On Christmas Eve 1814, the US and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent, which put an end to the War of 1812. It was the last time both countries were in direct conflict with each other. So in this episode, I'm going to find out exactly how it started, what happened, and its importance in shaping the future of the United States. As I ask, what is the War of 1812? Welcome to America, a history podcast. 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. His books include the Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812, which we'll also link to in the show notes, so you can read up further after this. Welcome to the podcast. Professor Andrew Lambert, thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Really good to have you on the podcast. And I figured as we've got an episode, conveniently time to go out on Christmas Eve, it felt appropriate to honour the Treaty of Ghent and the War of 1812 more broadly. So I'm going to preface this by saying that, you know, there are some episodes where I feel like I have a little bit of knowledge. 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. You know, who actually fought in the War of 1812?

So the War of 1812 is linked into the wider Napoleonic wars, which run from 1803 to 1815. In that war, Britain is using economic warfare as a means of breaking the French war effort. 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 it's found a perfect occasion to try and persuade the people in New England who are actually running all of these ships to support the war. The irony is that the people of New England do not support the War of 1812. They don't mobilize their militia. 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. The Civil War is the North's return for what the south and center was trying to do in the War of 1812. So the two main combatants are Britain and the United States. Britain Global Empire. United States rising Republic. 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 are going to be not the British or the Americans, but the Native Americans whose political and military power is broken in this war, which allows that great Sweep westward. We often forget that before the American settlers can settle the west, they have to get rid of the people who live there. 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.

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. Canada was, was a sort of early 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?

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 with the capture of Quebec. And then the next year Montreal fell and it's been under British rule. 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.

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?

Yes. And the aggression begins early and it continues right the way through the 19th century. When we get to 1898, we have the Spanish American War and the Americans finish what they started in 1800, grabbing Spanish territory in the New World. And of course, along the way they've also grabbed territory from Mexico. 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.

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?

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. And if you read the American school textbooks, you'll find that they did indeed win the War of 1812 quite convincingly because they managed to forget all of the battles they lost and the details of the treaty by which it was completed. So there's a willing suspension of disbelief about this. The Americans managed to create a version of the story that suits their purposes.

Yeah.

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.

I think on that note, though, like, why. Why did the War of 1812 become so significant? If the British had other more important things to worry about, why did this turn into what it did?

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. The incumbent regime, which has started this war and has not won it by any stretch of the imagination, is desperate to find some way out of this. So, as you mentioned, the peace is signed in Ghent in Belgium on Christmas Eve, 1814. Why? Because Belgium is occupied by British troops. 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. News comes through from New Orleans that Andrew Jackson has won a great victory against the British outside the city of New Orleans. So in the American version, the Battle of New Orleans decides the War of 1812, which then leads to a peace which clearly must be in American favor. 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.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

The War of 1812 exists today in America in a form which is not much related to what it was in 1810, 1812, 1814. Because that's the way that America wants it.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. Well, hopefully, maybe this podcast will change things. The millions of people that will listen to this and suddenly have an interest in the War of 1812. But I'm, I'm actually interested to look at the, the naval aspect of this war because it's something that you explore in your book. 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.

This war in 1812? The British do not have any spare troops. They're not going to send an army to North America. They. 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. So there's a huge synergy. The Americans take the risk of 1812 going to war because they know Napoleon is marching into Russia and they assume Napoleon will win and win easily. 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. The two battles that are particularly important here are the Capture of the USS Chesapeake by HMS Shannon, 1813 battle that took 13 minutes to finish, because the British captain was a male genius. And the last battle of the war was the capture of the American flagship, USS President of Long Island. 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. Then of course, in the middle of 1814, the war in Europe finishes really quickly. Napoleon abdicates, it's all over. The British are in Bordeaux in France, British army. 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, the United States government has no money. Its credit now is running out very, very quickly. And you can't wage war without money. So the British strategy has worked. 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.

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?

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 the British have been at war with France for 22 years and they've stacked up the kind of national debt we're a bit worried about at the moment. Not on health crises and such things, but just on waging war. 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. They'd learned that lesson these, the rebellion had persuaded them that the Americans were not loyal subjects of the King ever again. And doing it by military force, the British had no interest in that. It failed in the 1770s, it wasn't going to work in the 1810s. 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 and they just persisted until they got it.

Yeah. So from what you've said this, this might be an obvious question, but how might the future of America have been different had they won the War of 1812?

So if American victory in the War of 1812 would have involved taking Canada, which wouldn't have given them a huge boost of population, but it would have given them access to a lot more resources and particularly forest products, animal pelts, things like this. So it gives them a large area to expand into which they might have expanded into at the same time they were moving westward. It might have speeded up the westward process because they, they would not have been distracted by British anymore war. And of course by the 1840s they'd taken territory away from Mexico. So the expansive nature of the United States is restrained by this war. It might have gone further. There were many in America in the 1820s, 30s, 40s who thought that the whole of the Americas was really theirs to take. 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.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. And I think that there's a definite theme in almost everything we've spoken about on this podcast to date, which is this sort of ruthless expansionism that, that drove what the Americans did, certainly for the first kind of 100 or more years, that they were a republic. And that clearly was very consistent with, with what happened during the War of 1812 and why it happened to sort of bring this to some sort of close. 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?

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. You, you find as a, as a historian of The War of 1812, the American text pile up. The British texts don't appear. You can't really have a serious history of a war in which you're only looking at one side. 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. So if you want the full story, some of it is going to be new research. Yeah, I noticed in 1812 there was a lot of American publication.

Very, very well, this has been a fascinating 101, I guess, into the War of 1812, and there's far more to discuss. I think we'll we'll, we'll wrap this up here. 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.

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.

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. If you enjoyed this podcast though, please leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening to this and because it boosts up the algorithms and helps other people find us, which makes us very happy and also give us a follow. So all future episodes just appear magically in your feed as well. And do follow the links in the show notes to support the show from as little as £1. You'll help us keep the lights on, keep making the show, and we really appreciate that. We're also going to record a bonus episode straight after this recording and if you do become a subscriber subscriber, you'll get access to that at the same time that this episode drops. Otherwise you'll have to wait just a few days. But thank you so much for listening and goodbye.