'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.'
Well in fact it was exactly that, Tim, a[nother] simple case of aggression for land by the US .... we may need to agree to disagree on this, until you study it up some
'The official reasons in the declaration of war were'
Lol! ... 'official reasons' my arse, is this like the vaunted mushroom cloud Saddam had cooking? .... no doubt some of the citizenry swallowed impressment as casus belli, since the neocons of the day used it loud and long in their promotion of the war, still the true motives were made very plain in warhawk rhetoric, also in how they prosecuted their war once they got it going - think about it, they claimed to have cause against the Royal Navy, so straight-away they set out to rob the canadians .... yeah right .... by the way, HMS Leopard had stopped Chesapeake years before, in 1807 ... and by the time Canada was attacked in 1812 the RN had adopted a far more conciliatory stance on searching for deserters [little things they didn't tell you in school, eh]
'Of course England also had to deal with France.'
Precisely ... such perfect timing to rob the canadians, when their mother country is busy fighting off a dictator ... these US ships that were being stopped and searched for deserters were in fact trading with the enemy, getting rich off the misfortunes of others
Find the raw speeches of Calhoun and Clay for late 1811 and early 1812, i don't know if they're online anywhere but they make it vividly plain what were the priorities - robbing indians and canadians, period, all the rest was tacked on as selling points, packaging .... these two, by the way, were opposed by Madison until they made him an ultimatum, start up a war or they would do him a dirty ... i forget just what kind of dirty, but the nitty-gritty on this stuff is fairly well known if you put out the effort to look
See, the whole slaver/neocon/warhawk thing didn't just start up the day O'Sullivan coined the term Manifest Destiny, it had long before been strong among portions of those colonies ..... check this out -
' ... as the Acquisition of Canada is of unmeasurable Importance to the Cause ... '
memory.loc.gov
So the one you call the Father of your country aspired to be the Rapist of mine - this stuff didn't start with Clay or Calhoun or Madison or impressment or Napoleon or any of that ... Washington once authorised the robbing of an entire family whose daughter had turned down his advances
You do have your Websters and Thoreaus and Twains down there, just not enough of them at critical times ..... here is a fellow named Channing, writing to the neocon Clay just after the robbing of the tejanos -
'"Did this county know itself, or were it disposed to profit by self-knowledge, it would feel the necessity of laying an immediate curb on its passion for extended territory.... We are a restless people, prone to encroachment, impatient of the ordinary laws of progress... We boast of our rapid growth, forgetting that, throughout nature, noble growths are slow.... It is sometimes said, that ... the Indians have melted before the white man, and the mixed, degraded race of Mexico must melt before the Anglo-Saxon. Away with this vile sophistry! There is no necessity for crime. There is no fate to justify rapacious nations, any more than to justify gamblers and robbers, in plunder. We boast of the progress of society, and this progress consists in the substitution of reason and moral principle for the sway of brute force....We talk of accomplishing our destiny. So did the late conqueror of Europe (Napoleon) ; and destiny consigned him to a lonely rock in the ocean, the prey of ambition which destroyed no peace but his own."
odur.let.rug.nl
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