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8 - RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Brian Arthur
Affiliation:
University of Greenwich
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Summary

It will be agreed on all sides that most operative [of causes] have been the inadequacy of our system of taxation to form a foundation for public credit … but the public credit at this juncture is so depressed that no hope of adequate succour on moderate terms can safely rest upon it.

(John Eppes, Committee of Ways and Means, to Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Dallas, 14 October 1814)

IF, IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY, defeat in war lay in the inability to continue fighting while an opponent was able to do so, then, despite its victory at New Orleans in January 1815, the United States was defeated in the Anglo-American War of 1812. The Americans had failed to occupy Canada, either as a bargaining counter or permanently, as Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin had earlier agreed. Furthermore, the Royal Navy's economic warfare, in the form of its commercial and naval blockades, had deprived the United States of the financial means to continue fighting beyond the first few months of 1815. By depriving the United States of its imports the British commercial blockade had so reduced American customs duties, the major source of government revenue until the last year of the war, as to create major budget deficits and cause American dependence on increasingly unreliable public credit. The British naval blockade had so largely confined the American navy to port as to prevent its being able to lift the British commercial blockade or prevent British amphibious landings and major incursions into the United States at will.

Type
Chapter
Information
How Britain Won the War of 1812
The Royal Navy's Blockades of the United States, 1812-1815
, pp. 204 - 208
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2011

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