No stranger fate

...for some of us, than to find oneself living in a Philip K. Dick fiction.

Known planets: "This is an exciting time."

If only more people would notice! From xkcd.com:

Happy War of 1812 Bicentennial Day!

I guess it's happy!

So much for the laws of arms

The Chronicle of the Good Duke reporting on the English siege of Nantes, 1380-1:

And some of those in the [French] garrison were wounded but none of them died and none was taken except Robert Guy of Riom and when he was disarmed the English were bemoaning their loss and did not put a guard on him so Robert Guy left them and went to the ditches where he rejoined the companions who began to laugh about it. And the English were very discomfited by the deaths of their barons and their loss of their people in skirmishes so they did not know what to do. Things went from bad to worse as they caught dysentery.

Congratulations, students!

Let me express my regrets for not being at yesterday's NU convocation, the one for historians. I was out of town (and still am). Earning a university degree requires a lot of work and a lot of determination. For all the current cynicism about the value of higher education, it can be a rich experience -- inside and outside the classroom. I hope it was for you.

Upper Canada before 1812

Some more analysis by Alan Taylor of Upper Canada "before the war."

To suppress sedition,, the government sought to control the flow of public information. In a stark contrast with the republic, the British restricted Postal Service in Upper Canada to official dispatches and to the letters of favored merchants. An American settler described Upper Canada as the land of "no mail, no post-offices, [and] no post riders." ... A Local schools worried officials, who feared that a little knowledge was dangerous in common minds, particularly when their teachers came from the United States. ... Distrusting local, common schools, officials preferred to fund only a few elite schools, one per district ,to educate the sons of gentlemen. ... Britons defined Upper Canada as a set of absences: as free from the social and political pathologies attributed to the United States. They celebrated the colony for lacking the land jobbing, Indian warfare, African slavery, Republican electioneering, libelous newspapers, majoritarian intolerance, and mob violence that blighted the republic.In 1792 Patrick Campbell boasted that the settler in Upper Canada could get "get lands for nothing, be among his countrymen, and run no risk of being ever molested by Indians, tarred or feathered." The British promoted Upper Canada more for what it was not, than for what it was.

Results of that nasty little war

Of 1812, that is.

Nasty or not, it was important.

Before the war, the geographical and legal boundaries of the Anglophone world were ambiguous; lots of people were more concerned about the radical Democratic-Republican or conservative Tory or Federalist next door than they were about people who lived on the other side of the ill-defined border. Not to mention all those radical Irishmen who could be anywhere, as indeed could Irish conservatives.  How different were American farmers in New York State from "Late Loyalists" in Upper Canada (i.e. Americans who had moved north to buy cheap land)?  Not much, though some were more radical than others, or perceived as such.  Geography did not determine this.

But after the war, the border (the UC-USA border) meant a lot.  On  the other side, whichever side you  lived, were people who had burned your houses and wrecked your farms and maybe unleashed scary Indians on you.  They were now The Enemy in a way that they had not been before.  Migration was not welcome; the policy in Upper Canada became one of recruiting settlers direct from Britain.
 
I also get from Alan Taylor the  notion that Britain came very close to winning the war outright.  The treaty of Ghent of 1814 gave the USA very little of what it had fought for, and with Napoleon out of the way, Britain could have crushed the broke, divided States like so many bugs, even while observing the treaty.  Instead, the imperial government took a rather minimalist view of  its role in North America. In particular the traditional alliance with the Indians south of the lakes was abandoned.

Why?  The empire had been fighting a world war for a long time and was TIRED. And the Battle of New Orleans made the point that hegemony in America would probably not be cheap.