Burke and the War of 1812 plunged James Burke into a new theatre of war as he joined British forces defending Canada against an attempted annexation by the young United States of America. When I started writing the book, most people had never heard of the War of 1812, but Donald Trump’s announcement that he would like to see the USA annex Canada meant the war of 1812 was suddenly trending in social media.
What quickly became obvious was that very few people understood what had happened in 1812. It was not that surprising. The war was a scrappy affair. Both sides occasionally attempted bold strategic plans, but these usually came to nothing – from the first defeat of the United States when a grand three-pronged attack on Canada fizzled out as one failed invasion from Detroit, to the final defeat of the British (after the war had officially ended) with a doomed attempt to take New Orleans.
Political partisanship has further clouded the historical view. Well over 200 years later, people still view the war through politically partisan lenses. So, for example, a surprising number of people in the USA are convinced that the war was won by the USA. People on both sides of the conflict tend to downplay the role that native Americans played in the fighting (though Canadians seem to acknowledge this more than others) or how much the native tribes suffered in the aftermath of the war.
Now, with his new book, Black Redcoats, Matthew Taylor has highlighted another forgotten element of the war: the effect it had on enslaved people in the USA and the role that some of them played in aiding the British war effort.
In Burke and the War of 1812, the emphasis is clearly on the land war, but as the conflict went on, the role of the navies on both sides became increasingly important. Although the American navy was to prove its worth, the British had the ability to strike from the sea all along the eastern coast of the USA. They chose Chesapeake Bay as the focus of their efforts and established a base there. Eventually, the British had about twenty warships in the bay with some two thousand men capable of going ashore and taking the fighting to the enemy, most famously, in 1814, by marching to Washington and burning down the White House.
The White House after the fire
From early in 1813, enslaved African-Americans on the shores of Chesapeake Bay saw the British presence as an opportunity to escape to freedom. The first may have been nine men who, on 10 March, approached the guard boat of HMS Victorious and volunteered to serve in the ship’s company. Many more were to follow.
Soon, it was not only men who fled to join the British. Whole families were taken under the protection of the Royal Navy. Many of the men chose to join the British forces, but those who did not want to fight were given their freedom and evacuated to British territory in Canada or the West Indies.
The British action was driven by several motivations.
The men who chose to join them were valuable from a military point of view. They were loyal – desertion was not an option for them. They were committed to the British cause, which offered freedom to all the enslaved people in the territory under their control. They knew the geography of the area – an important factor given the guerrilla nature of many of the British raids – and they were soon to demonstrate that they were brave and able fighters.
The War of 1812 was a modern war, in that its economic element war was a strategic priority. To the farmers around Chesapeake Bay, their slaves were valuable stock and the British inflicted real economic damage by liberating them. Freeing enslaved people was also a blow to American morale as many Americans lived in fear of a slave rebellion.
Many naval officers were also motivated by sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Ironically, this was true even of some who themselves owned slaves in the West Indies. Slavery was already illegal in Britain and, whatever was happening in the West Indian plantations, British officers were uncomfortable to see slavery in a society which looked otherwise very much like that in England.
As the number of African-Americans serving the British military increased, a new military unit, the Corps of Colonial Marines, was formed in 1814 and volunteers were issued with red coats and given regular pay and rations.
The Colonial Marines proved excellent soldiers and were conspicuously active in many engagements, notably in the assault on Washington and the burning of the White House.
As the war drew to an end, the British planned an attack on New Orleans. It was probably always a step too far. Andrew Jackson had had time to construct a solid defence of the city and his troops were far from the inadequate opposition that the British had faced in 1812.
The British saw control of the coast of Georgia as important in enabling them to cut off the possibility of the Americans reinforcing New Orleans. The British task force sent to Georgia to accomplish this consisted of about 500 Royal Marines with 200 men from the 2nd West India Regiment from the Bahamas and 365 Colonial Marines. This meant that the slave state of Georgia was being threatened by a force that was majority black.
The British established a base at Cumberland Island where they were joined by many blacks fleeing from both Spanish and American slave owners. British forces were still based at Cumberland Island when news of the peace finally reached them and they were forced to withdraw. The island was held for approximately 8 weeks during which 1,700 enslaved people escaped to the British.
Meanwhile, in West Florida, the British had made allies not only of freed slaves but also of Native Americans. Thousands of Creek warriors had fled to Florida following war with the Americans and the British had organised a multiracial force of Creeks, whites, mixed race and black people to defend West Florida, then a notionally Spanish territory, against American attack.
The British formed a separate Florida Corps of Colonial Marines, based at Prospect Bluff, overlooking the Apalachicola River, about 15 miles north of present-day Apalachicola, Florida. The fort they built there was a moated, walled structure enclosing stone buildings. Bastions at the corner mounted defensive cannon. It was the largest man-made structure in Florida outside the cities of Pensacola and Saint Augustine. When the British withdrew they left at least 2,500 stands of muskets, 500 carbines, 500 swords, four 24-pounder cannon, and four 6-pounder cannon along with a fieldpiece and a howitzer. When the Colonial Marines were evacuated, as many as 450 of the men and their families decided to remain at the base, which became known as ‘Negro Fort’. It became the centre of the most well-armed Native American and free black community on the North American continent.
The continued existence of the Negro Fort, only 50 miles or so from the US border, was regarded as intolerable by the Americans and in the summer of 1816 units of the American army and navy attacked the fort. A gunboat opened the attack with a hot cannonball which, by chance, landed in the fort’s magazine. The explosion that it caused killed about 300 people.
The deaths at Negro Fort pretty much marked the end of the Colonial Marines, although individual marines seem to have continued as a thorn in American flesh, some becoming valued military advisers to Native American tribes in the region.
Matthew Taylor’s book explores an important and little known area of Anglo-American history. He looks at the possible influence of the Colonial Redcoats in history. It is, sadly, mainly a case of might-have-beens. If the British had responded to the diplomatic overtures of the Creek leader who travelled to London to plead for support; if a lucky shot hadn’t annihilated Negro Fort… Even so, the story tells us a lot about British and American attitudes to slavery and the start of the long, slow process of unravelling it.
Black Redcoats is an important book for anyone interested in the period and yet still immensely readable. I whole-heartedly recommend it.
It’s going to be a very short blog piece this week because I’m in the throes of getting Burke and the War of 1812 ready for publication. This is the eighth book in the James Burke series and I’m obviously getting better at the finishing touches because formatting it for paperback took much less time than I was expecting. I may may even be ahead of my planned publication date of 26 April. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking, though. I’ve only just got the final cover design and there’s always the danger that Amazon might object to it for one reason or another.
Some previous covers
I’d love to share the cover with you all, but apparently it’s normal to make a big deal out of the cover reveal, so I’m wondering if I should leave some time for the drum roll and general excitement. I’m not convinced that all this sort of publication build-up really helps that much for we independents. It’s different if you’re a big publisher and have to persuade retailers to stock your books, and work out what your print run is, and all that sort of thing, but that’s hardly likely to be a problem for me. Do you get excited about people talking about books you can’t buy yet? Or do you just want them to get on with publishing the things and not teasing you with promises? Let me know. Engaging with your audience is supposed to be an important part of marketing a new book but, although I’m here on my blog and on Twitter and Bluesky and Threads, engagement always seems pretty limited. Now the writing is done, I have lots of time to respond to anything people throw at me, so do feel free to ask me questions about writing, the War of 1812, or whatever. I’ll talk about tango, too, if you want.
I guess I ought to be thinking about what I’m going to write next – if I am going to write anything next. As with all my James Burke books, this one ends with a promise that ‘Burke will be back’ but I’m not entirely sure that he will be. I’m hoping that the excitement about Trump threatening to annex Canada might mean that the War of 1812 is suddenly fashionable and that this will be the book that finally breaks through and gets James Burke noticed outside the small circle (including you, dear reader) who have been following his adventures so far. If it doesn’t, I have to ask myself if I want to keep doing this. Learning to make sense of the War of 1812 came dangerously close to hard work and the book has taken me about a year to write. It’s reminded me how much easier it is to write contemporary fantasy and I know there are people who would like me to write more of the Galbraith & Pole books. Or I could just spend more time dancing (although not that much more time as we are already out two or three times most weeks and we’ll be dancing more once outdoor tango starts in the summer).
Anyway, if you want any more James Burke books, please buy this one and tell your friends to buy it too, and PLEASE post a review on Amazon. (If you’ve read any of the others and not yet reviewed – or reviewed them before I was publishing myself – please review them now.)
So that’s my life at the moment. We’re going to have a party on 26 April and someone is making a cake that looks like the White House and the icing will be singed much as the real thing was in 1814. We don’t get as far as 1814 in this book, but if there is another, I’m going to try to get the burning of the White House into that.
Search ‘1812’ on your favourite social media platform and you’ll get a surprising number of hits for a war from 213 years ago. Until a few weeks back, I doubt one person in a thousand could tell you anything about the war if they lived in either Britain or America. Rather more knew about it in Canada.
Why the sudden interest?
In a recent speech at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump threatened military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama canal. He also expressed enthusiasm for the idea of making Canada the 51st state. When asked if he might consider military force against the Canadians, he replied that he would not use troops but, rather, “economic force”. Doubtless the reassurance that Canada would not face American tanks rolling across the border will have come as a relief to the folks living north of the 45th parallel but the threat of economic force is still a belligerent threat. Many Canadians view Trump’s speech as a preparation for a hostile annexation of their country. This has reminded people that the USA has history in this regard. In 1812, American troops invaded Canada with the intention of seizing the territory from the control of the British and allowing the growing United States to expand northwards.
What AI imagines Trump might have looked like leading his forces in 1812
The War of 1812 was a real war but, in world affairs, rather overshadowed by events in Europe, where the continent was engaged in a brutal conflict with Napoleon. In fact, if you ask any European to tell you about military conflict in 1812, their most likely response (after ‘I don’t know anything about history’) will mention Napoleon’s march on Moscow, if only because Tchaikovsky wrote his famous 1812 Overture about it.
With the British army and navy having other things to do, there were few British troops available to fight in North America. The war was therefore fought between US troops and state militias on one side and a small British force, reinforced by Canadian militia. Both sides also made tactical alliances with Native American tribes, although the native forces were generally more sympathetic to the British, who some of them considered might offer protection against US expansion into their territories. The Americans and British also fought on the high seas with ships of both nations duelling it out in what was effectively a separate conflict.
The result was, perhaps inevitably, a scrappy little war which dragged on for almost two years. With such a long border and few settlements within striking distance, the war degenerated into little more than a series of raids. The Americans would burn a village in Canada; the Canadians would burn a slightly bigger village in the United States; the Americans would burn a town in Canada and so it went on until, in 1814, the British eventually burned down the White House.
For Canadians, the war was a serious affair. Thousands were killed in battle or died of disease during the war. Canadians saw it as, in the literal sense of the word, an existentialist contest. Defeat would have meant the end of their country. At the time, Canada was British colony. Although the Canadians relied on the British Army for defence in 1812, many historians consider that driving the Americans out of their country was a significant point in their development as a nation.
For Americans, the War of 1812 became part of their country’s foundation myth. It was when the young country came of age, taking on the mighty British Empire and fighting them to a standstill. As with most myths, the historical facts of the war are often subverted to serve the interests of the myth makers. In reality, the war was an inconclusive affair. When Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814, the Americans realised that Britain would soon turn its full naval might against them. British reinforcements were already on their way to Canada and America was anxious to end the war before they faced almost certain defeat.
The resulting peace settlement restored the situation that had existed before the war started. The pre-war borders were reinstated. The lives lost had been sacrificed for nothing. In the end, the only real losers were the native Americans. Britain made a token effort to protect its tribal allies in the peace treaty that ended the conflict, but both sides knew that the British would not go to war to protect the indigenous people. Deprived of the opportunity to expand northwards, the United States pursued its movement west with renewed vigour and acted ruthlessly against any native tribes that got in the way. In 1800 the Native American population of what was to become the United States was estimated at 600,000. By the decade 1890-1900 it was down to around 237,000.
Until now, most people seemed happy to let the events of 1812 be forgotten. In the last few weeks, they suddenly seem relevant again. Canadians, at least, are remembering the war. They’re not very happy about what happened. Perhaps the rest of us might try to recall it and avoid another messy (but hopefully bloodless) unnecessary conflict.
Burke and the War of 1812
It’s not often that my books about the adventures of the British spy, James Burke, are suddenly caught up in the affairs of the modern world. Burke was a real person who spied for the British during the Napoleonic Wars. Although my first Burke adventure, Burke in the Land of Silver, is closely based on truth, his subsequent adventures are largely fictional. There is no evidence that he ever operated in North America, but he moved around a lot and may well have been involved in events there. At the urging of fans who enjoy reading about the War of 1812, I have written a story featuring native Americans, the Washington of the time, the Ohio militia, the siege of Detroit, and the betrayals and double-dealings that are part of Burke’s stock in trade. It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye, as my mother used to say, or, in this case until a farcical series of political misjudgements creates a bloody conflict that brought no good to anyone. As I said, “Suddenly caught up in the affairs of the modern world.”
Burke in the Land of Silver, is currently out with beta readers. (Let me know if that’s something you would be interested in.) Assuming they don’t find too many mistakes, it should be published early this Spring.
Picture Credits
Featured image shows the British burning Washington from Paul M. Rapin de Thoyras’ book, The History of England, from the Earliest Periods, Volume 1 (1816). Source: Library of Congress
Other pictures:
Pencil drawing depicting soldiers starting the fire in the White House is from the New York Public Library
The Battle of Queenston Heights, 13 October 1812. Library and Archives Canada, 2895485
