1812, The War That Forged A Nation by Walter R. Borneman and Union 1812, The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence by A.J. Langguth

The War of 1812 is not generally considered an important war except notice the subtitles of these two books.  The significantly insignificant War of 1812 both solidified the gains of the Revolutionary War and unified a young nation!  It also gave us our national anthem, many national heroes and such memorable phrases as Don’t Give Up the Ship! Tippecanoe and Tyler, too! and We have met the enemy and they are ours!  Any student of American history benefits tremendously by knowing the origins and outcome of this war. As for knowing all the battles, I must admit that my head spun as one after another was fought, usually botched and lost or, less often, won in an unexpected show of strength, by the Americans.    

A portent of the war was the skirmish between the American Chesapeake vs. the British Leopard fought in 1807 off the coast of Virginia when the British attempted to board the Chesapeake to search for British deserters.  When the captain of the Chesapeake defied the British, they pounded his ship and carried off four sailors, three of whom were actually Americans!  The captain of the Chesapeake, Barron, surrendered, to his later humiliation, but the incident alerted Americans to the real and present danger of the British impressing American soldiers.  

The origins of the war, then, were British impressment of sailors, British trade restrictions, the fact of the British continuing to occupy forts along the Canadian border which they were supposed to have vacated per the 1783 Treaty of Paris and, lastly,  Indian attacks fomented by both British and French against the Americans.  President James Madison declared war June 18, 1812 with the approval of Congress.

The outcome of the war was worked out in Ghent, Belgium.  The Treaty of Ghent was signed on Christmas Eve of 1814, with the Battle of New Orleans on the brink of being fought.  The terms of the Treaty were underwhelming.  Each side resumed control of the territories occupied before the war.  No terms were set on impressment, one of the major causes of the war!  All Indian lands were to be restored to their various tribes. 

The war was fought on various fronts.  I found it easiest to think in terms of five fronts but this was a simplification solely for my convenience. First, in the Northwest Theater, the Battle of Tippecanoe fought in 1811 in the Northwest Territory was a precursor to the War of 1812.  William Henry Harrison, former governor of the Indiana Territory and later the president of the nation for one month, was in command.  It was a win for the Americans in the sense that they put an end to Shawnee Chief Tecumseh’s attempts to form an Indian nation.  At the same time, the battle aroused such antipathy towards Americans on the part of the Indians that Tecumseh and his tribes became allies of the British once war was declared just seven months later.   

In the Northeast there were two sea battles of consequence, the first being the U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) vs. the British Guerriere.  This battle was fought in the early months of the war and was an American victory.  The other battle was in July 1813 when Captain James Lawrence, commanding the Chesapeake took on the British Shannon. Lawrence, though fatally wounded, gave out his famous admonition, Don’t give up the ship!  Fight her till she sinks!  The Americans lost but Lawrence’s words served as an American rallying cry in subsequent battles of this war.

To the north was the Canadian Theater which I lumped together with the Northern Frontier including control of the Great Lakes and the area around Lake Champlain. The string of battles fought here was seemingly endless. The descriptions of battle strategy and troop location were beyond my grasp such that I had to take notes (not included here) to follow who went where and when. They were the battles of Detroit, York, Lake Erie and Fort Niagara to name a few.  Some noteworthies of this theater who come to mind were Oliver Perry, Winfield Scott and Zebulon Pike. 

The mid-Atlantic or Chesapeake Theater includes the Battle of Bladensburg, the vengeful burning of the White House and the bombarding of Fort McHenry outside of Baltimore, this last being the only time the Americans emerged at all victorious in this theater. I must add that it was gratifying to at last understand exactly why Francis Scott Key (or Frank Key as one author kept calling him) was sitting on a ship in the harbor and continually checking for the flag amid the rockets’ red glare!  Dolly Madison gets a cameo appearance here for saving George Washington’s portrait from peril when the Brits set fire to the White House.  She was whisked from the scene by carriage just in the nick of time.

The campaign to the South was basically the Battle of New Orleans, the crowning American victory that gave General Andrew Jackson his entrée to the national stage. This included the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (seemed to be mostly a case of fightin’ injuns) where Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson first met up.  Then Jackson and his Tennessee militia fought with gusto to defeat the arrogant British.  The date of the battle is January 8, 1815, some two weeks after peace had been declared in Ghent.  

The War of 1812 is not a topic I would re-visit though it has nothing to do with these books. There is something about the war that makes it a tedious subject.  Perhaps it has to do with a lot of action packed into a relatively short period of time, two years, and over a considerable geographic area including land, lakes, harbors and sea. 

These two books can be read in tandem and make a nice complement one to the other.  The Borneman book takes the chronological approach to telling history and gives us the events as they occur whereas the Langutth book uses more of a story-telling approach which gives an account of the war through the individuals who took center stage in the drama.

 

 

 

The Birth of America by William R. Polk

This book begins with some good information on the culture, languages and customs of the East Coast American Indian groups already here in North America as the modern age began.  This served as good basis for moving on to the age of exploration and discovery in the 15^th and 16^th centuries as French, Spanish and British explorers arrived on the eastern shores of the New World.

The author covers Ponce de Leon (1513 in La Florida), Panfilo Narvaez (1528 in Tampa Bay), Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565 in St. Augustine and Cabeza de Vaca (who traversed North America after the dissolution of Narvaez’s expedition).  We have Hernando de Soto, first in Peru, then up the Mississippi.  There is LaSalle, Verrazano (he sailed for France) who epxlored from North Carolina up to Massachusetts in 1524, Champlain, Cartier and Sir Francis Drake who was basically an English pirate!  (Note: The Portuguese heyday of exploration with its routes to India (Vasco da Gama in 1497) and the circumnavigation of the globe (Ferdinand Magellan in 1519) did not touch the northern continent of the New World.  Pedro Alvares Cabral came to the  southern continent when in 1500 he discovered Brazil.)

 The author has chapters on the perils of sailing the Atlantic, the slave and sugar trades and the French explorers and the fur trade.  He devotes a substantial chapter to the empires of West Africa that fed the slave trade and were the origins of blacks in America.  These were the Dahomey, the Congolese, the Akan and the Mali empires.  The author explores the Europe that gave rise to the New World and then focuses for the remainder of the book on the development of commerce, crops, industry, governance and rebellion in the colonies.

This was a good book for brushing up on your high school American history and gaining a more in-depth understanding of the topics that receive often superficial treatment in the textbooks.  For example, everyone knows that the colonists opposed the Stamp Act.  But what actually happened in 1765 in Boston when the British attempted to introduce the act was not the grassroots groundswell of discontent that is usually described.  Rather, the violence that was stirred up over this act was the work of a “trained mob,” with the players behind the scenes being Boston’s Samuel Adams and James Otis.  The author describes these two as taking the role of “Robespierre in the later French Revolution, inflaming the public and brushing aside the moderates.”   Adams is referred to as an “agitator,” “a shadowy figure” who “was no stranger to violence.”  The rioting in Boston over the Stamp Act was basically a terrorist act carried out by thuggish gangs from the North and South ends of Boston under the direction of the “shadowy” Adams.  Ignominious beginnings for the birth of  freedom in America!

The strength of this book was the way in which the author examined pre-Revolutionary America.  He organized 150 years of history into thematic topics and then explored those topics in some depth. The chapters on the Indians and slavery were particularly helpful in dispelling a lot of erroneous stereotypes and over-simplifications often associated with these two groups.  I took copious notes on most of the chapters.

Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush

In her autobiographical memoir, Spoken from the Heart, Laura Bush shows herself to be a very smart, well-adjusted and normal person.  These qualities are what certainly must have led her to being such a gracious and confident public persona on the international stage.  

The first chapters of the book are, truly, spoken from the heart. With a lot of feeling and insight about herself and her parents, she writes about growing up in dusty Midland, Texas, an only child who longed for brothers and sisters.  As a baby boomer growing up on the “other side of the 60s,” the cultural milieu of her early life is really part of history.  It was good reading.  After college, she lived on her own while teaching in Houston and pursuing a degree in library science.  When she and George Bush were introduced by mutual friends, it seems to have been a relationship meant to be.  Throughout the book and without being maudlin or overly personal, she refers to the solid respect and devotion she and the president have for one another. 

After the first 150 pages of this (400-plus page) book, Mrs. Bush’s writing often reads a lot like the standard apologetics books so predictable with public servants.  It is here that the reading does become tedious at times. By age 49 she was the First Lady of Texas and six years later she was First Lady of the United States.  More than half the book is devoted to her life as a public person.  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq Wars dominated the Bush presidency.  On these issues as well as Katrina, other areas of foreign policy and domestic issues, Mrs. Bush invariably and glibly supports and praises the decisions the President made.  

Still, she sprinkles in color and opinion along the way as she continues to discuss life with her daughters, her in-laws (“Bar” and “Gampy”), campaigning and entertaining.   She writes with genuine interest and concern about her work in Afghanistan, Burma, Africa and here at home with book campaigns and teenage gangs.  I believe that George and Laura Bush do nothing without first deciding if it is the virtuous thing to do.  Despite a noblesse oblige that may underpin their actions, they are sincere, honest and consistent in their beliefs.  They are not afraid to get their hands dirty and will do whatever it takes to get a job done.  

One exception to the consistency and sincerity of Mrs. Bush’s beliefs concerns abortion. She addresses the topic in this book but fudges it in my opinion.  She remains unclear on exactly what she does believe and blames the press for labeling her pro-abortion.  It is difficult to understand why Laura Bush appears to adopt the typical feminist stance on abortion when her thinking in other areas is so clear.  In the early years of their marriage, she and then-citizen George Bush were about to adopt a child, having difficulty conceiving on their own.  How do you justify abortion while simultaneously understanding first-hand the fragility and tenuousness of life.  

Despite her fuzziness on what I guess was the difficult topic of abortion, Mrs. Bush doesn’t typically shy away from the unpleasant.  She made repeated references to the smug, relentless sniping of the mainstream media during her husband’s presidency and discussed how she handled it.  She devoted quite a few pages to the tension and uncertainty provoked by Al Gore and the Democrats in the 2000 election.  (Reading between the lines, I’d say the Bush camp saw the Democrats’ behavior as petty and self-serving.)  Amidst the discussion, however, she stays cool and doesn’t ever give anybody the real tongue-lashing they deserve.   Even when writing about how the elitist press condescendingly treated her as a know-nothing from Texas, she remains above-board.   

The pace that she and W maintained during his presidency can be described in a word, whirlwind.  Perhaps this is true of any presidency and of every First Lady, but I kind of doubt it.  Laura Bush threw herself into a great number of projects and followed a travel and entertainment schedule that might have scared off a lesser individual (or a more self-absorbed or self-promoting first lady, a few come to mind).  She visited 75 countries, hosted more than 1,500 dinners and events, restored 5 and refurbished 25 rooms in the White House, attended summits and symposiums and panels.  And all this is not to mention her extensive work with Burmese refugees, AIDS patients in Africa (a country she traversed 5 times) and extensive work in Afghanistan (three visits) with women and children.  

Having visited the George W. Bush Presidential Library at SMU and following as I do the programs at the Bush Center, my allegiance to and interest in the Bush family waxes and wanes.   They are clearly dedicated to making a difference in the world and continue with projects they started during the Bush presidency.  Yet, their antipathy towards Donald Trump and his presidency bespoke a decided lack of vision I thought.  In addition, their moderated approach is ineffective in these turbulent times.  Nonetheless, this informative book has put my interest back in the waxing category.  Read it!