the country to honor and praise America, was thus inspired by one of the least creditable episodes in the 250-year history of American foreign policy.