The War of 1812 in the Grand Sweep of Military History

Anticipating substantial bicentennial interest in a conflict that Donald R. Hickey once claimed was America's "most obscure war," American publishers have rolled out numerous titles on all aspects of the War of 1812. In this issue we offer perspectives on the war from two of Britain's leading naval-military historians. Jeremy Black, no stranger to these pages, places the War of 1812 into the larger context of military history. And Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge: Britain against America in the Naval War of 1812 (Faber & Faber, 2012), focuses on British representations of the war. We conclude this section with senior editor Donald Yerxa's interview with Lambert, conducted in July 2012.

The War of 1812, the Anglo-American conflict of 1812-1815, does not bulk large in most treatments of military history. Indeed, outside the history of North America it is generally ignored. 1812 means Borodino, 1813 Leipzig, 1814 Napoleon's abdication, 1815 Waterloo. To be less Eurocentric, we might look at the conflict between Egyptian forces and Wahhabis in Arabia, where in 1813-1814 the Wahhabis suffered serious defeats.

Moreover, the War of 1812 appears indecisive, at least militarily, as far as the Western world is concerned. There were no great battles to compare with Trafalgar or Waterloo and no decisive siege comparable to Yorktown. American independence was already established, expansion to the Pacific was settled in the 1840s, and the fate of the country was fought out in the 1860s. In contrast, relatively little occurred in the 1810s. Furthermore, the war scarcely determined the fate or reputation of the British Empire.

Yet the conflict was important politically and also was (and is) instructive militarily. For the first, it helped establish the relationship between the two Anglophone empires. Despite repeated attempts to invade Canada, America was not able to end the partition of British North America that had occurred in 1775-1783. Nor were the Americans strong enough at sea to support effective and sustained transoceanic power projection. American warships could inflict considerable damage, but there was not going to be an amphibious force attacking Bermuda or Jamaica, let alone Ireland.

In contrast, the British could mount such attacks, but their success varied. More significantly, it proved impossible for Britain to sustain effective cooperation with Native Americans and the defeat of the latter in the Old Northwest and the Southeast transformed the balance of power east of the Mississippi, altered the strategic position of Canada, and ensured that Britain's future options were restricted, and notably so on land. Thus, at one level, the War of 1812 was part of a sequence, beginning with the arrival of Howe's expeditionary force at Staten Island in 1776, continuing with the French failures to suppress the Haitian revolution, rising to a peak with Spanish (and more briefly Portuguese) efforts to defeat the Latin American Wars of Independence, and culminating with Napoleon III's attempt to create a new Habsburg empire in Mexico, a sequence in which the powers of the Old World tried, and failed, to stop or limit the independence of those of the New. While each attempt was distinctive, both politically and militarily, there were also common elements that are instructive.

A detail from an 1817 print "Battle of New Orleans and death of Major General Packenham [sic] on the 8th of January 1815." Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-62].

But this approach also illustrates the problems with pattern-building. The British intention in 1812-1815 was very different from the other episodes, and not least from British policy in 1775-1783. Despite American rhetoric to the contrary, there was no attempt to end American independence, and, indeed, the British government neither wanted the war nor declared it. Moreover, Britain had a more serious opponent to fight, in the shape of France, and, faced with an unprecedented national debt, the government wanted to cut its costs, not least in order to end the wartime expedient of income tax.

The conflict showed the difficulties of fighting a successful "detached" limited...