WEBVTT - How Did the War of 1812 Settle the American Revolution? 0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:07.440 Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren 0:00:07.480 --> 0:00:12.240 Vogelbaum here. The War of eighteen twelve doesn't loom as 0:00:12.360 --> 0:00:15.920 large in the United States consciousness as some other conflicts, 0:00:16.120 --> 0:00:19.160 but it was an important one in that it basically 0:00:19.200 --> 0:00:22.320 settled the matter of the American Revolution once and for all. 0:00:23.920 --> 0:00:28.000 Just a quarter century after the Revolutionary War, Americans brashly 0:00:28.040 --> 0:00:31.120 took on the British Empire in a rematch, partly to 0:00:31.200 --> 0:00:35.080 resolve lingering grievances, but also with the ambitious aim of 0:00:35.120 --> 0:00:40.080 seizing Canada, and instead came perilously close to a catastrophic 0:00:40.159 --> 0:00:42.760 defeat that would have endangered the very future of the 0:00:42.840 --> 0:00:48.279 United States. But the Americans, despite suffering the indignity of 0:00:48.360 --> 0:00:52.000 having invaders torched their capital city, managed to fight the 0:00:52.040 --> 0:00:56.040 British to a stalemate. The conflict ended with a peace 0:00:56.080 --> 0:00:58.440 treaty in which the US didn't have to give up 0:00:58.440 --> 0:01:03.000 any territory and retained the ability to expand westward, and 0:01:03.040 --> 0:01:05.400 the British had to accept the US as a truly 0:01:05.480 --> 0:01:10.319 separate nation and trading power. For the article, this episode 0:01:10.400 --> 0:01:12.720 is based on How Stuff Works, spoke by email with 0:01:12.760 --> 0:01:16.320 Willard Stern Randall a Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar and 0:01:16.440 --> 0:01:21.480 History at Champlain College. Randall said the Revolution only assured 0:01:21.520 --> 0:01:25.720 political independence, it did not guarantee the economic survival of 0:01:25.720 --> 0:01:30.520 the United States. After the Treaty of Paris was signed 0:01:30.520 --> 0:01:33.800 in September of seventeen eighty three to end the Revolutionary War, 0:01:34.240 --> 0:01:37.639 relations between the US and the British Empire remained tense, 0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:42.319 with the British viewing Americans as commercial rivals. In the 0:01:42.319 --> 0:01:46.440 early eighteen hundreds, the United States grievances crystallized into several 0:01:46.480 --> 0:01:51.520 main points. A first was freedom to trade. The US 0:01:51.560 --> 0:01:53.600 became caught up in the war between the British and 0:01:53.680 --> 0:01:57.400 Napoleon's French Empire, with each power trying to restrict the 0:01:57.480 --> 0:02:01.840 US from trading with the other. Eventually, the French relented, 0:02:02.000 --> 0:02:06.560 but the British wouldn't. Randall said. The US wanted to 0:02:06.560 --> 0:02:09.440 stay in neutral country so we could trade with anybody, 0:02:09.720 --> 0:02:15.040 but the British did not believe in neutrality. Second, the 0:02:15.200 --> 0:02:18.440 US was angered by the Royal Navy's practice of impressment, 0:02:19.040 --> 0:02:22.359 that is, boarding American merchant ships and seizing sailors who 0:02:22.560 --> 0:02:27.520 claimed were British deserters. The fledgling nations saw impressment as 0:02:27.560 --> 0:02:30.360 assigned that the British didn't respect the US as an equal, 0:02:30.760 --> 0:02:34.720 but instead as a former colony that it could bully. 0:02:34.880 --> 0:02:37.560 To add to the insult, the British also didn't respect 0:02:37.600 --> 0:02:40.480 the right of sailors to give up being British subjects 0:02:40.639 --> 0:02:45.920 and choose US citizenship. And third, the British supported the 0:02:46.000 --> 0:02:50.240 Native Americans who were resisting US expansion along the western frontier, 0:02:50.800 --> 0:02:53.320 in part to protect British interests in the fur trade 0:02:53.480 --> 0:02:58.520 from American intervention. In addition to settling those differences with 0:02:58.560 --> 0:03:02.280 an armed conflict, the United States also saw an opportunity 0:03:02.360 --> 0:03:05.800 to seize Canada from the British. This was not a 0:03:05.840 --> 0:03:08.960 new concept. It had first surfaced during the Revolutionary War, 0:03:09.120 --> 0:03:12.560 when Benedict Arnold helped lead an unsuccessful invasion of Canada 0:03:12.760 --> 0:03:17.720 in seventeen seventy five to seventeen seventy six. Unfortunately, the 0:03:17.800 --> 0:03:22.639 lesson of that debacle hadn't sunk in. One vociferous advocate 0:03:22.680 --> 0:03:26.600 of a Canadian invasion was then former President Thomas Jefferson, 0:03:26.880 --> 0:03:30.399 who proclaimed that taking the lightly defended British colonial possession 0:03:30.600 --> 0:03:35.160 quote will be a mere matter of marching with all 0:03:35.200 --> 0:03:38.480 of these issues in mind, Congress passed a declaration of 0:03:38.520 --> 0:03:41.800 war against the British in June of eighteen twelve, which 0:03:41.840 --> 0:03:46.360 President James Madison quickly signed into law. But while the 0:03:46.520 --> 0:03:49.360 US had plenty of kutzpah to take on the British, 0:03:49.720 --> 0:03:54.840 it was woefully underprepared from a military standpoint. Randall said, 0:03:55.200 --> 0:03:58.000 we had three thousand soldiers and they had two hundred 0:03:58.040 --> 0:04:01.520 and fifty thousand. In Europe alone, we had twenty ships, 0:04:01.680 --> 0:04:06.520 they had nine hundred. On top of all that, the 0:04:06.520 --> 0:04:09.440 timing of the US declaring war, which came about a 0:04:09.480 --> 0:04:13.640 week before Napoleon launched an invasion of Russia, enraged the British. 0:04:14.360 --> 0:04:16.880 Randall said, the British felt we had stabbed them in 0:04:16.920 --> 0:04:20.640 the back. On land, things went badly for the US 0:04:20.800 --> 0:04:25.200 pretty quickly. General William Hull's initial foray into Canada in 0:04:25.279 --> 0:04:28.400 June of eighteen twelve failed and he withdrew to Detroit, 0:04:28.640 --> 0:04:31.440 where he soon found himself under siege by the British 0:04:31.480 --> 0:04:34.800 and their Native American allies under the leadership of Dacumsa. 0:04:36.000 --> 0:04:38.839 Together they fooled Hull into thinking that they had a 0:04:38.960 --> 0:04:42.760 much larger force, and in August of eighteen twelve, Hull surrendered, 0:04:42.960 --> 0:04:47.159 a humiliating defeat. A second US attack on Canada in 0:04:47.200 --> 0:04:50.719 October of eighteen twelve led to another disastrous defeat in 0:04:50.800 --> 0:04:53.960 the Battle of Queenston Heights, in which three hundred Americans 0:04:54.000 --> 0:04:58.200 were killed and almost a thousand were taken prisoner. The 0:04:58.320 --> 0:05:02.640 US did better on the water. The USS Constitution, later 0:05:02.720 --> 0:05:07.160 nicknamed Old Ironsides, pursued and defeated the British HMS Guerriere 0:05:07.279 --> 0:05:10.000 off the coast of Nova Scotia in August of eighteen twelve, 0:05:10.279 --> 0:05:13.760 damaging the British ship so badly that, after its captain surrendered, 0:05:13.880 --> 0:05:16.880 it had to be sunk. The British, who had been 0:05:16.960 --> 0:05:21.520 confident of their naval superiority, were stunned. But even greater 0:05:21.640 --> 0:05:25.560 losses were inflicted by the large US force of privateers, 0:05:25.560 --> 0:05:28.919 ships owned by American businessmen, to whom Congress gave the 0:05:28.960 --> 0:05:32.400 authority to wage a for profit war on the British navy. 0:05:33.480 --> 0:05:36.000 Over the course of the war, the privateers captured some 0:05:36.120 --> 0:05:41.080 one thousand, five hundred British ships. Blockade runners daringly did 0:05:41.120 --> 0:05:44.160 their best to keep the US economy going, slipping through 0:05:44.200 --> 0:05:47.080 the British naval vessels in fog storms and the dark 0:05:47.080 --> 0:05:52.599 of night to transport flower, tobacco, and cotton. After Napoleon 0:05:52.680 --> 0:05:55.080 was defeated and forced into exile in the spring of 0:05:55.120 --> 0:05:58.400 eighteen fourteen, the British could afford to send more troops 0:05:58.400 --> 0:06:01.640 across the Atlantic, and the ruation got scary for the US. 0:06:02.920 --> 0:06:05.720 In August of that year, a British force invaded Maryland 0:06:05.800 --> 0:06:09.560 and then marched on Washington, d c. The invaders ate 0:06:09.640 --> 0:06:12.360 food and drank wine from the table of President Madison 0:06:12.480 --> 0:06:15.080 before setting fire to the White House and numerous other 0:06:15.120 --> 0:06:20.000 public buildings. The arson was in retaliation for a similarly 0:06:20.040 --> 0:06:25.080 brutal American sacking of York now Toronto in Ontario, but 0:06:25.279 --> 0:06:29.120 British Rear Admiral George Cockburn, who orchestrated it, later had 0:06:29.120 --> 0:06:32.760 his official portrait painted with Washington burning in the background. 0:06:34.040 --> 0:06:37.800 Randall said, nobody imagined the British would try to destroy 0:06:37.880 --> 0:06:41.000 our capital. Most Americans didn't know what we had done 0:06:41.040 --> 0:06:44.760 in Canada, and Madison and his cabinet were clueless about war. 0:06:45.200 --> 0:06:52.200 They didn't even try to defend Washington. However, another British target, Baltimore, 0:06:52.640 --> 0:06:56.480 a home port to many privateer vessels, was much better prepared. 0:06:57.600 --> 0:07:00.640 A Fort McHenry, which protected the harbor, was stood an 0:07:00.640 --> 0:07:03.720 intense twenty five hour long attack in mid September by 0:07:03.760 --> 0:07:09.080 British warships, which eventually had to withdraw. That victory inspired 0:07:09.080 --> 0:07:12.040 Francis Scott Key, who was on a ship several miles away, 0:07:12.280 --> 0:07:15.360 to compose a song, the Star Spangled Banner, to celebrate 0:07:15.480 --> 0:07:20.760 the American resistance. Meanwhile, an attempt to invade New York 0:07:20.840 --> 0:07:24.160 that September was thwarted in the Battle of Lake Champlain, 0:07:24.560 --> 0:07:29.040 where US naval forces defeated British ships that put an 0:07:29.120 --> 0:07:31.800 end to a British strategy of driving a wedge into 0:07:31.880 --> 0:07:34.480 the middle of the US, an attempt to take back 0:07:34.560 --> 0:07:39.360 northern New England as a British possession. That defeat was 0:07:39.360 --> 0:07:42.560 so decisive that the British commander who had defeated Napoleon, 0:07:42.720 --> 0:07:46.120 Arthur Willisley, the Duke of Wellington, concluded that the war 0:07:46.320 --> 0:07:49.680 was unwinnable and declined to take over command of British 0:07:49.680 --> 0:07:54.440 forces in the US. Randall said it was Wellington who said, 0:07:54.600 --> 0:07:56.520 get out of there. You can't win it unless you 0:07:56.560 --> 0:07:59.560 control the lakes, and they couldn't. The bottom line was 0:07:59.600 --> 0:08:02.320 that England was broke. The ministry didn't want to go 0:08:02.360 --> 0:08:04.600 to Parliament again and say we need more money to 0:08:04.640 --> 0:08:08.000 continue fighting in America. The taxpayers wouldn't go for it. 0:08:10.080 --> 0:08:13.600 In the peace talks that were already underway, British negotiators 0:08:13.640 --> 0:08:17.400 abandoned their hardball territorial demands and started looking for a 0:08:17.480 --> 0:08:21.120 quick way out. They even abandoned a key demand for 0:08:21.280 --> 0:08:24.440 creation of a sanctuary for their Native American allies in 0:08:24.480 --> 0:08:27.480 the American Midwest, which would have made it difficult for 0:08:27.560 --> 0:08:31.320 the US to expand westward. If the US had been 0:08:31.360 --> 0:08:34.200 forced to grant that concession, it might have remained a 0:08:34.280 --> 0:08:39.480 small country along North America's eastern seaboard. In December of 0:08:39.520 --> 0:08:42.520 eighteen fourteen, the signing of the Treaty of Ghent ended 0:08:42.559 --> 0:08:47.040 the war, but being that it was signed in Ghent, Belgium, 0:08:47.200 --> 0:08:51.600 and instantaneous electronic communication didn't exist in those days, word 0:08:51.679 --> 0:08:54.240 didn't get back to North America soon enough to stop 0:08:54.280 --> 0:08:58.120 British troops from attacking New Orleans in January of eighteen fifteen. 0:08:59.400 --> 0:09:02.760 They were by General Andrew Jackson's forces in a short 0:09:02.800 --> 0:09:06.280 but brutal battle. They killed two thousand British soldiers in 0:09:06.360 --> 0:09:11.040 less than thirty minutes. A. Randall said, Jackson had hundreds 0:09:11.080 --> 0:09:15.080 of trained frontier marksmen. They killed off the British officers 0:09:15.120 --> 0:09:18.400 from the commanding general all the way down. The British 0:09:18.400 --> 0:09:21.360 soldiers who weren't killed were trying to hide under the bodies. 0:09:23.120 --> 0:09:25.840 The bloody victory had no effect on the war's outcome, 0:09:26.120 --> 0:09:29.880 but it made Jackson into a legend and eventually helped 0:09:29.960 --> 0:09:34.080 him get elected as president. The war, in which some 0:09:34.200 --> 0:09:37.960 twenty two hundred and sixty American service members lost their lives, 0:09:38.160 --> 0:09:41.240 ended in a stalemate, but surviving it was a larger 0:09:41.360 --> 0:09:44.120 victory for the United States, which was then able to 0:09:44.160 --> 0:09:52.160 grow into a world power. Today's episode is based on 0:09:52.160 --> 0:09:54.839 the article The War of eighteen twelve. The White House 0:09:54.840 --> 0:09:57.800 Burns and the Star Spangled Banner is born on houstuffworks 0:09:57.800 --> 0:10:00.839 dot Com. Written by Patrick J. Higer. Brain Stuff is 0:10:00.880 --> 0:10:03.840 production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and 0:10:03.920 --> 0:10:06.880 is produced by Tyler Klain. But four more podcasts my 0:10:06.920 --> 0:10:10.680 heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever 0:10:10.720 --> 0:10:12.280 you listen to your favorite shows.