Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution
Casual historians may believe America won its independence from Britain in 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence or after the 1783 Treaty of Paris. In Unshackling America, Willard Randall offers a comprehensive, occasionally dense, rebuttal.
Randall tracks American and British relations from the mid-1750s through 1814, a period defined by wars, tariffs, embargos, and the British impressment of over 15,000 American sailors. He reports on the War of 1812 in detail from both sides of the Atlantic, enumerating European diplomatic maneuverings as well as the bloody battles spanning the height and breadth of the (not always unified) United States of America.
A scholar with an extensive bibliography of biographies and histories, Randall is at his best when placing his daunting compendium of dates, places, and people into context. For example, readers may find contemporary parallels in his analysis that the War of 1812 was “a bitter internal political struggle as well as a war against a foreign enemy” and how, “The United States had not won [the War of 1812]—nobody had won—but it had not lost…” . Unshackling America would have benefited from less detail and more of Randall’s expert insights.
