This isn’t quite a history for the War 1812, though it lies behind much of the book.
Taylor starts by pointing out that Britain maintained that a subject was created by birth (inside the Empire), and nothing could remove that status. The United States gave citizenship to those people living there, and then to immigrants who become naturalized. These two systems were at odds with one another, especially as the Napoleonic Wars heat up, and Britain needs as many sailors as it can get to man the Royal Navy, which makes adopting the widest possible definition of subject inescapable.
But this fades into the background, and while the subject of impressment is handled in the book, it isn’t actually a central thesis. Rather, Taylor looks to the lands between the settled areas of the United States and Canada, which have a line drawn through them, but little else until you get further west where there are plenty native Americans who are looking to retain their lands and autonomy. The best route to this is through the British, who also want them to help contain the new republic. Another prong of this drive is splitting off Upper Canada from the rest of the dominion in 1791, which is basically where this book starts.
The initial point of Upper Canada is to develop territory adjacent to the United States so as to attract people from across the border and bring them back to the Empire. This experiment largely failed, and worse, when the War of 1812 started, both sides misunderstood the nature of that failure. Many “Loyalists” had been forced out of the colonies during and immediately after the Revolution, and had largely ended up in Canada. This second wave of immigration are termed Late Loyalists, but the main motivation was get free/cheap land, and stay out of politics of any kind, by living in a remote undeveloped area. They certainly had no love for the republican government of the US and all its apparent instabilities, but they had no love for a distant authority making demands on them either.
Meanwhile in the United States, the government is working through the crises endemic to a new organization, but what Taylor terms the Republican Party (technically correct, but never noted as not being directly related to the later party of that name, which survives today, and was more formally known as the “Democrat-Republicans”) is indulging in a dangerous combination of small government and aggressive foreign relations. One of the overriding concerns is keeping taxes down, which requires various expenditures, such as the army and navy to be as small as possible, but there was also a strong desire to acquire some or—hopefully—all of Canada. This leads into a declaration of war… with no good means of prosecuting it.
Taylor goes into some of the reasoning, but that end of his book might have been strengthened by looking more deeply into the view away from the border. This is a book on the borderland itself, but a bit of a time out to see what that borderland looked like from the viewpoint of Washington DC could have been a good idea. We don’t get London as such either, but we do get a number of policy decisions, starting with the creation of Upper Canada, and its administration by various people. A look at the relative population shifts on both sides of the border from 1790 to 1812 would be informative, as would the evolving organization of territories and states, but that is not gone into.
Of course, most of the War of 1812 is fought on the Canadian side of the border, so that is the territory that the history of the war here traverses. And this is where a very solid book has trouble. He goes into a fair amount of detail of the various operations, and gives the various battles, and how nearly all of them come to grief. This ends up as a jumble, and it is hard to tell the paths from the weeds. But, there is a theme consistently explored: How the various troop movements affected the local population. As usual in war, the locals do not do well, and as usual with such situations, opinions harden against the invaders.
The end conclusion of the book is centered the idea that the area was a borderland; an area where two governments had drawn a line, but there was little reality behind it. As more people come into the area, the shadings from one side to another remain, and then war ends up dividing things much more starkly, and a border that was little more than a line drawn by a treaty becomes much more a reality in the aftermath. Do not mistake this for a history of the War of 1812, for there is much more to that subject than is covered here, just as there is more to this book than the War of 1812.
