A History of England15 Mai 2022

90. A war fought for no good reason

Although Britain was in the closing stages of a long and desperate struggle with France, it somehow managed to get itself sucked into a separate war with the United States. Called the War of 1812, accurately for the start, hopeless for its end – in 1815 – it was unnecessary and avoidable. As a Canadian historian, Pierre Berton, put it when talking about the final accord, the Treaty of Ghent, “It was as if no war had been fought, or to put it more bluntly, as if the war that was fought was fought for no good reason”. For all that, it cost quite a few lives, and a lot of treasure and, as a by. Product, it ended for ever the capacity of Native American to resist further US encroachment on their lands.

It also taught a lot of lessons about how not to fight wars at a time when firepower had become far more devastating than in earlier times. Lessons that weren’t, unfortunately, learned. To the cost of a lot of dead or maimed soldiers from future wars.

Illustration: Battle of Lake Erie in the war of 1812 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Photo by William Henry Powell, from https://www.goodfreephotos.com

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

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