Many Britons were left sputtering and incredulous at American assertions of victory in the war

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 357.

Like the Federalists, many Britons were left sputtering and incredulous at American assertions of victory in the war. William James, a British admiralty court lawyer who was detained for part of the war in America and became almost unhinged over the American gloating he witnessed, quickly produced a popular account of the war that picked up where the editorials of the Times left off, belittling American naval triumphs and concluding that Americans were simply scoundrels who “will invent any falsehood, no matter how barefaced, to foist a valiant character on themselves.” In 1817 James’s book A Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States of America appeared, and he followed that with a huge six-volume history of the Royal Navy. The books contained a breathtaking number of inaccuracies regarding the size, force, armament, and character of the American navy but were most notable for the dripping anti-American sarcasm that filled page after page, all in the service of showing not only that the British navy had really won the war, but that in every instance when an American vessel had prevailed in battle, it was only as a result of superior force, cowardly tactics, and the employment of inhumane weapons such as bar and chain shot.

Needless to say, the only thing such attacks succeeded in persuading Americans of was that the British were not only as arrogant as ever but sore losers as well. A deep-seated Anglophobia would be one of the most enduring legacies of the war in America; among American naval officers the tradition of antipathy and suspicion of the British that stemmed directly from the War of 1812 could still be seen as late as World War II.

But British navy men on the whole took a more collected and detached view of the war’s consequences, and saw the writing on the wall better and sooner than most. The war had heralded the rise of not only a new naval power but a new kind of naval warfare, more professional and less chivalric, based more on technical mastery and less on heroics. The old world, in which indignant remonstrations like James’s over who had the better of points of honor still mattered, was rapidly slipping into history, like it or not. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” declared the Naval Chronicle’s Albion in one final letter he wrote March 12, 1815, to “take my leave of the American contest” and offer a few measured observations:

An inglorious, unsuccessful, war must naturally end in such a peace as America chose to give; for assuredly we have now done our worst against this infant enemy, which has already shewn a giant’s power. Soon will the rising greatness of this distant empire … astonish the nations who have looked on with wonder, and seen the mightiest efforts of Britain, at the era of her greatest power, so easily parried, so completely foiled.