[cotton1706]

They returned to status quo ante, i.e. no winners and losers. Have they read the treaty??

[Squawk 8888]

To all- please ping me to Canadian topics.

Canada Ping!

[Parmenio]

The article doesn’t mention the biggest losers of the war, the Shawnees and their allies who were decisively beaten at Horseshoe Bend. That victory opened up all of what was then the Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi and beyond) to settlement. Also, the plan of the British to forge an anti-American alliance between the Indians in the old Northwest and old Southwest was foiled.

[Triple]

My view is a bit different. The Brits unsuccessfully attacked a sovereign country and were repelled.

A small fleet on Lake Champlain and sunk or captured the invading British naval forces near Plattsburg. The tactics are still studied at the US Naval Academy.

[cripplecreek]

Remember the River Raisin!

[grumpa]

Good post. Thanks

[skeeter]

I'm glad the war still has special significance in Canada- someone should.

Both the principles have mostly forgotten it.

[tumblindice]

Causes of the War of 1812

1. The British Navy, stealing cargo and people, and impressing our merchant sailors.

2. Interference in United States shipping and trading.

3. British encouraging the First Nations to fight and attack Americans.

They were taking our seamen. And we were not impressed.

The Brits uh... they sensed our power and they sought our life essence.
We, uh... we do not avoid Brits, Squawk 8888. But we ... we do deny them our essence.

Man, these 1812 threads attract you Canucks like blue-bottle flies to a dead possum ...

Causes of WWII

1. Restless Germans looking for a good meal and shaven women.
2. And a bunch of other stuff.

[Hieronymus]

The Brits burnt Washington and the Yanks burnt Toronto (Parkdale specifically)—I would call that a win-win and, as an American living in rural Ontario, would be happy to see it repeated.

[Billthedrill]

This was the last in a series of wars over 200 years long in North America that make absolutely no sense at all if interpreted outside of their European context, and I make no exception for the American War of Independence. Certainly one might represent this as a British defense of Canada against an aggression from the south if one is willing to ignore the fact that the British themselves might rightly be regarded as interlopers in the area (and successful conquerors) by the French, and the latter in their turn by the native Americans, who held their own claims by virtue of conquest against other native tribes.

There is an interesting Wiki article that sums up the degree to which martial events in the New World were influenced by those in the Old - This One. The Nine Years' War, to begin with, the wars of the Spanish and Austrian Succession, and the better-known Seven Years' War that pitted Frederick the Great against Maria Theresa and a very young George Washington against the French several thousand miles away in what we term the French and Indian War. The American War of Independence, in which the French got their revenge against the British for the latter's takeover in Quebec. The French Revolution, in which the French paid for the debt they'd incurred tweaking the British nose in America. The Napoleonic Wars, in which the British stopped an astonishing French expansion, and to which the War of 1812 served as an interlude between the Grand Armee's disaster in Russia, and the Hundred Days and Waterloo.

Napoleon got his own future revenge in the New World in 1803 by selling Jefferson's administration the Louisiana Purchase, openly proclaiming he did so as a geostrategic move against the British, and as it eventually turned out, a stunningly successful one. And so, in my opinion, the British might be forgiven for viewing with considerable apprehension in 1812, the present and inevitable U.S. expansion to both the west and the north. To the north they managed to hold a line. To the west, it was hopeless.

There, however, it took some time to work itself out. The slogan "54-40 or fight" represented American expansionism not simply into British territory but abutting Russian claims. By 1846, when that was working itself out, Texas had already won independence and was setting up for the Mexican-American War, wherein the issue was claims the new Mexican government had inherited from both the Spanish and the French.

It is only outside this context that one can adhere to the strange and rather provincial claims of historians such as Howard Zinn that America must be judged in isolation and as inherently aggressive, imperialistic, oppressive, and evil. Despite the separation of the Atlantic ocean events in the New World were very much a function of events in the Old. In a sense events in the Old such as the French Revolution were a function of a reverse influence. If the honest reader does not attempt to understand it all together he doesn't stand much of a chance of understanding it at all. Just my $0.02.