I note that a number of the Republican Presidential candidates have referred to the Obama Administration as a "failed presidency." A fellow blogger alluded to this idea the other day, and I put a comment on his blog - Two Masters - which can be reached via the sidebar to this blog.
An interesting thing about failure, is that so much depends upon what one's goal was in the first place. Back in the dim past, in the 1960s and 1970, there was a lot of talk about not being the first American President to lose a war. This was based on the belief, apparently sincere, that the United States had never previously lost a war. In reality, the first American President to lose a war was James Madison. The United States lost the War of 1812, and quite decisively, too. It is true that General Andy Jackson, with help from Jean Lafitte and a passel of frontiersman, beat the British General Pakenham at New Orleans, on January 8, 1815. Unfortunately, the war was already over by then, and the Battle of New Orleans was irrelevant to the outcome.
How do we know that the War of 1812 was lost? Cross the bridge from Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario, or vice versa, and you're likely to have to produce some evidence of American citizenship. If the United States had won the War of 1812, Ontario (Upper Canada, as then was) would be American territory today. There is also the embarrassing fact that the British invaded the United States and burned the Capitol and the White House. Not many countries who've suffered that sort of treatment are regarded as having won the war in which it occurred.
Glenn A Knight
In my study
4 comments:
Mmm, and what do the Canadians say about the War of 1812? (It's been too long since I had Canadian history to remember much about it from their perspective.) What little I remember was a constant complaint (much like the Scots make about the English) that we were always grabbing land from them and the War of 1812 was a stalemate ITO regarding that problem.
I once read - and until recently, had a copy of - a two-volume history of the War of 1812 by the Canadian journalist and historian Pierre Berton. Flames Along the Border was one of the titles. Canada was dominated at that time by a couple of clans who were doing quite well out of British rule, and who had no interest in joining up with the crazy Yanks.
On one of my visits to Ottawa, probably in January of 1997, I heard a radio interview with a journalist and political commentator. I've forgotten the name now, but it was a familiar one to anyone who lived in Canada in the '80s.
Anyway, to set the scene for his political views, he began by assuring the listeners that he was descended from United Empire Loyalists - those are people American history books called "Tories." I think that he, like many Canadians, thought that the entire American Revolution was the kind of adventure upon which no sensible Scot would ever embark.
Glenn:
You write: “ The United States lost the War of 1812, and quite decisively, too.”
That’s a bold assertion for a speculative position. Even Wikipedia, not known as a bastion of jingoistic American right-wingishness, states: “The Americans declared war in 1812 for several reasons, including trade restrictions brought about by Britain's ongoing war with France, the impressment of American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy, British support of American Indian tribes against American expansion, outrage over insults to national honour after humiliations on the high seas and possible American desire to annex Canada.”
There may have been some Americans that lusted after Canada, and some of them may even have expressed that desire in the newspapers of the day, maybe even in speeches somewhere. But I don’t know that it was a majority position anywhere in the country, or even one held by a significant minority of people anywhere in the country. It was certainly not anything like an official war aim. There’s no support, I don’t think, for the idea that since some Americans still had a fantasy of annexing Canada, and the war did not result in the annexation of Canada, we therefore “lost” the war “decisively”.
The British were impressing our merchant seaman; they were militarily supporting the Northwest tribes against the United States; and they had certainly attacked our Navy on the high seas. After the War of 1812 they didn’t do so much of that anymore. The British certainly didn’t win the war.
If our goal was to get the British to stop doing what they had been doing, we succeeded just fine. So I’m not sure how we “lost”.
First, I still don't think of Wikipedia as a serious source of information, Agim. It's much like the Reader's Digest in that respect - something that people who don't know any better think to be authoritative, but that no knowledgeable person would depend upon.
Second, you are quite right that there were a number of reasons given for war with Britain, including the impressment of seamen. The British rescinded the Order in Council which authorized taking seamen off of neutral ships at about the same time as the United States declared war. They certainly didn't do so because we coerced them into it, and, if that had been the key reason for the war, we could have called off hostilities at once.
In other words, our major gain from the war, as we later claimed, was something the British were doing anyway.
One of the problems in looking at the War of 1812 in isolation is that, from the British point of view, it was a sideshow in the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon lost in 1814, though he made a brief comeback in 1815, ending at Waterloo. Many of the measures Americans resented were directed at preventing the French from receiving support from abroad. As the threat from France receded, the British became more accommodating to neutral shipping.
As a matter of scoring the war, though, you have to note that the British burned Washington, while we didn't even manage to singe London.
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