This is an unauthorized American redaction of a much longer British history, from 1817, of the Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. The American editor, Ebenezer Cummins, explains in his introduction that Baines is the most pro-American, hence the most acceptable, of the three earliest British historians of the War of 1812, which is the "late war" of the title.

At the time of publication, the contrast could hardly have been greater between American ballyhoo and European indifference toward the War of 1812. At first, this work occupied only three chapters of Baines' multi-volume History of the Wars of the French Revolution. To add heft to this history, Cummins subdivides those three chapters into fifteen. He then annotates the text and adds a 43-page appendix full of patriotic sentiment, wartime folklore, and spurious anti-British invective. Perhaps most memorably, Cummins insists as fact that the Canadians hung the scalp of a dead American beside the speaker's chair in the Parliament of Upper Canada — "as an emblem of victory."

So what we have here is a pirated edition of Baines, interesting as a document of the persistent anti-English mood in the U.S. after the "second war for independence."