The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies by Alan Taylor (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2011 75 The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies Alan Taylor By 1812 the United States government could no longer tolerate Great Britain’s continued violation of its sovereign rights on the high seas. With a desperate need to furnish enough sailors to keep the vast Royal Navy afloat, Britain resorted to impressing all men found on foreign vessels whose appearance or residence suggested he was a subject of the Crown. By seizing American citizens, Alan Taylor writes, “the Royal Navy threatened to reduce American sailors and commerce to a quasi-colonial status” (4). Many Americans considered this as an act of “counterrevolution ,” negating the rights of citizenship they had gained by victory in 1783. Indeed, the subsequent declaration of war against Britain over impressments was considered a defense of their revolutionary principles . Since combating the Royal Navy was seen as foolish and expensive, the republican government decided to attack Canada as a less costly alternative to force Britain’s hand on the high seas. Often lost in this tale are the people who fought in the war and the reasons why they did so. Alan Taylor brings the complexities of the different agendas of those who fought—Americans, Britons, Canadians, Irish immigrants, and Indians—to demonstrate how an undefined border separating America and Canada resulted in a civil war that initially “blurred national boundaries and political identities in North America” (8). Taylor begins by illustrating how an ambiguous border and cheap, available land permitted many Americans to move to Upper Canada and renounce American citizenship with an oath of loyalty to the English Crown. These “Late Loyalists” cared little about Canadian politics as long as their government kept taxes low and did not disturb them, and were not committed to contributing to the empire. Woven into the complexities of this “open” borderland were United Irishmen, who renewed their own civil war against the British empire by fighting in Canada to repay the British for their defeat in 1798, and Native Americans, who tenaciously fought for their own sovereignty by establishing the Ohio River as the border between the United States and an autonomous homeland. Not all natives would unite under Tecumseh and his British allies, thereby fighting their own civil war. For Taylor, “the War of 1812 was a civil war between competing visions of America” (12). The bitter conflicts among Federalists and Republicans threatened to divide the nation and thrust it into its own civil war. Republicans who controlled the government promoted military officers from within, shutting out the Federalists who opposed war and Alan Taylor. The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 620 pp. ISBN: 9781400042654, (cloth) $35.00. BOOK REVIEWS 76 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY chose to serve as smugglers and British spies. In their attempts to obstruct and expose the Republicans’ mismanagement of the war the Federalists “hoped that defeats would disabuse the voters of their illusions” (439). The constant power struggle between the two opposing parties severely restricted the American military’s capacity to fight an effective war. Moreover, “because Republicans had no clear idea of what they would do with Canada” if they successfully conquered it, the government did not clearly define its military objectives (438). Unable to recruit, supply, or sustain a professional army, America was doomed to fail militarily in Upper Canada. Taylor makes it clear that the political division , strongest on the northern borderland, crippled military strategy as “the porous northern border became a debilitating open sore for the United States. Instead of serving as the primary invasion route into Canada, that sector became the smuggler’s thoroughfare, feeding the enemy, distorting the American economy, and sapping support at home for the war” (292). Rather than concentrating on Montreal and Quebec as primary targets for victory, the army had to settle on fighting insignificant battles with little strategic value. Consequently, historians have perceived the War of 1812 as a conflict fought without clearly defined goals on the periphery of empire that resulted in little change, and it has received little academic attention. Taylor, on the other hand, finds...