I used not the term 'harassment' but rather 'impressment', which is what the practice was called at the time .... the french were impressing sailors as well, you know, and so were the yanqui pirates - navies were rough outfits in those days, rum sodomy and the lash, scurvy and sinking and shipwreck etc .... impressment formed in no way a genuine casus belli for any party
The fact that other countries may have done it doesn't make it not an act of war. The Leopard firing on the Chesapeake, is a classic example of an act of war, one countries navy attacking another's.
Sure desire for land by the US was part of the war but it wasn't a simple case of aggression for land by the US.
For canadians it forms part of our core identity that less than half a million of us were able to defend ourselves against a nation with fourteen times the population
The US was fighting against England, which had a greater population than the US at the time. Of course England also had to deal with France.
at the peace of Ghent the US negotiators dropped all pretense of concern with impressment, and no mention of the practice appears in any clause of the treaty
No mention of impressment in the treaty doesn't equal no American concern about impressment at the time of the treaty, let alone no concern at the beginning of the war. The war was about impressment, and land disputes, and the attempts of Great Britain to impose a blockade on France during the Napoleonic Wars and the fact that English soldiers occupied territory belonging to the United States, despite Great Britain's promise to remove these soldiers in the Treaty of Paris (1783), and an aggressive desire by some Americans to get more land, and other things.
The official reasons in the declaration of war were
1) The impressment of American sailors by the British,
2) British violation the neutral rights and territorial waters of America,
3) The blockade of U.S. ports,
4) Refusal to revoke the orders which prevented foreign ships from trading in America.
These were real reasons even if they were not the only ones.
All in all the war was a muddled one, both in its origins and it the way it was waged (for example the US never had a very coherent strategy and also one of the biggest battles of the war happened after the peace treaty was signed). It probably would have been better if the war could have been avoided, but it wasn't simply a war of American aggression.
Tim |
