prior to the war of 1812, the british navy engaged in impressment, which meant that they

Before going to Ghent had served a long stretch with the Channel Fleet – during which time he faced a court-martial where he was exonerated from charges of having failed to advance and bring a French squadron to battle. Gambier had been Governor of Newfoundland and had commanded the naval forces at the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807. The three negotiators were Vice-Admiral James Gambier Henry Goulburn the Undersecretary for War and Colonies and William Adams, an expert in maritime and naval law. And now the conclusion of the war was hardly being treated as top of the agenda and the result seemed of little importance when compared with the issues at stake in Europe – provided that the British red lines could be held: the security of British North America, the navigation of the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes and the protection of Britain’s native allies.

A war that was as much as anything the result of strategic miscalculations on both sides and in which neither side could be said to have achieved a decisive result.įor Britain, the American war had never been anything but a side-show in the titanic struggle against Napoleon: a struggle from which only one side would emerge intact and which had been concluded only when all the powers of Europe, united in one coalition financed by the commercial wealth of Britain, finally broke him. Their task was to frame a treaty that would end the war that had begun with James Madison’s declaration on 18 June 1812 – a war which almost no-one in Britain and many in the United States had never wanted.

Four months after the fall of Napoleon, as plans were being agreed for a great peace congress to be held in Vienna in September, three British and five American negotiators met in the small town of Ghent in the newly-independent nation of Belgium.

Prior to the war of 1812, the british navy engaged in impressment, which meant that they