Causes and Character of the War of 1812.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.
• Position: Book review

Causes and Character of the War of 1812

Alexander James Dallas, An Exposition of the Causes and Character of the War. Edinburgh, Scotland: Dunedin Academic Press. ISBN-13: 978-1906716288 2011. 169pp., $54.00

Why did the United States declare war against Great Britain in 1812? In purely geopolitical terms, Napoleon's France posed a greater long-term threat to U.S. security. Just five years before, Napoleon had concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with Tsar Alexander of Russia and was attempting to economically strangle the British by enforcement of the Continental System. By 1812, Napoleon had nearly achieved the effective political control of the power centers of Eurasia that Sir Halford Mackinder later considered the necessary and sufficient condition for a world empire.

What is more, it is arguable that the British navy--what Alfred Thayer Mahan called "those far distant, storm-beaten ships"--is all that stood between France and the possible invasion of the United States. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton in the late 1790s had warned in a series of newspaper articles that the French empire had "swelled to a gigantic size" and was threatening "to become the Tyrant both of Sea and Land." It was the British navy, Hamilton argued, that "has repeatedly upheld the balance of power in opposition to the grasping ambition of France." Fisher Ames in 1806 similarly warned that "a peace ... that should humble England, and withdraw her navy from any further opposition to [France's] aims, would give the civilized world a master." Congressman John Randolph in an effort to dissuade his colleagues from voting for war in 1812, asked rhetorically, "Suppose France in possession of British naval power, what would be your condition? What could you expect if [the French] were the uncontrolled lords of the ocean?"

But emotion and "honor" trumped geopolitics in Washington in 1812. A woefully unprepared United States declared war against the British Empire, suffered humiliating defeats and destruction (including the burning of the White House and Capitol), and still emerged "victorious" at the end of the war. Near the end of that war, the American Treasury Secretary, Alexander James Dallas, wrote An Exposition of the Causes and Character of the War, a book-length justification for the decision to go to war. Dunedin Academic Press has published a new edition of Dallas' book, with a useful introduction by H.G. Callaway which summarizes the life and work of this little remembered...