I always wonder what the battle for Lake Ontario would have been like. So much would have hung on the when it happened and what ships made it on the water by that time. Ships of the line fighting on the Great Lakes would have been an crazy thing. Control of Erie and Ontario would have been a pretty nice advantage for the U.S. war effort. The battle to build on Ontario is one of the more exciting stories of a front in which no real fighting took place. I have to admit that I'm a total fan boy of the early U.S. navy, I'm sure it bias's my view on the conflict. If you read a bit of the history, the extent to which the British were gobsmacked at the drubbing they received early in the naval conflict paints a much different picture to standard "Brits kicked the Yankees asses stone cold on the sea front" story of today. It's been almost two decades since I devoured every thing I could on the Barbary and 1812 war's at sea but the excitement of these early years of the U.S. navy are still my favorite era and theaters of military history.
Have you read Teddy Roosevelt's book on the 1812 Navy? I have not but I have heard that it is still referenced and considered authoritative. The build up story is a good one which probably deserves its own post. Have you considered writing an article of your own, that would be a pretty good subject for hubski. You are correct in that the surprising early American victories were shocking and embarrassing to the British, but with only a few warships, the US could not hope to defeat the British in anything but isolated engagements. The British blockade had a real tangible effect on the North. Yankees started building their own factories to create finished goods. On my "Today in History" section for February 22nd, I mentioned the opening of the first cotton to cloth factory in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1813 which began to counteract the embargo. I read a really good book 2 years ago about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the US. Small manufacturers in NY and Mass began producing finished goods for settlers moving west. The Erie Canal and Fulton's steamboat played big roles in developing intra-US trade. February 16th was the anniversary of Decatur sneaking into the Tripoli Harbor to destroy the captured USS Philadelphia. Decatur is on my list of people to write about. He was a 19th century superhero.
Decatur is a stud. I always thought they should make a major motion picture out of his part of Tripoli campaign. I've done quite a bit of reading about Theodore and more reading about the early U.S. Navy but I've never read his book on the U.S. Navy, seems like an over site. You got me poking around my library where I found Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812-1814. I remember it being a good read. Maybe I'll crack it open but I got a pile of stuff that that I've not read that I intend too read ahead of it. I don't seem to get much reading done between work, family and the internet now a days. I've never thought about history writing. I've only taken two history classes in my life, Ancient Greece and Economics and neither involved much writing. Always a consumer, never a producer.
I have two young children as well which makes a blog a luxury. You may find that writing about a subject changes your perception. Re-formulating ideas in your head onto paper creates connections that may not have occurred to you otherwise. I consider writing to be part of the learning process. Without publishing, try to write a one page summary of a topic, any topic, and see what you think. What would be interesting, write a summary of something you remember from Lords of the Lake and then read about it to see if you remember it the way its written.