May 3, 2013 Steve Vogel
Random House
ISBN 978-1400069132
534 pages
$30
Reviewed by Joyce Appleby
Two hundred years ago this spring, an ambitious and bellicose rear admiral, George Cockburn, steered a small squadron of British naval vessels into the Chesapeake Bay. Through April and May, Cockburn became the most hated man in America as he enthusiastically plundered whatever he laid his eyes on, sending back boatloads of booty to British military headquarters in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "I have no hesitation," Cockburn wrote his commander, "in pronouncing that the whole of the shores and towns within this vast bay, not excepting the Capital itself will be wholly at your mercy ... or destroyed at your pleasure." And he was right.
The law of unintended consequences operates with unique force when a war is launched. We know that all too well. Two centuries ago, Americans discovered even more painfully how true it was.
At the time, Britain and France were engaged in a titanic struggle. Britain had a first-class navy, and Napoleon had put together the greatest fighting forces the world had seen. The new American nation was suffering from that war's collateral damage -- to its merchant fleet and its pride. Both the British and the French refused to recognize the country's neutrality, seizing any ships that might aid their enemy. More provocatively, the British navy, starved for manpower, pressed American seamen into coerced service.
First-term Southern and Western members of Congress began screaming for retribution. Mild-mannered President James Madison, driven to desperate measures, advised Congress to declare war on Great Britain. And it did so in June 1812.
Here is where the law of unintended consequences kicks in. Madison didn't want a fight; he wanted to stop the depredations on American commerce, so he devised a strategy of invading Canada in the hope that this would force Britain to the peace table. Instead the Canadian campaigns, headed by old Revolutionary War veterans, floundered. It took a year for Madison to find any talented leadership for his woefully unprepared army.
One of the assumptions Madison and others labored under was that Britain would be too preoccupied with beating Napoleon to pay much attention to its quondam colonies. But alas, the British defeated Napoleon and dispatched him to Elba in the spring of 1814. The hero of the hour, the Duke of Wellington, was ordered to ready an expeditionary force of "Wellington Invincibles" for quick dispatch across the Atlantic to teach the Americans a lesson and perhaps even break up the union, which was then only 37 years old.
In "Through the Perilous Fight," Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel does a superb job of bringing this woeful tale to life. He leavens his fast-paced narrative with lively vignettes of the principal participants in this folly, beginning with Cockburn and Francis Scott Key, the one person most Americans remember from this forgettable war as the author of those daunting soprano lines: "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air."
Key, a Federalist, was also a devout Episcopalian who recoiled from the American strategy of attacking Canadians who had nothing to do with them. Cockburn shared none of Key's peace-loving sentiments. Americans compared him to Attila the Hun, conveniently forgetting that their troops had left hundreds of people out in the cold after burning down an Ontario town in the dead of winter.
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