The War of 1812

About This Book

In June 1812 the United States — a republic barely a generation old, with an army smaller than a single European corps and a navy of a dozen ships — declared war on the British Empire at the height of its power. For thirty months the two sides fought across a vast theatre: the frozen frontier of Canada, the decks of frigates on the open Atlantic, the forests around the Great Lakes, the swamps below New Orleans, and the burning streets of the American capital itself. It was a war the United States did not win, could easily have lost, and chose forever after to remember as a triumph.

The War of 1812 tells the whole of that strange and consequential story — not a string of disconnected images but the full arc, from the grievances that lit the fuse (the seizing of American sailors, the strangling of American trade, the fear and hunger on the western frontier) through the humiliating failed invasions of Canada, the astonishing single-ship victories of "Old Ironsides" and her sisters, Perry's fleet built from the standing forest on Lake Erie, the death of Tecumseh and the ruin of Native America, the burning of Washington and the flag that survived the night over Fort McHenry, to the peace signed at Ghent on Christmas Eve and the pointless, magnificent slaughter at New Orleans that came two weeks too late to matter.

And it does what most books on the subject refuse to do: it tells the war from every side — American, British, Canadian, and Native — and lays out honestly the question that has never been settled. Who actually won? Complete, fair, and gripping, it is the one volume for readers who want the entire story of the forgotten war that made a national anthem, a national hero, and, in a sense nobody intended, a nation.