War in the Chesapeake: The British campaigns to control the bay, 1813–1814

摘要

The term 'forgotten war' is one normally associated with the Korean Conflict of 1950–3. Yet such a term can also be applied to perhaps one of the most contemporarily traumatic, but now overlooked, wars of the early nineteenth century: the so-called War of 1812. It was once said by Francis Parkman that 'great events obscure the great events that came before them' and this is particularly true of a conflagration that set a former colonial ruling power, Great Britain, against its once fledging colonies, the (relatively) newly independent United States of America. For the former, of course, European Napoleonic events would immediately overshadow battles fought in farflung America. As for Americans though, it is somewhat surprising that a conflict which saw Andrew Jackson set on the road to the presidency, the burning of the Capitol and White House, in addition to the creation of the national anthem, the 'Star-Spangled Banner', became almost a byword of history. That said, it perhaps the far more destructive Civil War of the 1860s that accounts for this.