Remember the Raisin!

On August 5, 1812, the famous Indian leader Tecumseh, with a large body of warriors, ambushed an American force that was marching toward the Raisin River in the Michigan Territory. The river was the site of an old French settlement, and it was still sparsely populated by French-speakers. The Americans were traveling through the area with the aim of protecting a supply train with provisions for their garrison at Detroit. Tecumseh and his fellow warriors killed seventeen soldiers; and while that may seem like a small number, their action helped precipitate a dramatic American withdrawal from the upper Midwest. Shortly thereafter, the Americans decided to consolidate their supply lines in southern Michigan, and so they abandoned Fort Dearborn, the site of present-day Chicago. They wanted to hold Detroit, but quickly discovered they could not. A few days after the August 5th skirmish, the British seized the town.

In January 1813, with the British still in possession of Detroit, American soldiers returned to the Raisin River in an effort to protect the French habitants and secure their continuing loyalty to the United States. They made themselves vulnerable by going there, and, on January 22, they were defeated by a force of over 1,000 Native American, British, and Canadian fighters. In the aftermath of the battle, eighty wounded American prisoners were taken to a habitant settlement called Frenchtown, where, in the night, Indians killed dozens of them. Some of the prisoners were scalped, and some were fed to pigs. These events inspired American calls for revenge. On several subsequent occasions during the War of 1812, American soldiers charged into battle crying "Remember the Raisin!" Indeed, they shouted those words at the engagement later that year when they killed Tecumseh.

Similar battle cries have echoed more loudly through our American history books. We are more familiar with "Remember the Alamo," "Remember Fort Sumter," "Remember the Maine," and "Remember Pearl Harbor." Until recently at least, Americans have not devoted much attention to the War of 1812. This situation, however, is changing. John Latimer's 1812: War with America and Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies are early contributions to an imminent outpouring of books, scholarly articles, conferences, and other commemorative events marking the conflict. Much of this work has been timed to coincide with the 2012 bicentennial anniversary, when, it is widely assumed, the war will resonate more powerfully in public memory. I suspect, however, that most amateur history buffs in Britain and the U.S. would be astonished by the attention the War of 1812 is receiving in academic circles. It is attracting more scholarship than the War of the American Revolution.

Under these circumstances, the time will soon come when historians will no longer be able to justify their works on the war by asserting that it is understudied. Latimer makes an essential, almost foundational, contribution to the growing literature on the war, but his book already seems to belong to an earlier era. As a pioneer of sorts, he has had to work to recover and reconstruct a lost narrative and draw attention to a conflict that, he suggests, had been too easily forgotten, especially by the British public. The British, he explains, had cared deeply about the war while it was happening, but the conflict faded into relative insignificance for them following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.

Latimer offers a sweeping chronological account of the war "from the British perspective" (p. vii). He starts each of his chapters with a discussion of British politics, citing broadsides and songs as well as state papers, in order to illuminate what the British thought was at stake in their conflict with the United States. He makes a convincing case that the...