ted States_ and
_Macedonian_ Page 418

Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812

ANTECEDENTS OF THE WAR

CHAPTER I

COLONIAL CONDITIONS

The head waters of the stream of events which led to the War of 1812,
between the United States and Great Britain, must be sought far back
in the history of Europe, in the principles governing commercial,
colonial, and naval policy, accepted almost universally prior to the
French Revolution. It is true that, before that tremendous epoch was
reached, a far-reaching contribution to the approaching change in
men's ideas on most matters touching mercantile intercourse, and the
true relations of man to man, of nation to nation, had been made by
the publication, in 1776, of Adam Smith's "Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations;" but, as is the case with most marked
advances in the realm of thought, the light thus kindled, though
finding reflection here and there among a few broader intellects, was
unable to penetrate at once the dense surface of prejudice and
conservatism with which the received maxims of generations had
incrusted the general mind. Against such obstruction even the most
popular of statesmen--as the younger Pitt soon after this
became--cannot prevail at once; and, before time permitted the
British people at large to reach that wider comprehension of issues,
whereby alone radical change is made possible, there set in an era of
reaction consequent upon the French Revolution, the excesses of which
involved in one universal discredit all the more liberal ideas that
were leavening the leaders of mankind.

The two principal immediate causes of the War of 1812 were the
impressment of seamen from American merchant ships, upon the high
seas, to serve in the British Navy, and the interference with the
carrying trade of the United States by the naval power of Great
Britain. For a long time this interference was confined by the British
Ministry to methods which they thought themselves able to defend--as
they did the practice of impressment--upon the ground of rights,
prescriptive and established, natural or belligerent; although the
American Government contended that in several specific measures no
such right existed,--that the action was illegal as well as
oppressive. As the war with Napoleon increased in intensity, however,
the exigencies of the struggle induced the British cabinet to
formula