An 1814 watercolor and ink depiction of the U.S. Capitol after the burning of Washington, D.C., in the War of 1812. (Painting by George Munger)
Latent and overt violence at public sporting events is catnip for sociologists, who see competitive sports as violence condensed to a more manageable form. Historians are drawn to violence in sports as well, fascinated by its gradations—from life-or-death struggles in Roman coliseums and battlefields to docile, but no less ruthless, chess tournaments.
With the current spate of Canadian-led booing of the U.S. national anthem at professional hockey games, answered by American-led booing of the Canadian national anthem, these strains converge into parallel lines of history. One has already been written in the War of 1812, while the future of Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods and threats of annexation as “our 51st state” is anyone’s guess. For now, at least, the rink brawls between hockey players are, as the kids might say, “gnarly!”
Most Americans, and Canadians as well, would be hard-pressed to name one battle or event in the War of 1812. What almost every American misremembers from history class, however, is that Francis Scott Key “wrote” our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” during that war’s Battle of Fort McHenry. In fact, he put his famous poem to the melody of “The Anacreontic Song,” composed by John Stafford Smith, an Englishman. The United States and the UK are not just “two nations divided by a common language,” in the famous words of George Bernard Shaw. As in pop and rock music, a common culture divides us as well.
The War of 1812, which saw our young nation go at it with Britain and its remaining settlements in “British North America” (later called Canada) was the key event in forming our nascent Navy and building its prowess on the sea. Any other nation with no proven track record of sea power would have considered it folly to go up against the British Navy, easily the world’s most formidable assembly of frigates and sailors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That we went up against British sea power is a testament to our national distaste of taxation, fair or not, at sea or not, even in our early history. Want to make Americans boo for real? Easy. Just tax them.
The British, too, are surprisingly brief in remembering this war. Robert Tombs, writing in his magisterial The English and Their History (2014), spends no more than half a paragraph on it: “Disputes with the United States about its [Great Britain’s] trade with Napoleonic Europe led to an American attack in July 1982 and continual naval skirmishing. An invasion of Canada was beaten off by a British-Shawnee alliance. A small British force of 3,700 landed on American soil and burned Washington. The Americans made peace in 1814, but fighting continued for some time before the news arrived, and another small British force was defeated at New Orleans.” (410)
And that was that. Except “Canada” would have been better described as “British North America”; it had yet to be named. And most people do a double-take to exclaim, “Wait! What? The British managed to burn down Washington? As in D.C.?!”
Yes, that D.C., and in August 1814. “The US President and his wife have just enough time to pack their belongings and escape from the White House before the enemy enters. The invaders tuck into dinner they find still on the dining room table and then set fire to the place,” writes Peter Snow in his 2013 book When Britain Burned the White House: The 1814 Invasion of Washington. No could say the Yanks were not asking for it, having invaded Canada in three failed campaigns before that, in 1812 and 1813.
For most Canadians, the War of 1812 burns considerably brighter in the national memory. For them, the conflict effectively launched a national identity, even if it did take several decades to congeal, due in part to lasting unresolved tensions between French-speaking Québécois and the English-speaking majority. “Canada at the time was British North America. A Canadian at the time would consider a British regular soldier one of their soldiers. That attitude continued on in the Canadian psyche so it becomes Canadians [who] beat the Americans at the Battle of Queenstown Heights, Canadians captured Detroit, Canadians burnt the White House, but the British lost the Battle of New Orleans,” says Ron Dale, Superintendent of Niagara National Historic Sites, Canada.
So while a little-known history of a lesser-known war—on the U.S. side, at least—menaces the United States and Canada from a dark corner of the room, the collective future of both nations marches toward a fraught, tense future. Naval power and muskets no longer figure in the calculus of open battle, but since the War of 1812 more or less gave Canada its identity, who knows what nations await to be born as our national, and international, political landscape simmers, sears, and threatens to boil over?
