The War of 1812: Historian's Perspective

Graeme Decarie, Canadian Historian

Further Reading

U.S. Expansionism

The Americans said they were going to war because they were annoyed with the British treatment of their sailors at sea, and that was a factor. But it's amazing that the people most affected, the ones along the Atlantic coast, were the least anxious to go to war. They knew what going to war against the British navy would mean. Those who were most enthusiastic were the ones in the interior, and this, of course, is another aspect of the world in 1812. We think of the United States as expanding as it does in the movies: just peaceful settlers and cowboys. But that’s not the way it was. It expanded by a series of extraordinarily aggressive and brutal wars against its neighbors. And those neighbors in the west were the Indians. And the neighbours in the North were us.

If you were in what was the American West of the time, one of your war aims was land. And land, not just for settlers, but land for speculators who could snap up huge parcels and then make fortunes selling it to people coming in. They looked at the land to the west of them. They also looked at the land to the north - Upper Canada - which was largely empty and had plenty of good land for settlement. It seemed like an excellent possibility.

In addition to that, there were those who were very concerned about the threat of Indian attack, which they saw as the Indians being aggressive. But was in fact the Indians desperately trying to hold on to what little bit they had left, and who were very conscious of this land hunger on the part of the Americans and the extent to which it drove them.

Before the century began, before the 1800's, the First Nations defeated a large American army and the dead Americans had dirt stuffed into their mouths. The natives had a very accurate appreciation of what it was that motivated the Americans. The Americans wanted land. They were eternally hungry for land and more land - Indian land. And so in order to satisfy them I guess, when they were dead, the Indians stuffed their mouths with as much land as they could put into it.