The War of 1812: Difference between revisions

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[[File:Francis-Scott-Key_9189.jpg|frame|"Oh say! Can you see?'']]
 
The [[The War of 1812]] (1812-1815) is the most popular war ever to grace the Americas. Americans think they won it; the Canadians think ''they'' won it, and the British have ''no idea'' they fought it. In the US it has been called 'The Second Revolutionary War'; in Canada it is remembered as the war in which Canada stopped the US trying to Annex them, and like we said, the British don't even know it happened. In fact, no-one outside North America knows it happened. This is because an altogether more expensive, expansive, ideologically charged, bloody and ''important'' series of wars had been going on elsewhere for some time. There were more men on the field when General Bonaparte won at Austerlitz in 1805, for instance, than there were English-speaking soldiers in all of the Americas in 1815. These conflicts were the French Revolutionary and [[Napoleonic Wars]], which basically concern the failed attempts of France to alternately defend itself against and dominate all of Europe.
 
The causes of the war basically boil down to the knock-on effects of the [[Napoleonic Wars]]. Traders in the US had become rich from war-profiteering; basically, selling to both sides in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Both sides had declared an embargo upon each other, and commissioned privateers and used their navies to raid each others' shipping. After their sound victory at Trafalgar in 1805, the British were suddenly in a much better position to confiscate American trade bound for France - and they did just that. Moreover, the expansion of the Royal Navy left them short of sailors. As a result, Royal Navy began to conscript sailors into the navy in British ports and began to search US vessels they encountered for deserters - easily identifiable by their RN tattoos. Some ten thousand men were thus taken from American merchant vessels and pressed into RN service. Virtually all of these men actually ''were'' deserters from the Royal Navy, but that was besides the point. The facts were, the Royal Navy was ignoring the sovereignty of the United States, which had real troubles being taken seriously as a country abroad (and, to a certain extent, at home). The traders who actually owned the ships in question didn't mind - they were raking it in and entry into the war was the ''last'' thing they wanted - but a new generation of Americans who had not experienced the hardships of [[The American Revolution]] and its aftermath were eager to prove their worth and wage a Second American War of Independence to drive the British from the continent.
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