Splintering the Wooden Wall: The British Blockade of the United States, 1812-1815 (review)

In the flood of works published on the War of 1812 in the past fifteen years, the focus has been mainly on narrow military topics: battles and campaigns and soldiers, sailors, and ships. Larger, more daunting topics have attracted less attention. For the war at sea, a multitude of source materials on both sides of the Atlantic, coupled with an arcane language, has deterred anyone from attacking broader themes. As a result, we are still dependent on Theodore Roosevelt's Naval History of the War of 1812 (1882 and later editions) for an overview and Alfred Thayer Mahan's Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812 (1905) for an understanding of naval strategy. Though surely the most important use of naval power in the war, the British blockade of the U.S. has been largely ignored since the publication of Mahan's great work. Hence, the appearance of Wade Dudley's new study on the subject is especially welcome.

Conventional wisdom holds that the British blockade did enormous damage to the United States by bottling up American warships, destroying American trade, and undermining government revenue. Dudley challenges this view. He argues that warships and privateers, which throughout the war left and returned to port with alarming ease, exacted a heavy toll on British trade; that the coasting trade flourished; and that the decline in foreign trade was really a voluntary withdrawal that left the American merchant fleet intact for a postwar revival.

What accounts for the failure of the blockade? Although a number of factors played a role—the rough and poorly charted coastline, the Royal Navy's pursuit of prize money, and British dependence on the license trade to feed its forces on both sides of the Atlantic—Dudley places most of the blame on the British government and particularly the Admiralty. Royal officials in London refused to provide the warships needed to do the job and further weakened the blockade by ordering the British navy to target American warships in port and to launch diversionary raids on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Dudley makes a convincing argument, one that he buttresses by comparing the American blockade with the more effective European blockades imposed by Great Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The main weakness in the argument stems from a failure to look more closely at the very real economic and financial damage that the blockade did to the United States.

This study has many merits but is marred by too many factual errors and inconsistencies. At the beginning of the study, we are told when the various segments of the American blockade were implemented, but in two cases the dates do not match those presented later in the text (cf. p. 34 with pp. 85 and 101). We are thus left without an authoritative statement on a matter that is central to the study.

Although this work must be used with caution, it is nonetheless an important work on a neglected subject. It can be read with profit by all students of the War of 1812 as well as anyone interested in the challenges of power projection in the Age of Sail.