The Hemispheric Dimensions of Early U.S. Nationalism: The War of 1812, Its Aftermath, and Spanish American Independence:

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The War of 1812 emerged in a moment of continental and transatlantic strife. In North America, U.S. settlers bristled at Britain's presence in Canada and at British ties to native peoples in the Great Lakes region. Across the Atlantic Ocean, meanwhile, Britain and Napoleonic France were at war, and each side had restricted neutral U.S. trade with the other. Britain, for its part, had also impressed thousands of sailors toiling in the U.S. merchant marine, capturing and forcing them into the shorthanded Royal Navy. At odds with Britain along the border and on the high seas, the United States eventually responded with a declaration of war.1 Although the War of 1812 had continental and transatlantic origins, it also had hemispheric significance. Immediately after endorsing military mobilization in his annual message of November 1811, President James Madison turned his discussion south to Spanish America. “In contemplating the scenes which distinguish this momentous epoch,” he proclaimed, “it is impossible to overlook those developing themselves among the great communities which occupy the southern portion of our own hemisphere.” It may have been “impossible” for Madison to overlook the rest of the Americas, but historians since that time have done largely that; no major accounts of the War of 1812 have addressed the hemispheric setting that Madison and thousands of his contemporaries took for granted. While Atlantic and continental perspectives are central to explaining how the war happened, hemispheric perspectives offer additional reasons about why the war mattered.2