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Essay on The War Of 1812 Was Fought Between The United States And Great Britain From
| Date: |
11-20-00 8:27am |
| Subject: |
History |
| Word Count: |
3649 |
| Page Count: |
14.6 |
The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and Great Britain from
June 1812 to the spring of 1815, although the peace treaty ending the war was signed in
Europe in December 1814. The main land fighting of the war occurred along the
Canadian border, in the Chesapeake Bay region, and along the Gulf of Mexico; there was
also fighting that took place at sea.
There were many reasons for the Americans to go to war with the British. From
the end of the American Revolution in 1783, the United States had been irritated by the
failure of the British to withdraw from American territory along the Great Lakes, their
backing of the Indians on America's frontiers, and their unwillingness to sign commercial
agreements favorable to the United States. American resentment grew during the French
Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, in which Britain and France were the two
main countries. In time, France came to dominate much of Europe, while Britain
remained the supreme naval force on the seas. The two countries also fought each other
commercially: Britain attempted to blockade the continent of Europe, and France tried to
prevent the sale of British goods in French possessions. French and British maritime
policies produced several crises with the United States, but after 1803 the difficulties
became much more serious. The British Orders in Council of 1807 declared that anyone
who trades with the French would have their ships seized, and France's Berlin and Milan
decrees of 1806 and 1807 declared that anyone who trades with the British would have
their ships seized by the French. The United States believed its rights on the seas as a
neutral country were being violated by both France and England, but British maritime
policies were resented more because Britain dominated the seas. Also, the British
claimed the right to take from American merchant ships any British sailors who were
serving on them. Frequently, they also took Americans. This practice of became a major
grievance of the Americans.
The United States at first attempted to change the policies of the European
powers by economic means. In 1807, after the British H.M.S. Leopard fired on the
American ship called the Chesapeake, President Thomas Jefferson Congress to pass an
Embargo Act, banning all American ships from foreign trade. The Embargo Act failed to
change British and French policies, but devastated New England shipping.
Failing in peaceful efforts and facing an economic depression, some Americans
began to argue for a declaration of war to redeem the national honor. The Congress that
was elected in 1810 and met in November 1811 included a group known as the War
Hawks who demanded war against Great Britain. These men were mostly from the West
and South. Among their leaders were John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Henry Clay of
Kentucky, and Felix Grundy of Tennessee. They argued that American honor could be
saved and British policies changed by an invasion of Canada. The Federalist Party,
representing New England shippers who foresaw the ruination of their trade, opposed
war.
Napoleon's announcement in 1810 of the revocation of his decrees was followed
by British refusals to repeal their orders, and pressures for war increased. On June 18,
1812, President James Madison signed a declaration of war that Congress, with
substantial opposition, had passed at his request. Unknown to Americans, Britain had
finally, two days earlier, announced that it would revoke its order.
U.S. forces were not ready for war, and American hopes of conquering Canada
collapsed in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813. The initial plan called for a three-pronged
attack: from Lake Champlain to Montreal, across the Niagara frontier, and into Upper
Canada from Detroit. The attacks were uncoordinated and all failed. In the West, General
William Hull surrendered Detroit to the British in August 1812. On the Niagara front,
American troops lost the Battle of Queenston Heights in October. Along Lake Champlain
the American forces withdrew in late November without seriously engaging the enemy.
American ships won a series of single-ship engagements with British ships, and
American privateers continually bothered British shipping. The captains and crew of the
ships Constitution and United States became renowned throughout America. Meanwhile,
the British gradually tightened a blockade around America's coasts, ruining American
trade, threatening American finances, and exposing the entire coastline to British attack.
American attempts to invade Canada in 1813 were again mostly unsuccessful. There was
a standoff at Niagara, and an attempt to attack Montreal by a combined operation
involving one force advancing along Lake Champlain and another sailing down the Saint
Lawrence River from Lake Ontario failed at the end of the year. The only success was in
the West. The Americans won control of the Detroit frontier region when Oliver Hazard
Perry’s ships destroyed the British fleet on Lake Erie. This victory forced the British to
retreat eastward from the Detroit region, and on October 5, 1813, they were overtaken
and defeated at the battle of the Thames by an American army under the command of
General William Henry Harrison. In this battle the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who
had harassed the northwestern frontier since 1811, was killed while fighting on the
British side.
In 1814 the United States faced complete defeat, because the British, having
defeated Napoleon, began to transfer large numbers of ships and experienced troops to
America. The British planned to attack the United States in three main areas: in New
York along Lake Champlain and the Hudson River in order to sever New England from
the union, at New Orleans to block the Mississippi, and in Chesapeake Bay as a
diversionary maneuver. The British then hoped to obtain major territorial concessions in
a peace treaty. The situation was particularly serious for the United States because the
country was insolvent by the fall of 1814, and in New England opponents of the war were
discussing separation from the Union. The Hartford Convention that met in Connecticut
in December 1814 and January 1815 stopped short of such an extreme step but suggested
a number of constitutional amendments to restrict federal power.
The British appeared near success in the late summer of 1814. American
resistance to the attack in Chesapeake Bay was so weak that the British, after winning the
Battle of Bladensburg, marched into Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public
buildings. President Madison had to flee into the countryside. The British then turned to
attack Baltimore but met stiffer resistance and were forced to retire after the American
defense of Fort McHenry, which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words of the
"Star-spangled Banner."
In the north, about 10,000 British veterans advanced into the United States from
Montreal. Only a weak American force stood between them and New York City, but on
September 11, 1814, American Captain Thomas MacDonough won the naval battle of
Lake Champlain, destroying the British fleet. Fearing the possibility of a severed line of
communications, the British army retreated into Canada.
In late 1814 New Orleans was home to a population of French, Spanish, African,
Anglo, and Creole peoples dedicated to pursuing economic success and the joys of life. It
also occupied a strategic place on the map. Located just one hundred miles upstream
from the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Crescent City offered a tempting prize to a
British military still buoyant over the burning of Washington, D.C. To capture the city,
Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane fitted out a naval flotilla of more than fifty ships to
transport ten thousand veteran troops from Jamaica. They were led by Sir Edward
Pakenham, the 37-year-old brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington and a decorated
general officer.
For protection, the citizens of southern Louisiana looked to Major General
Andrew Jackson, known to his men as "Old Hickory" (Cooke 27). Jackson arrived in new
Orleans in the late fall of 1814 and quickly prepared defenses along the city's many
avenues of approach.
Meanwhile, the British armada scattered an American fleet in Lake Borgne, a
shallow arm of the Gulf of Mexico east of New Orleans, and evaluated their options.
Two British officers, disguised as Spanish fishermen, discovered an unguarded
waterway, Bayou Bienvenue, that provided access to the east bank of the Mississippi
River barely nine miles downstream from New Orleans. On December 23 the British
vanguard poled its way through a maze of sluggish streams and crossed marshy land to
emerge unchallenged a day's march from their goal.
Two American officers, whose plantations had been taken by the British,
informed Jackson that the enemy was at the gates. "Gentlemen, the British are below, we
must fight them tonight," the general declared (Rutland 68). He quickly launched a
nighttime surprise attack that, although tactically a draw, gained valuable time for the
outnumbered Americans. Startled by their opponents' boldness, the British decided to
defer their advance toward New Orleans until all their troops could be brought in from
the fleet.
Jackson used this time well. He retreated three miles to the Chalmette Plantation on the
banks of the Rodriguez Canal, a wide, dry ditch that marked the narrowest strip of solid
land between the British camps and New Orleans. Here Jackson built a fortified mud
rampart, 3/5 mile long and anchored on its right by the Mississippi River and on the left
by a cypress swamp.
While the Americans dug in, General Pakenham readied his attack plans. On
December 28 the British launched a strong advance that Jackson fought off with the help
of the Louisiana, an American ship that blasted the British left flank with broadsides
from the river. Four days later Pakenham tried to bombard the Americans into
submission with an artillery barrage, but Jackson's gunners stood their ground.
The arrival of fresh troops during the first week of January 1815 gave the British new
hope. Pakenham decided to cross the Mississippi downstream with a strong force and
overwhelm Jackson's thin line of defenders on the river bank opposite the Rodriguez
Canal. Once these redcoats were in position to pour flank fire across the river, heavy
columns would assault each flank of the American line, then pursue the defenders six
miles into New Orleans. Units carrying fascines, bundled sticks used to construct
fortifications, and ladders to bridge the ditch and scale the ramparts would precede the
attack, which would begin at dawn January 8 to take advantage of the early morning fog.
It was a solid plan in conception, but flawed in execution. The force on the west bank
was delayed crossing the river and did not reach its goal until well after dawn. Deprived
of their misty cover, the main British columns had no choice but to advance across the
open fields toward the Americans, who waited expectantly behind their mud and
cotton-bale barricades. To make matters worse, the British forgot their ladders and
fanciness, so they had no easy means to close with the protected Americans.
Never has a more polyglot army fought under the Stars and Stripes than did Jackson's
force at the Battle of New Orleans. In addition to his regular U.S. Army units, Jackson
counted on dandy New Orleans militia, a sizable contingent of black former Haitian
slaves fighting as free men of color, Kentucky and Tennessee frontiersmen armed with
deadly long rifles and a colorful band of Jean Lafitte's outlaws, whose men Jackson had
once disdained as "hellish banditti" (Sugden 264). This group of 4,000 soldiers, crammed
behind narrow fortifications, faced more than twice their number.
Pakenham's assault was doomed from the beginning. His men made perfect
targets as they marched precisely across a quarter mile of open ground. Hardened
veterans of the Peninsular Campaign in Spain fell by the score, including nearly 80
percent of a splendid Scottish Highlander unit that tried to march obliquely across the
American front. Both of Pakenham's senior generals were shot early in the battle, and the
commander himself suffered two wounds before a shell severed an artery in his leg,
killing him in minutes. His successor wisely disobeyed Pakenham's dying instructions to
continue the attack and pulled the British survivors off the field. More than 2,000 British
had been killed or wounded and several hundred more were captured. The American loss
was eight killed and thirteen wounded.
Jackson's victory had saved New Orleans, but it came after the war was over. The
Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812 but resolved none of the issues that
started it, had been signed in Europe weeks before the action. The treaty of Ghent
included an agreement to have no forts made on the U.S. and Canada border.
One man who had a major impact on the War of 1812 was a Shawnee Indian
Chief named Tecumseh. In 1774 the Hathawekela Shawnee had left Ohio and moved to
the Upper Creek in northern Alabama. Tecumseh's mother, who had just lost her husband
at the battle of Point Pleasant, went with them but left her two sons to be raised by their
older sister Tecumpease. Tecumseh and his brother grew up as orphans. Large groups of
Shawnee had left Ohio in 1773 and 1779 and settled in southeast Missouri. The Spanish
appreciated them as a defense against the Americans. Spanish people came to Ohio in
1788 to urge more Shawnee and Delaware to emigrate, and more groups left. In 1793
Baron de Carondelet, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, gave the Missouri Shawnee a 25
mile square land grant near Cape Girardeau. Groups of Ohio Shawnee unwilling to
accept the Greenville treaty joined them, and two years later, the Hathawekela left the
Creek in Alabama and immigrated to Spanish Louisiana.
By 1800 the Hathawekela, Kispokotha, and Piqua were in Missouri, and only the
Chillicothe and Mequachake remained in Ohio. After fighting Shawnee in Ohio for 30
years, most Kentucky frontiersmen would have found it difficult to believe there were
more Shawnee in Missouri than Ohio in 1795. The Missouri Shawnee maintained close
ties to the Delaware who settled with them. There were problems with the Kaskaskia east
of the Mississippi who usually refused to allow the Shawnee to hunt or travel across their
territory to visit their relatives still in Ohio. This erupted into open warfare during 1802
when the Shawnee attacked a large Kaskaskia hunting party. The Kaskaskia lost so many
of their few remaining warriors, they never again challenged the Shawnee's right to move
as they pleased through southern Illinois.
The alliance came undone after Fort Greenville, and most of the political and
social organization of the individual tribes went with it. A man named Bluejacket was
recognized as the Shawnee chief, but after an attempt to revive the alliance failed in
1801, the leadership of the Ohio Shawnee passed to his rival Black Hoof, a Mequachake.
Black Hoof may have been a "peace chief" (Hoose 181) favoring accommodation with
the Americans, but he was no fool and was determined to keep his people's lands. During
a visit to Washington in 1802, he asked Secretary of War Henry Dearborn for a specific
deed to the Shawnee lands in Ohio. After some discussion, the request was denied.
Meanwhile, Tecumseh had located his village on the deserted grounds of Fort Greenville.
Individual Americans who met him found him friendly, intelligent, and even charming,
but he was also absolutely determined to fight any farther expansion of settlement.
In 1805 a Shawnee drunk named Lalawethika, Tecumseh’s younger brother,
underwent an spiritual awakening in which he received a religious vision. Afterwards, he
stopped drinking and changed his name to Tenskwatawa; Americans called him the
Shawnee Prophet. While his own people watched this sudden transformation with
amazement, Tenskwatawa gathered a large following among the Shawnee and Delaware.
Tecumseh added a political element to his brother's religion; it was an alliance of all
tribes to halt the surrender of land to the Americans. Perhaps the greatest of all Native
Americans, “Tecumseh was brave, respected, a skilled politician, and spell-binding
orator” (Edmunds 114). In the years following 1795, the Americans had been steadily
moving back the Greenville Treaty line. The Delaware had sold a part of Indiana in 1803,
and the Wyandot surrendered much of Michigan in 1807. Tecumseh believed that no
chief had the authority to sign away his tribe's lands nor could any tribe sell lands that
were used in common. By 1808 he had a promise of support from the British in Canada
and had placed himself in direct opposition to Black Hoof, Little Turtle, and the other
peace chiefs.
The dislike was mutual, and Black Hoof's opposition insured that Tecumseh and
the Prophet had few followers among the Ohio Shawnee. With most of their support
among the tribes in the western Ohio Valley, Tenskwatawa left Greenville in the spring
of 1808 and established his new capitol at Prophetstown on Tippecanoe Creek in Indiana.
The location was intended as a challenge to Little Turtle, the Miami peace chief. In
August the Prophet met William Henry Harrison, the American governor of the Indiana
Territory who would soon be Tecumseh's enemy. The meeting ended on a friendly note,
but Harrison sent spies to Prophetstown. Their reports confirmed his worst fears: it
appeared that Tecumseh had assembled almost 3,000 warriors, from different tribes,
ready to fight American expansion.
Harrison had instructions from Congress to end native land titles in Indiana and
Illinois. In 1809 he made treaties with the Delaware, Miami, Kaskaskia, and Potawatomi
at Fort Wayne and Vincennes gaining 3,000,000 acres of southern Indiana and Illinois.
When he heard what had happened, Tecumseh threatened to kill the chiefs who signed.
The following June his followers killed Leatherlips, a Wyandot chief.
Tecumseh met with Harrison at Vincennes in August, but harsh words almost
caused a fight between Harrison's soldiers and Tecumseh's escort. They met again during
the summer of 1811, but by this time both knew that war was only a matter of time.
Immediately afterwards, Tecumseh left for the south to try to recruit the Chickasaw,
Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee. Before leaving, he gave his brother specific instructions
that, during his absence, he was to avoid any confrontation with the Americans.
Tecumseh was south of the Ohio River when they attacked settlements in Illinois
bringing the frontier to the point of war. Harrison assembled 1,000 men at Vincennes and
in September moved against Prophetstown. He arrived at Prophetstown in November and
camped just across Tippecanoe Creek from it. Shots had not been fired, but the Prophet
ignored his brother's orders and decided to kill Harrison with a suicide squad. The battle
ended in a draw, but the Americans lost 62 and 126 were wounded. The warriors
eventually were forced to leave, and Harrison burned Prophetstown. Tippecanoe was not
significant as a military victory, but it destroyed Tensquatawa's reputation as a prophet.
When Tecumseh returned from the south in January, his alliance was in shambles, and
the War of 1812 was only months away.
By the time of the declaration of war in June, Tecumseh had gathered over 1,000
warriors in Canada to fight for the British. However, after a council with Tecumseh and
the Prophet on the Mississinewa River in May, the Shawnee, Delaware, and Wyandot
decided to remain neutral. Some even supported the Americans, but few joined
Tecumseh and the British. The war began with a series of disasters which sent the
Americans reeling. General William Hull invaded Canada in July but, when he heard a
rumor that 5,000 warriors were coming down Lake Huron by canoe, he retreated to
Detroit. Hull's opposition was only 800 of Tecumseh's warriors and 300 Canadians. After
several detachments were attacked near Detroit, Hull surrendered in August without a
fight. The victory at Detroit brought more warriors to Tecumseh and set off a series of
raids against American forts and settlements across the frontier. Following the death of
Little Turtle in July, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa returned to northern Indiana to recruit
warriors from the Miami. In September the Prophet ended the military side of his career
with an unsuccessful attack on Fort Harrison. William Henry Harrison was given
command of the American army in the Northwest and launched a series of attacks that
forced the Prophet and his followers to return to Canada. Early in 1813, Harrison built
Fort Ferree on the upper Sandusky and moved the Delaware from Indiana to the Shawnee
villages at Piqua and Auglaize in Ohio to take away any chance of their joining
Tecumseh. However, a unit of 900 Kentucky militia men commanded by General James
Winchester was ambushed on the Raisin River in southeast Michigan with 300 killed.
After surrender, 50 prisoners were massacred while British officers just stood and
watched. There would have been more victims if Tecumseh had not arrived and
personally intervened. Afterwards, he called the British officers cowards for their failure
to protect American prisoners.
Despite the loss on the Raisin River, Harrison kept inching forward and built Fort
Meigs on the Maumee River in February. Tecumseh, meanwhile, had returned to Indiana
for more warriors and increased his force to almost 2,000. In May they joined the new
British commander, Colonel Henry Procter, to attack Fort Meigs, but the Americans held
on, and many of Tecumseh's warriors became discouraged with siege warfare and went
home. Proctor was forced to end the siege but made a second unsuccessful attempt in
July to take Fort Meigs. By August Harrison had assembled an army of almost 8,000 and,
after Oliver Perry's naval victory on Lake Erie, was ready to take the offensive. Proctor's
resources at Fort Malden were already running low, not only with having to feed
Tecumseh's 1,500 warriors, but also 12,000 members of their families. When Harrison
began his advance, the British could offer little resistance.
Ultimately, Proctor was to prove every bit as incompetent and cowardly as the
American's William Hull. Tecumseh described him as "a fat animal, that carries its tail
upon its back, but when affrighted ...drops it between his legs and runs off." Harrison
pursued Procter east across Upper Canada. Tecumseh did his best to cover the British
retreat and slow the American advance. The British attempted a stand at the Battle of the
Thames on October 6th, but Proctor and his staff suddenly left the field abandoning their
own troops and leaving Tecumseh and 600 warriors to make a last stand in a small patch
of swampy woods. When Tecumseh was killed late in the afternoon of October 6th,
1813, the last possibility of united Native American resistance to American expansion
died with him.
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