As an Ohioan, I feel compelled to add Commodore Perry’s big win in the Battle of Lake Erie: Battle of Lake Erie - Wikipedia
Well, of course you would not really expect the President of the United States to say something like “Those damned Brits are occupied in a war to the knife with Nappy - why don’t we just take whatever we can from them in the North and West when their backs are turned? Who’s with me now?” - would you?
Naturally, they will make the case that the US is just defending itself and its just rights. As it happened, the major irritants du jour were naval, so those are the justifications that got trotted out. Only to be conveniently forgotten when the war ended.
But as you know, naval matters did not really matter a damn to the War Hawks who were pushing for the war. If it was up to Madison, the war would not have happened at all.
Whether the US meant to take Canada forever, or use it as a “bargaining chip” isn’t really material to this particular issue - fact is, the US invaded Canada to take it for some reason, and that invasion simply wasn’t a success. Some territory was gained, but some was lost - it was a wash.
The invading country failed its ostensible war aim - namely, a successful invasion. No territory was gained, no “bargaining chip” even.
Again, if it was up to Madison the war would not have happened - and in any event, no “bargaining chip” was gained.
Fact is, the Administration wasn’t really driving the bus on this war, so you have to look beyond the administration to understand why it was fought and what its true aims were.
There is no doubt that British naval high-handedness worsened relations and handed the Hawks a ready-made excuse for fighting. But equally, there is no doubt that the timing of the fight was awfully convenient (that is, while the Brits were in the War with Nappy neck-deep with nothing to spare for the colonies), that the “War Hawks” who were really motivating things were thinking more of expansion of the US than they were or matters naval, and that the President was dragooned into the fight against his own inclinations.
As for “no plans to conquer Canada” - what were US armies doing invading across the border? They were not there for their health, but to drive the Brits out, to defeat them. What is that, if not a conquest?
No, it didn’t. The end of the Napoleonic Wars ended the practice of impressment, period.
Even if your theory was correct - how exactly would the Brits being deterred from impressing Yanks cause the Brits to not impress - other Brits?
That makes no sense. Yet the practice, in effect if not in law, ended after the Wars.
The War of 1812 did not end impressment - it died a natural death, and clearly would have even if the War of 1812 never happened.
I have no idea how this adds to your point, which I understood to be that the War of 1812 was a victory because it ended impressment.
In my mind, you are mistaking correlation with causation. You are also apparently conflating the alleged cause of the war with its results.
The War of 1812 ended at around the same time as the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Compared with the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812 was a pimple to a gushing wound. The end of the Napoleonic Wars brought with it the end of the Brits straining every nerve to increase the size of their fleets - and so, an end to impressment, which was never thereafter used.
The next war that really required the Brits to strain every nerve to increase their navy was - WW1.
That all relies on accepting a good deal of your say-so about British motivations.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
No, it didn’t. The end of the Napoleonic Wars ended the practice of impressment, period.
[/QUOTE]
Most of that probably had more to do with there was no need for the RN to impress sailors at the rate they were doing during the NW, but ok…I concede the point. I actually was looking it up when you posted and had found the same Wiki link.
That wasn’t my point…apparently you didn’t get it, but it seems moot so I’ll just move on.
My point was that, from the US’s perspective it ended a foreign power being able to impress OUR CITIZENS. That the RN decided to end them for it’s own was probably of supreme indifference to us. But if they ended it after the NW anyway, it certainly means that, regardless of the outcome they would have stopped impressing our people. So, ok…I concede the point. I think the others are still valid. And it was still a very sore subject from our perspective and one of the major irritation points in why the US went to war. That the point became moot in hindsight perhaps simply means that the Brits saw the error of their ways. 
Or, as you point out, they just didn’t have any more enemies in their weight class to fight after France went down. It was a relatively peaceful time in Europe (one of the few), and left the Brits time to play around with the rest of their empire.
As your assertions rely on your own interpretations of Rah Rah AMERICA! Fuck Yeah! motivations for thinking that the US gained from the war as well. You seem fixated on the fact we didn’t annex Canada as the primary reason we ‘lost’ and they ‘won’, but in fact that wasn’t our own over arching goal. We got the Brits to stop impressing our citizens (yeah, they did that anyway), we got a pretty much free hand without continued interference in our southerns and western expansion and an end to the Brits supporting native tribes against us, we got an open hand wrt our trade and British restrictions…and we got treated as a full nation state. To me, that’s a draw by any reasonable standards. It’s certainly not a loss.
While I do think that the US wished to expand to the North as well as to the West (and really, why would it not?), my point isn’t that the US lost because it failed to “annex Canada”.
My point is that even conceding for the sake of argument that the US did not wish to annex Canada, but only invaded to gain Canada as a “bargaining chip” for concessions elsewhere - that even putting the US case at its highest, it still failed to win. The invasions were overall unsuccessful, Canada was not seized as a “bargaining chip”, and so the war was a failure in gaining its ostensible goals.
When one country wages a war of aggression and invades a neighboring territory to take it (no matter whether to hold it forever, or to gain points for later negotiations), and “fails to win”, it has lost.
No doubt the war had all sorts of psychological impact on both the US or Canada, but that is essentially irrelevant to the question of who won or lost.
Now, the argument can be made that the War acted as a valuable deterrent, in deterring the Brits from helping the native Americans who were exposed to being despoiled by the Yanks. As with impressment, I rather suspect this is a moot point. The Americans were so much more powerful than the natives, this was a war the natives were bound to lose - unless the Brits supported them with military force: which would have led to a war, 1812-style. I see no evidence that the Brits were willing to risk that, and as the 19th century wore on, the Yanks only became more powerful, and the Brits consequently less likely to risk a major war for their native allies.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
My point is that even conceding for the sake of argument that the US did not wish to annex Canada, but only invaded to gain Canada as a “bargaining chip” for concessions elsewhere - that even putting the US case at its highest, it still failed to win. The invasions were overall unsuccessful, Canada was not seized as a “bargaining chip”, and so the war was a failure in gaining its ostensible goals.
When one country wages a war of aggression and invades a neighboring territory to take it (no matter whether to hold it forever, or to gain points for later negotiations), and “fails to win”, it has lost.
[/QUOTE]
Except, again, that wasn’t our goal. It wasn’t even a primary goal. The main goal was to get the British to leave us the fuck alone, to stop impressing our citizens, to stop screwing with our trade and to stop supporting the native tribes and hindering our expansion south and westward. Taking Canada away from the Brits was one of the few things we could see in achieving those ACTUAL goals, since we couldn’t exactly go head to head with the RN in a set piece battle…and we couldn’t exactly invade the home islands. I’m not sure why this logic escapes you, or that you think that taking Canada was our primary goal…or why you think that the US was the aggressor here. We went to war because of the British actions…we sent a delegation to the UK to try and do this without a war, and basically they ignored us.
Even though we didn’t take Canada, we achieved our actual war aims…the British left us alone from then on, they stopped screwing with our trade, and they stopped supporting native tribes and impeding our expansion. I’m sure that if we had taken Canada and somehow held it that would have been a bonus…but it was hardly our main aim.
My point is pretty simple: none of those goals required, for its achievement, the war.
The war was supposed to achieve those goals by taking Canada. Canada was never taken. The goals were achieved, but what evidence exists demonstrates that they would have been achieved anyway, war or no. The war was lost by the US, but that loss had no impact on the ostensible “goals”, because achieving those goals depended on factors completely outside the ambit of the war. There was never any possibility that the Brits would successfully take over the US, or that they would keep an enormous navy in existence, or that they would keep blockading Europe indefinitely, which is what would have been necessary to avoid those goals from being met.
This is like arguing that a particular war was necessary to keep the Earth in its orbit, and then proclaiming it must have been “won” no matter the outcome of its battles, because the Earth remains in its orbit, doesn’t it?
Of course the US was the “aggressor”. They were the ones who went to war. The British did not want a war, and they certainly did not want it then, when they were busy fighting Nappy. Every war in history, the “aggressor” has some sort of reasons for.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
My point is pretty simple: none of those goals required, for its achievement, the war.
[/QUOTE]
Obviously Madison et al disagreed with your hindsight assessment. I disagree with them as well, even knowing how things played out.
No…Canada was simply one of the places we could get at the British. What we wanted to do was force the British to stop doing the things they were doing to us.
What evidence do you give that all of those goals would have been achieved without the war? It’s not like the British had a good track record of conceding things like those that put the US at odds with them, especially with former colonies. Using your 20/20 hindsight, what evidence do you have that the British would have left our trade alone and allowed us our westward and southern expansion had there been no war? Perhaps it’s the history of tolerance and generosity they displayed in India?
The war was a ‘loss’ to you because you are fixated on the US having to take Canada to ‘win’. You are obviously going to remain fixated on that regardless, so there doesn’t seem much more point in this back and forth. I don’t believe that taking Canada was a first tier goal of the US in the 1812 war…it was something that would have been nice, and it was one of the few ways we could actually get at the British to get them to pay attention to our list of issues. It had the desired effect…they paid attention. It had the desired effect…they stopped being ass hats (and allowed us to be the ass hats wrt the native peoples as the gods intended :p).
This is like saying that if I bully you, take your lunch money, tell you what you can or can’t do, that you’d be the aggressor if you punched me in the nose. Technically true, but kind of an un-nuanced view point of the situation. No, the British didn’t want a war with the US…they wanted us to behave, to accept what they told us, trade with who they said we could and not with who they didn’t want us to and do as they told us and just take it while they got on with the important work, to them, of fighting Bony. They refused to even listen to our complaints or to modify their behavior based on them. I don’t want you to punch me in the nose simply because I want to take your lunch money or I tell you what to do, either…but you’d still be justified in doing so to get my attention and make me stop doing those things. YMMV, of course (obviously it does). shrug
Well, under modern international law blockades are illegal. Britain was essentially conducting a blockade against the European continent and essentially blocking American trading ships from free use of the sees. When they would stop and impress American sailors, that would also be against international norms. While we didn’t have formal international law in the early 19th century, I’d say under standards of the day America had casus belli, and in many respects Britain essentially was already waging war against the United States, albeit at a low level. The arming of native tribes being another matter.
My view of the War of 1812 is it was a bit of a boondoggle and unnecessary for a lot of reasons. But I can’t really view it as Britain being the innocent aggrieved party and America being a reckless cow boy picking a fight.
I’ve always viewed it as a strategic draw, with many tactical losses (but some victories)–since conquest of Canada wasn’t a war aim I only view the failure to occupy it as a failed objective, not as a “loss” in the war. That’s like saying since Operation Market Garden was a failure we lost WW2. The stated U.S. war aim was to end harassment of its ships on the high seas–and Britain essentially did that unilaterally in 1814 before the war was over, which made the whole exercise pointless, which goes back to why I view it as a strategic draw. The only group I’ve ever seen seriously argue it was a victory for anyone was Americans who didn’t know what it was about and think we “saved ourselves from British invasion” or Canadians who view it as akin to their Revolutionary War that guaranteed Canadian independence from America.
I think while it was a strategic draw for the United States it had some long term serious benefits. A big one was it instilled a deep appreciation in the importance of naval power, and the U.S. Navy has long since been a significant focus of the United States. It was instrumental in our ability to strangle the Confederacy, for example, in the ACW. While the U.S. Army was historically left very small and incapable by European standards, our Navy was sufficient to any task before it pretty much from the 19th century all the way up to the present, and I think the War of 1812 was at least part of why even when we weren’t keen to invest in standing armies we usually kept our navy in pretty good shape. It also largely ended British engagement with natives fighting U.S. encroachment, largely leading to us being able to more easily settle the Louisiana Purchase territories–the rapidity with which we did so making it so we could also settle the far West/Pacific as well. It’s not impossible this would’ve have happened without the War of 1812, but it may have happened later on, at which point situations could have played out differently (perhaps some other European power would have held a firmer grip on areas west of the Louisiana Purchase–possibly Britain.)
Some of the most devastating battles of 1812 were the clashes between the United States and Britain’s Native Allies, many of them wiped out the fighting forces (fighting age young men) of native tribes for an entire generation, which had a major impact even if Britain had kept arming them afterward.
The US still had phantasies about annexing Canada even in McKinley’s day. How could the Canadians possibly not want to be part of the obviously superior country? But by then it was simply a forlorn hope that the poor, oppressed colonials Up There would come to Washington, hats in hand, begging to be made the 40-somethingth state. See https://www.csub.edu/~gsantos/img0004.html
It is simply not true that blockades are illegal under modern international law.
Not that any of that necessary applied in 1812, when “international law” was considerably more rudimentary.
A blockade was not typically considered a valid cause for war; the Allies, for example, blockaded Nazi Germany in WW2 prior to US involvement. The Americans were angry, but did not declare war on the Allies.
This case was in essence exactly the same: the Brits enforcing a blockade on the Americans over a war in Europe.
Likewise, impressment wasn’t a reasonable cause for war. The British view, rightly or wrongly, was that they were going after deserters who simply jumped ship to US vessels. While no doubt individual captains abused this concept to simply enslave prime seamen, this could have been handled short of war.
The British alliance with the native Americans is the worst case (and by far the most real of the three issues). The natives were not the ‘aggressors’ in their interactions with the Americans and were not American subjects: the Americans wanted a free hand to indulge in dispossessing and ‘ethnicly cleansing’ natives from their ancestral lands, purely for American profit: culminating in such crimes as (War of 1812 hero) Andrew Jackson’s “Trail of Tears”, one of the direst acts in US history. To claim that the Brits were the “aggressors” merely by supporting the natives in this struggle is a bizarre and very 19th century version of these events.
A unilaterally enforced blockade would be illegal under international law at present. This is why Kennedy called the blockade of Cuba during the CMC a “quarantine.” Since he never would’ve gotten Security Council approval (since the USSR was, obviously on it) for a blockade he essentially conducted an illegal blockade under a false pretense.
The idea that blockading an entire continent (including countries that Britain herself was not even at war with necessarily), and seizing enemy ships and forcing her crews into your Navy wouldn’t be casus belli is strange to me. Just in the prior century Britain went to war in part because one of her sailors officers lost an ear in an altercation with Spanish coast guards.
If one actually looks at the history of Britain’s justification for wars, or any European power’s in the contemporary period the actions of Britain in regard to America and other neutral powers would absolutely, in the norms of the time, be cause for war.
Edit to Add: I actually misspoke in my original post and this one, I should not have used the word “illegal” as that carries a different meaning than that which I wish to convey. Not that blockades are illegal (like a war crime), but rather that blockades are “acts of war”, giving the aggrieved a valid cause of war. I hope that clarifies what I meant there–not saying Britain’s blockade would be “illegal” under modern law, but that it would give the blockaded parties or injured third parties valid cause of war, since a blockade is itself an act of war. If Kennedy had started a “blockade” of Cuba without Security Council approval it’d have been akin to starting a war without said approval (which the U.S. and others have done), which isn’t an “illegal” action (although many argued it was when Bush invaded Iraq.) But the blockading of a country is an act of war.
Sure, blockading a country is an act of war.
What isn’t an act of war is enforcing that blockade by restricting what ships of third parties can bring into the blockaded country.
At least under customary international law, a blockading nation can - quite ‘legally’ and without causing an act of war - enforce its blockade as long as it follows the ‘rules’, which are codified (at present) in the San Remo Manual - even though it is as yet unratified.
It’s the usual international law muddle, but basically the Manual purports to be a mere codification of ‘customary’ law.
This is why, for example, the Israeli Blockade and seizure of neutral shipping was ruled to be “legal”.
So - to conclude the argument - if ‘modern international law’ was applicable in 1812, the British were not doing anything ‘illegal’ or an "act of war’ (against the US) by (1) declaring war on Napoleonic France; (2) establishing a blockade of the Napoleonic Empire; and (3) enforcing that blockade on neutral shipping, such as that of the US.
Edit: “unratified” not “ungratified”! Damn you, autocorrect!
But Britain wasn’t just blockading Napoleon’s Europe, Britain was routinely stopping all U.S. shipping and “assuming” its cargo was bound for Europe.
The issue then is whether the Brits were enforcing their blockade ‘properly’. Not that enforcing a blockade on third parties was per se illegal or an act of war.
The answer to that would depend on individual incidents.
However, it is pretty obvious that ships crossing the Atlantic are likely going to Europe, if they are not headed to the UK.
What irritated the Americans was British ‘high handedness’ in making them subject to British blockade restrictions (plus forcibly taking deserters, on occasion impressing Americans, etc.)
Here’s an interesting account:
[Emphasis added]
http://www.eighteentwelve.ca/?q=eng/Topic/2
Once again, it is worth pointing out that the Orders in Council establishing the blockade were rescinded before the American declaration of war! So clearly, the war did not “cure” this problem. Also, demonstrates that Madison was influenced by the notion that Canada could easily be taken, and that the locals would welcome that.
Madison did not know that the Orders in Council had been rescinded, and said that, if had known, he would not have declared war.
The issue, though, is whether the War can be counted as a “win” for the US. The allegation made upthread was that it could, because the War ended impressment and ended British interference with American trade.
My point is that the War can’t logically be credited with these achievements, as they would have occurred even had the War not happened - or, in the case of the Orders in Council, they were achieved before the War was declared.
And ended British interference in US southern and westward expansion. We CAN logically credit all but one of those achievements to the war, and we don’t know that they would still have happened without the war and the subsequent flow of history. Personally, I don’t think they would have happened, at least not when and how they did. I see no reason why, without the war, Britain would have stopped supporting the native tribes and trying to block US expansion, or have allowed the US to trade when and how we wanted (having gotten blocked us to their benefit during the NWs). It’s not like the Brits were known for their magnanimous generosity wrt trade when it might impact THEIR trade to the benefit of other countries.
The best you can say about the War of 1812 is that no one really wanted it, and once it started, no one knew where to take it. The British did have plans to cut off the Western part of the U.S. for an Indian territory under British control, but they only came up with that once the war started. The U.S. wanted to stop the British from treating them as if they weren’t an independent country, but once the war started, the U.S. realized they were in deeper than they planned. The U.S. lost all of its trade during the war, and really didn’t have the funds. The British navy was pretty good at keeping the U.S. out of the Atlantic.
In the end, once the Napoleon wars ended, the British realized they weren’t in position to state the terms of victory, and the U.S. realized that the war really wasn’t going anywhere and was very costly. The result: Pretty much the same situation as before. The British stopped the impressment of U.S. citizens, but they were probably going to stop anyway. The U.S. promised not to invade Canada, but that didn’t work out this time now that British Canada was full of old United Loyalists. The Great Lakes became a warship free zone and the British returned some forts they had promised to return earlier.
For the U.S., it did establish a U.S. nationhood, but it wasn’t very strong. The British did decide that the U.S. has to be treated with semi-deference, but they still did whatever they wanted in the New World for almost another 70 years.
And when a Canadian friend took credit for burning Washington, I told them they did a lousy job – it got rebuilt a few years later. Next time, they should try to plow salt into the earth.
Of course, we didn’t do much better with Toronto.
By the way, in the 1920s, both the U.S. and Canada developed military plans to invade each other.
Damned icebacks!
Shakes fist at Canada