<em>After Tippecanoe</em>: The War of 1812 150 Years Later

Abstract

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 38:1 (Spring 2012): 155-58©2012 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. After Tippecanoe: The War of 1812 150 Years Later by Donald R. Hickey Philip P. Mason, ed. After Tippecanoe: Some Aspects of the War of 1812. 1963; repr., East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011. Pp. 104. Index. Notes. Paper, $19.95. Despite a significant and widely acknowledged legacy, the War of 1812 did not occupy a prominent place in the public memory for very long. Even though called the “War of 1812” as early as 1812, to most people it was just “the war” and (after it was over) “the late war” or “the late war with Great Britain” until it became necessary to distinguish it from the Mexican War. Shortly thereafter the Civil War swept both of these wars into the deep recesses of the public memory. Annual celebrations on January 8 to commemorate Andrew Jackson’s great victory at New Orleans died out, and the 50th anniversary of the conflict passed largely unnoticed, although the city of Cleveland did erect a monument to Commodore Oliver H. Perry in 1862. The war’s 100th anniversary, from 1912 to 1915 generated a little more interest, but the 150th anniversary, from 1962-1965, was largely ignored. After Tippecanoe, originally published by Michigan State University Press in 1963, was one of the few attempts to explicitly commemorate the sesquicentennial. This slender volume, a collection of six papers sponsored by the Algonquin club and delivered in the winter of 19611962 in Detroit and Windsor, has now been reissued, doubtless in anticipation of the bicentennial of the war. At the time that these papers were delivered, there was little academic or popular interest in the War of 1812. Henry Adams’s multivolume History of the United States during the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson to the Second Administration of James Madison (first published in 1889-1891 and then revised slightly in 1901-1904) still dominated the literature on the war, and this despite the work’s weak military history and the author’s unsympathetic treatment of just about everyone except those who he thought agreed with his ancestors, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Adams’s History was arguably the 156 The Michigan Historical Review first modern account of the War of 1812, and it can profit the modern reader, but it was also a fierce, if often subtle, defense of the author’s family, and that skewed many of his conclusions. But in 1862 Adams had few competitors. The great flood of books and articles that would transform the historiographical landscape of the war still lay in the future. In selecting scholars to deliver these papers, the Algonquin Club chose wisely: C. P. Stacey and George F. G. Stanley were accomplished Canadian military historians; Reginald Horsman, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Great Britain, was at the dawn of a distinguished career that would establish him as the leading scholar of the War of 1812; and Thomas D. Clark was a student of Kentucky and the American South who was still writing history as late as 2003, when he was 100 years old. The first essay, penned by William T. Utter, focuses on the causes of the war. Identifying and giving proper weight to the reasons why any war was undertaken by a democratic nation can be vexing because many people have a voice in the decision and their motivations may vary. For the War of 1812, various causes have been set forth over the years: the desire to redress maritime grievances (particularly the orders in council and impressment), annexationist interest in Canada (either to add to American landholdings or to put an end to British influence over western bands of Indians), the need to uphold national honor and vindicate republican institutions, and the desire of Republicans to preserve political power and silence their domestic foes. Utter proclaims that he belongs to “the school of multiple causations” and takes the sensible view that several issues, most notably maritime grievances and the desire to annex Canada, contributed to the decision for war (p. 11). But before succumbing to the notion that...