War of 1812

The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and the United Kingdom, with their respective Indigenous allies, from June 1812 to February 1815. It was waged mainly along the border with British North America, on the Great Lakes, on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and at sea, as a side conflict of the Napoleonic Wars. The peace treaty restored the pre-war borders, but the war had lasting effects on Canada, the United States and, above all, the Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes and the South.

Locked in its struggle with France, Britain restricted neutral trade with Napoleonic Europe and stopped American ships to take sailors for the Royal Navy, a practice known as impressment. Many of those taken were men the United States regarded as its own citizens. Americans also resented British support for Indigenous confederacies, such as the alliance led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, that resisted settlers moving into the Old Northwest. Congress declared war on 18 June 1812 in a vote split along party lines, with the Democratic-Republicans in favour and the Federalists against.

The United States hoped to conquer or pressure Britain through Upper and Lower Canada, but its invasions repeatedly failed. In August 1812 General William Hull surrendered Detroit to Isaac Brock, and in October an American crossing of the Niagara River was defeated at Queenston Heights, where Brock was killed. In April 1813 American forces captured York, the capital of Upper Canada, and Oliver Hazard Perry's victory on Lake Erie on 10 September allowed William Henry Harrison to win the Battle of the Thames on 5 October, where Tecumseh died. Later that autumn, a much smaller force of Canadian and Mohawk fighters turned back an advance on Montreal at the Chateauguay River.

After Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, Britain could send more troops across the Atlantic. On 24 August 1814 British forces defeated American militia at Bladensburg, entered Washington and set fire to government buildings, among them the Capitol and the president's residence, the White House. In September an attack on Baltimore failed; the bombardment of Fort McHenry inspired the poem that became "The Star-Spangled Banner". On 11 September an American naval victory at Plattsburgh, on Lake Champlain, forced a large British army marching south from Canada to turn back.

In the South, war among the Creek, or Muscogee, merged with the wider conflict. After Red Stick Creek warriors killed several hundred people at Fort Mims in August 1813, American militias and their Creek and Cherokee allies invaded Red Stick territory. At Horseshoe Bend on 27 March 1814, Andrew Jackson's army killed about 800 Red Stick fighters. The Treaty of Fort Jackson then forced the Creek as a whole, including those who had fought alongside the Americans, to give up some 23 million acres of land. On 8 January 1815 Jackson repulsed a major British assault on New Orleans.

The Treaty of Ghent was signed in December 1814, before the Battle of New Orleans, and took effect when the United States Senate ratified it on 17 February 1815. It returned conquered territory and was silent on impressment, which ended anyway with the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Estimates of the dead vary; one count puts American deaths from all causes at about 15,000, while at least 10,000 Indigenous people are thought to have died.

The victory at New Orleans made Jackson a national hero, and some Americans came to call the conflict a second war of independence, a label many historians question. In Canada, resisting invasion helped to bind together French Canadians, loyalists and other settlers. The heaviest losers were the Indigenous nations: Britain dropped its proposal for an Indigenous buffer state at Ghent, and in the following decades the United States obtained vast land cessions in the Old Northwest and the South.

Our 1815 map shows the United States and British Canada just after the war, which left the border between them where it had been in 1812.