by Jefferson Morley
Salon.com

On the 200thanniversary
of the War of 1812 Monday, NPR’s “Morning Edition”
noted that this obscure conflict resulted in the sacking of Washington
in 1814, but also gave us the Star Spangled Banner. This reassuring
balance of costs and benefits makes for a tidy historical footnote
while managing to gloss over the few reasons why the War of 1812
still matters today.

It matters
mostly as an occasion for patriotic pomp and circumstance in the
mid-Atlantic states and Canada where the war was fought. Maryland
has issued a commemorative license plate, complete with bombs bursting
in air. Replicas of the tall ships of that era are sailing in Baltimore
Harbor. But the war also has some historical relevance. In Foreign
Policy, James Traub calls the War of 1812, the “most
important war you know nothing about.”

The War of
1812 matters because it was AmericaÂ’s first war of choice.
The United States did not have to declare war on Great Britain on
June 18, 1812, to survive as a nation and indeed President James
Madison did not want to. The newly founded United States was growing
westward but the “war hawks” in Congress pressed for a
conflict with AmericaÂ’s former colonial masters in the hopes
of gaining even more territory to the north. The term “hawk”
was coined in the run-up to the War of 1812 and the hawks of U.S.
foreign policy have been with us ever since.

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June
25, 2012

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