Few people today realize that the United States’s sovereignty was not assured until 1814, when England acknowledged it with the Treaty of Ghent. In fact, earlier that same year, the prospects for America couldn’t have looked bleaker. By year's end, however, the young nation was at peace, poised for expansion to the west, never to go to war against Britain again. How did this remarkable transformation happen? Drawing from rarely used source material, Willard Sterne Randall re-creates the dramatic chain of events that prevented the nation from falling into British hands.