War of 1812

The War of 1812 was a conflict which was fought between the United States and the United Kingdom in the early nineteenth century. The name for the war is somewhat misleading, as it was not fought exclusively in 1812, but rather it broke out in the summer of 1812 and lasted for nearly three years down to the spring of 1815. The conflict was an offshoot of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe in so far as British efforts to regulate trade and movement around the Atlantic Ocean in the context of the wars had led to growing tensions between Britain and the US and the eventual outbreak of hostilities. The most notable event during the war was the British capture of Washington D.C. in August 1814 and the burning of the US capital. The war generally ended with both sides returning to the status quo ante-bellum, but it affirmed the modern border between the United States and what was then the British colony of Canada. With this the border was demilitarized and extensive westward migration occurred from parts of the US like New England and New York State towards the southern shores of the Great Lakes. Thus, the War of 1812 led to extensive migration into regions like Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin from the mid-1810s onwards.

War of 1812 chronology of events

Although modern relations between the United States and Britain are defined by the ‘special relationship’ based on a shared language, history and cultural traits, in the decades following the American Revolutionary War the two countries remained at loggerheads with each other, often concerning a tense border situation between the US and British Canada and rivalry for naval superiority in the north-western Atlantic Ocean. These tensions came to a head in the 1800s and early 1810s when the US remained on favorable terms with France during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars which followed. In the summer of 1812 the US government elected to go to war with Britain over these issues, a conflict which became known as the War of 1812.

A contemporary print of the burning of Washington D.C. in 1814

The war was a stop-start affair, in large part because the British were more pre-occupied with events in Europe, where Napoleon initiated his disastrous invasion of Russia just weeks after the commencement of the conflict in North America. However, Bonaparte’s first fall and abdication in 1814 allowed the British to commit more troops to North America and in August 1814 they seized the region between Maryland and Virginia and burnt Washington D.C. on the 24th of August.

Peace negotiations began in earnest thereafter, as all sides were exhausted by decades of war in Europe and the Americas since the early 1790s. These eventually culminated in the Treaty of Ghent. Under the terms of this the US and Britain largely returned to the status quo ante-bellum, the situation before the war. However, provisions did provide for both sides to show greater respect towards each other’s respective borders in British Canada and the northern limits of the United States. Many parts of it were demilitarized and this encouraged mass migration into the southern shores of the Great Lakes in the years that followed.

Migration after the War of 1812

The War of 1812 led to a wide-ranging movement of people across various parts of North America. By the dawn of the nineteenth century the United States was becoming overpopulated in the states and lands lying along the East Coast and as more and migrants arrived to Europe every year people needed to acquire new lands to the west. Many were moving from states like Georgia and the Carolinas into Tennessee, Kansas and Alabama, but there was a reluctance to move west from New York State and New England to the region south of the Great Lakes in what are now the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan, in large part owing to tensions with the British who had militarized the border right across the Great Lakes in British Canada. This also involved the British allying with the Native Americans of the Great Lakes region against the US government and has led some historians to refer to the period between the Seven Years’ War in the late 1750s and early 1760s and the end of the War of 1812 in 1815 as the Sixty Years’ War.

With the end of the War of 1812 a massive wave of migration occurred into this region, much of it bolstered by land grants to war veterans. Others were new arrivals to New York, Boston and Philadelphia who quickly trekked out west. Many of these came from regions like Scandinavia and Germany in Europe. This migration continued at speed until the Panic of 1819, an economic crisis of the time, dampened the amount of loans being given out to would-be settlers in the north of the Midwest, after which it declined for a time. But ultimately the War of 1812 opened the floodgates for the beginning of mass migration to the Great Lakes region, bringing tens of thousands of people first and then hundreds of thousands towards the mid-nineteenth century.

Another element of the migration which was attendant on the War of 1812 occurred between the United States and British Canada. By 1812, although a number of states in the north of the Union such as those in New England, New York State and Pennsylvania, were free states where slavery had been abolished, most of the southern states still allowed slavery. The military emergency and the incursion of large British armies into states like Virginia created an opportunity for enslaved people there to escape and to head north towards freedom. Because it was still legal to hunt down escaped slaves in the northern free states at that time, many continued moving north until they reached British Canada and settled in places like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Some were collected by British ships off the East Coast and shipped directly north to Nova Scotia. Upwards of 4,000 or so slaves escaped to Canada in this manner, many of who subsequently enlisted in Britain’s Colonial Marines, often settling on lands in Trinidad in the Caribbean afterwards.

Demographic impact of the War of 1812

The Home Insurance Building in Chicago

The bulk of the migration attendant on the War of 1812 was from the East Coast of the United States to the Great Lakes Region around the modern-day states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. An indication of the extent of this migration over time is provided by charting the population of the city of Chicago, which emerged in the half century which followed as a major urban center along the southern shores of the Great Lakes. The city had only a few hundred inhabitants by the 1820s, but thereafter it increased rapidly. By 1840 it was nearing 5,000 people, expanded to nearly 30,000 by 1850 and nearly quadrupled to 112,000 souls by 1860. By 1870 it was the fifth most populous city in the United States with nearly 300,000 inhabitants and reached a million in the late 1880s. In 1885 the world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building, was erected here. Thus, Chicago had moved from barely existing as a settlement by the 1810s to become one of the world’s most important urban centers by the 1880s, a sign of how dramatic the westward expansion into the region south of the Great Lakes was in the decades following the War of 1812.

Explore more about the War of 1812

• United States, War of 1812, Soldiers who Served in Volunteer Organizations record collection on MyHeritage
• New York City And Vicinity During the War of 1812 - 1815 record collection on MyHeritage
• Missouri Soldiers, War of 1812 to World War I record collection on MyHeritage
• Roster of Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the War of the Rebellion, Residing in Nebraska, December 1, 1897 record collection on MyHeritage
• Other military records on MyHeritage
• Researching Your War of 1812 Ancestor, webinar by Thomas MacEntee on Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• The War of 1812 Records — Preserving the Pensions, webinar by Rebecca Whitman Koford, CG, CGL on Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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