WI a different Anglo-American relationship in the Napoleonic era?

On Sunday, doing my part to enjoy Ontario's Doors Open, I visited Fort York.

It was a beautiful afternoon to see the fort, nestled in what is now one of Toronto's many new condo districts close to the shore of Lake Ontario. Besides being a reconstruction of a British military outpost, Fort York also is probably the closest thing Toronto has to a museum of local military history. Many of its buildings contain displays, of maps and artifacts and the like, relating to the War of 1812 and most particularly the Battle of York, which resulted in the razing of the Upper Canadian capital and heavy casualties on both sides. I was touched by these plaques, originally erected in 1934 by American and Canadian/Commonwealth memorial organizations.





There do not seem to have been any contemporary plaques from First Nations groups commemorating what happened. That came later.

The War of 1812 is interesting, a sort of point at which Anglo-American relations could have tipped into one pattern or the other. Had there been more adroit diplomats in both countries, the war could have been avoided altogether, and Anglo-American relations would have been much warmer earlier. Had one side or both pushed more, we could have had different boundaries. Had the war started earlier and lasted longer, been more a North American theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, the long-term consequences would be incalculable. (I played with this once in an AH, creating US eventually tending towards the xenophobic.)

Is this correct? Was the War of 1812 evitable? Alternatively, how could the war have spun most plausibly out of control? An extended years-long war in the Great Lakes basin, much longer than what we saw, could--for instance--have significant effects on settlement patterns.
 
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