A Republican president, one who muses about adding Canada to the United States, erects trade barriers to punish America’s rivals and ignite domestic manufacturing. Instead, he does grievous harm to the U.S. economy.
Frustrated, the United States launches a war of choice. Despite promises of a quick and decisive military triumph, the conflict drags on. The president’s rosy predictions of imminent victory are so divorced from reality critics fear he has lost his mind.
The parallels between the War of 1812 and America’s conflict with Iran are striking—and the economic echoes are as noteworthy as the political ones.
The embargo that President Thomas Jefferson imposed on Britain and France in the runup to the War of 1812 cratered U.S. exports by roughly 80% and imports by nearly 60% within a year—a self-inflicted wound that plunged the young nation into depression before a single shot was fired at Britain.
Trump’s tariffs haven’t done that much damage, but they’ve still raised core goods prices by an estimated 3.1% and are projected to shave 0.4% off long-run GDP and cost roughly 345,000 full-time jobs, according to the Tax Foundation.
Then, as now, the American pressure campaign preceded a war that made the economic picture considerably worse: Once the fighting between the United States and Britain started, a blockade by the Royal Navy compounded the embargo’s damage in 1813-14, just as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—which the International Energy Agency calls the largest oil-supply disruption in history—has kept energy markets on edge through the current war.
Most Americans are only dimly aware of the War of 1812, the country’s first as an independent nation. Those who can remember the name of the war at least know when it started. Some might remember that it birthed the Star-Spangled Banner, or that it made General Andrew Jackson a household name, putting him on a path to the presidency.
But vanishingly few Americans know why we started a war with Great Britain 214 years ago, and what we got out of it. That’s largely because the answers are 1) no good reason and 2) basically nothing.
The main difference between the War of 1812 and the current one with Iran—and it’s a significant one—is that the War of 1812 was fought on American soil. Thousands of soldiers died, and America was humiliated when the British burned the Capitol and the White House. Thankfully, nothing nearly as dire has befallen us in this war—at least not so far.
But as our war with Iran plods into its seventh month, with the Trump administration no closer to achieving its goals (whatever they are), it might be instructive to remember how we extricated ourselves from another ill-considered conflict two centuries ago—namely, by scoring some battlefield successes and seizing the opportunity to sign a peace treaty that reinstated the status quo ante.
In 1803, Napoleon controlled much of the European continent, and he was marshalling his forces to invade England. Both Britain and France seized neutral American ships engaged in trade with their enemy—and in the case of the British, impressed American sailors into the Royal Navy.
Many Americans were outraged, but their young nation was in no position to respond militarily. Instead, President Jefferson pushed Congress to approve an embargo that sought to punish both countries by barring all export shipping from U.S. ports.
Surely, Jefferson and his fellow Republicans predicted, the embargo would force the British and French to change their behavior. And as an additional benefit, it would foster the growth of American industry. The opposition party, the Federalists, protested that the embargo would be economically ruinous for Northeastern states and the country as a whole.
They were right: As a self-inflicted economic blow, the embargo far outpaced Trump’s tariffs. Farmers struggled to find markets for their crops, unemployment skyrocketed and the nation plunged into a depression.
Congress finally scrapped the embargo a few days before James Madison, another Republican, succeeded Jefferson in March 1809. However, Madison replaced it with another law, the Non-Intercourse Act, which continued to prohibit trade with Britain and France while lifting the embargo on other countries. A few months later, he began allowing American ships to visit British and French ports, while keeping U.S. ports closed to British and French ships. None of it changed British or French behavior.
There was another factor that was driving America toward war with Britain, one that had less to do with honor than with glory.
The so-called War Hawks in Congress—mostly young Southerners and Westerners such as John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay—believed British Canada was ripe for the taking, and they wanted America to seize it. “The conquest of Canada is in your power,” Clay declared to his congressional colleagues in 1810. “I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”
On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain. Things went awry almost immediately.
In the middle of July, a force under the command of Brigadier General William Hull rowed across the Detroit River and landed on the Canadian shore without encountering any resistance. Basking in his apparent victory, Hull issued an ebullient proclamation to local residents.
“Inhabitants of Canada! You will be emancipated from tyranny and oppression,” he declared. “Had I any doubt of eventual success I might ask your assistance, but I do not. I come prepared for any contingency.” Hull’s aide de camp observed that the British and their Indian allies were “deserting by hundreds.”
Hull then marched south, toward the eastern bank of the Detroit River, to seize Fort Malden.
But when he tried to resupply his troops, warriors led by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh attacked the supply trains and forced them back to Detroit. The Canadian militia and their Indian allies had not deserted after all—they had simply disappeared into the woods.
Things got worse. Hull learned the American garrison at Fort Mackinac, Michigan—which didn’t know the country was at war—had surrendered to a combined British and Indian force without firing a shot, leaving Hull vulnerable to “the whole northern hordes of Indians.” In response, the panicked Hull unaccountably ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, on Lake Michigan in what is now Chicago.
The sixty-six soldiers, nine women and eighteen children who abandoned Fort Dearborn were supposed to be escorted to Fort Wayne by a trader named William Wells and thirty Miami warriors. Wells had been captured by the Miami as a child and later married a sister of their chief Little Turtle, but he had left the tribe and fought with the Americans against an alliance of Indian tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.
Tecumseh had fought there, too, and he had not forgotten Wells’s betrayal.
Following his orders, five hundred Potawatomi and Winnebago warriors set upon the group as they crossed the sand dunes about a mile outside Fort Dearborn, slaughtering most of them. Wells was singled out for special treatment: The warriors reportedly beheaded him and ate his heart.
Then Hull received word that British Major General Isaac Brock, governor general of Upper Canada and commander of its armed forces, was approaching with an unknown number of reinforcements. Thoroughly unnerved, Hull skulked back to Fort Detroit. The British seized the advantage, pounding the fort with cannon and mortar fire from the Canadian side of the border.
The American commander bravely refused to give up the fort—for one day. After a cannonball smashed into the officers’ mess, killing four men, Hull sent his son across the river under a flag of truce and gave up the fort, and his entire army, to the British.
Two other American invasions of Canada at the beginning of the war were similarly unsuccessful. Despite these embarrassing setbacks, Madison won reelection in November. He devoted most of his second inaugural address to defending the war, calling it “just in its origin and necessary and noble in its objects.”
One Madison critic, fellow founding father Gouverneur Morris of New York, thought the president must be either drunk or on drugs. “When I read Mr. Madison’s message I supposed him to be out of his senses, and have since been told that he never goes sober to bed,” Morris wrote to a friend. “Whether intoxicated by opium or wine was not said, but I learned last winter that pains in his teeth had driven him to use the former too freely.”
As the war with Iran has dragged on, Democratic opponents have leveled similar, if less colorful, criticisms at President Trump.
“It was launched without a clear plan, executed without a coherent strategy, and has become a costly, self-inflicted disaster for the American people,” U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand proclaimed on the Senate floor at the end of July. “Every justification that we were given for this conflict has proven hollow.”
The United States scored some military successes in 1813, most notably in a major naval battle on Lake Erie in September. That victory allowed the Americans to retake Detroit, regain control of the Northwest Territory and make another push into Canada.
Nevertheless, the broader picture was darker than ever. In October 1813, Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig and six months later, he abdicated his throne. Now free to concentrate its considerable might against the United States, Britain transferred 14,000 battle-hardened troops to the American theater. By the end of 1813, the Royal Navy had blockaded much of the East Coast, wreaking a terrible toll on the U.S. economy.
On August 24, 1814, British troops landed in the Chesapeake Bay town of Benedict, Maryland. After routing U.S. forces at Bladensburg, they marched unimpeded into the American capital.
In the House of Representatives, the British chopped up the doors, paneling and window frames and tore down the visitors’ galleries. They fired rockets into the roof, only to discover that it was covered with sheet iron and would not ignite. So they heaved all the mahogany chairs, desks and tables into a large pile in the middle of the room, sprinkled it with rocket powder, and launched rockets into it. That did the trick: The resulting bonfire was so intense it cracked stone, melted glass, scorched the skin off the fluted columns, burned marble to lime.
They had no trouble torching the older, dried-out wood in the Senate, and within minutes the entire Capitol was aflame.
Nearly everything inside the White House was combustible. In just minutes, the flames consumed it all: the mahogany doors and windows, the huge dining room sideboard, the pianoforte, the red velvet cushions in the Oval Room, the yellow damask curtains—even the brassware melted in the heat.
After a torrential rainstorm had doused the fires, someone scrawled graffiti on the scorched walls of the Capitol. “George Washington founded this city after a seven years’ war with England,” the message read. “James Madison lost it after a two years’ war.”
A month after the burning of Washington, American forces repelled the British at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, a triumph that inspired Francis Scott Key, who witnessed the battle, to pen the Star-Spangled Banner.
But as 1814 turned into 1815, the overall situation was dire. British troops had occupied eastern Maine, and were making plans to absorb it into Canada. The redcoats were threatening to invade upstate New York, raiding the Atlantic coast with impunity, and advancing toward New Orleans.
The U.S. had gone to war to end the impressment of its sailors and conquer Canada—it had done neither. Nevertheless, Madison was looking for a way out.
Even before the burning of Washington, the two sides had begun peace negotiations in the Belgian city of Ghent. American negotiators, having decided not to push for either of their country’s stated war goals, signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814.
The treaty essentially restored the situation before the war. But most Americans preferred to think of it as a victory, and peace ushered in what became known as the Era of Good Feelings. For about a decade, the partisan warfare between Federalists and Republicans died down as Americans, united with a new sense of purpose, concentrated on building up their young nation. The political peacemaking and the gradual extinction of the Federalists even led to a short-lived belief that America had moved beyond competing political parties.
We should be so lucky.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
The post America’s dumbest war (no, not this one) appeared first on Fortune.
