Origins of the War of 1812

[9][10] The British Empire was engaged in a life-and-death war against Napoleon and could not allow the Americans to help the enemy, regardless of their lawful neutral rights to do so.

That this restriction took such an extreme form after 1807 stemmed not only from the effort to defeat Napoleon, but also from the undoubted jealousy of America's commercial prosperity that existed in England.

America was unfortunate in that for most of the period from 1803 to 1812 political power in England was held by a group that was pledged not only to the defeat of France, but also to a rigid maintenance of Britain's commercial supremacy.

Britain was not trying to provoke a war and, at one point, cut its allocations of gunpowder to the tribes, but it was trying to build up its fur trade and friendly relations with potential military allies.

[20] According to Pratt, There is ample proof that the British authorities did all in their power to hold or win the allegiance of the Indians of the Northwest with the expectation of using them as allies in the event of war.

The American expansion into the Northwest Territory (now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) was being blocked by Indians, which was a major cause animating the Westerners.

"[24] More controversial is whether an American war goal was to acquire Canadian lands, especially what is now Western Ontario, permanently or whether it was planned to seize the area temporarily as a bargaining chip.

"[28] The other faction, based in the South, said that acquiring new territory in the North would give it too much power and so opposed the incorporation of Canada since its Catholic population was viewed as "unfit by faith, language and illiteracy for republican citizenship."

[29] Even James Monroe and Henry Clay, key officials in the government, expected to gain at least Upper Canada from a successful war.

Hull's proclamation also threatened them with "the horrors & calamities of war" and promised to kill out of hand any white found fighting with an Indian.

President James Madison believed that food supplies from Canada were essential to the British overseas empire in the West Indies and that an American seizure would be an excellent bargaining chip at the peace conference.

Thomas Jefferson, for example, was now out of power but argued that the expulsion of British interests from nearby Canada would remove a long-term threat to American republicanism.

Stagg argued that Madison and his advisers believed that the conquest of Canada would be easy and that economic coercion would force the British to come to terms by cutting off the food supply for their highly-valuable West Indies sugar colonies.

Stagg suggested that frontiersmen demanded the seizure of Canada not because they wanted the land, since they had plenty of it, but because the British were thought to be arming the Indians and thus blocked settlement of the West.

"[34] Alfred Leroy Burt, a Canadian scholar but also a professor at an American university, agreed completely by noting that Foster, the British minister to Washington, also rejected the argument that annexation of Canada was a war goal.

However, Stagg stated that "had the War 1812 been a successful military venture, the Madison administration would have been reluctant to have returned occupied Canadian territory to the enemy.

Once the war began, ex-President Thomas Jefferson warned that the British presence posed a grave threat and pointed to "The infamous intrigues of Great Britain to destroy our government... and with the Indians to Tomahawk our women and children, prove that the cession of Canada, their fulcrum for these Machiavellian levers, must be a sine qua non at a treaty of peace."

He predicted in late 1812 that "the acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us the experience for the attack on Halifax, the next and final expulsion of England from the American continent.

That stance was motivated by the advice of Albert Gallatin, who had calculated that half of the US deep-sea merchant seamen (9,000 men) were British subjects.

However, they relied on unverifiable declarations by the individual concerned for evidence of citizenship, and the large fees paid for the documents made them a lucrative sideline.

"[48] Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun pushed a declaration of war through Congress by stressing the need to uphold American honor and independence.

Speaking of his fellow Southerners, Calhoun told Congress that they The historian Norman Risjord emphasized the central importance of honor as a cause the war.

[50] Americans of every political stripe saw the need to uphold national honor and to reject the treatment of the United States by Britain as a third-class nonentity.

[53][54] Many Americans called for war, but Jefferson held back and insisted that economic warfare would prove more successful, which he initiated, especially in the form of embargoing or refusing to sell products to Britain.

Historians have demonstrated the powerful motive of honor to shape public opinion in a number of states, including Massachusetts,[55] Ohio,[56] Pennsylvania,[57][58] Tennessee,[59] and Virginia,[60] as well as the territory of Michigan.

[61] On 3 June 1812, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired by the pro-war extremist John C. Calhoun, called for a declaration of war in ringing phrases by denouncing Britain's "lust for power," "unbounded tyranny," and "mad ambition."

Stagg, a historian from New Zealand, The failure of Jefferson's embargo and of Madison's economic coercion, according to Horsman, "made war or absolute submission to England the only alternatives, and the latter presented more terrors to the recent colonists.

The establishment of Fort Madison in 1808 on the Mississippi had further angered the Sauk and led many, including Black Hawk, to side with the British before the war broke out.

The Oxford historian Paul Langford looked at the decisions by the British government in 1812: In the US House of Representatives, a group of young Democratic-Republicans, known as the "War Hawks," came to the forefront in 1811 and were led by Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky and by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

On 1 June 1812, President James Madison gave a speech to the US Congress that recounted American grievances against Britain but did not specifically call for a declaration of war.