The Second American Revolution
Friday November 13, 2009
Termed the Second American Revolution, the War of 1812 had a major impact on American life. Take a look at the timeline of events that took place during this ordeal that involved President James Madison fleeing from the White House.
Comments
Wasn’t it Dolley Madison who fled? The President was off reviewing the troops and was not at the White House nor in Washington that day.
Who drew up that “Timeline” of the War of 1812? It’s a complete work of fiction. Take the first item for instance, “British impress approximately ten thousand Americans forcing them to work on British ships”. What actually happened was that the British Navy, which was desperately short of manpower to fight Napoleon, stopped and boarded American ships looking for deserters from the Royal Navy. They found quite a lot of them – but not ten thousand! Very few Americans of that time had naval experience, and the majority of the crews of “American” ships were in fact British-born, and easily identifiable from their accents, and yes, a lot of them were deserters from the Royal Navy. Now, the British navy was a brutal organisation which treated its sailors disgracefully, and you can’t blame anybody for deserting from it. But, nevertheless, point of fact, what the Royal Navy was looking for was deserters, not so much to punish them as to fill the gaps in crewing their ships in the war with France. And “ten thousand Americans forced to work on British ships” is a complete distortion of what actually happened.
The War of 1812 wasn’t a “Second War for Independence”, for the simple reason Britain never had any intention of attempting a re-conquest of the USA. The war was just a side-effect of the Napoleonic Wars. The War of 1812 started by accident after a compromise agreement had already been reached, and concluded with the meaningless Battle of New Orleans (which happened because they didn’t have the internet…..) two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed . The USA signed the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814 because Britain had defeated Napoleon’s France, and would now be able to transfer plenty of troops to the American war, instead of it being just a minor sideline. The war achieved absolutely nothing.