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The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence
Simon & Schuster
November 2006
On Sale: November 7, 2006
496 pages ISBN: 0743226186 EAN: 9780743226189 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
In A. J. Langguth's classic Patriots: The Men Who Started
the American Revolution, he brought to life leaders from the
generation of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in all
of their complexity, with their great strengths and human
frailties. In Union 1812, those men appear again, tempered
now by age and new responsibilities. James Madison, the fourth president of the United States,
must decide whether to go to war again only thirty years
after the American Revolution. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson had all made major
concessions to avoid entangling their young and divided
nation in new battles with Europe. But the War Hawks,
aggressive congressmen from the South and West, are
demanding that Madison take action to uphold America's honor
against Great Britain. In this gripping narrative of the second and final war of
independence, Madison leads an unprepared nation into a
struggle that will establish the United States as a major
world power and stake its claim to the entire continent. As the war begins, the U.S. Navy consists of seventeen
oceangoing ships; the British fleet numbers seven hundred.
Nor is the country united in its will to win. Governors in
New England are refusing to call out their militia, while
mobs attack antiwar newspaper editors in Baltimore in a
violent repetition of the Boston Massacre. Dramatic scenes range across the world, from vicious
fighting on the frontier -- one British officer compares the
hand-to-hand combat with the savagery of bulldogs -- to
Dolley Madison's elegant receptions at the executive mansion
and the wrangling among America's peace delegates in Belgium
at Ghent. Before the outcome is decided, the war will have engulfed
land and sea, with a disastrous U.S. defeat at Detroit and
epic naval campaigns on the Great Lakes. After the Americans
sack Toronto, the British retaliate by burning the White
House and the Capitol and laying siege with their rockets to
Fort McHenry. Finally, two and a half years of bloodshed and botched
strategies culminate in the spectacular battle of New Orleans. The heroes of Patriots are joined here by dozens of the most
colorful and enduring characters from America's past: not
only the diminutive and brilliant Madison and the statuesque
Dolley, but also Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, Oliver Perry
and Stephen Decatur, the great Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh,
and four legendary men who will follow Madison into the
White House -- James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John
Quincy Adams, and the triumphant hero Andrew Jackson. For too long, the War of 1812 has been ignored or
misunderstood. Union 1812 thrillingly illustrates why it
must take its place as one of the defining moments in
American history.
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