"War Visits the Chesapeake" Topic

Beginning in 1813, Britain unleashed a campaign of raids in the Chesapeake Bay that escalated to large-scale assaults against two of America's most important cities in August and September 1814. While the invaders were largely successful, did they achieve their ultimate objectives?

link

As the US signed the peace treaty in 1815 without achieving any of her stated war aims what do you think?

We game this period in 25/28mm one of the guys in our group comes up with great ship and shore scenario's, which lets us us ships and infantry--we sometimes do the same scenario 2 or 3 times --playtesting for the Cons--our group is fortunate in that we have a 12.6 X 6 foot table and several members can make and/or have great terrain and buildings--a nice set-up can sometimes make up for an afternoon of BAD dice.
Ron

Yes 1814 was the last time the US and Great Britain went to war The Royal Navy clearly demonstrated that the US coast's would be vulnerable to attack should another war start Even if the US got its act together and was successful on land the cost would be the probable destruction of its port cities and merchant fleet.

As the article points out the US was able to successfully defend itself in several areas but that was against only a small portion of the Royal Navy A Royal navy free of its war against France could have place a hundred ships of the line off the American cats plus the ability to land thousands of troops anywhere they wanted .

To both sides this would be a worse case scenario and the eventual "winner" would pay a heavy prices in losses as the loser .War was to be avoided.

From 1814 on until 1917 there were many crises that arose between the two countries that could have resulted in war but the memory of the 1813 raids and the burning of Washington was always there . The result has been two centuries of peace and the longest undefended border in the world between Canada and the US. So yes the raids had a successful result

At the same time, the War of 1812 has frequently been called the second War of Independence. There were many reasons for the war, but one of the results is that never again did Britain try to dictate or infringe itself on America. But it still took decades before we could call ourselves friends.

As to whether the raids achieved their goal, I think it is interesting that for 20 years after the War of 1812 about 40% of the US military budget went into building forts at seaports all along the Atlantic coast – Fort Sumter being one good example

The Chesapeake area of operations was only a distraction. Both sides recognized the center or gravity was on the US-Canada border.

Eric

Ron Skirmisher,

Would you be willing to share some of those scenarios? I'm doing the Battle of Sackets Harbor in 28mm at Fall In, to include the landing boats and gunboats and want to use them in the future as well. The Chesapeake is going to be my next area of concentration so I'm very interested in what you guys are doing.