Friendly Fire

Bernard Porter

Fusiliers: Eight Years with the Redcoats in America by Mark Urban
Faber, 384 pp, £20.00, September 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 22486 9
1812: War with America by Jon Latimer
Harvard, 637 pp, £22.95, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 674 02584 4

Britain has fought the Americans twice. The first occasion we know about: it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775-83). Mark Urban’s book is about the experiences of one British regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them weren’t Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be hazy about it. It ran from 1812 to 1815; the peace that formally settled it was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but because news took so long to travel not everyone knew this until April the following year. It was during this war that British troops burned down the presidential mansion in Washington – the one thing most Americans are aware of – and it ended with the restoration of the status quo ante, which makes it look pretty pointless. In some American history books it is known as the Second War of Independence, which is nonsense. Britain wasn’t threatening that independence in any serious way: only US trade, temporarily, and insofar as it was seen to be aiding Britain’s major enemy at the time – Napoleon’s France.

You are not Logged In

If you have already registered login here
If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 30 No. 4 · 21 February 2008 » Bernard Porter » Friendly Fire (print version)
Pages 9-10 | 3003 words

Letters

From Andrew Jotischky

Bernard Porter, reviewing books on the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, says that ‘friend and foe were not always clearly demarcated’ (LRB, 21 February). The books he was reviewing seem to deal largely with events in the American North-East, but his remark is particularly apposite in the case of the lesser-known South Carolina campaign of 1780-81, which had the character of a civil war as much as a war of independence. The American victory at King’s Mountain in October 1780, for instance, which Thomas Jefferson called ‘the turn of the tide of success’, was fought almost entirely between loyalist and patriot Americans, the only Briton on the field being the loyalist commander Major Patrick Ferguson, who was killed in the battle. Ferguson, a Scot leading Americans, was confronted by a superior force of militia, prominent among whom were the ‘Overmountain men’ from the Appalachians of western North Carolina and Tennes- see. Many of them were themselves of recent Scots-Irish descent. Although other notable battles in South Carolina, such as Cowpens, did feature British regiments, the campaign as a whole was marked by bitter and sometimes vicious encounters between loyalists and rebels (or patriots). The British strategy in South Carolina, indeed, was based on an attempt to exploit existing divisions between Americans.

Andrew Jotischky
Lancaster

From Tim Nau

Bernard Porter writes that Washington was ‘surrendered without a fight’ when the British invaded the area in 1814 (LRB, 21 February). This is untrue. About six thousand Americans, mainly local militia, attempted to stop the advance of the much larger British force on 24 August at Bladensburg, just north-east of the capital. They were, however, no match for the British and the battle was over in minutes.

One might also quarrel with Porter’s use of the word ‘sack’ for what happened next. The victors marched on Washington and burned its public buildings, but left most of the city’s residential areas undisturbed.

Tim Nau
Toronto

From Peter Dreyer

Bernard Porter writes of the War of 1812: ‘Only the Canadians seem to have got the right angle on it. It was their war for colonial freedom.’ And only the Canadians seem to have any kind of strong feelings about it. On a visit to Canada last year, my wife and I were lectured by a Niagaran on ‘the Americans and their crazy wars’ – by which, we learned, he meant, not Iraq and Vietnam, but 1812.

Peter Dreyer
Charlottesville, Virginia