Volume 76, Number 4 · October 2012

James Madison faced a difficult war because of Republican antipathy to taxation, debt, standing armies, federal aid to infrastructure, and a national bank. Many Republicans shared Thomas Jefferson’s faith that an untrained militia could easily conquer Canada, but they did not improve militia training or administration. Indeed, Jefferson gutted the army’s fledgling supply organization in 1802, an act far more significant for the War of 1812 than the creation of the Military Academy. Jefferson boxed himself and his successor into a corner by refusing to negotiate with Britain on realistic terms and by relying on commercial sanctions that damaged the economy and devastated revenues. Reactive and backward-looking, the Jeffersonian Republicans refused to match ends and means and failed to create a viable deterrent or alternative to war.

Addressing one aspect of the larger problem of the U.S. Army’s often poor performance during the War of 1812, this essay focuses on the War Department’s attempt to create a competent officer corps. The article provides data about the officers’ social origins and discusses their difficulties in performing their duties, as revealed in the transcripts of 334 general courts martial. The conclusions suggest that officers were judged more severely for their moral and character defects than for their shortcomings in performing routine duties. These findings also explain why, unlike their European counterparts in the Napoleonic era, most U.S. Army officers failed to achieve the necessary degree of proficiency.

Navies in the age of sail required artisans familiar with the working of a sailing vessel as well as a warship’s operations. The years 1797 to 1812 were formative for the body of skilled petty officers on whom commissioned and warrant officers relied to turn their armed ships into effective instruments of warfare. This essay provides an overview of the early U.S. Navy’s process of recruiting and training petty officers, how the character of subordination and discipline was negotiated between commissioned and lesser officers, and the petty officers’ life aboard ship in the era of the War of 1812.

The Anglo-American conflict of 1812–15, “the War of 1812,” provides an opportunity for considering the nature of warfare in the early nineteenth century and, also, the opportunities and problems that Britain, the world’s leading naval power, enjoyed as it sought to balance wide-ranging commitments.

It proved difficult for Britain’s Royal Navy to fight the War of 1812 while already at war with France. This ongoing conflict had lasted for nearly two decades and had left Britain with few reserves. Moreover, war with America necessitated a massive westward shift in naval deployments even while the European war intensified with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the expansion of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign. The following article analyzes how the Royal Navy balanced operations between Napoleon’s Empire and the United States with an emphasis on 1812 and 1813.

The War of 1812 is a conflict that carries an unduly heavy burden of mythology, much of it propagated by nineteenth-century historians and deriving mainly from national chauvinism. In this respect, one of the most misunderstood events of the war is the British destruction of public buildings in Washington in August 1814. This article examines the background of that event and discusses whether it was justified, either under the laws of war, as they were understood at the time, or in retaliation for the American destruction of Canadian towns and villages in the northern theatre.

To better understand American Indian participation in the War of 1812 it is necessary to step away from the narrative constructed by men like President James Madison and General William Henry Harrison, who saw a dangerous British-Indian alliance wherever they turned. Similarly, it is helpful to avoid using the Treaty of Ghent as a narrative endpoint. Therefore, instead of seeing the War of 1812 as a singular event and its conclusion as an end point, this article places the conflict and its Indian participants within a broad chronological context. Such an extended framework helps to explain why Indians were divided in response to the war and to illustrate how it connected developments that came before and after. Rather than addressing some type of composite Indian story, the article focuses on the Wyandot communities in the Old Northwest, whose lives were intertwined with those of their native neighbors and whose histories reveal that while the War of 1812 was undoubtedly transformative, it is best viewed as a transition rather than as a conclusion.

In the War of 1812, the United States had a small navy and relied on privateers—private armed ships that sought to make money—to engage in commercial warfare against Britain. If privateers stopped a British merchant ship, or an American trading under a British license, they sailed it into a friendly port. If deemed a “good prize,” the vessel and goods were sold, the net proceeds divided between the privateer’s owners, officers, and crew. But sometimes, the stop and search went beyond the bounds of law: the seizure of the Ann Maria, a tiny Virginia schooner, off St. Thomas, by the Baltimore privateer Nonsuch, led all the way to the Supreme Court, and reveals the dark side of a system based on legalized robbery.

Wikipedia has become the world’s dominant educational resource, with over four million articles in the English language edition that reach hundreds of millions of readers. Wikipedia is written by and for the benefit of highly motivated amateurs. Military history is one of its strengths, with over 50,000 articles and over 700 well-organized volunteers who prevent mischief and work on upgrading quality. They rely on free online sources and popular books, and generally ignore historiography and scholarly monographs and articles. The military articles are old-fashioned, with an emphasis on tactics, battles, and technology, and are weak on social and cultural dimensions. This essay examines how the 14,000-word article on the “War of 1812” was worked on by 2,400 different people, with no overall coordinator or plan. Debates raged as the 1812 article attracted over 3,300 comments by 627 of the most active editors. The main dispute was over who won the war.