American History Hit - The War of 1812

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

In the early 19th century, amidst the Napoleonic wars, the British began restricting the United States’ trade with Europe. On top of this, the British Navy began recruiting American sailors by force. As a result, on 18th June, 1812, the US declared war. The conflict, between the United States and the British and their Native American allies, lasted until February 1815. With America still a very young nation, trying to assert itself on the world stage, it is often called the second American war of independence.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's the 24th of August 1814 in Washington, D.C., then called Washington City, the Capitol building is burning, set alight by some of the 4,500 British troops

who have marched on the nation's capital following their victory against U.S. forces at the Battle of Bladenburg the very same day. President James Madison, his government and the military have fled, but the president's wife, Dolly Madison, remains in the White House. With the British only minutes away, she too escapes in possession of Gilbert Stewart's famous portrait of George Washington. Soon after, the presidential mansion goes up in flames. What might appear to be a decisive blow to the U.S. is in fact only temporary. The British make no attempt to hold the city. The attack was in return for U.S. incursions into Canada,

and hostilities continue for another six months. The burning of Washington took place during the War of 1812, which in fact lasted, until February 1815, a conflict between the United States and the British and their Native American allies. With the U.S. still a very young nation trying to assert itself on the world stage, this is often called the Second American War of Independence, heralding a new era for a still new nation. Hello, thanks for tuning into American history hit. I'm Don Wildman. And on this episode, well, I'm excited. Because if anyone out there is like me, you've moved through life with a fairly vague notion of what the War of 1812 was really about. It's causes, its consequences. And understandable, though

that may be, after all the 1812 falls between the American Revolution and the Civil War in our early education, it's important to realize that we've missed much if we haven't circled back. So think of today as a gift, an opportunity to close that circle. Well, at least prep you to read a good book on the subject. And for this, we have just the expert and just the book. Don Hickey has been called by the Yorker magazine, the dean of 1812 scholarship. He's written eight books on the subject and too many articles in too many journals to mention, but I've been concentrating on his 1989 publication, War of 1812, The Forgotten Conflict, which is so much the definitive study it was republished in 2012. Thank you, Don Hickey, for agreeing to talk to a novice today. You bet. One comment on my

book, I significantly revised that book in 2012 based on a lot of research. which done by a lot of other scholars as well as myself. So that's the addition I would refer your listeners to. Thank you. It is an engaging read. Every page kind of fills in a blank about what this war was all about. And, you know, if one cares about filling in the puzzle of American history, that's always a rewarding experience.

And it's important. And broadly speaking, the War of 1812 really put this nation on more certain footing. It's sometimes called the Second War of Independence, put us on the path of becoming a serious player. in the world. Not to mention altering the American political landscape. With such important stakes, you call it in that title the Forgotten War. Why do you think? Well, it gets forgotten. The revolution and the Civil War were such bigger wars and so much more consequential that I'm nearly not surprised that the War of 1812 is a forgotten conflict, at least in the United States.

Truly forgotten in the United Kingdom. In Canada, however, it's their war of independence. So it looms pretty large in their history. Interesting. Let's remind listeners where the United States is right now. We're only 1812. We're 36 years out from the Declaration of Independence, about 15 from the U.S. Constitution being ratified. And we've recently doubled our size with the Louisiana purchase in 1803, which is less than a decade before. Still, incidentally, history's greatest real estate coup.

In the timeline of a human life, we are but a toddler experiencing. seeing growing pains. A toddler with a very big toy box. Toddler, maybe. I might say pre-adolescent, maybe a very young teenager. A population of the U.S., by the way, was 7.7 million. At the time of the American Revolution, we were close to three million. So we had more than double the size of the population. Yeah, I think what people are going to take away, I hope, from this conversation, is how ambitiously sophisticated, really, the U.S. was out of the gate. You know, there was a lot going on in this country at this point economically and governmentally for sure. And that kind of emerges through this conversation.

Since we've won our independence from Great Britain, there's been a revolution in France, and the Napoleonic wars have been going on for a decade over in Europe. It's a mess over there. And the U.S. meanwhile, is just trying to figure out how to run itself, you know, and a lot of people how to get rich, which is working out surprisinglyly well. Trade is booming with Britain, of all places, our main trading partner, mainly in cotton and grain. But with France too. And as we approach 1812, this has become problematic. How is America now a growing problem for both the British and the French? Well, the problem for us was that in 1793, Britain and France went to war. And they remained at war almost continuously until 1815. And this was not a war confined to

Europe, but it was waged around the world. And we had a large and growing international commerce and got caught in the middle. And so I would argue that the central problem for American policymakers in this period, and that would be the federalist who controlled the national government in the 1790s, and the Republicans thereafter, the Jeffersonian Republicans. The central policy issue they had to grapple with was how could a second-rate power, like the United States, protect its rights, preserve its neutrality, and promote its other interest in a world that was at war? This was the million-dollar question. that our policymakers face throughout the period.

Part of the difficulty in understanding these issues of the war, it's because there's not a lot of common reference points for us today. I mean, these are early pre-industrial days in America, pre-rearroad. We're still horse and buggies. It's all shipping in agriculture. I mean, I think I learned about this in fifth, maybe seventh grade, I don't know. And the thing I remember is maritime issues. The impressment of sailors by the British was really our point to declare war.

But that could not have been the only reason that a brand, A grand new nation declares war on the world's preeminent military again for the second time. Well, I would argue the two leading causes of the war were, number one, the British orders in consul, which were executive orders issued by the British government that restricted our trade with the continent of Europe, and under the authority of which the British seized four or five hundred American merchant vessels and condemn them in their cargoes. The other issue was the one you mentioned, impressment. The Royal Navy was chronically on. understaffed, and with 500 to 1,000 ships in service, it stopped neutral merchant vessels on the

high seas to reclaim British subjects. The problem was you couldn't tell the difference between a British subject and an American citizen. The language differences were not as pronounced, and as a result, six to nine thousand American citizens got caught in the Royal Navy's Dragnet between 183 and 1812. And that problem of impressment was not only a security. a significant threat to our sovereignty, but a real hardship on those American citizens who found themselves in British service subjected to all the horrors of British naval discipline, enforced with a cat of nine tails, and fighting a war that was not their own. Well, those were the two leading causes of the war.

Now, here's the problem that I think a lot of Americans, even at the time, but especially later on, who looked back at this war, did not understand. we were a second-rate power, seeking to force a truly great power in the midst of a titanic struggle to change policies that that nation considered vital to its war effort. And the only way we could put pressure on Great Britain with our own tiny Navy was by invading and seizing Canada. In principle, the notion was we'd hold it for ransom on the maritime issues. Give up the orders and consulate and impressment, or we're going to

keep Canada. But the administration never actually clarified its position on Canada. So it is entirely possible that if we had conquered it, we might have kept it and, you know, surrender the maritime issues. The problem here was, in my studied opinion, the American conquest of Canada in this period was beyond our means. This war was not winnable. And therefore, at least from a policy perspective was a huge mistake. All of this that you speak of is happening against a backdrop of political transition in America, political turmoil, even in Washington, as power is shifting from the federalists of Washington and Hamilton, H, the strong federal government, to more the Democratic Republicans, the more of a Jeffersonian Republic transition. And Madison, who is the president at this time,

who believes strongly in states' rights in a weaker federal government governing the nation. And all of this will unfold throughout the century in profound and deadly ways, but it's sort of the beginning of what's happening now. Well, this was our first party system, and I would argue that Americans were about as deeply divided then as they are today. We sometimes think today that our situation is unique, but there are a half dozen periods in our history when we were pretty deeply divided. As an aside, the only time we couldn't resolve our differences peacefully was in 1861, and that's when we had our Civil War. The Jeffersonian Republicans, I think, overrated our ability to extract concessions from the great powers of Europe, particularly Great Britain. They tried a series of economic

sanctions between 186 and 1812, the most ambitious of which was Jefferson's embargo, which simply cut off America's export trade. This had a catastrophic effect on the American economy and an equally bad effect on government revenue, which was almost entirely dependent. on taxing trade. When that didn't work, the Republicans went to war in 1812, but I think they're, again, they were deluded into thinking that we could force the British to give up practices, which the British simply were not willing to surrender. Now, as it happens, Great Britain repealed the orders in Council about the time we declared war. And since that was the leading cause of the war, the British actually thought this would bring the war to an end. They released ships. They were

holding in British ports and suspended their military operations in North America, believing that the United States would now agree to peace. But instead, we insisted that the British give up impressments, something they were never going to do. And as a result, the war continued for another two and a half years. So sprawling stuff, and we're mentioning things along the way here that we're going to return back to in this conversation. But I want to also remind listeners that we're dealing with this doubled size of the nation here. The Louisiana Territory. comes along in 1803, and suddenly there's this brand new factor of our society, which is dealing with the indigenous nations, which had previously been used to dealing with the British and the

French, of course, over centuries, who were here for mostly mercantile purposes. They didn't want their land. We did. You know, that was on the horizon as far as certainly the Democratic Republicans. It was time to come to terms with how this was going to work out. How much is this part of the war of 1812? Well, it's an important part. Because Canada had only a population of about a half million, and the British were tied up in Europe, they lined up Indian allies for the defense of Canada. And the great Tashani leader, Ticumsa, developed a confederacy of Indians in the old Northwest that was allied to Great Britain in the war of 1812. Now, the United States effectively shattered that Indian confederacy when it killed Ticumse in the Battle of the Thames. in October of 1813. The Indians did continue to fight on the periphery for another couple of years, but I think effectively they were defeated in the old Northwest. And meanwhile, Andrew Jackson won a series of battles defeating the creeks in the old Southwest. So when the dust cleared at the end of the war of 1812 and the British abandoned their Indian allies, not simply for this war, but permanently,

it meant they were now at our mercy. And as a result, the door swung wide open to American expansion in both the old northwest and the old southwest. The Indians were the big losers in this war. So you see what a broad sketchbook we're on here. I mean, we're talking about kind of how big the nation is at this point, never mind the policy ideas behind how we're surviving as a nation. Let's circle back to one that we've mentioned several times already. The Orders of Council, this is a term we run into a lot at this point of the 19th century, this early point. to me what this was? Well, this was a part of an Anglo-French commercial war. After the British won the Battle of Trafalgar in 1804, they were undisputed mistress of the seas, and France, even with its continental allies,

could not challenge Great Britain on the high seas. Not long after, an 185, 6 Napoleon emerged, with a great victory at Austerlitz against his enemies on the continent of Europe, and that left France supreme on the continent. So by 1806 or so, you have this great war in which the two antagonists cannot get at one another. It's like a battle between a tiger and a shark. They can't engage one another. And so France decided to target Britain's trade. We got caught in the middle. The British retaliated. And thus we found ourselves threatened, our international trade, which was very lucrative, threatened by both of the great European powers as they sought to get at one another. So who issues the orders?

Well, technically, the orders and counsel were issued in the name of the king, but it was actually the British government under the Tories who issued the orders and counsel between 187 and 1809, which sharply curtailed American trade with the continent of Europe. But that was in retaliation to France's continental decrees, issued a little bit earlier, which closed the continent of Europe to any trade from Great Britain or any ships that had stopped. in Great Britain on their way to the European continent.

So you got this major trade war and we're caught in the middle. Right. And the upshot is embargoes, basically, right? I mean, you've got our primary partners both embargoing each other's markets for us. Yes. So suddenly we're caught in the middle of a European conflict, not being able to sell our goods or buy goods, I guess, but mainly sell our goods because we're a huge source of cotton and grain for these places. And that's our survival. Well, yes. Now, it's worth pointing out that even though it looked like American trade with the European continent was impossible under these countervailing restrictions, it either violate the French continental decrees if you sailed through Great Britain or the British Ordersen Council, if you sailed directly to the continent, there were still opportunities for lucky and true to American merchants to make a profit. The Baltic remained open to American trade, the Eastern Mediterranean remained open to American trade.

and after Spain joined Great Britain's coalition, around 1807, the Iberian Peninsula remained open to American trade. And there was a large British army there that had to be fed, and we were happy to send supply ship after supply ship to the Iberian Peninsula to feed those British troops. In addition to these commercial opportunities, there are other ways one might try to circumvent these countervailing British and French restrictions. Some merchants carried dual papers, a legitimate set of papers and a fake set of papers. And depending on who stopped you on the high seas or in a port, you tried to fool them. Now, the danger of this was everybody knew the game, and British and French search parties always look for that second set of papers, because if they could find it, that was prima facie evidence of fraud, and the ship and cargo would be condemned. The other thing that American merchants could do was engage in bribery. Now, it was tough to bribe the British, but a lot easier to bribe the French, and especially

if you happen to be in a French-controlled port on the continent, which was usually run by locals. So you might have an American merchant show up that passed through England with a cargo of Virginia tobacco in, say, Amsterdam. Dutch was under France's control, but you had local Dutch port officials running the show there, and you might have the Dutch port officials say, well, it looks to me, Captain, like you're in violation of the country. continental decrees. You stopped in London on your way here. So it is likely that your ship and cargo are going to be forfeit. Well, the American captain reaches into his pocket. They did have pockets in those short pants they wore and puts some coins on the desk and goes over and looks out the window and

says, ah, Mr. Portofficial, what a glorious day it is in Amsterdam. And the Dutch Portofficial looks at the table and at the coins there, scoops them off, puts them in his pocket and says, Mr. Captain, I see that all is in order, you may unload your cargo. And everybody's happy with this. The British are happy because you complied with the orders and consul. The Dutch official is happy because he's got the jingle of coins in his pocket. Dutch burgers are happy because they have access to the fine tobacco from Virginia to feed their nicotine fit, and the French are happy because they have no idea what just went down.

Yes. These are the gray areas of policy that make the world go. round. Impressment, we've mentioned this as well. I want to define what this means. I grew up thinking, oh, that means kidnapping. It's a much more subtle practice. Well, interesting, the Jeffersonian Republicans did often refer to it as kidnapping, and that's not out of line. The British Navy, which had 500 ships in service in 1812, was probably about 20 percent understaffed on its warships. And the rule in Great Britain was once a British subject, always a British subject. So they maintained the right to remove British subjects, even if they'd become Americanized citizens, although very few had, or excuse me, naturalized citizens.

It just wasn't worth the effort. But the British Navy reserved the right to stop American merchant vessels on the high seas, muster the crew. And they would interview the crewman to see whether they were British or American. and sometimes they were pretty easily able to figure it out. They'd ask the crewman, well, where were you born? I was born in Baltimore, sir, and what state is that in? That's in the state of Boston, sir. That's where I come from.

Bosons made, take that man and put him on our ship. But there were other times when the British didn't care. You'd get a junior midshipman 15, 16 years old, feeling his oats in charge of a press gang on board an American merchant vessel, and he would just say, you, you, you, and you are British subjects and will be serving on my ship. And some poor American citizen says, but sir, I'm an American citizen. Bozens mate, give that man 12 stripes across his back for speaking disrespectfully to his majesty's officer. And you're stuck.

There was no way a little merchant vessel could face down a British warship. About all the American merchants could do, they were required by law to report. any impressments in the United States. The U.S. government might try to acquire evidence that you were indeed an American citizen, and if they did, they would send it to London. And if London felt this evidence was compelling, they would order your release. That could be two or three years down the road, and in the meantime, you're confined to a British warship.

And the British rule was if you accepted the King's bounty, the enlistment bounty, didn't matter whether you'd been impressed or not. You were now a volunteer, and they weren't going to release you. There are two factoids that jump out to me. One, the method of the madness here, because one of the facts was so many young men in Britain were coming to the new world to America to, you know, chase their dreams. And they were siphoning off those young sailors that would be available for the Navy, who was in the process fighting wars in Europe. So part of it was just resupplying their men from American ships who were coming out. The other thing I read about was the fact that some people could actually see British,

ships sitting offshore waiting for American ships to come out? I mean, it was that kind of pipeline, right? Well, a couple of observations on this. It was pretty easy. As our merchant fleet expanded rapidly with our international trade in this period, largely because we're in a war torn world, there are just a lot of commercial opportunities, a lot of money to be made. It wasn't hard to get British tars, as they might be called, because they work with tar a lot, to sign on to American merchant vessels. The pay was better than the Royal Navy. The working conditions were better, no cat of nine tails, and the tour of duty was shorter. If you signed up for service on an American merchant vessel, you signed up for a limited tour, maybe a voyage from the United States to the

British West Indies or to Great Britain or maybe to the Far East. In the British Navy, there was no limited tour. Once you were in service, you weren't released until the Navy demobilized. unless you were taken out in a bag or with a serious wound or injury as a result of your service. So it was very easy to attract British tars to fill out American crews just because the conditions were so much better. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Many Americans felt were tired of being bullied. That was a big kind of theme of life in those days. And we'd beaten the British once.

It was time to get rid of these guys and chase them out of Canada. There was a lot of boisterous noise about this stuff. How does this war actually begin? When is the first shot fired? Well, we declared war on June 18th, 1812, and I think there was a brief naval engagement off the coast of North America. I've forgotten where it was. I might have been off the coast of Massachusetts a few days later.

And a British warship escaped. It wasn't much of an engagement, just an exchange of fire. That ship made it to Halifax and said, hey, boys, I'm. I think we're at war now, and word spread across Canada. And the Canadians actually had a, their fur traders had a system for spreading this kind of information quickly, an express system. So the war spread to Western Canada a lot faster than it did to the United States. And there really wasn't a major battle until a couple of months into the war, because we had

marched a military force up to Detroit. And I think that Detroit surrendered on the 16th of August, if memory serves me right. American Army was defeated. It's a story in and of itself. The commanding general there, a guy named William Hull had lost his nerve. He was old incapacitated. And a British threatened an Indian massacre, and he said, okay, we surrender. But you have to remember the pace of communication in the age of sail and the age of wagons and horses,

was a lot slower than it is today. So everything moves at a much more deliberate pace in those days. Yeah, much of the military action takes place in the northwest territories, the great lakes, but all up and down the Atlantic seaboard. I've always thought of it as a maritime war. That's not correct, is it? No, we couldn't match the British on the high seas. We did win some single ship engagements that they were strategically unimportant. And we did threaten their trade, but the British convoy system was actually pretty effective in keeping their trade together in spite of the activities of American privateers. I think it's worth remembering how widespread this war actually was in North America.

By my count, there were something like nine different theaters of operation. Three or four on the northern frontier with Canada, maybe three along the Atlantic seaboard, Maine, the Chesapeake and Georgia. And then there was the Gulf Coast. And then there was another front around St. Louis that primarily involved us with Great Britain's Indian allies. So it was a war that, in a way, was fought all around the periphery of North America, or at least of the United States. The famous events of the War of 1812 kind of happened toward the latter part, and we'll get to those in a moment. The earlier is really about Canada, isn't it?

It's this mission that if we get Canada, we can hold that hostage, as you said. Did we make progress in that department at all? Well, a little bit of progress in 1813. Oliver H. Perry won a great naval victory against the British squadron on Lake Erie, and whoever controlled the lakes control the surrounding land. The British found after that defeat they could no longer supply their forces on the Detroit frontier and a huge number of Indian allies and their dependents. And so they withdrew to the interior.

William Henry Harrison chased after. them with an army of about 3,000 strong and caught off with them about 75 miles east of Detroit. The result was the Battle of the Thames in which the United States defeated a smaller British force and its Indian allies and in the process killed the great Indian leader, Tacomsa. Now that meant that thereafter that part of North America was under American control. That victory was just too far west to shape the outcome of the war. too far removed from the centers of power and population in eastern Canada, mainly Montreal and Quebec, to bring us any closer to the conquest of Canada. So we did enjoy success in the West,

but it wasn't going to bring Canada into our hands. I always wonder about these earlier wars, how strategic those leaders were being in terms of creating and forming the nation. One of the great objectives of the North was access to the St. Lawrence River, which leads into the Great Lakes. how much were those Washington leaders, the American leaders, thinking of the future of the nation in fighting this war? Were there objectives they could see if they win it's going to be better for us? Or was it just a reactionary conflict? Well, you have to remember, we had no war planning agency in the war department at the time. And we kind of developed our strategy on the fly a few months before the war.

And they talked about how best to seize Canada. and they came up with a three-pronged attack in the west along the Niagara frontier and then along the Lake Champlain axis, which led to Montreal. And the idea was we'd launch these three invasions simultaneously and they would succeed in conquering Canada. I don't think that was at all possible for us to achieve. Beyond that, there just wasn't a lot of thought put into how we were going to accomplish these three missions. The logistics of waging war in the North American wilderness were just insurmountable obstacles. It was even harder for the British because they had to ship everything across the Atlantic. But at least they had a system in place because of their long-term wars on the continent of Europe.

And they had the money to support their logistical operations. But we had all kinds of problems. Even though our centers of production were a lot closer than the British had to connect. intend with. Let's talk about James Madison, his outlook on this war and where he falls in the pantheon of American presidents. Well, he was a great man in a lot of ways, but he was a retiring, scholarly type guy. It wasn't, I don't think, well cut out to be a war leader. One of his great attributes is he resisted the urge of most war leaders to crush any domestic opponents. That has happened in almost every war we fought. How do we silence the opponents of this war? That's what an administration

headed by a strong president often thinks about. Madison didn't think that way. He understood that if you're going to believe in freedom, it's got to extend to your domestic opponents as well as your followers. But he was a weak war leader. He tolerated opposition and disloyalty in his cabinet. He was slow to change his generals in the field. He just wasn't a war leader that you need for aggressive action in a war.

Yeah, his legacy really comes down through the U.S. Constitution, which he is a huge architect of. I think of archetypal moments, sort of set pieces when I think of the War of 1812. And I'm being random in my thinking here, but the USS Constitution, which people know because it sits in harbor in Boston to this day, plays a big part in the symbol of this war.

Am I right? Absolutely. Constitution had four successful cruises. It defeated several British ships in actions on the high seas. And while, as I mentioned, these were strategically unimportant, they gave a great boost to American morale because we were able to face down, at least in these single ship engagements, the most powerful Navy the history had ever seen on the high seas. So that was a great boost to morale. And I think the USS Constitution emerged as a kind of symbol of the rising America. And it was almost

dismantled in the late 19th century, but they kept it intact, and I think it was FDR who restored it to the U.S. Navy. So to this day, or at least now, it is part of the U.S. Navy, but it's basically a tourist attraction. It's been restored to what it was like in 1812. You can tour it and see what a mid-sized vessel, warship, a frigate, look like. It's part of the big legacy of this war. We got a lot of symbols and sayings and images that helped us define who we were. And the Constitution was just one of those. Sure. What happens in 1813 to 14 is what people mostly remember, these big events that happen,

especially, of course, the attack on Fort McHenry. I'm plucking this out of a vastness of this war's story. But bring us to that moment and give me the context of what then becomes the beginning of the national anthem. Well, the character of this war changed fundamentally in the spring of 1814 when Napoleon was defeated in Europe, because that meant the British could devote their military and naval assets to this kind of pesky side show, the American War across the Atlantic. So this ceases to become a war in which we're likely to conquer Canada or even try to conquer it. And it becomes a war in defense of American soil. The British take the offensive in the last year of the war.

They invade Upper New York. They invade the Chesapeake. They invade at Georgia, and they launch a major campaign on the Gulf Coast. Now, that Chesapeake campaign represents one of the low and one of the high points for the United States because the British occupied Washington burned some of the public buildings and then forced the government to flee for about a week or so. and that becomes really the low point for the United States in this war. An enemy occupies our capital and burns the White House, the Capitol buildings, and several other public buildings.

But that's followed several weeks later by the successful defense of Fort McHenry, which prevents a British army, which was threatening Baltimore from getting naval support and compelling Baltimore to submit. One can visit Fort McHenry these days and understand that the complexities of that naval battle, that siege, really. It's a fascinating strategy they were following. I learned that when I did a TV show there. Can you explain how that worked? I think it's a really interesting examination of British naval techniques. Well, the British had lined up a force of maybe 4,500 for an assault on Baltimore. But they found that the local general there, a guy named

Sam Smith, had called out 10 or 15,000 militia, and they were dug in on the east and northern side of Baltimore. And so it was going to be a tough engagement if the British were likely to assault. It wasn't going to be like Washington, where they defeated a largely militia ban in the Battle of Bladensburg and then marched into the capital city, which was now wide open. So what the British commander asked the Navy to do was to sail into the harbor and soften up the American lines. But in order to do that, the Navy had to silence the guns of Fort McKinery, which protected the entrance to the harbor. The British sent a squadron of bomb and rocket ships up the river, and they bombarded Fort McInory for a little over 24 hours straight, but we're unable to do

enough damage to compel it to submit. And so that squadron withdrew, the British naval commander, told the Army commander, we're just not going to be able to help you out. And the Army commander withdrew, and Baltimore was saved. The British ships basically line up in a horseshoe, and they sort of sail in and each at its given time when their broadside is facing the fort, fire off their guns, and then sail onward. And it's sort of this conveyor belt of armament coming in to shoot. And that's how this goes on for such a long period of time throughout the night, which is, of course, important because somewhere in the midst of all of this, famously, the lawyer Francis Scott Key comes to negotiate on behalf of a client and spends the night on one of these ships during this great siege that was going on.

The British squadron of bomb and rocket ships realized in their initial fire that they were a little bit too close to the big coastal guns of Fort McKinney. But if they drew back a little bit, Fort McHenry would be within their range, but they would be beyond the range of Fort McHenry's guns. And so thereafter pretty much had a free hand during that bombardment. But they just couldn't compel Fort McHenry to submit. Ultimately, the damage was fairly minor. Now, Francis Scott Key was a 30-year-old lawyer in Georgetown, and the British had taken a doctor by the name of Beans as a prisoner. Francis Scott Key goes to Madison's administration and says, let me travel to the British fleet under a flag of truce, see if I can get Beans released. And so he goes actually with an American official, a guy who handled British POWs under a flag of truce to the British fleet, which was down in Chesapeake Harbor, about nine miles. away from Fort McKinney. The British say, okay, we're going to release beans, but you guys can't

leave until after this engagement at Fort McKinery is over, because we don't want you sharing any vital intelligence. So the two ship is held under the guns of a British warship about nine miles away from Fort McKinney. And Francis Scott Key, who, by the way, was a federalist, most of whom opposed the war, paces a ship all night long and watches the bombardment. And in the morning, he first of all sees the British Bahaman rocket ships come back down to the mouth of the river. That's a good sign. If they had prevailed, they would probably not be there. And then at 9 a.m., he hears Yankee Dunel being played nine miles away at the fort as they raised the big Garrison flag, 32 by 40 feet, the Fort McKinery flag, actually didn't fly during the bombardment. It was too

pricey to risk during a bombardment. But after it was over, they sent it. up, and I think he gets out a spyglass, because I don't think he could have seen it with the negative eye. He sees the flag go up. And he's moved to write this song, which initially is entitled Defense of Fort McKinney. It's published as a broadside a couple days later in Baltimore, subsequently renamed the Star-Spangled Banner, becomes a very popular patriotic air in the 19th century. And then in 1931, largely as a result of a movement headed by John Philip Sousa, Congress names it the national anthem, and it has been our anthem ever since. There you go. A truly inspiring story. One of the other figures that emerges, and this is the reason

that it's important to understand this war, is that there's really big figures involved here. Andrew Jackson, toward the latter part, all the way through the war and even back to the American Revolution, he was involved in the military. But particularly at the end, he's made famous by the Battle of New Orleans, which is really at the very tail end of the war. His emergence, and his heroic status at the end of this conflict really launches him into the big time in terms of American politics, eventually becoming president, and now on our $20 bill, still to this day. Explain his strategy in New Orleans and what was so bold about his endeavor there. Jackson was really a great military leader.

And unlike some of the antiquated generals on the northern frontier, he led from the front. Now, the advantage of defending New Orleans was it was about 80s. miles up from the Gulf Coast. It was impossible for the Royal Navy to provide adequate protection. You just couldn't get up the Mississippi because of the turns and the American forts there. So you had a British Army basically acting without any naval support. And Jackson had a very strong earthwork established south of New Orleans running from the Mississippi River to an impennerable Cyprus swamp. And the British had to get through that. And they just couldn't. It was about 20 feet. wide, solid earth, and maybe, depending on where you were, four to eight feet tall,

and the American just sat behind those earthworks and fired artillery and small arms at the advancing British who were wide open and exposed, and the result was a British military catastrophe. They suffered a couple of thousand casualties in maybe 45 minutes. Jackson's own casualties on the line 13. Probably the most lopsided, defecutive. any British Army has ever sustained. Don, how does this war end? The United States is thrown on the defensive after the British made peace with their enemies in Europe

in the spring of 1814 and can now concentrate on what had been a side show to them. And the British really had the United States on the run in 1814. They took the offensive. We didn't have enough men in service to stay the course in the war. We're running out of money. the government actually defaulted on the national debt in 1814.

There was a kind of secessionist movement in New England. Federalists were fed up with this war and we're talking about leaving the union. There were just all kinds of problems that the U.S. faced. And it was now prepared to win the war without any agreement on impressment. And I would say by late 1814 with their military operations, their offensive operations not going as well as they'd hoped, the British were now ready for peace as well. You have to remember the British were war-wary.

They'd been waging war for 20 years. So you reached a point where both sides just wanted to bring this war to an end. And that's what led to the Treaty of Ghent, which provided for returning to the status quo antebellum, the state that existed before the war, as if the war had never been fought. Is that true, in your opinion? Did anything get accomplished? There's an old saw that everybody's happy with the outcome of this war. The Americans are happy because they think they won. The Canadians are happier because they know they won.

And the British were happiest of all because they've forgotten all about the war. There's some truth in that. The British certainly did forget about this war. The battle they remembered from 1815 was, of course, Waterloo. No one in Great Britain remembered New Orleans, no did they care to remember New Orleans. But in America, the story was very different. We focused on the victories late in the war, particularly at New Orleans. And the myth developed that we had won the war, that we had prevented the British from trying to recolonize the United States,

which was pure fantasy. The British had no interest in that. And that we had successfully defeated the conquer of Napoleon and the mistress of the seas. That was the myth of the American victory. So you can argue that Americans kind of think this war vindicated their sovereignty. And we get all these symbols and sayings out of the war that helped define us. Uncle Sam starts being used as a reference to the U.S. government. We get the national anthem. We have the great flag at Fort McHenry, which survives today at the Smithsonian. We have sayings like, don't give up the ship. We have met the enemy in their hours. And we have symbols like the great Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, all of which help, I think, the American people kind of define what their

country is all about and what it means to be an American. Now, by the same token, the Canadians can look at this as a great war. They didn't think much about it until after the Confederation was established in 1867, and they essentially become independent, at which point they look back and conclude that this was really their war of independence, because they had staved off this attempt of the United States to conquer and annexed Canada. For the British, it's an important turning point because it marks a fundamental change in their foreign policy. When the war is over, they still have to wrestle with the problem of how do you defend Canada from an aggressive, expansionistic and growing power to the South?

They concluded that lining up Indian allies just didn't work, and so they abandoned their Indian allies permanently and decide the best way to protect Canada is to accommodate the United States. Try to avoid trouble with the United States, hoping American expansion will proceed to the west and to the south and not to the north. And it turns out this works out pretty well. There are some rough periods and some war scares in Anglo-American affairs in the 19th century. But by 1871, most of the issues have either disappeared or resolved in an important Anglo-American treaty that year, the Treaty of Washington. And the upshot of this is by 1890, there's a genuine Anglo-American accord. That turns into co-belligerency in World War I and a full-fledged alliance in World War II that persists to this day. So I would argue the British foreign policy of accommodation was vindicated over the next 175 years.

book that I like to read, of your many, is the War of 1812, The Forgotten Conflict. The author is Don Hickey. Folks, it's a very important thing. This is the beginning of really the expansion of the United States to not understand the basic building blocks of that, much of which come out of the War of 1812, not least of which is the figures involved, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, these future leaders who are going to really figure out how the country runs over the next several decades coming up to the Civil War. All that is in this story, and you can find it in this good man's work. Thank you so much for joining us, Don Hickey. I hope I meet you again. Well, my pleasure. Thank you, Don. This has been great fun. Thanks for listening to this episode

of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.