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The War of 1812
The United States grows up
After the United States bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, we began to feel
good about ourselves as a country because we were growing. As of 1812, we
continued to have problems between the North and the South because of the
differences in the northern manufacturing and the southern farming economies but
overall the new country was doing well.
A major problem for the country continued to be British interference with our trade.
The English navy had actually begun a policy of “impressment”. Impressment meant
that the British would stop American ships and not only take supplies, but also
started taking American sailors. They basically kidnapped Americans and forced
them to join the British Navy in their continuing war with France.
American citizens complained to the government about the
impressment of our citizens until President James Madison was forced ask
Congress to declare war on England.
It was a very strange war because for the first two years, there was
almost no fighting. The British were still fighting France and therefore did not
want to waste troops on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean fighting the pesky
Americans. Instead of committing their best soldiers to America, they sent
their new untested soldiers to fight in North America.
When there was fighting it was usually a small battle in Canada or a
small naval battle in the Great Lakes or the Atlantic Ocean and the Americans
won more fights than they lost.
Finally, in 1814, the British were able to defeat the French. They
immediately moved their best troops to America to fight. In August of
1814, the British moved to end the war quickly by attacking the new
American capital of Washington DC. The English moved into the city
easily as many American soldiers ran from the mighty Redcoats. The
British wanted to punish and insult the Americans, so they decided to
burn every government building in Washington DC.
What happened next was one of the strangest events in American
history. With the city of Washington DC burning and almost all buildings
reduced to ashes, several tornadoes dropped out of the skies. The
British troops, experienced and trained through the toughest fighting
they could imagine against the French, had nowhere to hide from the
storms. Left out in the rain, lightening, and over 100 mile per hour
winds, they were beaten, injured, and some even killed. Most of
England’s best troops would never fight again in the war.
After being run out of Washington DC by the weather, the British
decided to attack another major American city in Baltimore, Maryland.
The only way to get to Baltimore was by water through the Chesapeake
Bay. As the British Navy moved on Baltimore, the Americans made
unusual plans to defend the city.
The city of Baltimore was guarded by Fort McHenry. The general in
charge of Fort McHenry knew that he must stop the British ships from
entering the water immediately by Baltimore. To stop them, he ordered
several ships to be sunk into the harbor. By sinking the ships, he blocked
entrance to the port. The British ships could not pass over the sunken
ships without ripping the bottoms of their own ships. Forced to remain
outside of the harbor, the British could only shoot cannons into Fort
McHenry and hope to drive the soldiers from the fort.
After a full night of bombing, shooting, and explosions the sun rose on
Fort McHenry. An American named Francis Scott Key, wondering who
had won the battle, looked over to Fort McHenry and saw, flying above
the Fort, a massive American flag that the general of the fort had
ordered. This showed the Americans had held out against the superior
British forces. Key was so emotional about the victory, that he took out
a pen and paper and began to write a poem about what he saw the
previous night…”Oh say can you see, by the dawns early light? What so
proudly we hailed, in the twilights last gleaming…” This poem was
called the “Star Spangled Banner” and would become our national
anthem.
In January of 1815, the final battle of the war was fought. The British
abandoned their attempts along the Atlantic Coast and believed they
could win the war by shutting off most trade coming from America. To
do this, they decided to cut off the mouth of the Mississippi River by
taking the city of New Orleans.
The job of protecting New Orleans fell to General Andrew Jackson.
Jackson had few trained soldiers and decided to use whatever resources
he had to fight of the attacking English. He rounded up a fighting force
that included soldiers, pirates, slaves, freed slaves, outlaws, whites,
blacks, French, Spaniards, farmers, bar owners, business men, rich, poor,
and middle class. In other words, Jackson’s fighters were America.
People from all walks of life who came to this place to have a better life.
Once the fighting started, it was a blood bath. The highly trained British
soldiers made horrible mistakes, like forgetting boarding ladders needed
to climb steep hills. The Americans, on the other hand patiently held
their ground and shot invader after invader. When the battle was over
and the British retreated in defeat, they had lost 2042 men…the
Americans had lost only 71, and only 13 of those were killed.
The war officially ended with the Treaty of Ghent. In this treaty,
the British again promised to pull all of their soldiers off of United States
soil (they had promised this after the Revolutionary War but had not
done it). This time they DID. The British also agreed to end the
impressment of Americans.
As a people, Americans were now feeling especially cocky about
themselves. They had now taken on the strongest military in the
world…twice, and won both times. Americans began to think of
themselves as special. What could they not accomplish if they wanted
to? A new belief called “Manifest Destiny” began to spread. This was
the belief that it was God’s will that the United States expand to control
all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In the next 33 years, we would.