Lambert The Challenge

Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27321-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 560 Seiten

In the summer of 1812 Britain stood alone, fighting for her very survival against a vast European Empire. Only the Royal Navy stood between Napoleon's legions and ultimate victory. In that dark hour America saw its chance to challenge British dominance: her troops invaded Canada and American frigates attacked British merchant shipping, the lifeblood of British defence. War polarised America. The south and west wanted land, the north wanted peace and trade. But America had to choose between the oceans and the continent. Within weeks the land invasion had stalled, but American warships and privateers did rather better, and astonished the world by besting the Royal Navy in a series of battles. Then in three titanic single ship actions the challenge was decisively met. British frigates closed with the Chesapeake, the Essex and the President, flagship of American naval ambition. Both sides found new heroes but none could equal Captain Philip Broke, champion of history's greatest frigate battle, when HMS Shannon captured the USS Chesapeake in thirteen blood-soaked minutes. Broke's victory secured British control of the Atlantic, and within a year Washington, D.C. had been taken and burnt by British troops. Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, brings all his mastery of the subject and narrative brilliance to throw new light on a war which until now has been much mythologised, little understood.

Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History at King's College London. His books include Nelson: Britannia's God of War, Admirals: The Naval Commanders Who Made Britain Great, Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812, for which he was awarded the Anderson Medal, and The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy Against Russia 1853-1856. His highly successful history of the Royal Navy, War at Sea, was broadcast on BBC Two.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lambert, Andrew

Leseproben

Introduction

Every nation needs a history, a unifying narrative that explains and justifies the present.

This book is about a war and the way it became part of two very different narratives. Wars have been a central concern for historians for close on three thousand years, their causes, conduct and consequences conveying everything from divine judgement to moral lessons. In a crowded field the War of 1812 occupies a curious position. Although often referred to by Americans as a victorious ‘Second War for Independence’, it is also considered a success north of the border, where a very different view of the outcome has helped shape Canadian identity. In Britain, 1812 is the year Napoleon marched to Moscow; the war with America is a long-forgotten sideshow. The British define the very essence of ‘Britishness’ by reference to another, contemporaneous conflict, one in which they fought for their very existence against the greatest military genius of the modern age.

In June 1812 the United States, not yet fifty years old, challenged the greatest naval and economic power of the time, invading Canada and attacking British ships. It would be a curious war, fought in the shadow of a far greater conflict. At first the British simply did not believe that the Americans meant to fight about issues of principle, issues which they had no hope of upholding. Eventually they accepted the need to respond, but only after Napoleon began his terrible retreat from Moscow. Eighty years later a great American historian gently reminded his fellow citizens that the War of 1812 had been a disaster; after a litany of defeats all along the Canadian border, the capture and destruction of Washington, bankruptcy and the loss of several warships, including the national flagship; the peace settlement had been a fortunate escape.1 This begs the question: how could a defeated nation, one that suffered such devastating losses, declare a victory and remain in occupation of the literary battlefield for two centuries?

The answer lies in the smokescreen of words that obscured American aims and objectives throughout the conflict. President Madison went to war demanding that Britain end the practice of stopping and searching American merchant ships and impressing seamen on the high seas. Yet these aims were not even mentioned in the treaty that ended the war; the peace process was dominated by questions of land and the rights of Indians. While this mismatch between rhetoric and reality was hardly unusual, examining British war aims and strategy reveals a very different war. Both sides considered the war in the context of the European conflict. In the summer of 1812 Napoleon was about to invade Russia with over half a million men. The American administration expected that Napoleon would win. They planned to seize British North America – modern Canada – and hold it while Napoleon defeated the British. Former President Thomas Jefferson expected that the Canadians, anglophone and francophone alike, would be happy to join the American Republic, indeed Jefferson opined that conquest would be ‘a mere matter of marching’. Instead, invading American armies were repulsed by a handful of British regulars, Canadian militia and their Indian allies.

In fact the only battles the Americans won in 1812 were at sea, despite the Republican administration effectively ignoring the Navy. In three frigate actions that year substantially larger American ships captured smaller, less powerful British opponents. Desperate for good news to bolster their flagging grip on political power, the Republican Party latched on to the sea of glory, claiming these victories had been won in fair and equal combat, and linked the claim to the idea that war had been declared as response to British treatment of American ships and sailors. In reality the seafaring communities of New England and New York, who suffered most from pre-war British actions, consistently voted against war, a fact which reinforces the charge of partisan opportunism. War was popular with Republican voters in the agrarian Central Atlantic states, and especially in the West, because it offered a golden opportunity to seize land from the British and the Indians.

Although the war would drag on until the end of 1814, its outcome was decided by the failure of the American army to conquer Canada, the defeat of American attacks on British merchant shipping and a devastating British economic blockade that left America bankrupt and insolvent. In case anyone in America had missed the utter helplessness of their government, 4,000 British troops captured and burned Washington DC. The Presidential mansion, where the decision for war had been taken, was one of the public buildings to be torched. In the rebuild it acquired a coat of whitewash. The idea that the British ‘lost’ the war – in which they secured their war aims by compelling the Americans to stop invading Canada, destroyed their capital city and reduced them to insolvency in the process – is one that requires explanation.

This book examines the origins, conduct and consequences of the war from a British perspective, focusing on the development of policy and strategy in London and the conduct of war at sea. Not only has the war on the Canadian border been studied in depth by some outstanding scholars, but it was, for all the bloodshed and chaos, a strategic stalemate. Early British victories on land blunted the American offensive; American naval victories on Lake Erie in 1813 and Lake Champlain in 1814 restored the balance. British amphibious operations, from Maine to New Orleans, a mix of triumph and disaster, are equally well-known, if less well understood. The decisive theatre was the American Atlantic coast and oceanic sea lanes, where the Royal Navy’s North American Squadron defeated the United States Navy, and blockaded the American coast. The American attack on commercial shipping failed and instead most American warships were blockaded in port, leaving the entire coast open to economic and amphibious attack. As Napoleon wryly observed, the Americans had ‘not yet succeeded in seriously disturbing the English’. He expected they would do better in the future.2

Most accounts of the naval war focus on the three small-scale, intense combats of 1812 and the lives of the American heroes who won. The other three frigate battles of the war tell a very different story. On 1 June 1813 HMS Shannon captured the USS Chesapeake off Boston in less than fifteen minutes, in an action of ferocious intensity, fought with astonishing skill and courage on both sides. On 28 February 1814 HMS Phoebe took the USS Essex at Valparaiso, Chile, in a strikingly one-sided action. Finally, on 14 January 1815, the USS President was taken off Sandy Hook by HMS Endymion in a pursuit battle that pitted the American flagship, and the American naval hero, against a smaller British opponent. After the Americans surrendered, two more British ships came up to stop the President escaping – just as President James Madison had fled the scene at Bladensburg only months before. Re-examining these actions, and the way they have been represented in British and American literature, demonstrates that the American victory was internal. This was a war for cultural identity and cultural independence, one that created a continental America focused on land and expansion. And it did so without reconciling the sectional interests or cultural divisions of North and South, thereby setting the scene for an altogether greater catastrophe half a century later.

*

This book is about events that occurred 200 years ago, and their contemporary resonance. I have attempted, as far as possible, to allow those who took part to speak for themselves, and in their own language. Of late it has become standard practice to refer to ships and nations as neutered, as it. The men and women of 1812 did not see the world in this way; for them ship was she because it was living thing, a sensibility that Byron expressed in the immortal line:

She walks the waters like a thing of life,

And seems to dare the elements to strife.3

The same held true for the liberal nations involved in this conflict, invariably represented by Britannia or Columbia, armed and dangerous female embodiments of a tradition stretching back to the war goddess Pallas Athene. I have retained this usage, both in quotations and in the text, because it would be absurd to make the romantic heroes of 1812 speak the language of another age, one that has little comprehension of their mental world, their values or their culture.

*

It is important, lest anyone confuse the point, to stress that reconsidering an old war fought by brave men with pre-industrial warships and weapons has little to do with winning or losing, and less with old notions of right and wrong. This book examines how the past has been created, and why. It ceased to matter who ‘won’ the War of 1812 over a century ago, when America, Britain and Canada recognised the need to work together to address far greater threats. What matters now is that we recognise the past as an evolving cultural construction. In this respect art and literature did more to make our War of 1812 than cannon and diplomacy. Modern versions of the war still reflect agendas developed to serve the political interests of the men who waged the war. These became enmeshed in emerging national identities in North America, becoming central to the self-image of modern states. Little wonder much of the discussion is handled in emotive terms.

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