Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution

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St. Martin's Publishing Group, Jun 27, 2017 - History - 256 pages

Unshackling America challenges the persistent fallacy that Americans fought two separate wars of independence. Williard Sterne Randall documents an unremitting fifty-year-long struggle for economic independence from Britain overlapping two armed conflicts linked by an unacknowledged global struggle. Throughout this perilous period, the struggle was all about free trade.

Neither Jefferson nor any other Founding Father could divine that the Revolutionary Period of 1763 to 1783 had concluded only one part, the first phase of their ordeal. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 at the end of the Revolutionary War halted overt combat but had achieved only partial political autonomy from Britain. By not guaranteeing American economic independence and agency, Britain continued to deny American sovereignty.

Randall details the fifty years and persistent attempts by the British to control American trade waters, but he also shows how, despite the outrageous restrictions, the United States asserted the doctrine of neutral rights and developed the world’s second largest merchant fleet as it absorbed the French Caribbean trade. American ships carrying trade increased five-fold between 1790 and 1800, its tonnage nearly doubling again between 1800 and 1812, ultimately making the United States the world’s largest independent maritime power.

 

Contents

A Glow of Patriotic Fire
1
Force Prevails Now Everywhere
19
For Cutting Off Our Trade
50
To the Shores of Tripoli
89
The Reign of Witches
124
Free Trade and Sailors Rights
142
A Mere Matter of Marching
182
Purified as by Fire
214
You Shall Now Feel the Effects of War
279
Destroy and Lay Waste
299
Hard War
338
So Proudly We Hail
361
I Must Not Be Lost
375
Acknowledgments
407
Bibliography
427
Index
443

Father Listen to Your Children
245

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About the author (2017)

WILLARD STERNE RANDALL is a journalist and author of several biographies of Founding Fathers. He is a Distinguished Scholar in History and Professor at Champlain College. He lives in Burlington, Vermont with his wife, with whom he has co-authored multiple volumes of history.

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