![]() ![]() ![]() Now, dismay and anxiety reverberated across the country. The torching of the capital was said to be in retaliation for the burning of buildings in York (near present-day Toronto) by American troops earlier in the war. Thomas Jefferson, the former president, predicted that such a venture would be “a mere matter of marching.” In Congress, the hawks advocated an attempt to annex Canada, thereby reducing British influence in the contested Northwest. vessels along the Eastern Seaboard, and British and American forces began skirmishing along the Northwest frontier and in Canada. No matter how unequal the balance of power was between the United States and Great Britain, President Madison nevertheless condemned Britain’s “progressive usurpations and accumulating wrongs,” asserting that such outrages would not be tolerated by a nation that had earned its right to international respect through victory in the American Revolution three decades earlier.įrom the moment hostilities commenced, in July 1812, British naval ships engaged U.S. Britain wanted to prevent American foodstuffs and other goods from reaching France they needed to cut off that trade in order to help them win against Napoleon.” “At this point,” says historian Douglas Egerton, author of Gabriel’s Rebellion and other works on antebellum America, “England still regarded American trade as part of their domain-even after the Revolution. Locked in a fierce struggle for global domination with Emperor Napoleon’s France, they brazenly interfered with neutral America’s lucrative maritime commerce with Europe by seizing American ships and forcing kidnapped American seamen to meet the need for manpower on British naval vessels. The British had been largely responsible for provoking hostilities. The Navy was just plain outmatched by the Royal Navy.” Donald Hickey, author of The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, says, “The Army was understaffed, untrained, poorly equipped and led by superannuated and incompetent officers. England remained a mighty world power, while the fledgling United States was strapped for cash, plagued by domestic discord and militarily weak. Reporting news of the rout, the London Courier crowed: “War America would have, and war she has got.”Īs the flames rose across the capital on that sweltering August evening, the American government’s decision two years earlier to declare war on Britain-in a conflict that would come to be known as the War of 1812-seemed foolhardy and self-destructive. President James Madison, along with his attorney general and secretary of state, had fled to safety across the Potomac River. Battle-hardened redcoats had overwhelmed and scattered the largely untrained and poorly led American militiamen and regulars deployed to stop them from reaching the capital. All burned ferociously, as did the structures housing the War and the State departments. On the evening of August 24, 1814, British troops torched the Capitol, the Treasury, the President’s House (not yet called the White House). One by one, the buildings at the heart of the American government went up in flames. ![]()
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