"Faithful History": British Representations of the War of 1812

Long before the fighting finally stopped, Americans began to focus on the way in which history would judge the war. Despite the defeat, it was possible to write up the conflict as a victory, exploiting the ambiguity of the Treaty of Ghent, a status quo ante compromise that did not reflect the depth of their defeat. By contrast the British were far too busy settling the future of Europe, a problem that was only resolved twelve months after the signatures at Ghent. British statesmen had never expressed much interest in the war; peace provided an ideal opportunity to ignore it altogether. Very few British accounts of the war appeared in print, and only one author treated the subject in an original manner. This left the Americans free to create an Anglophone understanding at variance with reality, largely to serve Republican Party agendas: a version of 1812 that would occupy a critical role in postwar politics, a contested ground on which Republican partisans erected a substantial victory arch of words and pictures to transform defeat into victory, folly into wisdom. While judgments of the war remain complex, they can be summarized by examining the contrasting fates of the President and the Constitution.

For all the skill and courage involved, frigate battles rarely exercised a profound influence on international relations. But 1812 was an unusual war. It has often been described as little more than a succession of such Homeric contests, contests in which the new boys challenged the old masters, and whipped them. At the heart of the mythic version lies the USS Constitution, the thrice victorious symbol of American victory. From the moment she arrived at New York on May 15 the ship became legend. The celebrations that greeted her triumphant return contained an element of desperation: New York's own frigate, the mighty President, was nowhere to be seen. As Henry Adams observed a century ago, the War of 1812 was a disaster for the United States:

The worst disaster of the naval war occurred January 15, when the frigate President—one of three American forty-fours, under Stephen Decatur, the favourite ocean hero of the American service—suffered defeat and capture within fifty miles of Sandy Hook.¹

While the Republicans were hastily making a totem out of the ever-victorious Constitution, the flagship of American victory, that version of events was being neatly subverted across the Atlantic, where her sister ship, the mighty President, also survived to tell a very different story. At this remove it matters little who "won" the War of 1812, what matters is that we recognize the fluid, endlessly contested nature of the past. Not the past as fact, but the past as a cultural construction. The War of 1812 as it exists in the modern memory is almost entirely the creation of contemporary and near contemporary political and personal agendas. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the frigate battles. While the British carefully noted the causes of defeat, and punished those who had failed, the American response, led by the two surviving captains and the hagiographers of the third, created a magical reality to obscure unpalatable facts. These versions became enmeshed in the cultural construction of a new national identity; they became foundation myths for an American culture, a new way of being American. Little wonder the language is emotional, rather than rational. That the United States and the United Kingdom hold very different views of 1812 only serves to remind us that history is neither fixed, nor agreed.

The War of 1812 was fought between two literate populations sharing a common language. Partisan accounts of the war were used to sustain Anglo-American hostility long after the causes and aims of the war itself had been forgotten.² The American version, the one that concentrated on the three frigate victories and the battle of New Orleans, enabled American politicians to claim that they had "won" the war. This powerful domestic propaganda was frequently revived for international service. The British response was provided by lawyer-turned-historian William James, an Admiralty court...