I

Americans approaching the bicentennial of the War of 1812 will find it difficult to place the conflict in a coherent narrative of their nation's past. Certainly, they are familiar with some of its more dramatic moments, including the burning of Washington, D.C., by the British in August 1814 and their subsequent repulse from Baltimore, a victory that inspired Francis Scott Key to compose the verses that were designated as the national anthem in 1931. They can also recall Andrew Jackson's defeat of the British at New Orleans in January 1815, and to a lesser extent the earlier failure of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh to unite the Indians of the Old Northwest in a confederation to halt the seemingly inexorable advance of the American frontier. Beyond that, memories begin to dim. Occasionally, naval buffs celebrate the triumphs that were to guarantee the position of the U.S. Navy in the nation's defense establishments, but thereafter oblivion descends. Only specialists in the field of ethnohistory now pay much attention to the struggle of the Creek Indians, paralleling that of Tecumseh, to preserve their territorial integrity in the Southwest and along the Gulf coast. And almost nothing is remembered of the ten attempts made by the United States between 1812 and 1814 to invade the Canadian provinces of Great Britain – nearly all of which ended as miserable and often bloody failures. Indeed, while standing in the British post of Fort George on the Niagara Peninsula in the summer of 1989, I recall hearing an American tourist protest very loudly that she had no idea that Canada had ever been attacked by the United States.