Standing 5-foot-4, Jefferson’s successor James Madison shared a diminutive stature with Napoleon, but not, apparently, the dictator’s bellicose tendencies. The next few years brought more provocations from the British, but still no war. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. When Napoleon’s reach for European hegemony renewed hostilities between the two countries in 1803, both sides implemented policies that denied American rights to neutral trade, making commerce with either an act of allegiance to one nation and hostility to the other. As much as Americans liked to see themselves as being providentially free from the wars and “entangling alliances” of the Old World, maintaining such freedom proved exceedingly difficult amidst the near constant war between France and Britain. The war was rooted in the tenuous diplomatic relationship of the United States with the traditional European powers. The peculiar story of America’s second war with Great Britain is generally forgotten, but it was essential in affirming the legacy of the Revolution and the nation that it made. Revisiting the War of 1812 reminds us that the nation remained incomplete in the early decades of the 19th century. The Revolution was supposed to have been a discrete event, one that created the indisputable fact of the American nation. But while Hofstadter was right in many ways, his broadside fails to register the war’s central place in the national story.
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