When Tom Williams decided to send his soldier/spy James Burke to North America for his next book, he wondered how European readers would respond to a rather obscure war that took place across the Atlantic while Napoleon was capturing most people’s attention. But as he was writing Burke and the War of 1812, that conflict became unexpectedly relevant…
When I first considered a book on the War of 1812, it was a war that hardly anyone had heard of. Say “1812” to anyone in Europe and they think of Tchaikovsky’s overture and, if they know anything besides the sound of cannon in the orchestra, they will remember Napoleon’s march on Moscow.
Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow marked the beginning of the end of the Napoleonic Wars that had consumed the continent for nine years and which were going to result in hundreds of thousands more deaths before Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815.
Set against this background, a minor war in North America, with a death toll measured in a few tens of thousands, was easily overlooked in Europe.
For Americans, the war was a more serious matter though, even there, hardly an existential conflict. Although some Americans claimed it as a second War of Independence, pretending to believe that Britain was trying to reclaim the colonies, American statehood was not at stake.
The young nation was aggrieved that the British did not respect its freedom of the seas, blocking its freedom to trade with France. (France, too, was interfering in its right to trade freely and some hotheads suggested that they should go to war with France as well as Britain.)
British naval vessels had also seized sailors from American ships, pressing them into British service. In theory, they restricted these seizures to British citizens, but they weren’t too fussy who they took and this, understandably, enraged American seamen.
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Both the restrictions on trade and the impressment of American sailors were legitimate grievances, but that was not really what the war was about.
What the young United States wanted was Canada, and by the time war was declared, passed through Congress by only a narrow majority, American troops were already marching to the Canadian border.
The annexation of Canada, Americans were assured, would be “only a matter of marching”. America was bigger, better armed, and a country whose ‘manifest destiny’ was to rule the North American continent. Surely the Canadians would see that the United States was the future and they would rush to join them.
Many of those living in Canada had been born south of the border and would be only too happy to exchange allegiance to a tyrannical British monarch for freedom under the American republic.
As for the rest of the Canadian population, many of them were French and hardly likely to defend the country on behalf of an English king whose armies were at war with the French. The fall of Canada was a done deal the day the war started.
It did not, of course, go quite like that. The invasion was a mismanaged disaster and the early months of the war saw a succession of American defeats that left British forces occupying some American territory.
Suddenly aware that the British were serious about defending their Canadian territory and the Canadian militias were happy to fight alongside them, the Americans regrouped and achieved significant successes in 1813.
By 1814, with Napoleon safely (as the Allies thought) exiled on Elba, the British finally felt in a position to take the North American war seriously. British reinforcements were despatched across the Atlantic and the British advanced into United States territory, attacking Washington and burning down the White House that August.
Faced with the prospect of a protracted war against a British army and navy no longer preoccupied with battles in Europe, the Americans decided to negotiate a peace settlement that essentially put everyone back in the position that they were in before the fighting started. (The tragic exception to this was the indigenous people of North America, who saw their population halved in the following decades of the 19th century.)
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With the war in Europe over, the British navy had less need of men and the issue of impressment was no longer significant. The restrictions on American trade with France had been lifted by the British just before the war started, though communications in those days being slow, the Americans hadn’t realised this.
The pre-war borders were re-established and a straight line was drawn from the westernmost point of the Canadian border to the Rockies with the United States governing south of the line and the British (later an independent Canada) holding the territory to the north.
And so, apart from some minor border disputes in the mid-19th century, things continued for over 200 years. The war passed into history. The British generally forgot about it, the Americans convinced themselves that they had achieved a great victory, whilst conveniently forgetting almost all the realities of the conflict, and the Canadians allowed themselves, if they remembered it at all, to feel a bit smug.
All that changed in January, 2025. Donald Trump announced that Canada should be part of the United States. As in 1812, Americans pointed out that there were far more of them than there were Canadians and they were much better armed.
Nobody has actually said that annexation would be “only a matter of marching” but the thought was clearly there. The border, Trump claimed, was just a line on the map and it was time to start moving it.
Canadians are unamused. The British, as in 1812, are hoping that if they ignore it, it will all go away. Americans, as in 1812, are divided but, as then, the majority seem broadly supportive of Trump’s ideas, although exactly how those ideas are to manifest themselves in reality is not clear.
What is clear is that the War of 1812 is suddenly a hot topic. Many people are taking to social media to explain their views on the war, although most seem to have little idea of what actually happened or why.
For Christmas 2023, my wife, who knows far too much about the way my mind works, gave me a couple of books about the 1812 war and around a year ago I started writing the eighth of my stories about Napoleonic soldier/spy James Burke. I had decided that, for a change of scene, I’d send him to America to fight in a war no-one knew anything about. I worried that nobody would be interested what happened in North America back then.
The book, available now, is rather more relevant to today than I had ever expected.
Burke and the War of 1812 by Tom Williams is published on 26 April, 2025.
Find out more about this book.
Have a look at some of Tom’s other Historia features:
Wellington’s biggest Peninsular War secret
Re-examining the history of Empire in fact and fiction
Why I wrote about Irish history
When my Spanish research trip went astray
Researching the Land of Silver
The Battle That Changed Britain
You may also be interested in:
Black Elk, Lakota Sioux holy man, warrior, survivor by Alec Marsh
Cherokee Chieftains at the British Court by Hunter S Jones
Why I’ve written a Western by Matthew Harffy
Historia’s interview with John Larison — author of the HWA Gold Crown Award-shortlisted Whiskey When We’re Dry, which challenges the traditional values of the Western — by Frances Owen
Did the American Civil War End in Liverpool? by Hilary Green
Are we the bad guys? Writing naval historical fiction from the French point of view by JD Davies
Images:
- The ruins of the US Capitol following British attempts to burn the building, drawing by George Munger, 1814: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Battle of Tippecanoe by Kurz & Allison, c1889, detail: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (no known restrictions on publication)
- The death of General Brock at the Battle of Queenston Heights by John David Kelly, 1896, detail: Library & Archives Canada via Wikimedia (public domain)
- British Burning Washington from The History of England, from the Earliest Periods, Volume 1 by Paul M Rapin de Thoyras, 1816: Library of Congress via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814 by Amédée Forestier, 1914: Smithsonian American Art Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Battle of Queenston Heights by James B Dennis: RiverBrink Art Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
