What to Make of the War of 1812?

We recently marked the bicentennial of the War of 1812. You can be forgiven if you didn’t notice. Intensely unpopular in its own time, the War of 1812 hasn’t gained much traction in the public imagination among Americans today. And who can blame them? The War of 1812 may have produced the national anthem, but it also included the burning of Washington. The only major battlefield victory for the Americans—at New Orleans in January 1815—actually occurred after negotiators had signed a peace treaty ending the war.

Yet the War of 1812 marked the first time the United States actually declared war, theoretically an important moment in any nation’s history. The bicentennial of the conflict therefore offers a revealing moment to mull over the shifting fortunes of military history. One of the principal concerns of historical writing for centuries, military history actually remains one of the most popular subgenres of mainstream American nonfiction; but it has fallen on hard times among academic historians. Not that war, conflict, and military institutions aren’t the stuff of historical inquiry—especially when it comes to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and much of the twentieth century. Yet scholars remain cautious. The reasons are simple. Military history often appears to be the preserve of the enthusiast rather than the scholar, given to celebration rather than critical analysis; at its worst it appears to support militarism rather than question its outcomes. These circumstances are particularly true for early America. Over twenty years after the “New Military History” proclaimed the value of studying military institutions and military conflict, few historians have followed suit when it comes to early America.¹

For Paul A. Gilje, Donald R. Hickey, and Gene Allen Smith, exploring the War of 1812 includes a careful effort to navigate clear of the scholarly pitfalls of military history. Hickey has produced a single-volume documentary edition that seeks to chronicle the war in the broadest terms possible. Gilje situates the War of 1812 within a much longer struggle over the rules of maritime commerce and the social status of mariners. Smith examines warfare as a force that held the potential to transform racial hierarchies, but more often preserved them.

Understanding these books begins by triangulating them within three complementary yet very different historiographical traditions surrounding the War of 1812. Long before he edited the Library of America edition on the War of 1812, Hickey had established himself as the leading historian on the military history of the conflict.² J. C. A. Stagg’s work remains the most revealing consideration of the diplomatic disputes that precipitated the war and the political context that surrounded it.³ More recently, Alan Taylor’s study of the war on the U.S.–Canadian borderlands reflects the broader shift in American history away from the time-honored attention to political and military narrative and toward a focus on political culture, social history, and Indian history.⁴

As a result, the recent books by Gilje, Hickey, and Smith all operate within the overlapping concerns of Stagg, Taylor, and Hickey himself. They veer closest to Taylor’s approach, concerning themselves with the social, cultural, and racial dimensions of military conflict rather than elite decision making or battlefield tactics. Yet all three books are fundamentally dependent on those political and military histories. The authors recount similar general narratives of the war. The War of 1812 was very much the Americans’ fault, but it came in response to British actions. In the decades following American independence, the...