Volume 2 of 2.

I must confess I know little, if anything, about the War of 1812 with the USA, which is the subject of this book. For anybody else in the same boat, who wants to learn about it, this 1000-page account will go a long way towards remedying that lack of knowledge. It is a contemporary account, published a few years after the war, which officially ended in December 1814 though hostilities dragged on. As you might expect, the prose is flowery, written at a time when authors were not inclined to simply call a spade a shovel, but rather tended to elaborate with wordy sentences. That said, it is a very comprehensive account with great attention to detail, beginning with the causes for the war during which an American invasion of Canada was sharply seen off. There are numerous appendices containing official correspondence, the wording of the Peace Treaty drawn up in Ghent in December 1814 (though hostilities did not cease for a two or three months) and casualty figures for va...