What is the War of 1812?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:17

On Christmas Eve: 1814

As I ask, what is the War of: 1812

I'm Niamh Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by by a Lawton professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College.

t America in the Naval War of: 1812

Andrew Lambert: 00:01:32

It's a pleasure to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:33

Really good to have you on the podcast.

reaty of Ghent and the War of: 1812

This is not one of those episodes. So this is going to be an education for me as much as anyone. And on that note, let's go back to basics.

actually fought in the War of: 1812

Andrew Lambert: 00:02:05

So the War of: 1812

So they're stopping France from trading with outside countries which can supply war materials, generate profits.

And this means that neutral suppliers who would like to trade find that somewhat uncomfortable because the British are stopping their merchant ships and if they have French cargoes on board, they're seizing them. So the Americans get very excited about this because this is their windfall opportunity. They're making a lot of money out of somebody else's war.

Neutrality is very attractive. You get big economic benefits.

And at the same time, when the British stop these merchant ships, they're acutely aware that many of the sailors on those ships are British. In the Atlantic shipping industry in the Napoleonic War era, most of the sailors speak English, most of them are British.

Some of them have moved to America and have signed a paper to say they were Americans. But the British government doesn't recognize that you were born a subject of the king. That's it. You can't change. You're British.

So the British are impressing these people because the Navy needs men. And the Americans will tell you that it was all about this issue of impressment, that it was a human rights issue. It wasn't. It was an economic issue.

And the war didn't begin at sea. The war began with an American invasion of what we now call Canada or then British North America. It was a massive land grab.

The Americans wanted Canada. They wanted to control what was then its main export, which is animal pelts, and clear the British out of the whole of North America.

So it's a very ambitious war launched by the Democratic Republican Party. They were the ancestors of modern Democratic party, and they wanted to clear the British out.

They wanted to extend the lands which could be put under slave economy plantations. They wanted to extend economically. And of course, ultimately they're going to expand or expand all the way to the Pacific.

So these people are set on expanding United States, not just the original 13 colonies, but getting up towards 50 by the end. So this is a very aggressive, expansive country taking advantage of a major war on the other side of a big ocean.

and do not support the War of: 1812

They don't take part in any serious warlike operations. Anybody living north of New York is really not interested in this war. It's bad for business.

The people down further south, around the Chesapeake Bay and in the Carolinas, they've got a whole range of issues which they're quite happy to fight about. But it's the beginning in many ways of the American Civil War.

as trying to do in the War of: 1812

But there is also a serious Native American confederacy led by two Shawnee brothers, one called the Prophet and the other one the war chief, Tecumseh. These two men are trying to build a native confederacy to resist the advance of the Americans across their lands.

And the losers of the War of: 1812

And that's the big battle of this war is ultimately not British and American. It's the Americans against the Native Americans.

The battle that you need to remember is called Horseshoe Bend and it's the reason why there's a statue of Andrew Jackson outside the White House.

Liam Heffernan: 00:06:16

There's a lot to unpack there.

And you know, we've, we've covered the, the very complicated history, to say the least, between us settlers and Native Americans a few times on this podcast. So I'm going to pivot a bit towards the French, actually, because you mentioned Canada.

ly battleground in the War of: 1812

And I think a lot of people nowadays would assume that the French had quite a strong foothold in Canada because there's a lot of French speaking provinces. So how did France get involved in all of this?

Andrew Lambert: 00:06:51

So France is involved in the war because it's also operating warships and Commerce Raiders in the Atlantic. There is also still some islands in the Caribbean which were French and the French might like to get them back, but they've all been captured.

So the French have no possessions in the New World anymore. What we find in Canada is a very large Francophone population who've been there from the founding of European Canada.

But France lost Canada in: 1759

But the British respect the political and wider rights of the French population, so they're allowed to retain their language, their, their religion, Catholics. And these people turn out to be very loyal to the British Crown. They are not republican Frenchmen from Europe.

They are old fashioned royalist Frenchmen who've been left in a bit of a time loop.

The French have no king, but they still are quite happy to have George as their king because he maintains their, their interests and looks after them.

So there's one battle on the Canadian frontier where the entire army, it's quite a small army that defeats the American invasion, is francophone all the way up to the general commanding it. So at Battle of Chateauga, we've got French Canadians defeating Anglophone North Americans in a battle on the Canadian frontier.

So yes, the French have been there a long time and their view of American invaders was deeply negative. British were better than the, than the Americans in terms of ruling the area.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:35

And presumably there was, I would assume, quite a lot of resentment amongst the British, the French and Even the Spanish, in terms of, you know, America suddenly deciding they're going to be the dominant republic in that part of the world. You know, it was, it was muscling in on territory that these big other empires probably thought was, was theirs, Right?

Andrew Lambert: 00:08:55

Yes. And the aggression begins early and it continues right the way through the 19th century.

When we get to: 1898

They failed in Canada, but they would have had that everything if their military had been successful. This is a very aggressive republic. It's a land hungry, expansionist, ambitious country. And the model for all of this is Republican Rome.

These people see themselves as the new Romans. And if you go to Washington, D.C.

you get a very strong sense that this is a grand imperial capital built by Republicans and it's got all the Republican and Roman symbolism you could possibly look for. So they do believe they have a manifest destiny to rule the whole continent. They say that presidents get elected saying things like that.

So it really does matter. At least four presidents were elected on the basis of their service in this war.

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:01

Yeah, I mean, you could, you could argue even today, you know, presidents get elected on, on, on this platform of quite extreme patriotism, certainly compared to what we're used to in the uk. So I think that's still kind of. That's still there today, right?

Andrew Lambert: 00:10:16

Yes, it is. And you know, you don't have to go much beyond Donald Trump's slogan about making America great again. You know, it's something that does appeal.

hey did indeed win the War of: 1812

Liam Heffernan: 00:10:46

Yeah.

Andrew Lambert: 00:10:48

And the British have never bothered to challenge it because we've just beaten Napoleon. So we don't care. We are the masters of the universe. We control the whole wider world and we've defeated the greatest warlord in modern history.

So James Madison doesn't cut it. You don't brag about beating him in battle. He's not a heroic leader, he's not a great general, he's a politician.

So it's something that we can just, we just let it, let it go. You know, we don't have to worry about that.

Liam Heffernan: 00:11:19

like, why. Why did the War of: 1812

Andrew Lambert: 00:11:30

The simple answer is American politics, of which we've all had quite a lot recently. There's an election cycle coming up, and the.

in Belgium on Christmas Eve,: 1814

Ghent has a British garrison. If you come to the other guy's turf to settle your treaty, you clearly lost. If you. If you're in charge of the process, they come to you.

Americans come all the way to Europe.

They go to Ghent, which is full of British troops, and it's on the main road that's connecting London with Vienna, where the end of the Napoleonic wars is being worked out. What the British basically say is you can have status quo anti. Basically back to. Back to where we were before this all started, and that's it.

And we will not discuss maritime economic warfare, which is one of the big American claims, and the American sun. But on the day that this news arrives in Washington, the peace has been signed, and it takes a best part of two months.

ew Orleans decides the War of: 1812

The peace isn't favorable to the Americans. The Battle of New Orleans has nothing to do with it. And it's not even the last battle of the war. There's a.

There's another one after New Orleans which is more important. And it's a very clear British victory.

So it's an invented narrative to sustain the political party that had just lost the war, to ensure that its leadership would continue and that the next president would be a member of this party, not the other one. So it's all about domestic politics.

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:33

It's interesting, though, that you mention about how sort of the end of the war was spun domestically, because it reminds me of when I visited the Air and space Museum in D.C. a decade ago or so now, and there was an exhibit at the time around the Battle of Britain and World War II.

And I was really taken aback by how it was presented, very much as if the Americans swooped in and won the war and saved Europe. And I wondered if I was reading a bit too much into it, but there clearly does seem to be this revisionism that happens in American history.

Andrew Lambert: 00:14:16

I don't think there's much interest in anybody else's history.

And claiming credit for things that other people have done is something that every country been at the top of the tree has done since the dawn of time.

So, you know, I don't think there's anything particularly unusual here, but a view of the world wars of the 20th century from America is, is somewhat skewed by the fact that they missed five years of the nine years in which these two wars were being waged. You know, they were pretty late to the party.

And as for the Battle of Britain, you know, there might have been one or two Americans in Britain, but I think the British won that one.

And without the British commanding the Atlantic, the Americans would never have got to Europe in the first place or the second place in the other war. So we have to be very careful about this.

And that's what happens when you allow your sense of self importance in many ways and your political agendas to walk the way that you write history. And ultimately that history will have to be rewritten because it doesn't work.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:20

Yeah.

Andrew Lambert: 00:15:20

It doesn't tell us what happened. It tells us what you want us to understand.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:24

Yeah.

Andrew Lambert: 00:15:25

And history has always been exposed to that. The political agenda of today will determine how we read the past and the present has to be understood.

The whole study of history is about how different generations read the same past for their own purposes.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:41

Yeah.

Andrew Lambert: 00:15:42

The War of: 1812

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:56

Yeah.

Andrew Lambert: 00:15:56

And it doesn't exist in Britain because we, we just haven't given it much thought.

Liam Heffernan: 00:16:01

Yeah. Well, hopefully, maybe this podcast will change things.

ave an interest in the War of: 1812

And I don't know an awful lot about, you know, maritime conflict. So explain to me, you know, why did this sort of, why did the sea become an important battleground in, in.

Andrew Lambert: 00:16:28

This war in: 1812

They have a few regiments in, in the two halves of what is now modern Canada, they have some troops in the West Indies, but they're mostly there and can't be moved. The main military effort is in Spain. Wellington is marching into into Spain as the French are pulling troops out to invade Russia.

he Americans take the risk of: 1812

And on that basis, the British will be essentially forced to cave into the French. And in that process, the Americans can reach in and grab what they want.

So they're hoping in many ways to pick up some trophies from a world war which Napoleon is going to win just outside Moscow. And that doesn't happen, as we all know. But the Americans are so convinced by Napoleon. They're very pro French.

They bought the whole Napoleon T shirt and the beanie cap and everything. They really do think he's the man. And the British, you know, the British and the Russians between them defeat him and destroy his army.

So that's critical. Britain's main weapon in the war against France isn't the army, it's the navy, because the French economy is the thing that sustains its war effort.

And breaking the French economy means a massive economic blockade of Europe. So the whole of Europe is excluded from global trade. Its maritime connections are cut, and the British then dominate those trades.

To the extent that they're selling colonial produce, things like coffee, tea, sugar into Europe at massively inflated prices in order to subsidize their own war effort. They're also selling the French boots and greatcoats to master Moscow in, because they can get a lot of profit out of these things.

So it's an economic war and the British are winning. That main weapon they're going to use against America is a blockade. They're going to blockade the American port.

America is massively leveraged around export crops. It exports grain, exports timber, exports a lot of tobacco, sugar. It's producing a wide range of things which it can't consume.

America doesn't need all of these products that it's producing. It's very much pushing them into the world economy. So the British just choked them off.

If you can't sell those goods, you're not getting any income, you can't pay your taxes, the government can't function, and your state will collapse. And that's pretty much what happened. The war ends because the United States is bankrupt, and that's a naval control of shipping.

So you put ships off all the key ports. Boston, New York, all the Way down and you stop them using the sea.

And as a result, slowly but surely, the economy breaks and the Americans don't have enough naval power to challenge them, that they have a small number of ships which go out.

And rather than doing what they're sent out to do, which is capturing merchant ships and causing economic damage to the British, they're more obsessed with winning battles. So they go and fight British warships and the Americans will tell you they won three great victories over the Royal Navy.

What they won't tell you is that the ships that won those victories were about a third bigger than the ships they captured. It was a heavyweight against a medium weight kind of competition, and the Americans were perfectly capable of winning that.

But when it came to a fight between two ships of exactly the same rate, they lost.

SS Chesapeake by HMS Shannon,: 1813

Fabulous example of very high speed sailing, very skilled gunnery won by the British ship, which is why the naval reserve headquarters in London is called HMS President. That's in memory of the American flagship. And the Americans have never used that name on a warship since that point.

That was, that was their ship and they lost it. So the British take control of the sea. This enables them to impose this powerful economic blockade and slowly but surely strangle the United States.

n of course, in the middle of: 1814

So they have an option and they talk about this, should we send the whole army to America and defeat the Americans? And they go, no, don't do that, it's a waste of time.

So they send a very small number of troops, about 4,000 to Canada, about 4,000 into the Chesapeake Bay.

And just to point out how weak the United States has become, after two years of blockade, an army of 4,000 British troops lands in Virginia, marches in Maryland, marches through Maryland, captures Washington, burns down the public buildings and drives the American government out. And as a result of that, there's a run on the bank and the United States government is now bankrupt.

By August: 1814

This is why the Americans are talking about peace, because without money, you can't pay. Men fight and men don't fight for fun.

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:04

So as you mentioned, the, the war ended because America was bankrupt and they didn't have much choice. But what was the point? What was the end game for, for the British or the Americans here? And did either of them really get what they wanted?

Andrew Lambert: 00:22:20

The British got what they wanted, which is the Americans stop invading Canada. And they haven't invaded it since, certainly not with guns. There's a reduction in the need for armed force.

And remember, by: 1815

There's an enormous national debt which is now dominating the political landscape and it has to be addressed. It all sounds familiar. The Chancellor of Exchequer is desperate to cut the army and the navy very, very hard.

And the idea of carrying on fighting against Americans when the European war is over means that the Europeans aren't going to take the British seriously. You know, you're still at war, you can't concentrate on the European business.

And Britain needs to stabilize Europe and get it balanced up so it doesn't revert back into the chaos of the Napoleonic era.

So the British are happy to take a pretty straightforward status quo treaty with the Americans because that gives them everything they need and anything more is going to cost a very large amount of money. The Duke of Wellington, who's just finished defeating the French in Spain, is consulted about this. You know, what do we do in Canada?

And Wellington looks at the map and he goes, there's nothing you can do that it's too big. You can't send enough troops there to make it secure. And invading America from Canada, it's just too big. Far logistically is very, very difficult.

What they did, taking Washington was a brilliant little operation which emphasized just how powerful the British were without a massive force, without a large army, without a huge logistics tail. So they used a method of war which enabled them to go in, do some serious damage and then come back out again.

And the British had to accept that fighting the Americans to a finish, there was no point in it. They didn't want America back again.

est in that. It failed in the: 1770

The Americans had had a whole generation to become Americans. A lot of those people were born as Americans after the rebellion. So they, they had a sense of themselves. The British had no interest in crushing.

And of course the United States was. America was Britain's best trading partner in the Atlantic theater. So British exports to America are huge. American exports to Britain are huge.

Neither side wants to stop doing that because that's a large part of their economic well being. So there are a lot of reasons not to do this. The Americans have failed in their war aims. The British have blocked them again and again.

So the best thing to do is just to say, okay, let's just wipe the slate clean and sort of start again. Within six months, Anglo American trade is booming. There's huge reserves of material coming out of America which lower prices on the British market.

Revenue from customs on some of those imports, means exchequer is being filled in Britain. Americans are getting their revenues up. So all of a sudden it starts to come back up again. And then they find other things to argue about.

And by the mid century the slave question is a very serious one. The British have abolished the Americans instead of persisting in that.

So there have been a series of issues over which Britain and America have faced off, but this one, ultimately it's an attempt to conquer Canada. And the fact that the Americans ended the war by invading and conquering small Spanish Florida gives the game away.

They tried this in: 1812

Liam Heffernan: 00:26:16

Yeah.

erent had they won the War of: 1812

Andrew Lambert: 00:26:31

merican victory in the War of: 1812

ore war. And of course by the: 1840

e were many in America in the: 1820

And Manifest Destiny is about God having made a decision about who should rule this place. And the Americans did see themselves in, in that role.

Liam Heffernan: 00:27:31

Yeah.

Andrew Lambert: 00:27:31

So there is no limit to their ambition other than the practicalities of getting past the people who can stand in their way.

Liam Heffernan: 00:27:40

Yeah.

at happened during the War of: 1812

Even though we've only just scratched the surface of this conflict, if people did want to read more about it, what would you say is the key, key moments or the sort of, the defining events that people should, should look up?

Andrew Lambert: 00:28:25

There's an American version of this war and it's all the things that the Americans were successful at. So they'll tell you they won three frigate victories. They won't tell you that they lost three frigate battles as well.

They will tell you that American privateering did a lot of damage to British merchant shipping. It did in the first 12 months of the war. But once the British got their convoy system running, it didn't do much more.

And large numbers of American privateers were captured and locked up. That's what the big prison on Dartmoor was built for, the lock up American privateer crew.

So a privateer is a, is a private citizen who's taken a commission from his government, essentially capture foreign hostile merchant ships for profit. And the Americans are quite successful with this. But eventually the British system grinds them down. So there's an American narrative.

Be aware of what the Americans are saying, but also think about why they're saying it. And then there's a British version which is almost entirely unwritten.

as a historian of The War of: 1812

And this war is one of the very rare ones where you only need one language to do the whole of the war. So there's no excuse for not reading the British material. But a lot of it remains in the archives. It's not been published.

research. Yeah, I noticed in: 1812

Liam Heffernan: 00:30:03

, I guess, into the War of: 1812

Andrew, it's been amazing having you on the podcast today and we'll drop a link in the show notes to your book as well so people can check that out. But before we sign off, I'd love to know how people can connect with you directly if they, if they want to do that.

Andrew Lambert: 00:30:33

Yeah, I'm in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and you'll find me there. Look us up online and yeah, contacts all along.

Liam Heffernan: 00:30:41

Amazing. And you can find me on. On X. I'm kind of still there, but I'm also now on Blue sky and on LinkedIn, so just search for my name and you'll find me.

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