CAREFUL STUDY OF THE WAR OF 1812 between Britain and the United States began almost as soon as conflict ended in February 1815. Described then in America as a ‘second war of independence’, the war remains both important and controversial. From the outset, each study tended to concentrate on particular aspects of the war. In 1817 William James, a British lawyer-turned-historian, was meticulous in refuting some of the more extravagant contemporary American naval claims in his Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War. Since then, almost every separate action has been minutely dissected and its naval and military significance analysed at length.

Alfred Mahan's Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812, published in Boston in 1905, also dealt in detail with the war's early single-ship actions, which caught the public imagination then and since. Mahan's description and evaluation of British maritime blockades against the United States was part of his argument in favour of ‘a naval force adequate to the protection of our commerce’. He attributed the bankruptcy of New England merchants to British maritime blockade, but stopped short of admitting the eventual insolvency of the American government.