![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() What accounts for the failure of the blockade? Although a number of factors played a role-the rough and poorly charted coastline, the Royal Navy's pursuit of prize money, and British dependence on the license trade to feed its forces on both sides of the Atlantic-Dudley places most of the blame on the British government and particularly the Admiralty. He argues that warships and privateers, which throughout the war left and returned to port with alarming ease, exacted a heavy toll on British trade that the coasting trade flourished and that the decline in foreign trade was really a voluntary withdrawal that left the American merchant fleet intact for a postwar revival. Hence, the appearance of Wade Dudley's new study on the subject is especially welcome.Ĭonventional wisdom holds that the British blockade did enormous damage to the United States by bottling up American warships, destroying American trade, and undermining government revenue. has been largely ignored since the publication of Mahan's great work. Though surely the most important use of naval power in the war, the British blockade of the U.S. As a result, we are still dependent on Theodore Roosevelt's Naval History of the War of 1812 (1882 and later editions) for an overview and Alfred Thayer Mahan's Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812 (1905) for an understanding of naval strategy. For the war at sea, a multitude of source materials on both sides of the Atlantic, coupled with an arcane language, has deterred anyone from attacking broader themes. ![]() Larger, more daunting topics have attracted less attention. In the flood of works published on the War of 1812 in the past fifteen years, the focus has been mainly on narrow military topics: battles and campaigns and soldiers, sailors, and ships. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003. Splintering the Wooden Wall: The British Blockade of the United States, 1812-1815. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: ![]()
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