I was reading a short blurb in a magazine the other day which discussed the U.S. record in wars that it fought. The War of 1812 was listed as a U.S. victory.
I always thought that the War of 1812 was a draw. I’m not trying to stir up any nationalistic U.S/Canada jingoism here. Could someone please tell me the facts on who was considered the winner of 1812 and why?
Wasn’t the War of 1812 between US and Great Britain, not Canada?
This is a hotly debated topic amongst historians. IANAH but I’d say that the US won. I am probably biased though.
The US lost most of the battles, many of them to the North in the area of Canada. The British for a time even occupied Washington D.C. and burned the White House (you can supposedly still see pock marks from the bullets.) All of that being said, the Brits wanted to win the Colonies back and they didn’t. The U.S. successfully defended their land.
For a time, British soldiers were stationed in the U.S. Now U.S. soldiers are stationed in Britian. Maybe that part is irrelevant but I thought I’d get in a cheap shot anyway.
Haj
The British troops also caputured and burned Buffalo to the ground, if I remember correctly. Surely they deserve some credit for that… 
Umm…the U.S. started the War of 1812. Granted, it was in response to a provocation (the Royal Navy firing on and boarding the USS Chesapeake), but I don’t think the US gets points for defending their territory when they declared war first, and crossed the border with troops first.
The way I see it, none of the borders changed under the treaty of Ghent, but the Royal Navy did presumably stop boarding U.S. ships after the war, so perhaps the U.S. can claim a technical victory for that reason. But it was a pretty costly victory. Personally, I’m more inclined to call it a draw.
Wasn’t the US action in response to Britain boarding US vessels and press ganging those they captured ?
I thought it was largely because it hurt US trade so much that the ship owners put pressure on the US government.
Someone will clear this up, or maybe I’ll use that search engine.
Neither side won. The peace terms were status quo ante bellum, which translates as, “Let’s pretend this whole regrettable incident never happened.” See
http://www.galafilm.com/1812/e/events/ghent.html
The US was humiliated because it failed to achieve any of its territorial aims in Canada, and the loss of trade with Britain led New England to the brink of seceding from the Union. The British were embarassed because the world’s leading naval power had lost a strategically important battle on Lake Champlain, and symbolically important battles on the high seas. (Not to mention losing the Battle of New Orleans after the war was over…) Both sides were happy to forget about the whole thing, and indeed the war remains mostly forgotten to this day.
Except in Canada. In Canadian lore, valiant Canada fought off a massive invasion by the US war machine, with precious little help from the ungrateful Brits. (Never mind that Canada didn’t exist as a country, the troops were British, the Brits were busy fighting a massive war against Napoleon in Europe at the time, and the US war machine was, by today’s standards, a small, unorganized rabble.) Heck, some Canadians even believe Canadians burned down Washington, despite the lack of evidence that any of the British troops involved were Canadian. (I posted a thread on that a while ago; you could search for it.)
Which is perfectly understandable. To the Brits and the Americans, the War of 1812 was essentially a footnote to the Revolution. But to the Canadians, the war, which happened mostly on their territory, was a defining event in the history of their country. It’s not surprising that it has become mythologized in the same way Americans mythologize the Revolution.
Britain was, of course, also facing Buonaparte at the time, so the “War of 1812” to the British historians is only a few minor skirmishes in the larger Napoleonic Wars that lasted around a quarter of a century, concluding in 1815.
Thus, I would not be surpised to find that British historians either (a) consider that they won the War of 1812 because they defeated Napoleon in 1815; or (b) that there was no “War of 1812”.
Tchaikowski won the War of 1812, since his 1812 Overture (celebrating the Russian victory over the French) is now a tradition for U.S. Independence Day.
In one sense the US can be said to have won the War of 1812. Before the war, Britain still hoped to bring the colonies back under control. After the war they gave up, and recognized US independence.
If we look at war aims, both sides failed. The US didn’t take over Canada, and Britain didn’t take over the US. So, in that sense it was a draw.
France won the war, by getting Britain tied down in a distracting drain of resources across the ocean instead of concentrating on defeating Napoleon.
Everyone is saying either a draw or slight edge to the Yanks.
Is there anything notable Britain gained from this war? Security for Canada, maybe? Or is it simply that they were happy to have the US out of their hair so they could get back to the French, and thus were willing to make some small concessions without any corresponding gains?
FWIW and as CK notes, British history of that period tends to concentrate on the Peninsula War in which the Duke of Wellington was busy taking on Napoleon at various locations around Iberia. Napoleon had to be taken on immediately as it was likely he would soon present a very serious threat of invasion. Thus, most of Britain’s military resources (best commanders, troops, etc.) were funnelled into Portugal and Spain.
The British Navy (in somewhat of a post-Nelson malaise) also had to divide its resources between blockading the French, guarding against invasion and popping across the Atlantic so it to was fairly stretched.
So from here, The War of 1812 just doesn’t figure too much as its comparative significance is slight. To be honest, I knew next to nothing of it until coming to the SDMB – I’d image that would be the case for the majority of Brits.
Maybe it deserves more attention.
Along the lines of Dex, my vote goes to the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, esp. on July 4.
Is there any evidence that Britain ever cared to bring the U.S. back under the crown? The impressment issue was more a matter of Britain simply declaring that the seas were “theirs” while they fought France. (Napoleon’s navy was so thoroughly quailed by the end of the War of 1812, that Britain no longer needed to impress sailors to crew their vessels. By the time of the Treaty of Ghent, Britain probably figured it was just too much hassle to keep boarding ships looking for more crew.)
While I have never seen any indication that Britain wanted to reclaim the thirteen lost colonies, the War of 1812 was responsible for getting the Brits to stop casting covetous eyes on Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Prior to the war, Britain had maintained a “presence” in the region that occasionally conflicted with the specifications of the Treaty of Paris. After the war, everything South and West of the Great Lakes was clearly considered to be U.S. territory. From a military perspective, the war in the Great Lakes produced no clear victory for either side. The Brits took Mackinac Island (cleverly), Detroit (rather ignominiously), then the western shore of Lake Erie (rather treacherously). When Perry defeated the British fleet, the British commander began withdrawing from the region, suffering a brutal defeat at the Battle of the Thames. More important than the defeat of the British was the defeat of their indian allies and the death of Tecumseh. This was the action that actually secured the U.S. territory. However, the U.S. commander, William Henry Harrison, did not move on to attack the British at York (Toronto), but pulled back to the Detroit River.
In the next year, the U.S. made several half-hearted (and incompetently led) assaults across the Niagara River. It was the repulse of these attacks that have entered Canadian mythology (mostly because some Canadian militia got thoroughly chewed up during an otherwise clear victory by the British regulars).
So I take it you believe that WWII was started by Britain and France?
To some extent, the lore was true. The Was of 1812 was not fought between the British and the USA: it was fought between the British, Canadians (that’s what they were called then, too) and Indians vs. the USA.
The War of 1812 really STARTED in what is now southern Ontario, when American troops, such as they were, first attempted to invade Canada. The campaign rapidly became a fiasco; Detroit weas lost to a combined force of British regulars, Indian troops under Tecumseh, and Canadian militia. The U.S. general in command, Gen. Hull, was unquestionably the worst general in American history - he made McClellan look like Sun Tzu - and before long that part of the USA was cut off. Some fairly bloody battles were also fought in and around the Niagara peninsula, on up into Toronto (then York) which was burned twice. In all cases, most of the troops fighting on the British side were Canadians, though for much of the war they were commanded by a Brit, Isaac Brock. Once Brock and Tecumseh were dead the war was fought pretty incompetently on both sides, to be quite honest.
The troops that burned Washington and attacked Baltimore WERE British almost to a man, but that was a different theatre of war. The war was fought over a pretty vast area, of course, so both sides drummed up whatever they could find. On most of the battlefields in Ontario, New York, and Michigan, that meant a lot of Canadians and Indians.
As top who won; nobody won, but it’s easy to see who lost; the natives. The Indian nations were completely screwed in the Treaty of Ghent, and it was really that that began the precipitous decline of the aboriginal people as a whole. British plans for a sovereign Indian state were abandoned, and the Indians nations were rapidly gobbled up by the USA, which hated them and wanted them exterminated, and the British and Canadians, who had previously seen them as allies but abandoned them (in a most disgraceful manner) to make the peace.
Fascinating. It really does seem to be a case of history being written for different audiences.
We have the American version, that it was the final stroke for independence and a victory over nasty British policies.
We have the British version that it didn’t really exist outside of the continental Napoleonic Wars.
We have the Canadian version that it was a war of American aggression.
Not one of those stories represents the whole truth, of course. The differences between the British and American versions are obvious; the Canadian version fails to recognize the major battles fought in Louisiana, for instance (which presumably were not directed against Canada.)
We need to hear from the French and Native Americans.
Then we can rename it as the “Rashomon” War (where everyone has a different version of what happened.)
What the heck are you talking about?
I admitted that the U.S. was provoked by British actions at sea. However, the U.S. did launch the first invasion attempt of the war (at a place called Sandwich across from Detroit, July 12 1812). Britain and France may have declared war before Germany did in WWII, but they weren’t the first to launch an invasion in that war, Germany was.
hajario said that he felt the U.S. did better in the war because they kept the British from retaking their colonies. But as several other people have pointed out, that’s not why the War of 1812 was fought. It wasn’t a case of Britain trying to undo the result of the American revolution (although I’m sure they would have enjoyed that), it was the U.S. invading Upper Canada in retaliation for British actions at sea.
Ya’ll haven’t heard of the War of 1812? Dang!
I studied it back in school along with all the other wars we’ve had. It was always considered a draw for all sides, considering that no one really gained any ground. The only good part about it was General Jackson’s successful defense of New Orleans against British forces.
It’s entirely true that neither the US nor Britain really thought this one out before emotions got the better of them, and that nothing militarily truly decisive occurred. Even the sinking of several British warships didn’t really matter overall. It was the equivalent of a thoughtless dis on the street turning into a gang fight.
But the war is taught in US history classes as being about ensuring independence, getting Britain to recognize that the Revolution was irreversible and that the US deserved the same respect from the world’s most powerful nation that it gave other nations. Those results were achieved - Britain stopped impressing US sailors (and is it true that they impressed any country’s men they could find, or just Americans, btw?), they stopped fiddling around in US territories west of the Appalachians, and abandoned the dreams some still had, deluded or not although reflected in British military strategy, of recapturing that part of the Empire.
So even though US objectives didn’t get any more sophisticated than “They can’t push us around anymore!”, those objectives were in fact achieved.