thought it manifest good taste and good sense to say of the Americans in his speech of February 18th, 1813, in Parliament, that “generally speaking, they were not a people we should be proud to acknowledge as our relations.”  Decatur and Hull were engaged in a social rather than in a political contest, and were aware that the serious work on their hands had little to do with England’s power, but much to do with her manners.  The mortification of England at the capture of her frigates was the measure of her previous arrogance....

Every country must begin war by asserting that it will never give way; and of all countries England, which had waged innumerable wars, knew best when perseverance cost more than concession.  Even at that early moment Parliament was evidently perplexed, and would willingly have yielded had it seen means of escape from its naval fetich, impressment.  Perhaps the perplexity was more evident in the Commons than in the Lords; for Castlereagh, while defending his own course with elaborate care, visibly stumbled over the right of impressment.  Even while claiming that its abandonment would have been “vitally dangerous if not fatal” to England’s security, he added that he “would be the last man in the world to underrate the inconvenience which the Americans sustained in consequence of our assertion of the right of search.”  The embarrassment became still plainer when he narrowed the question to one of statistics, and showed that the whole contest was waged over the forcible retention of some eight hundred seamen among one hundred and forty-five thousand employed in British service.  Granting the number were twice as great, he continued, “would the House believe that there was any man so infatuated, or that the British empire was driven to such straits that for such a paltry consideration as seventeen hundred sailors, his Majesty’s government would needlessly irritate the pride of a neutral nation or violate that justice which was due to one country from another?” If Liverpool’s argument explained the causes of war, Castlereagh’s explained its inevitable result; for since the war must cost England at least 10,000,000 pounds a year, could Parliament be so infatuated as to pay 10,000 pounds a year for each American sailor detained in service, when one-tenth of the amount, if employed in raising the wages of the British sailor, would bring any required number of seamen back to their ships?  The whole British navy in 1812 cost 20,000,000 pounds; the pay-roll amounted to only 3,000,000 pounds; the common sailor was paid four pounds bounty and eighteen pounds a year, which might have been trebled at half the cost of an American war.

WHAT THE WAR OF 1812 DEMONSTRATED

From ‘History of the United States’:  copyright 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.