US conflict with Britain in 1812-15

choi

Allegra di Bonaventura, Postscript to Revolution; The US conflict with Britain in 1812-15 was both a minor theater of the Napoleonic Wars and a divisive clash among North Americans. Wall Street Journal, Aug 15, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the ... pendence-1502750922
(book review on William Sterne Randall, Unshackling America; How the War of 1812 truly ended the American Revolution. St Martin's 2017)

Note: There is no need to read the rest of text.
(a)
(i) Allegra "is a female given name of Italian origin."  Wikipedia
(ii) allegro (adjective masculine; feminine singular allegra): "cheerful"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/allegro

(b) "America's heroic mythology of the War of 1812 has a life of its own. It endures in the final words of mortally wounded naval commander James Lawrence [1781 – 1813; still his frigate, USS Chesapeake, was captured by Britons in a one-ship action off Boston, Massachusetts] ('Don't give up the ship!') and in Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's crisp dispatch after his unlikely victory over the Royal Navy at Lake Erie: 'We have met the enemy and they are ours.' It even lives on in the ungainly lyrics of our national anthem, evoking a triumphal David and Goliath national story that echoes the victory of the American Revolution. But for most of us, the complexities of the War of 1812, which involve multiple nation-states, international trade and sovereignty rights, remains at some distance.
(i) Oliver Hazard Perry was the older brother of Commodore Matthew C Perr, who opened Japan
(ii) Oliver Hazard Perry. Perry's Victory & International Peace Memorial, National Park Service, undated
https://www.nps.gov/pevi/learn/historyculture/perry.htm
("was named after his paternal grandmother's father, Oliver Hazard, and also for his uncle, Oliver Hazard Perry, who had recently been lost at sea"by the time he was born)

* The memorial, a Doric column, is on a island in Lake Erie, ~50 miles south of Detroit.

(c) "For Mr Randall, American maritime freedom is the central issue of the conflict. Describing a fledgling United States at the dawn of 19th century, he finds country buffeted between great nations of France and Britain, then engaged in the all-out conflict of the Napoleonic War. Despite American efforts to maintain maritime neutrality as the largest neutral trading power, 'the two belligerent powers competed with each other in * * * how much American shipping they could seize,' taking nearly 1,500 American ships between them from 1803 to 1812."

(d) "Readers seeking engaging renditions the conflict's most popular anecdotes will find them here: Dolley Madison's frantic efforts to rescue the Declaration of Independence and White House valuables from an advancing British army in August 2014 receive it [sic; their] due, as does the uneasy night, a month later, of Francis Scott Key, who amid the bombardment of Baltimore Harbor 'watched anxiously all night as the Congreve rockets [of the British] glared red' before waking to the sight of 'the immense new garrison flag * * * rising and unfurling.' " (quotations from the book; brackets original)
(i)
(A) Burning of Washington
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
(Aug 24, 1814; section 4 White House)
(B) Thomas Fleming, When Dolley Madison Took Command of the White House. Smithsonian Magazine, March 2010
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/hi ... ed-the-day-7465218/
("As Dolley headed for the door [of White House], according to an account she gave to her grandniece, Lucia B Cutts, she spotted a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a display case; she put it into one of her suitcases")
(ii) Congreve rocket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congreve_rocket
(a photo caption: "32-pounder rocket c1813")

* Congreve
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/congreve
(pronunciation)
(iii)
(A) Star-Spangled Banner (flag)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-Spangled_Banner_(flag)
(B) The Star-Spangled Banner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner
(is the national anthem; section 1,1 Francis Scott Key's lyrics: storm flag)

(e) "While the American economy reeled from resulting trade losses, Britain persisted in a parallel policy of impressment, addressing manpower shortages in the Royal Navy by compelling sailors into forced service. * * * Both impressment and the seizure of ships were a challenge to American sovereignty, less than a generation after the War of Independence, and led to American call for 'Free Trade and Sailors' Rights.' After the Americans defied Britain's 1807 Orders in Council forbidding trading with France and her allies, they were soon on the roads to armed conflict with Britain."
(i) Impress (vt; in + press): "to levy or take by force for public service; especially : to force into naval service"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impressing
(ii) Order in Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_in_Council

(f) "Mr Randall * * * dubb[ed] the war 'a costly stalemate' * * * We learned how Laura Ingersoll Secord lost her Queenston, Ontario, home -- and nearly her husband -- to American forces but then exacted her revenge by delivering vital intelligence about American attack plans to the British-allied Mohawk. The devastating effect of the war's travails on the Secord family, though, remains unspoken."

Laura Secord
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Secord
(1775 – 1868; née Ingersoll; section 1.3 War of 1812; section 1.4 Secord's walk)

(g) "The war's legacy, for Mr Randall, is predominantly economic: The nation 'emerge from a half-century-long trade war as a major maritime power, a sovereign nation with worldwide commercial networks.'  But the costs of war topped  $158 million, according to some estimates,, leavnig the country saddled with debt and 'the brink of economic collapse.' As the dust and disarray of war settled in 1815, the road forward -- still fresh and unpaved -- promised to be bumpy."