50 Fun Facts About War of 1812

Which nickname was given to the congressmen who pushed the United States into declaring war in June 1812?

The War Hawks. Mostly members from the South and West, they hoped the fighting would let the United States take Canada, an ambition the war proved was beyond its army.

What did the anti-war Federalist Party call the War of 1812?

Mr. Madison's War. Not one Federalist in Congress voted for it, and the party's north-eastern strongholds kept up their opposition for as long as the fighting lasted.

Which party supplied the votes for war in June 1812?

The Democratic-Republicans. They carried the House 79 to 49 on Southern and Western votes, while most members from the trading Northeast opposed a war declared mainly over grievances at sea.

The fall of which ruler in April 1814 freed thousands of British troops for the war in North America?

Napoleon. Once he had abdicated, Britain could ship whole brigades across the Atlantic, and within months they had invaded New York and burned Washington.

Which British prime minister was assassinated on 11 May 1812, weeks before the war began?

Spencer Perceval. The government that followed his repealed the trade orders America had protested against, but the news did not cross the Atlantic in time to stop the war.

Which American post guarding the Huron–Michigan passage was the first to fall to the British in 1812?

Mackinac. Its commander had not yet heard that war was declared when British regulars, fur traders and several hundred Indigenous warriors arrived, and he gave up without a shot.

Which city did American general William Hull surrender to Brock on 16 August 1812?

Detroit. Brock had the smaller force but marched straight at the fort while Tecumseh's warriors closed in, and Hull gave up to spare the town 'the horrors of an Indian massacre'.

Isaac Brock was killed during which October 1812 battle on the Niagara River?

Queenston Heights. Brock was shot leading a counter-attack up the slope, yet the Americans still lost, because much of their militia refused to cross the river onto foreign soil.

USS Constitution, a frigate made famous by the War of 1812, is preserved as a museum ship in which city?

Boston. She was built in the city in the 1790s, and when word spread in 1830 that she was to be scrapped, a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes raised a public outcry and she was repaired instead.

The River Raisin massacre of January 1813, which gave American troops a rallying cry, took place in which present-day state?

Michigan. Wounded prisoners left behind at the village of Frenchtown were killed by warriors allied to the British, and 'Remember the Raisin!' became the Americans' battle cry.

Which American commodore reported his 1813 victory on Lake Erie with the words 'We have met the enemy and they are ours'?

Oliver Hazard Perry. He scrawled the note on the back of an old envelope after capturing an entire British squadron, a win that forced the British army to pull back into Upper Canada.

The battle flag flown at the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie carried which dying words of Captain James Lawrence?

Don't give up the ship. Lawrence gave the order as he lay mortally wounded three months earlier, and his crew could not obey it: the British boarded and took his frigate anyway.

Which future president led the American delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent?

John Quincy Adams. His five-man team, which included Henry Clay, held out through months of British demands for territory and came home with the pre-war borders intact.

York, the capital of Upper Canada burned by American troops in April 1813, is now which city?

Toronto. The Americans burned its parliament and other public buildings, and the tit-for-tat that followed ended the next year with British troops setting fire to Washington.

Which Canadian heroine walked some 30 km in 1813, dodging American sentries, to warn the British of an attack?

Laura Secord. Her request for a pension was refused and her walk went unrewarded for decades, until the visiting Prince of Wales heard the story in 1860 and sent her £100.

After burning Washington in 1814, the British were beaten off weeks later at which nearby port city?

Baltimore. A sharpshooter killed the general who had burned the capital as his troops advanced on the city, and the fleet's guns failed to batter its harbour fort into surrender.

Charles de Salaberry's Canadian volunteers turned back a far larger American army marching on Montreal at which 1813 battle?

Châteauguay. From behind log barricades de Salaberry's men raised a din of bugle calls and cheers, so the Americans could not tell how few defenders they faced and gave up the march.

Which American general's brigade of grey-clad regulars beat the British in open battle at Chippawa in July 1814?

Winfield Scott. Short of blue cloth, his men wore militia grey, so the British commander took them for amateurs; months of hard drill had made them anything but.

Which inconclusive July 1814 battle near Niagara Falls was one of the bloodiest of the war?

Lundy's Lane. Exhausted troops fought hand to hand around the British guns in the pitch dark of a sultry night, often unable to tell friend from foe, and neither side could win.

After the British burned the Library of Congress in 1814, which Founding Father sold his own books to restock it?

Thomas Jefferson. Congress bought all 6,487 of his volumes to start again, but a second fire in 1851 went on to destroy nearly two-thirds of them.

Who commanded the American squadron that won the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain?

Thomas Macdonough. His victory made a British army of some 11,000 turn back to Canada, and pushed Britain's negotiators at Ghent to drop their territorial demands.

Tariff money the British took from occupied Castine, Maine, helped found which university?

Dalhousie. Customs duties collected while the British held the port went home to Halifax, where the Earl of Dalhousie used them in 1818 to found a college open to students of every church.

Which British general led the force that captured and burned Washington in August 1814?

Robert Ross. Less than three weeks after his troops burned the capital's public buildings, an American rifleman shot him dead as he rode at the head of his next advance.

The rout of American militia at which battle opened the road to Washington?

Bladensburg. The outflanked militia broke and ran with no plan for a retreat, and by that same evening British troops were marching into the capital.

What put out the fires in Washington less than a day after the British lit them?

A violent thunderstorm. Possibly a hurricane, it spun a tornado through the city, and its flying debris is said to have killed more British soldiers than the capital's defenders had.

What did British officers do inside the White House in August 1814 before setting it on fire?

Ate the president's dinner. The table had been laid for his guests, and a servant who had helped prepare the meal recalled that the invaders finished it and drank the wine.

The full-length portrait rescued from the White House before the British burned it in 1814 depicts whom?

George Washington. Legend has the First Lady cutting the canvas from its frame herself, but a servant who was there wrote that staff took the huge portrait down and sent it off by wagon.

Which singer topped the American charts in 1959 with the comic ballad 'The Battle of New Orleans'?

Johnny Horton. The song was written by Jimmy Driftwood, an Arkansas school principal who set the story of the battle to an old fiddle tune to get his pupils interested in history.

'Defence of Fort M'Henry' was the original title of the poem that became which song?

The Star-Spangled Banner. Printed as a handbill within days of the 1814 bombardment, it was sung for more than a century before Congress made it the official national anthem in 1931.

Francis Scott Key's poem about Fort McHenry was set to which tune of a London gentlemen's music club?

The Anacreontic Song. Its tune was so popular in America that Key had already fitted an earlier patriotic song of his own to it in 1805, and he wrote his new verses to match.

Who ran both the State Department and the War Department through the final months of the War of 1812?

James Monroe. When the secretary of war resigned after the capital was burned, he took on that office as well, and two years later he was elected president.

The huge flag that flew over Fort McHenry in 1814 is now kept and displayed by which institution?

The Smithsonian. Mary Pickersgill's 30-by-42-foot flag stayed with the fort commander's family for ninety years, and they snipped pieces off it as souvenirs before it went to the museum.

The Red Sticks, who fought the Americans in the South, were a faction of which nation?

The Creek (Muscogee). The fighting began as a civil war inside the nation, and other Creeks fought beside the Americans, yet the peace treaty took more than 20 million acres from the nation as a whole.

What did the smuggler Jean Lafitte and his men receive for helping to defend New Orleans in 1815?

A full pardon. The British had offered to pay him handsomely to fight on their side; he took the offer to the Americans instead and bargained for his men's freedom from prosecution.

Which future Texas hero was badly wounded as a young lieutenant at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814?

Sam Houston. Among the first over the enemy barricade, he took three wounds that nearly killed him, and his courage won him the lasting patronage of his commanding general.

The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, was signed on the eve of which holiday?

Christmas. Signed on 24 December 1814, the treaty handed back every conquest and never mentioned impressment, the grievance that had taken America to war.

The city of Ghent, where the peace was signed, lies in which modern country?

Belgium. The country did not exist in 1814: Ghent was about to be joined to the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, and Belgium broke away only in the revolution of 1830.

Which general won the lopsided Battle of New Orleans two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed?

Andrew Jackson. News of the peace had not yet crossed the Atlantic, so the battle changed nothing in the treaty, but it made him a national hero and, in 1828, president.

Which British major general commanded the attack on New Orleans in January 1815?

Edward Pakenham. The Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law rode forward to rally his faltering columns, was hit by an American volley and died of his wounds soon after.

The spell of national unity that followed the War of 1812 is known as the Era of what?

Good Feelings. With the anti-war Federalists discredited and fading away, one party ran national politics almost unopposed, and much of the old rancour went with them.

New England Federalists met to air their grievances about the war in which city over the winter of 1814–15?

Hartford. As its delegates neared Washington with their demands, news arrived of peace and of the victory at New Orleans; the protest now looked disloyal, and the party never recovered.

The 1817 Rush–Bagot Treaty demilitarised which waters?

The Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. Each country agreed to keep no more than a vessel or two on each lake, which ended the naval building race there.

USS Constitution earned which nickname after British shots bounced off her hull against HMS Guerriere?

Old Ironsides. A sailor is said to have shouted 'Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!', and half an hour later the British frigate was such a wreck that her captors had to burn her.

Which June 1813 frigate duel off New England ended within fifteen minutes with the American ship boarded and captured?

Shannon vs Chesapeake. The British captain, who had drilled his crew for seven years, sent a written challenge into port, and the fight that followed was over in about a quarter of an hour.

Legend traces which national nickname to a New York meatpacker who supplied army rations in the War of 1812?

Uncle Sam. The story says soldiers joked that the 'U.S.' stamped on Samuel Wilson's barrels stood for him, but dictionaries say only that the name grew out of those initials during the war.

In 1807 HMS Leopard fired on an American frigate off Virginia and boarded her in search of what?

Royal Navy deserters. The British killed three of the crew and took four men off the ship, and American fury over the seizure of sailors smouldered until war came five years later.

Who led the American forces at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe against Tecumseh's confederacy?

William Henry Harrison. The battle gave him the nickname 'Tippecanoe', and nearly thirty years later the slogan 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' carried him to the presidency.

Tecumseh's brother, the spiritual leader known as 'the Prophet', was named what?

Tenskwatawa. His accurate prediction of a solar eclipse in 1806 won him a following across the tribes; a defeat in 1811, fought while his brother was away, lost him most of it.

Fort Dearborn, whose evacuees were ambushed in August 1812, stood where today?

Chicago. Potawatomi warriors attacked the column soon after it left and the empty fort was burned; the rebuilt post grew into the city, whose flag carries a star in its memory.

American general James Wilkinson, who led the 1813 push on Montreal, was secretly paid by which country?

Spain. He swore secret allegiance to its king in 1787 and drew its pension as agent 'Number Thirteen', all while rising to become the most senior general in the United States Army.