The War of 1812 - Crash Course US History #11

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course US History and today we're going to talk about what America's best at: War.

[Patriotic Rock Music]

Uh, Mr. Green, the United States has actually only declared war 5 times in the last 230 years.

Oh me from the the past, you sniveling literalist.

Well today we're going to talk about America's first declared war, The War of 1812, so called because historians are terrible at naming things.

I mean the could have called it The Revolutionary War: Part Deux, or The Canadian Cataclysm, or The War to Facilitate Future Wars.

But no, they just named it after the year it started.

[Theme Music]

I know this disappoints the military historians among you, but as usual, we're gonna spend more time talking about the causes and effects of the war than the actual, like, killing parts, because ultimately it's the ambiguity of The War of 1812 that makes it so interesting.

The reason most often given for The War of 1812 was the British impressment of American sailors, whereby American sailors would be kidnapped and basically forced into British servitude.

This disrupted American shipping and also seems like a reasonably obvious violation of American sovereignty, but it's a little more complicated than that.

First of all, there were many thousands of British sailors working aboard American ships so many of the sailors that the British captured were in fact British.

Which gets to the large point that citizenship at the time was a pretty slippery concept especially on the high seas.

Like, papers were often forged, and many sailors identified supposed American-ness through tattoos of like eagles and flags.

And there were several reasons why a British sailor might like to become, or pretend to be, an American, including that the Brits at the time were fighting Napoleon in what historians, in their infinite creativity, called The Napoleonic Wars.

And on that topic, Britain's impressment policy allowed them both to disrupt American shipping to France and get new British sailors to strengthen their war effort,

which was annoying to the Americans on a couple levels especially the French-loving Republicans,

which is a phrase that you don't hear very often anymore.

Another reason often given for the war, was America's crazy conspiratorial Anglophobia.

There was even a widespread rumor that British agents were buying up Connecticut sheep in order to sabotage the textile industry, lest you worry that America's fascination with conspiracy theories is new.

So those pushing for war were known as war hawks, and the most famous among them was Kentucky's Henry Clay.

They took the impressment of sailors as an affront to American national honor, but they also complained that Britain's actions were an affront to free trade, by which they meant America's ability to trade with Europeans other than Great Britain.

And to be fair, the British were trying to regulate American trade.

They even passed The Orders in Counsel which required American ships to dock in Britain and pay tax before trading with other European nations.

Britain, we were an independent nation! You can't do that kind of stuff!

We have a special relationship but it's not that special!

But the problem with saying that this caused the war was that The Orders had been in effect for five years before the war started.

AND they were rescinded in 1812 before the US declared war.

Although, admittedly, we didn't know about it because it didn't reach us until after we declared.

There was no Twitter.

Another reason for the war was Canada.