"What was the War of 1812 even about?" Topic

"Can history explain anything? Henry Adams, after a lifetime of writing about American history, wasn't sure that it could. "Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories,—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect," he wrote. But he suspected that the assumptions wouldn't bear scrutiny, and he was haunted by the idea that hoping for a causal explanation of human affairs might be a mistake. "Chaos was the law of nature," he suggested late in life. "Order was the dream of man."
Perhaps it was Adams's penchant for historiographic nihilism that drew him to the War of 1812, the conflict with Britain that looms over his masterpiece, the nine-volume "History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison." As a great evil, a war calls out for some kind of theodicy—for an explanation of why it happened and what it meant—but the War of 1812 frustrates the desire for such answers. Its origins lie in a concatenation of misperceptions, crossed signals, and false hopes. Its end is no less obscure: America, which started the war, accomplished none of its stated aims, and the peace treaty merely restored the combatants to the status quo before the fight. A number of historians feel that neither Britain nor America won—though most agree that the Indians, allies of Britain who never again seriously obstructed white America's expansion, definitely lost. At the time, no one seemed to have more than a partial understanding of why they were fighting. A British government official compared the two countries to two men holding their heads in buckets of water, to see who would drown first. Adams wrote of the first winter of the war, "So complicated and so historical had the causes of war become that no one even in America could explain or understand them."
Many of Adams's successors have found it just as hard to say what the war was about. Recently, in "The Civil War of 1812" (Knopf; 2010), Alan Taylor pushed pointillism even further than Adams did, taking as his subject the unstable allegiances and local vendettas along the border between America and Britain's Canadian colonies—the sort of fractal details that tend to get smoothed out of popular narrative. "No single cause can explain the declaration of war," he wrote. In "The Weight of Vengeance" (Oxford), a new study marking the war's bicentennial year, Troy Bickham repeats the refrain: "There is no single explanation for the outbreak of war in June 1812." But Bickham has a trick up his sleeve. It turns out that he's an optimist. He thinks that it is possible to say what the war was about. What's more, he's sure that Britain lost…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Short answer is that both sides were still butt-hurt from the last war and wanted another go at the other.

It was about 2 years and 8 months.

Long term goals in the Southeast were to expel Spain from Florida and the British influence along with them. Several Patriot invasions from Georgia into Florida had already occurred.

Jackson captured Pensacola prior to the battle at new Orleans. America coveted the Muskokee land in Alabama especially since they connected American land along the Atlantic coast to Louisiana. War aims in the current Midwest were similar. Reducing British influence and securing land. Sea trade and ships were more a propaganda effort making good speech material rather than anything significant.

Officially the war was about the US being unhappy at the Royal Navy stopping and seizing ships and impressing sailors – as they did with the USS Chesapeake in 1807 – the British Cabinet actually reversed the policy in 1812 but the news did not reach the US before war was declared

There was also a fraction in the US government who thought Canada was ripe for the picking – as well that defeating the British would open up the frontier for further expansion westwards

The Brits viewed the war as a distraction from their main focus, this being a gentleman of Corsican extraction who was very busy on the continent

Depends who you talk too…
The Americans were divided about the war and it's aims.

For some it was freedom of the sea's and the Royal Navy impressment of "American" sailors (the British still considered Americans born British to be British citizens).

Some to settle old scores and complete the revolution, an early form of "manifest destiny" and to remove the threat of invasion from the North.

Others because behind every "red Indian" they saw a redcoat because why else would the Indians object to being driven from their land? The Anglo-Canadians did offer clandestine support, volunteers even joining in some of the battles, but not enough to make a real difference.

As pointed out earlier, Spanish Florida was also a target.

I think also there was an element of an American inferiority complex, a young nation trying to prove themselves the equal of their British forbearers. Wars are sometimes fought for no better reasons. That much abused word, "glory".

The Anglo-Canadian war aims were much simpler, keep the Americans at bay at the lowest possible cost while the serious business of defeated Napoleon took priority. The men on the ground in Canada also wanted to create an Indian "buffer state" in the "Old Northwest" but for London that was not worth fighting for.

"There was also a fraction in the US government who thought Canada was ripe for the picking"

That would be the President then – bit more than a "faction" (or even a fraction, although technically correct I guess) :)