In resisting the US invasion, theirs was a victory of “a David over the American Goliath.” Americans remember the British burning of Washington, D.C., in 1814, but forget that the American invaders had burned the public buildings of Upper Canada’s capital, York (present-day Toronto), the previous year. Indeed, Taylor suggests that the Canadians have much more reason to celebrate the war than Americans do. “The War of 1812,” he writes, “looms small in American memory, forgotten as insignificant because it apparently ended as a draw that changed no boundary and no policy.” Because of the resistance of Fort McHenry in Baltimore to British bombardment, which inspired our national anthem, and Andrew Jackson’s stunning defeat of the British invading force at New Orleans in 1815, Americans, says Taylor, tend to think of the war as “a defensive triumph against British aggression.” But this perspective “obscures the war’s origins and primacy as an American invasion of Canada.” Although its bicentenary will soon be upon us, Taylor implies that Americans might not even bother to celebrate it. In his remarkable and deeply researched book the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor masterfully captures the strangeness of this war. This second war by the recently established US government against the former mother country of Great Britain was, said Virginia’s John Taylor, the philosopher of Jeffersonian Republicanism, a “metaphysical war, a war not for conquest, not for defense, not for sport,” but rather “a war for honour, like that of the Greeks against Troy.” The War of 1812 was the strangest war in American history.
Watmough: Repulsion of the British at Fort Erie, 15th August 1814, 1840 Chicago History Museum/Bridgeman Art LibraryĮ.C.
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