Well, we did get a catchy little ditty out of it, eventually.
That report is a little odd in concluding on the “success for Canada” note after having pointed out that there was no nation of Canada and Canadian territory for the U.S. wasn’t a pre-war motive. He also says “the United States…managed not to flat out lose the war.”
We did get a pretty crappy national anthem out of it.
Yeah. 
It was either that or the one that sounds like “God Save the King.” 
I did a thread on this a few years ago. The consensus was that we lost. I didn’t and still don’t agree. My own assessment is that neither side lost, but we gained more than the Brits did from the war, politically if not territorially.
-XT
In the peace settlement the UK gave up its historic support for American Indians. Examine Indian wars before and after 1812. Afterwards lacking European allies the Natives were unable to mount credible resistance and these wars became minor affairs. It’s an exaggeration to say we won the West in the War of 1812 but we did make that conquest much less costly in the blood and treasure of white people. The US also won respect for its navy which embarrased the vaunted Royal Navy. This gave America diplomatic credibility.
So yeah, I’d say paving the way for Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine are significant accomplishments. Whether they were worth going to war over or not is a matter of opinion. What did Great Britain get? Well, they failed to lose Canada and managed to do it without sacrificing forces needed to keep up the pressure on French forces in the Iberian Peninsula (with food provided by their American enemies) which contributed greatly to Napolean’s downfall. So they kept their empire afloat.
I’d call it a draw.
I don’t see how people can claim the United States lost the War of 1812. The main American goals were to stop British encroachments against American sovereignty. The main one was impressment (British refusal to recognize American citizenship), British to control American trade, and British attempts to prevent American settlement in the Northwest territory (by supporting native resistance and refusing to withdraw from area forts).
Granted, the elimination of impressment and trade restrictions was more a result of Napoleon’s defeat than American fighting. But the British did see that Americans were willing to fight over these issues. And the British did agree to stop interfering in the Northwest territory, an issue that was unaffected by events in Europe.
So the outcome of the war was that Britain acknowledged that it had to treat the United States like a real country and not just a temporary inconvenience.
I doubt the entire war has crossed most Brits’ minds. I just looked it up in a history book, and the only place it’s mentioned is in a sidebar:
Further down the sidebar under 1814, it says:
Now, fair enough, this particular book might generously be described as “concise”, but Chaka Zulu gets two paragraphs.
He was tough.
Lawrence was a wuss.
The problem with the War of 1812 is that both sides had immediate goals (in which they succeeded) which were completely noncompetitive. That is, they didn’t actually oppose the other guy’s basic war aims. However, both sides also had further-reaching goals which did not succeed.
America wanted to take Canada as its far-fetched goal. If you look at the history, there was a non-trivial chance of this and things could have gone the other way, which might have resulted in an independent Canada, and American dependency, or even outright American control.
Britain wanted to reassert, at the very least, hegemony, and perhaps bring America at least as a dependent state even if it couldn’t outright reclaim it. In the end, neither party was remotely willing to go into this fight to the death, and perhaps underestimated the other’s resolve. it would sort of be as if in the Civil War both North and South had taken a long look at things in 1862 and decided they could live with some form of compromise.
The Monroe Doctrine was a British idea that was enforced by the Royal Navy for at least the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
All this. I recall being taught that 1812 was the fight that “confirmed” American independence.
How do you reckon that?
There’s a lot of truth in what he said. In the 1820’s the British didn’t want to take over Latin America but it also didn’t want other European powers to take over Latin America. So when the United States declared it would prohibit any European expansion in Latin America, Britain thought it was a great idea. Britain even offered to make the Monroe Doctrine a joint Anglo-American policy but the Americans did not want to be diplomatically connected with another country.
But while the United States could say no European powers could interfere in the Americas, it didn’t really have the power to enforce this in the early nineteenth century. The real strength behind the doctrine was the British agreement that it would not seek to violate it and that it would be hostile towards any other power that did.
I know. I was questioning the notion that it was a British idea to start with, rather than an assertion by the confirmed-independent-real-country U.S. which Britain was then happy to go along with, in the new context following the wars of 1812 and Napoleon.
Canada not being an independent country at that time is not the same as there not being a Canada. French Canadians certainly didn’t have a cultural connection to the British, and even for a lot English Canadians, Britain was a remote place. It was always noted to me in (Canadian) history class that the war of 1812 was about the time of the solidifying of Canadian national identity, in no small part because of the American invasion (whatever their motives in invading were).
It can’t be considered a “late hit” when neither side heard the ref blow the whistle ending the play. 
In fact, it took the British a very long time to evacuate their American forts after the treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War. I’m glad we didn’t have to find out how long it would’ve taken them to leave New Orleans if the British had won the Battle of New Orleans. 
It was a defeat but the best case scenario for the US, we could have had a worse defeat with us losing huge swaths of territory and New England seceding and becoming a British puppet (see Hartford Convention).