The results of the War of 1812, initiated by the United States against the United Kingdom from 1812 to 1815, included no immediate boundary changes. The Treaty of Ghent restored the territorial status quo ante bellum, returning occupied territory on both sides, but it did not resolve the maritime disputes over impressment, neutral trade, and belligerent rights that had contributed to the war, Britain maintained their maritime belligerent rights in full. The longer-term result was the beginning of a more stable Anglo-American relationship, eventually followed by more than two centuries of peace between Britain, Canada, and the United States.
Britain’s principal objectives in North America - defending Canada and maintaining its maritime system during the war with France - were largely achieved, although these aims were shaped by the wider strategic priority of defeating Napoleon rather than by territorial expansion in the United States until after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. The British then went on to demand an Indian Buffer State and parts of North Maine.
American forces launched repeated invasions of Upper and Lower Canada, and held Canadian territory in the final settlement (Thames river valley) not returned until July 1, 1815. Britain’s North American objectives were more limited and were shaped by the wider Napoleonic Wars: to defend Canada, preserve its maritime system, and avoid diverting major resources from Europe while the war with France continued. Until 1814, when Britain tried launching an offensive to secure an Indian buffer state and parts of northern Maine.
The end of the Napoleonic Wars changed the practical importance of the maritime disputes. Britain no longer needed to maintain wartime restrictions on trade with France, and impressment largely ceased because the Royal Navy no longer required wartime levels of manpower. However, Britain did not formally renounce impressment or its wider maritime claims in the Treaty of Ghent. Rare American allegations of post-war impressment appeared in diplomatic correspondence in the 1820s, and later Anglo-American disputes involved the stopping, visiting, searching, and seizure of American vessels, especially in anti-slave-trade enforcement.
In the United States, the war was later remembered as a “Second War of Independence”, reflecting the belief that national honour and sovereignty had been vindicated. Several historians have questioned this interpretation, noting that Britain did not seek to reconquer the United States and that the peace settlement secured no American concessions on maritime rights. In Canada, the war contributed to a separate nation-building memory, with Anglophone Canadians presenting the defence of Upper and Lower Canada as a successful resistance to American invasion, while Francophone Canadians generally attached less importance to the conflict.
The threat of New England ended after the failure of the Hartford Convention. In Britain, the war was overshadowed by the defeat of Napoleon and by European diplomacy after 1815. For Indigenous nations allied with Britain, the outcome was far more damaging: the failure to secure an Indigenous buffer state at Ghent and the weakening of organised resistance in the Old Northwest opened the way for further American expansion.
Early peace talks Efforts to end the war began in 1812, when the main American diplomat in London proposed an armistice in return for a renunciation of impressments, but the British refused. Later in 1812, when the British captured Fort Detroit and news of the repeal of the Orders-in-Council reached Washington, DC, George Prevost arranged an armistice with his counterpart, Henry Dearborn. The British frigate HMS Junon was sent to relay the Americans' response to the British squadrons on the North American Station. However, US president James Madison decided to continue the war as it didn’t mention the end of impressment. In 1813, the Russian Empire offered to mediate a peace, but London rejected the offer for fear of compromising British interests in Europe. Finally, Britain and the United States agreed to peace talks in January 1814.
Negotiations In August 1814, peace discussions finally began in the neutral city of Ghent. Both sides began negotiations with unrealistic demands. The United States wanted an end to all British maritime practices that it deemed to be objectionable and guaranteed fishing rights off Newfoundland. The British announced, as an essential element of the peace treaty, their longstanding goal of creating a "neutral" Indian barrier state, which would cover most of the Old Northwest, be independent of the United States, and be under the tutelage of the British, who could use it to block American expansion and to build up British control of the fur trade.Dwight L. Smith"A North American Neutral Indian Zone: Persistence of a British Idea." Northwest Ohio Quarterly 61#2–4 (1989): 46–63. London dropped that demand when the Americans adamantly refused it and indicated that they would end negotiations. The British had been weakened by the collapse of Tecumseh's Confederacy after the Battle of the Thames in 1813 and no longer controlled adequate supply lines to support a barrier state. Britain also wanted to keep the northeastern parts of Maine that had been captured to provide a land corridor to Quebec from the Maritime Colonies.
After months of negotiations, against the background of changing military victories and defeats, both parties finally realized that their nations wanted peace and that there was no real reason to continue the war. Both sides were tired of the war since port trade was almost paralyzed. Also, after Napoleon had fallen in 1814, France was no longer an enemy of Britain and so the Royal Navy no longer needed to stop American shipments to France or to have more seamen. The British were preoccupied in the rebuilding of Europe after the apparently-final defeat of Napoleon. The negotiators agreed to return to the status quo ante bellum, with no changes in boundaries. Both sides signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814. The next and final step would be the treaty's formal ratification by both governments.
When the treaty was signed, the British but not the Americans knew about the imminent Battle of New Orleans, which would be fought on January 8, 1815. The treaty finally went into effect after it had been formally ratified by both sides in February 1815.
The treaty failed to secure official British acknowledgement of American maritime rights, but in the century of peace between the world's naval powers from 1815 to World War I, those rights were not seriously violated. The Royal Navy ended its practices that had angered Americans since they were no longer needed since the fall of Napoleon. American pride and honor were built by the Indian threat being ended and by the rejoicing surrounding American victory at New Orleans.Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Andrew Jackson's Honor," Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 1–36 in JSTOR In doing so, the United States had successfully created a sense that it had become fully independent from Britain.Watts (1989) pg???
Native Americans A key reason that American frontiersmen had been so much for the war in the first place was the threat posed to their continued settlement of territory that was inhabited by Native Americans of various tribes. The frontiersmen blamed Native Americans' attacks on the arms and supplies that were provided by British agents in Canada. In addition, the frontiersmen wanted access to lands for which the British acknowledged belonged to the United States but blocked its expansion by inciting and arming the Native Americans. The 1813 death of Tecumseh in battle removed a powerful obstacle to American expansion although the Native Americans' involvement in the war continued, as did their resistance to American westward expansion after it ended. The Native Americans were the main losers in the war by their loss of British protection and never regained their influence.
In the Southeastern United States, Andrew Jackson's destruction of Britain's allies, the Creek Indians, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, ended the threat of Native American hostilities in that region. That opened vast areas in Georgia and Alabama for settlement as plantations and farmlands. The United States occupied all of West Florida during the war and, in 1819, purchased the rest of Florida from Spain with the Adams–Onís Treaty, which prevented the Spanish from arming hostile tribes there. Creek Indians who escaped to Spanish Florida joined the Seminoles there and put up a long resistance, known as the Seminole Wars.
In the Treaty of Ghent, the British promised not to arm the Native Americans from Canada or even to trade with them, and the border was largely pacified. However, some Americans assumed that the British had continued to conspire with their former Native American allies in an attempt to forestall American hegemony in the Great Lakes region, but Calloway argued that such perceptions were faulty. After the treaty, the Native Americans in the Great Lakes region became an undesirable burden to British policymakers.Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British–Indian Relations, 1783–1815 (1987)
Canada
Some American politicians had mistakenly expected the population of Upper Canada, which was partially of American origin, to throw off its "British yoke". However, that did not happen since many of them were United Empire Loyalists and had, willingly or otherwise, left the US out of loyalty to Britain. After 1815, British officials, Anglican clergy, and Loyalists tried to spot and root out American ideals like democracy and republicanism. Thus, the British and Loyalists would set the different colonies of what would later become Canada on a course that was different from that of their former enemy. They also discouraged further immigration from the United States.
When the United States attacked British North America, most British forces were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, British North America had minimal troops to defend against the United States, whose much larger military force was, however, initially poorly trained. For most of the war, British North America stood alone against a much stronger American force. Reinforcements from Britain did not arrive until 1814, during the final year of the war. The repelling of the American force helped to foster Loyalism in the colonies that later became Canada.
The nationalistic sentiment caused suspicion of such American ideas as republicanism, which would frustrate political reform in both Upper and Lower Canada until the Rebellions of 1837. However, the war started the process that ultimately led to Canadian Confederation in 1867. The Canadian writer Pierre Berton wrote that although later events, such as the rebellions and the Fenian raids of the 1860s were more important, Canada would likely have become part of the United States if the war had not taken place since American settlers would have continued to arrive and so Canadian nationalism would not have developed.
The war was highly significant in Britain's North American colonies. After the war, Canadian supporters of Britain portrayed the war as a successful fight for national survival against an American democratic force that threatened the peace and stability that the Canadians had desired. Throughout the war, most of Canada's inhabitants assigned the war to an American desire to annex the British colonies, a perception that was reinforced by American Generals such as William Hull, even tho Hull’s proclamations stated nothing about annexing Canada, but that the town of Sandwich was under was under a military occupation.