The War of 1812

The United States declared war in June 1812 for two tangled reasons. On the Atlantic, Britain was seizing American sailors through impressment and choking neutral trade while fighting Napoleon. On the frontier, Britain was arming and encouraging Tecumseh's confederacy, a coalition of Native nations resisting American expansion into the Northwest. War Hawks in Congress, mostly southern and western congressmen like Henry Clay, wanted war to end British meddling on the frontier and saw a chance to seize Canada. New England, whose merchants profited from Atlantic trade even under British restrictions, opposed a war that threatened their livelihood. This regional split meant the republic never fought as one united country.

The war played out in three theaters. In Canada, American invasions repeatedly failed, and Tecumseh's death at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 broke the Native confederacy's power in the Northwest. In the Chesapeake, British forces landed in 1814, marched on Washington, and burned the Capitol and White House in retaliation for earlier American burning of York. They then pushed on to Baltimore, but Fort McHenry held through a night of bombardment, inspiring Francis Scott Key's poem that became the national anthem. In the Gulf theater, Andrew Jackson defended New Orleans against a British invasion in January 1815.

That victory at New Orleans came after the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed in Europe in December 1814, restoring prewar boundaries and settling nothing about impressment or trade rights. News simply hadn't crossed the Atlantic yet. The war's real legacy was psychological and political: a surge of nationalism, the end of Native resistance east of the Mississippi as a major obstacle, and the collapse of the Federalist Party, which had opposed the war at the Hartford Convention.