victories, culminating in the capture of Pensacola in November 1814. In early 1815, Jackson defeated a British attack on New Orleans, catapulting him to national celebrity and later victory in the 1828 United States presidential election. News of this success arrived in Washington at the same time as that of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which essentially restored the position to that prevailing before the war. While Britain insisted this included lands belonging to their Native American allies prior to 1811, as Congress did not recognize them as independent nations, the Americans did not comply with these provisions and the British made no effort to compel them to do so. The Native Americans were subsequently pushed west of the Mississippi River. Origin Since the conclusion of the War of 1812, historians have long debated the relative weight of the multiple reasons underlying its origins. During the nineteenth century, historians generally concluded that war was declared largely over national honour, neutral maritime rights and the British seizure of neutral ships and their cargoes on the high seas. This theme was the basis of President James Madison's war message to Congress on June 1, 1812. At the turn of the 20th century, much of the contemporary scholarship re-evaluated this explanation and began to focus more on non-maritime factors as significant contributing causes as well. However, historian Warren H. Goodman warns that too much focus on these ideas can be equally misleading. Historian Richard Maass argues that the expansionist theme is a myth that goes against the "relative consensus among experts that the primary American objective was the repeal of British maritime restrictions". He says that scholars agree that the United States went to war "because six years of economic sanctions had failed to bring Britain to the negotiating table, and threatening the Royal Navy's Canadian supply base was their last hope". Maass agrees that expansionism might have tempted Americans on a theoretical level, but he finds that "leaders feared the domestic political consequences of doing so", particularly because such expansion "focused on sparsely populated western lands rather than the more populous eastern settlements". To what extent that American leaders considered the question of pursuing territory in Canada, those questions "arose as a result of the war rather than as a driving cause." However, Maass accepts that many historians continue to believe that expansionism was a cause. Reginald Horsman sees expansionism