It's a particular pleasure for me to have Professor Andrew Lambert here, who is professor of Naval History,
Department of War Studies, King's College, and was first examined at my Ph.D. examination.
So always good to see him and have a good, serious, thought based discussion of 19th century naval affairs.
And in his latest book, just out on Amazon, available for purchase for anyone who might be interested in purchasing it,
I saw Amazon is just discounted to half price.
Now, you know, he has said much further into the 19th century than I have with this one on the war of 1812.
For the British, a great triumph for the Americans, also a great triumph for Canada, a great triumph, I think.
So it's an interesting example of a war that everybody won, but no one really wants to discuss the strategic implications of his talk today.
Professor Andrew Lambert is going to answer decisively who won, why and with what consequences.
Thank very much for that kind introduction. I've made some mistakes in my terms, but Anastasius wasn't one of them.
You'll be pleased to know that news of the American Declaration of War in June 1812 prompted a brief outburst of patriotic anger in London,
where most right thinking Englishmen had expected a peaceful outcome to the current Anglo American crisis.
The London Times regretted the need to carry, and I quote, the flame and devastation of war to America.
But it did so without fear of the outcome. Even America's best friends in London and America had many friends in London at the
time were convinced the matter would blow over as soon as news reached Washington.
The contentious orders in council had been repealed.
In the event it would take six months of war and several rather unpleasant naval defeats
to make the British take the Americans seriously enough to hate them up until that point.
They treated them with marked disdain throughout the conflict.
Lack of resources would be the key issue for the British effort.
The British were obliged for most of the war to take an almost entirely defensive stance.
The war was conditioned by the American strategy, which was the invasion and conquest of Canada, and this determined the main theatre of the war.
It forced the British to deploy resources into that theatre and to sustain the logistics link back to Britain.
This placed a priority on the naval mission in controlling the Atlantic sea lanes,
controlling the American threat to troop ships and oceanic commerce.
And only slowly was an effective naval and then ultimately economic blockade built up,
which would conduct a war effectively against the United States,
using pretty much the same strategy that was already being deployed to some effect against continental Europe.
The key condition for this war is remembering that the United States is in the
process of shifting its culture from a maritime to a continental identity.
In 1883, the Louisiana Purchase was acquired at a remarkably low number of cents per acre by Thomas Jefferson.
He bought it at what the Americans would call a fire sale.
The Napoleonic Empire in the New World was now entirely at the beck and call of the British,
so Napoleon cashed it in before the British had time to take it.
This changed the nature of the United States.
What had been a maritime trading economy geared into the Atlantic world now had a
new alternative and dynamic open frontier stretching across towards the Pacific,
across the rest of the century. We all know what happens, and it is something that sets in trend from 1803.
This is a process which is already a decade old when this war breaks out.
It's no accident the men who vote for this war have nothing to do with the maritime economy.
This is a continental war voted for by continental people, many of whom lived on the other side of the Appalachians and have never seen the ocean,
let alone worried about the maritime pollution rights of New England ship owners or the personal security of New England seafarers.
Although he shared the widespread hope that the Americans would, in the fullness of time, negotiate their way back out of this conflict.
Lord Melville First of all, the Admiralty consulted senior naval officers, particularly Lord Keith,
who commanded the downed station, was therefore easily accessible and was a longstanding political ally.
Keith responded with some useful information about American harbours,
charts and other technical matter dating back to the War of Independence, in which he, like most of the other senior naval officers,
had served Melville and some vice admiral to John Borlase Warren to London and
offered him command of the combined North American and West Indies stations.
Essentially, the British had two stations, one controlling the Atlantic and one divided into two subsections in the Gulf of
Mexico and Caribbean War was given command of all three to harmonise resources.
This didn't work because the theatres were too widely spread for that to be effective.
And it got him into a lot of trouble with Caribbean plantation owners who were more
concerned about protecting their interests and prosecuting the war or defending Canada.
Warren was an interesting choice.
He was a political ally of the Grenville faction who were then being courted by the newly formed Liverpool administration.
Remember,
the Prime Minister has just been shop in the precincts of the House of Commons and so a new government is formed which nobody thinks is going to last.
Everybody is anticipating the Prince Regent will remove it and replace it with one more to his taste.
Turns out his tastes have changed and local Lord Liverpool remains in office for the next 15 years.
So making allies and securing votes in the House of Commons is a critical part of
waging the war of 1812 and the Granville faction are being courted quite actively.
Warren, himself an outstanding frigate commander and a useful squadron commander and an adequate diplomat,
having been the minister in St Petersburg a decade earlier,
his command stretched from Newfoundland to the coast of Mexico,
and his political masters back in London would not give him the attention that perhaps such a complex theatre demanded.
London only decided to take the war seriously some months after it began, and even then, mostly in a negative rather than a positive light.
The endless demand to protect the West Indian Islands and West Indian trade deflected
effort away from the more active prosecution of the war on the American coast.
Furthermore, the Admiralty, rather than Warren, consistently underestimated the scale and nature of the maritime threat posed by the United States.
Warren himself responded relatively effectively to the threats he faced, but was always short of resources to conduct this operation.
The backdrop, of course, of all of this is the Americans have only declared war because they fully expect that Napoleon will defeat the Russians.
He will re-impose a more thorough and rigorous version of the continental system, and the British will be defeated.
Therefore, the opportunistic seizure of what is now Canada will be something that will not be reversed at the final wash up of the peace process.
There was no anticipation on the part of the US administration that Napoleon might be defeated.
It was an inevitable victory and they were merely exploiting the inevitable.
The British response, therefore, was to send Warren out first and foremost to negotiate.
His diplomatic background meant that he was given a very tight brief by Foreign Secretary Counsel Ray,
under which he could negotiate a restoration of peace, essentially status quo ante.
And that is an important condition. From the start, all the British wanted was for the Americans to stop invading Canada.
That was the baseline of their war aims and remain so to the end.
If the Americans refused to negotiate, Warren was then given authority to undertake active operations,
but he was given nowhere near enough manpower and particularly not ship power to conduct this effectively.
Furthermore, Warren's relationship with Melville was deeply problematic.
Melville, as first lord of the Admiralty, was also the political manager of Scotland, and Warren didn't fit into his patronage network.
Fact His patronage network was of more interest to Melville than the conduct of the war.
Correspondence between Melville and Warren for the first 18 months of the war is dominated by the promotion of deserving Scots officers.
It is not dominated by the development of strategic measures to bring the Americans to the peace table.
Melville ran Scotland through the patronage of the East India Company in the Navy,
and he used the naval patronage to serve the interests of Cabinet ministers representing the other kingdoms.
Normally, the first Lord would have conducted a useful private correspondence with a theatre.
Andre as important as Warren to supplement the abilities rather bold strategic directions with a more informed and deniable version.
This doesn't happen. These two men never, ever got onto the same wavelength.
Indeed, the only time Melville wrote to Warren more than once a month was when Warren had made a mistake with handling patronage and promotions.
So the subtext is clear The American war was an awkward embarrassment for the government.
Getting the right officers promoted was important. And Melville, although he never said as much,
effectively blamed Warren for not making it go away and easing the problem of
keeping a very large Navy at war with the French and finding spare resources.
Warren picked up a lot of very useful intelligence on his way out, and his handling of the war through intelligence is a very interesting story.
The war, of course, is often explained as an issue revolving around the imprisonment of American seafarers.
This famous incident, 27th June 1807 in HMS Leopard, fired into the USS Chesapeake and removed four British deserters from the ship,
having attacked a national warship of the United States in international waters without proper provocation.
The Americans, of course, didn't recognise your nationality as inevitable.
The Americans recognise your nationality as a fluid concept. You could cease to be British, you could become American.
The British did not take this view. You were born a subject to the king. You remained one until you died.
And in the case of one of those deserters, that was shortly after this incident, he was stretched by the neck.
He not only deserted, but he also insulted and attacked one of his officers on the high street of Norfolk, Virginia.
And that was unforgivable. The other three men were given back to the Americans shortly after the outbreak of war,
because we decided while they were deserters from the Royal Navy, we weren't entirely sure they were British and.
Key problem from the start was that the American attack, which begins begins with the attack on its most beloved era.
It's the first time that anybody in any of the British know about this.
Very quickly becomes a question of whether the Americans can actually take Canada.
There are two fronts which the Americans attack on only in the middle of 1812 and Detroit and Canada and across the Niagara front.
They also planning to attack further north.
If this doesn't materialise, the American assumption, as Thomas Jefferson said, was that it was only a matter of marching.
Most Anglophone Canadians were sort of Americans and they would probably not mind.
The Francophone Canadians probably didn't like the British very much, so they wouldn't mind.
The main object of the invasion was to wipe out the Native Americans so nobody cared.
The problem, as General William, how quickly discovered was that the Canadians actually did care.
Most of those Anglophone Canadians had actually been thrown out of the United States with tar and feathers on their back.
So they weren't keen to rejoin the United States. They were empire loyalists.
That's why they called their new City Kings town. To make a point about who they were and the French Canadians turned out to be royalists.
The last time they'd been French, they've certainly been a king on the throne of France, and they preferred kings to republics.
This is the founding myth of Canadian national identity. They all got together and kept the Americans out.
It's a great myth. It's sort of true, but it's not wholly true. Most of the fighting was done by a small force of British regulars,
initially led by General Isaac Brock, the national hero of Canada, born in Guernsey.
If you go to the Canadian War Memorial, you'll find his jacket with a very large hole in the front of it.
Brock persuaded General Hull to surrender Detroit and his Army by threatening to unleash his savages.
And then he raced back to the Niagara Front, where he led a suicidal charge at the Battle of Queensland Heights, which got him killed.
But the American invasion was thrown back on two fronts and failed.
And for the rest of the war, American attempts to cross into Canada and acquire territory consistently failed.
The United States had planned an invasion and had not bothered to prepare an army.
The army across the frontier was neither large enough nor well enough trained to do the business it was sent to do.
And the British were able to bring reinforcements into theatre to keep up with the growing strength of the American army.
And in all the major firefights right the way through the war, the British Army came out on top.
These were only tactical victories, but the whole war on the front is a stalemate.
At the beginning of the war, this is where everybody was. And at the end of the war, they're back in the same place.
Nothing much has changed. The one major British offensive, the attempt to send an army down into Lake Champlain, failed.
American attempts to cross the frontier again failed. So this is the story of something that actually never happened.
There were naval battles on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie. But essentially, it's a status quo ante on this front.
This placed enormous priority on the Americans finding another strategy.
The problem was the Republican government of James Madison, like Thomas Jefferson's, his predecessor, was entirely anti naval.
They hadn't bothered to buy or build any new ships for more than a decade.
They hadn't invested any money in the Navy before the war. They just mobilised what they had and sent out to sea to do what it could.
They had no expectation of success. Interestingly enough, of course, in terms of strategic effects, the American Navy had no effect.
The strategic effect produced a sea by the United States was entirely private.
A large number of privateers, about 350 commissioned,
went to sea and were initially relatively successful against unescorted British
merchant shipping in the Atlantic and all the way down into the West Indies.
So American strategy for war failed American private enterprise redeemed American national failure,
but it pointed in the direction of the British response.
Warren was well aware of the privateer threat, and most of his deployments were geared around increasing the strength of the convoy system,
increasing the number of escorting vessels with convoys,
and essentially doing what happened in the Battle of the Atlantic, removing unescorted, easy pickings from the theatre.
Warren's job was to run a tight convoy system to supplement that with a blockade of the American ports that had warships in them.
Boston is the main American naval base for most of the war.
New York, the second, and the Chesapeake, just down the south of the map is the third.
If those three have located, the US Navy is not going to see in any strength.
Those are the main deepwater harbours the American fleet uses. But initially, Warren.
Is very short of ships. He doesn't have enough to keep up a regular blockade.
And by the time the war really gets going in October,
the weather has broken and it's impossible to blockade Boston effectively through the winter with sailing ships.
Warren knows this and so does everybody else, including the Americans.
So he faces a desperate problem of trying to have enough ships at the right place to stop the American Navy coming out.
This means he's not able to stop the privateers getting out, a different threat for which he doesn't have at this stage the resources.
While we're in short of resources, he's not short of quality people.
His reinforcements include some of the best and brightest the Navy has to offer, and particularly Rear Admiral George Coburn,
who was removed from the Cadiz station where he was running the amphibious elements of supporting the Spanish
War and sent across to take command of the Chesapeake Bay and conduct amphibious operations in the theatre.
Other officers were sent across and Warren insisted and was generally this was
generally done that any ship sent to the station had to be ships of high speed.
There was no point sending slow sailing ships to the American station because the American ships,
unlike many of the other ships that the Royal Navy was fighting at this time,
were generally distinguished by being well, well handled relatively fast.
So you will see the Admiralty actually picking out specific ships because of their known performance under sail.
That one ship in particular was very interesting. HMS Superb, which Nelson was rated as a very fast ship, was specifically sent across as a flagship.
This was one of the fastest line of battleships in the Royal Navy.
It was intended to use that speed to hunt down and capture one of the American frigates.
It didn't happen, but it was a good move.
Because pretty fully expected, as did the Americans, that the war at sea would turn out to be a bit of a walkover.
The American Navy seven frigates about the same number of brigs and sloops and some gunboats.
What did they know about fighting at sea and who were they to challenge the British?
It didn't work out like that.
The first ship to ship action, which was brought to a conclusion USS Constitution, captured HMAS Carrier and the Americans went home in triumph,
having defeated the masters of the ocean they know fancied themselves to be quite important.
This wasn't true. The Constitution was a third larger than the very end, had a third more firepower and at least a third more crew.
It was a very one sided battle. If the American had lost, he would have been a great fool.
Isaac Hayes, who won this battle, was no fool. He was a very good officer, probably the best in the American Navy.
And he handled his very powerful ship effectively to take a much weaker opponent.
That's not how the American administration celebrated the victory.
And indeed, the standard version of this is that two ships of the same class met and the Americans triumphed.
It's a pretty large class, and it comes in many gradations.
The American ship is a whole rate larger than the British ship.
At the same time, of course, things were not going quite Napoleon's way in Russia, operating out of an enormous bloodbath.
Resolve nothing more men died in the key bastion in this battle than died in the whole of the War of 1812.
If you want to know the scale of these two wars, this is a big war.
The war of 1812 was a very small war. 20,000 fatal casualties on all sides.
The Russians lost a lot more than that on that day. But this is the war that the British government is looking at.
They are not looking at America. They've sent Warren with some instructions.
They're feeding him ships as they can. They are not looking at this war.
That correspondent spoke with him, which is nonexistent and with each other.
It is very clear they are not interested in what is happening in America.
They assume that command of the sea will give them everything they need.
They assume that they can get away with this and they are not going to take any
military manpower out of the European theatre to send it to North America.
The reinforcements that arrive in Canada for the ground war are coming in the West Indies.
These are relatively understrength West Indian based units which have suffered the
ravages of disease and are certainly not in the first flush of fighting efficiency.
But they are more than good enough to do the job. Should be stressed that at the very end of the war of 1812,
there were still more British regulars serving in West Indian garrisons and they were defending Canada.
The British did not strip the West Indies to defend Canada.
They sent just enough, even towards the end of 1812.
The Admiralty is more concerned about a build up of French naval strength in the roads than it is about the entire American navy.
Some of the more neurotic members of the Board of Admiralty are convinced the French are going to win a naval arms race.
Fortunately, that doesn't happen.
It's very fortunate because it allows the government to keep the Navy estimates to 1812 levels despite fighting an extra war.
The French challenge begins to slide away just as the American challenge comes on stream.
So the 1813 estimates were only 700,000 more than those of 1812.
That's about a 6% increase, which, given you've got a whole new war to fight, is quite impressive piece of fiscal management.
It is a wonder the Admiralty clung to the hope that, and I quote,
there was some appearance at one time of the American government being inclined to return to a state of peace.
The dream of the Board of Admiralty really only evaporates on Trafalgar Day 1812.
It's only then they realise from the news that the Americans are determined to fight this war to a finish.
Having been offered status quo ante because the British should repeal the orders and counsel the Americans,
just turn around and say, Well, it's not about that anymore. Now it's about the imprisonment thing.
You will have to stop impressing American seafarers. Those are our demands.
And this is something the British government will not concede.
Fact, it won't even talk about it with the Americans at any stage or indeed anybody else at this period.
The news from America doesn't get any better.
It was Macedonian was captured in the mid-Atlantic by the United States, another disproportionate battle.
And then the constitution captured in West Java off the coast of Brazil.
And this time the battle was painted up not by an American, but by a British artist.
And the disparity in size and power is very clear.
This is not the art of American victory. This is the art of heroic British defeat.
The plucky Brit has fought a good fight. He's had his mask shot away, and he's going to have to surrender.
But it was a heavyweight against a middleweight competition.
There was really only one winner to this battle. The job was well handled, well fought.
A captain was killed in the battle and she took quite a beating.
But the result was inevitable. As long as the American captain didn't make a complete mess of the action, he was going to win.
And the British were now subverting American claims of glory by pointing out the disparity of force for poor old Warren.
It seemed the news couldn't get any worse, and fortunately it didn't.
Instead, the increase of naval power on the coast meant that an effective blockade could be imposed.
And by the middle of 1813, the royal. The Navy have taken control of American coastal waters around the middle of the day on the 1st of June 1813.
The American naval hero, Commodore Stephen Decatur, broke out of Long Island Sound to the west,
to the east and the United States with his with HMS Macedonian, the USS Macedonian and the USS Hornet.
He was intercepted by a seven before and a frigate driven into New London, Connecticut,
and his two frigates never left the Thames River at New London for the duration of the war.
One third of America's frigate strength had been taken off the board in a single morning.
Later that afternoon, USS Chesapeake sailed from Boston with orders to intercept and destroy British supply and troop
shipping heading into the Gulf of St Lawrence to reinforce the Army on the Canadian frontier.
Because the American Army was taking a beating on the frontier and was desperate to cut supplies.
Lawrence set off fully expecting to have to fight the single British frigate that lay out in Boston Bay.
What he didn't anticipate was that this frigate was a remarkable vessel.
The Shannon had been commanded by Philip Brook for seven years and he'd brought
the vessel to a pitch of perfection in terms of its gunnery and tactical handling.
Brooke had instructed his men and rewarded them for precision of fire, solid execution of duty, and the very skilled conduct of battle.
Brooke essentially outmanoeuvred Lawrence and drew him into a battle he couldn't win.
As Lawrence's ship comes along from behind Brooks, guns fire into the American gunboats as they range alongside.
After most British gun firing into the foremost American gun, within a minute,
half the American guns are either disabled or their gun crews have been killed or wounded.
On the gun deck, gun deck officer is dead on the upper deck of the American.
Grenades have been knocked over. Marines have been killed. All of the ship's officers have been wounded.
Ships sailing, masters dead. Ships will have been destroyed.
And the main backstage pass were up here, which makes sure the main mast doesn't fall over has been shot away.
The American ship is crippled, suffered very heavy casualties and is no longer an effective fighting or sailing platform.
A single full broadside aimed fire.
Richmond didn't fire into the ship. They fired into the gun force, killed the crew.
He told them that was precisely what they were doing. You kill the crew, you take the ship.
Normally, these are attritional battles. The 1812 battles lasted an hour and a half to 2 hours.
This one was going to be over in 11 minutes.
The Chesapeake then swung up into the wind out of control, and the Shannon fired into a stern galleries, causing further chaos.
At this point, the two ships then collided. Brooke led his men onto the upper deck of the Chesapeake in and cleared away.
The last remaining American crew, drove down below and obliged them to surrender.
It was literally all over in 11 minutes time by the first lieutenant's watch, which was down in the magazine of the Shannon.
At this point, Brooke was attacked by three British deserters,
one of whom hit him over the head with a cutlass and opened his skull up and exposed his brains.
He survived because the surgeon had the good sense not to treat him. Six days later, the Shannon led the Chesapeake up Halifax Harbour.
It was the Stars and Stripes of the Union. Brooke, by this stage, was making something of a recovery.
James Lawrence had just died of peritonitis alone.
Would have the misfortune not only to lose a battle, but to be buried three times in three different cities.
He's now in Trinity Churchyard in New York, just across the road from Wall Street.
The Americans have lost essentially three frigates in one day, the ship taking, the other two taken off the board,
and they would never again challenge the British at sea with warships privately at threat remained active.
But this was a turning point. George Cruickshank quickly got to work on what the bafflement here we see Jack
talk giving Uncle Sam boot up the britches to insisted British valour triumph
over Yankee boasting this was British revenge for all of those American planes
that won the battles in 1812 and to have bested the masters of the ocean.
And there's lots of rather subversive matter going on here.
The Americans had actually laid on a celebratory dinner for the battle, which they knew they were going to win.
And that even issued a ticket for Captain Brooke, who was to attend this battle in honour of his defeat.
He didn't go to the dinner. He was just composed. And you can see over there a maniac with a cutlass is about to hit him head.
That maniac, of course, is taken straight out of the 1790.
That's usually a French Jacobin. He's now obviously an American Jacobin.
I don't think Cruickshank at this stage knew he was a British deserter. Brooke himself came home and survive until 1840.
He became a national hero. He was the first British naval officer to be given a gold medal,
which you see hanging in the middle of his chest, that for a single ship action, he was the first.
There would only be one other. They'll come to him afterwards and the light isn't good,
but he is standing on the stars and stripes and that is how you are portrayed
when you've taken an enemy vessel and the standard that goes with it after this,
the American response. The British blockade was to pass an act of Congress called the Torpedo Act,
which gave you full value for any British ship you could blow up with what we these days would call an IED.
The Americans decided they couldn't fight a conventional war. They would have to fight an unconventional war.
Asymmetric warfare is nothing new these days.
People do it to the Americans. In those days, they did it to other people.
A torpedo, of course, a reference to a torpedo fish or electric eel.
Anything underwater and shocking, a torpedo.
And here we see Jack Charles, rather interesting response.
Blow up my hull. Indeed. You may kiss my blank blank tap rail.
Mr. Yankee Doodle. The British, not hugely impressed.
The first Royal Navy captain to be subject to one of these attacks was Thomas Hardy, who lost a promising young officer and several men on a vessel.
The Americans had floated out with a bomb in it. He sent a message ashore to the local community.
If they did that again, he would burn the town down around their ears and them in their beds didn't do to annoy Thomas Hardy.
He was quite a nice man normally, but this offended his sense of what was proper.
This was not correct, was at sea, were fought by gentlemen using gentlemanly rules.
By the end of 1812, certainly by the middle of 1813, the Americans knew that they were in a difficult position.
Napoleon had been defeated as late as the 4th of December.
One of the leading proponents of the war, Henry Clay, told Congress that he expected Napoleon was at that very moment dictating peace in Moscow.
Napoleon was actually back in Paris. He was dictating very different things.
Madison opened the New Year by signing a new naval program to build some ships.
He should have done that two years earlier if he meant to do anything about the war.
And he marked the collapse of his hopes and a dawning realisation that having taken his country to war utterly unprepared,
he as Chief Magistrate was ultimately responsible for the looming catastrophe.
The British never understood America's relationship with France.
The Americans looked to France, but they never got too close to France.
They never quite trusted Napoleon, however much they were fighting the same enemy.
Blockade was now increasingly effective with a naval blockade blocking American warships from getting to see.
The British were able to concentrate more and more ships on the escort of convoys.
Convoy system run by the Admiralty in very close cooperation with Lloyd's of London.
Very close relationship between these two organisations and a daily indeed hourly exchange of information about the conduct of convoys,
the assembly of ships, and interestingly, a shared interest in prosecuting those who broke the rules.
Merchant ship captains who left that convoy were sent to prison.
You voted your insurance. You vitiated your right to be a seafarer.
And you sent to the Fleet Prison. Naval officers who abandoned that convoy lost their command and probably their careers.
This was not an unimportant matter. By the middle of 1813.
The Royal Navy had got a pretty strong convoy system running, and there were very few unescorted merchant ships for American privateers to attack.
Privateering became an increasingly rewarding business.
Privateer doesn't want to fight a battle. He wants to take the easy prize.
If you make him fight a battle, he will probably go away and come back another day.
And if every time it comes back, there are no free prizes, he will go back to his home port, pay off his ship.
And in the case of many privateer owners, he will take his money out of the sea and put it into land investments.
By 1814, American seafaring communities are investing in industry.
Baltimore Great Seaport Town. The dominant Privateering town becomes an industrial hub.
During this war, people are taking their money out of the sea where they're not getting a good return.
They're putting it into industry where they're getting five and 10%. And money talks.
This war is being won by the decision of American capitalists to move their money in particular ways.
The British also only blockade those pieces of America that have voted for the war.
The division list of Congress means that they can blockade the states that voted for the conflict.
Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia. These are the people the British make war on.
New England gets laid off for the first 18 months of the war because they voted against
it and they are supplying the grain that Wellington's army is eating in the peninsula.
Wellington couldn't find enough grain and chilli had to import it and it came from New England.
Those American seafarers and ships were supplying the British.
They were not going privateering. This was a double positive.
Getting the Americans to do that trade was very effective.
But even so, the war just wouldn't go away. All the way through 1813, the British government is essentially unconcerned by the war.
The war is happening. The war is not being lost. So they'll just leave it running.
But increasingly, the West India planters are becoming agitated about their commercial losses.
And ultimately this will lead to the removal of John Warren, his sacked essentially at the behest of the West India community.
April 1814 sees a dramatic shift.
All of a sudden, the British are not fighting two wars. They're now only fighting one against the Americans.
Napoleon has abdicated. He's on his way to the island of Elba.
I put this in Fiennes in German. It's a German celebrating the Corsican ogre being taken off to sea.
At this stage, the British have a choice to make. Do they send significant reinforcements to the American theatre to prosecute the war?
To a decision to impose peace on the Americans by serious amount of military power?
And they decide not to. They use their military transports to take the Portuguese army home from Bordeaux and then pay the transports of this.
And 4000 British troops from Bordeaux and another three and a half to 4000 from the Mediterranean garrisons to Bermuda,
where 4000 men, mostly those from Bordeaux, then reimburse and sail into the Chesapeake Bay,
where under the direction of George Coburn they row up the Patuxent River land,
move swiftly to the field of Bladensburg where they demolish the American army and then occupy Washington.
This is something Coburn has been planning for the previous 12 months an amphibious strike using maritime power to move troops quickly,
to strike at the American capital as a way of distracting America's attention from the Canadian frontier.
The decision to destroy the public buildings of Washington is a response to the American destruction of what is now Toronto,
then New York, the previous year. And the whole object is to force the Americans to recognise that weakness.
It works in one critical way.
The last remaining American capitalists with any money available take their money north of the border and buy British government securities.
The US government cannot raise any capital from anywhere to do anything.
The American envoys in Europe try to raise money on the Amsterdam market and the
British tell the Dutch that they really didn't want to lend the Americans any money.
If they want to get Belgium at the peace settlement, which is looming. So the Dutch won't lend them any money either.
America is not bankrupt. By November, the US government has no money to pay anybody for anything.
It is absolutely without credit or cash. This is a fairly decisive result.
This is the architect of the destruction of Washington, said George Coburn,
seen here in his officially commissioned portrait with his top boots and his
spurs on where the public buildings of Washington burning in the background.
This is his finest hour. He's very pleased with himself. I think there's a wry smile across his lips.
He's quite pleased. This is his handiwork. This is a great achievement.
That's what he did to the White House. He ate the dinner that Madison had laid down to celebrate his victory.
And then they burned the place down the Capitol building as well.
And two days later, a British frigate squadron captured Alexandria having sail at the Potomac.
And here we see John Bull as a minotaur imposing peace on the merchants of Alexandria,
their hair standing on end at the sight of this astonishing monster which has come up their river.
Despite the best efforts of the U.S. Army and Navy to stop them, and they went home with all of their swag as well.
The strike force then sailed and landed just outside Baltimore to see if the Americans would run away another time.
4000 British troops drove the Americans off the field at North Point and into the defences of Baltimore.
But the British discovered that there were 25,000 armed men in Baltimore and the odds were rather difficult.
So after a solitary bombardment of Fort McHenry, which gave the Americans their national anthem, eventually they withdrew with 4000 men.
The British could only do what the Americans would let them do. BLADENSBURG They ran away.
They got an easy victory at North Point.
They eventually retreated, but they didn't run away because the men of Baltimore were defending their own private property.
The men of Washington were not prepared to die to defend government property as a clear distinction between these two places.
All the way through this process, the British were really quite anxious to get this rather awkward little war finished.
Not because they were worried about losing it, but because they didn't need to win it.
The main object of British policy throughout this period is the resettlement of Europe.
Europe is the big issue all the way through this war. It is the only war that matters in London.
The American war is a sideshow. Negotiations are ultimately held in Ghent, in Belgium.
Why again? Why Belgium? Belgium is a British occupied province.
The British army had been in Belgium since the beginning of the downfall of Napoleon in early 1814,
when the British had sent a small army to try and capture Antwerp,
which was the epicentre of the entire 20 odd year war with the French, with the French in Belgium.
The British were going to be at war with them. This was a given. So the British didn't have enough military manpower to deal with Antwerp in 1814.
There was no way they were going to send military manpower to deal with the Americans if they couldn't get the French out of Belgium.
One was important. The other wasn't. Fortunately, when Napoleon finally abdicated,
the British were still in Belgium and they occupied the province and having the negotiations that served several purposes.
It was close to London. It was on the main road to Vienna where the larger negotiations were happening,
and the American Mail travels through the British post office, which opened and read it.
So for security was not a strong point of the American government at that stage.
So the British were able to read their mail quite neatly.
By the end of 1840, it was quite clear that the European powers looked upon the American war as a weakness for Britain.
Britain was still at war. How could it take part in the grand peace settlement?
The Russians wanted to talk about maritime belligerent rights at Vienna.
They wanted to talk about limiting British power. Sort one thing the Americans would have been very happy to talk about as well.
The British made it quite clear they would not talk to anybody at either negotiation about anything if that was on the table.
Gulf War II made it quite clear these issues were not going to be discussed.
The British could not attend any such Congress. Nor was the American war to be brought into the discussion of the European settlement.
These two entirely separate events. They were not to be cross contaminated.
So the British kept the two wars separate. They laid down their absolute demands at the beginning, the no discussion of maritime belligerent rights.
So there was never a discussion again of either the orders in council or the imprisonment of seafarers.
These were simply not mentioned. The Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814.
Status quo ante. The terms the Americans have been offered on day one.
They fought for two and a half years to achieve nothing.
Of course, they achieved quite a lot in the war, but not the things that they've been looking for.
The last throw of the dice would have been another American invasion of Canada.
But without any money, it's very difficult to mobilise manpower to conduct military operations.
Shortly before news of the piece arrived in New York, the American flagship, the U.S. president,
set off to attack the last remaining maritime target, which American ships could access.
They thought British trade with China. The US president was going to sail to the China Seas to cut up the East India's trade.
Commodore Victor set off from Sandy Hook on the 14th of January and the next morning he fully expected to be free and clear in the Atlantic.
Instead, he was intercepted by four British frigates, hunted down and eventually captured by HMS.
And. This was the last great naval battle of the war of 1812 Clippers victory.
The smaller British ship this time captured the bigger American one and did so in very fine style.
Henry Hope.
The Captain was the next captain to be given a naval gold medal for winning a frigate battle, and the British brought their prize home in triumph.
This, of course, is Castle, right, a map of the war of 1812. This is how the British saw the War of 1812.
It was completely irrelevant to the big issue of settling the European state system and establishing a balance between the French,
the Austrians, the Russians and the Prussians,
creating a unified Netherlands that would keep the French out of Antwerp and off the river shelf for as long as possible,
and stabilising something which was essential to the future prosperity of Britain.
In the process, Cussler realised that Canada was very valuable.
Canada would replace Britain's dependency on the Baltic for grain, timber and naval supplies.
And Castlereagh is very clear about this. Canada is well worth keeping because of its impact in reducing our dependency on the Baltic,
which has forced the British to fight a five year campaign at very great expense to keep Baltic access open.
So it did turn out to be a very useful thing in the end.
Canadian timber, first products and grain would give the British Empire a degree of autarky.
How did the British government view this? The end of the war with the Americans?
With great pleasure and satisfaction. They didn't want to fight another year.
It would have cost £10 million, which they didn't have, and they had no desire to take any of America.
The object to the war throughout had been to make the Americans stop what they were doing and consider their position.
Ultimately, they did this. The Americans, of course, were a little short of friends in Europe,
and the Spanish were rather annoyed because they'd started the War of 1812 by invading Florida, which was then Spanish as well.
So the British ended up with a peace settlement,
which was most convenient because rather than sending more troops to fight in America and even sending Wellington to command them,
the British still had some troops left in Europe.
When Napoleon returned, one of the architects of the victory against the Americans, Rear Admiral Henry Hoffman,
was back in time to take command of the blockade of France, and it was his squadron that took the surrender of Napoleon.
So he'd come from capturing the US as president to taking the surrender of the Emperor.
He was brought back to Plymouth and then sent to a properly British place from which he could not escape.
I think that's a rather nice way of representing some very big flag, very small island.
The Americans immediately claimed that they'd won the war. This is what you do.
If you're a political party seeking re-election, you don't say, Oh, sorry we lost.
You say we won. And there's a massive outpouring of Republican Party propaganda claiming victory, not the victory.
The Americans thought they were going to get a military victory, but a naval victory.
Here we have the anti naval party making the Navy into the heroes of the day.
These are the names of American naval heroes. These are seahorses.
We've met them in their hours. This is a motto of the Commodore Perry from the Battle of Lake Erie.
So all of a sudden, the unexpected victories of the American Navy have become the basis for victory.
And to this very day, the Americans will show you the USS Constitution and remind you that this ever victorious ship won three battles
in the war of 1812 and is still around to celebrate the fact she's the flagship of the American version of 1812.
But this should be contrasted with HMS President when the British brought president home.
She was a bit knocked about, so they built a perfect replica of her.
And after many interesting years of service, she ended up as the headquarters of the London Royal Naval Reserve.
She's seen here in the Docklands in her declining years, and that name is stuck.
Headquarters of the Royal Navy in London has been HMS President ever since.
It's interesting you talk to very few naval officers you've ever stopped between the
cloakroom and the bar to look at the engravings of the capture of the USS Present,
because none of them seem to know where the next president comes from. One of them even told me something to do with Tony Blair.
I had to disabuse him of this notion. In 1833, there was a border dispute between Maine in Quebec and First Lord of the Admiralty.
Sir James Graham sent the ship HMS Present to the American station to be the flagship under the command of Admiral Sir George Coburn.
This a man of a sense of humour. This in 55, there's another little argument between the British and the Americans.
And the same first of the Admiralty sent HMS Chesapeake under the command of Captain George Brooke, who was the son of Philip.
The point was easily made British Seapower was the guarantee of the independence and integrity of Canada as a British dominion.
So the key in looking at this war is to get away from the idea that it was a second war of independence
in which the Americans fought off the dastardly British who were coming to reconquer their country.
The British had no desire to conquer anything in the new world, apart from the will of the Americans to keep invading Canada.
They wanted them to go away and behave themselves. As a result of the war, the Americans learned that they couldn't take on the British on their own,
that they would have to wait until they were very busy fighting somebody else. And even then, they probably couldn't get away with it.
And after the war, the Americans may have claimed victory,
but their response in terms of their defence budget suggests that they recognised they'd lost for the whole of the 19th century.
The major output of American defence spending was the construction of a massive series of coast defence fortifications from Maine to Florida.
The east coast of America is the most heavily fortified of any such coast.
If you go to such obscure fishing villages as Newport, Rhode Island, you will find a fortress so big they held a jazz festival inside it.
And New York Harbour is one of the world's largest collections of sea coast defences.
There was only one reason for building these defences. There was only one navy that could possibly come to attack America's coast.
And there was only one reason why the British would have ever gone to attack.
America, and that would have been another invasion of Canada.
So those two things don't happen. It's not that the British don't attack America is that the Americans don't invade Canada.
And as a result, those fortifications never tested until 1861, when they ended up being very useful to the Confederates.
The Confederacy and its supporters have been very interested in the lessons of the War of 1812,
because one of the more effective British techniques for upsetting the South and central states
of the United States was to land on the coast and to incite the slaves to desert their masters.
George Coburn was very quick to raise regiments of colonial Marines,
former American slaves who were equipped with red jackets and muskets, and he said, were excellent men.
They were tall, strong, well-built. They knew the local country and they didn't desert.
Some of these men took a prominent part in the attack on Washington.
The nightmare scenario for the American South from 1815 to 1861 was the arrival on the coast of a British fleet,
complete with West Indian regiments of black soldiers.
If you ever wondered why the Southern Confederacy was the most well-armed and prepared section of America for war in 1861,
they were frightened of a servile revolt, particularly one prompted by the British.
It was they pushed for so much money to be spent on the coast defences of places like Charleston.
So when Fort Sumter was bombarded, it was facing the wrong way.
It was facing up to sea to stop the British coming in, not to impose federal control over the city.
One war at a time. Who's, quote, Abraham Lincoln?
December 1861. The current crisis.
United States Navy stops a British ship in international waters and removes two of its passengers at gunpoint,
clear breach of international law, particularly in breach of the American version of maritime rights.
So the British the British insisted they got the envoys back, although they didn't personally want them.
They were slave owners after all. And the Americans backed down.
And Lincoln said one war at a time. Absolutely right. In 1812, the British didn't have a choice.
They either conceded to the Americans and with it conceded their ability to wage war against France effectively or they fought.
On this occasion, they fought and they were successful,
in part because Napoleon failed and in part because they were very fortunate, as the British have often been in their enemies.
The Americans went to war with no capacity to win the war. They didn't have the military strength,
the financial resources or the long term planning in place to do anything other than, as Jefferson said, march into Canada.
Fighting for anything was not something they planned for.
Curiously, by the end of the war, the Americans had got reasonably good at fighting for things, but it was by then rather too late.
So I think the lesson ultimately of this war has to be if you want to take on one of the world's great powers,
it's probably a good idea to get very ready before you start to think very clearly about what it is you mean to do.
And to be very certain that those are the people who are keeping them distracted
are going to continue to do so until you've finished what it is you wish to do.
Thank you.