Most one-volume accounts of the War of 1812 consist of operational histories of its military and naval campaigns, bookended by short chapters on the “causes” of the conflict and some discussion of the inconclusive peace treaty which brought it to an end. It also has to be said that such volumes often provide readers with little more than mere narratives of seemingly disconnected military disasters that lack any visible pattern and make no particular sense. In his new book, Troy Bickham commendably avoids this approach in favor of adopting more problem-oriented perspectives that permit him to explain why this much-derided conflict was an episode of major significance in the history of both the United States and the larger Euro-Atlantic world.

The great strength of The Weight of Vengeance is its utilization of newspaper sources, not only in the United States but also in Canada as well in Great Britain and its West India colonies. From these sources readers will derive a vastly expanded sense of the range of reactions to the events of the war as these were experienced by the parties directly involved and by those at a greater distance who were affected by its impact. The author's most valuable contribution here is to demonstrate that, for Great Britain, the war was much more than an inconsequential sideshow to the larger struggle that London was waging against Napoleonic France at the same time. British newspapers took a far greater interest in the American war than most historians have supposed and British ministers, particularly Earl Bathurst as secretary for war and the colonies, devoted considerable energy to instructing officials in Canada on how to respond to the American invasions, even though they were unable to spare them much in the way of resources before 1814.

Equally valuable are two chapters that describe the range of dissenting opinions against the war. For the United States, Bickham ably outlines the manifold economic, partisan, religious, and sectional considerations that made the Madison administration vulnerable to criticisms that had become so intense by 1814 that they threatened the very integrity of the republic. He even suggests that, had the war not ended in February 1815, the United States would have been at serious risk of civil war. In Great Britain, the spectrum of dissent was narrower, with much of it reflecting concerns about how the war jeopardized British commercial interests. There was, nonetheless, some genuine peace sentiment in Great Britain, arising partly from war weariness and partly from principled concerns by British Radicals, such as Samuel Whitbread, who deplored a war with a kindred people whose devotion to liberty and constitutional government matched, if not exceeded, that of Great Britain itself.

Nevertheless, the insights that Bickham derives from newspapers come at a cost – that of neglecting (comparatively) other sources, such as personal papers and official records. The two chapters covering the “causes” of the war explain its outbreak as “the perfect storm” generated by all the grievances that roiled Anglo-American relations after 1803. But this meteorological image operates more as a metaphor than as an explanation, which might have been made more precise by closer attention to the diplomatic record. Bickham also overreaches in his arguments by claiming that both Great Britain and the United States, for their own reasons, wanted this war – Great Britain to curb the rise of the republic and keep it in a state of colonial subordination, the United States to compel a decent respect from the former mother country. Most other historians would not be quite so emphatic, and Bickham himself, at later points in his account, usually employs more nuanced language as he elaborates on the motives of the combatants. And Bickham's final conclusion is not so much that the United States won the war as that Great Britain lost it – largely because of its unwillingness to devote more than one campaign to the accomplishment of its goals.

There are also some occasional and unnecessary errors. On page 195 Bickham attributes a remark denouncing party conflict and “jacobinism” to James Madison in his “war message” of June 1812, but that message contains no such remark. Rather worse is an unwarranted reliance – in the account of the peace negotiations in 1814 – on The Diary of James Gallatin, a source that was exposed as long ago as 1957 as fraudulent. But these matters aside, readers who want a short account of the War of 1812 without an undue emphasis on its military events can consult Bickham's volume with pleasure and profit.