Not everyone agrees.
"With good reason, the War of 1812 is often referred to as the Second War of American Independence. In what amounted to a coming-of-age for the fledgling republic, the war with Britain established once and for all that Americans were not Britain’s “colonial subjects” in any sense of the word and that Britons who ignored that fact did so at their peril. This, however, is hardly the whole story. As Alan Taylor reminds us in his thought-provoking new book, the war that secured the independence of the republic was also, like the Revolutionary War before it, a “civil war,” one that pitted neighbors and family members against each other throughout British North America and the United States. For this reason, the War of 1812 was much more than a struggle over the external question of relations with Britain. It was also a war to decide what, exactly, being a citizen of an increasingly democratic republic meant and whether republicanism was sufficiently potent to counter threats from the British Empire that still occupied nearly half of the North American land mass."