That was the excuse we used to invade and take over Canada. If you remember from your high school textbooks, you'll remember about how there was a "border disagreement" and the british were pressing US sailors into their service (which did happen a couple times). This is code for, "we want their land and we're going to invade them." Which then the Canadians (who were British subjects, with British army support) stomped on down to the capitol, lit it on fire, and said, "now stop fucking doing that, America." If we were trying to stop impressments, we would've been patrolling and providing merchant escorts, or attacking ports to free American sailors.

The same thing happened with the Mexican American war, it's just we acfually succeeded in stealing the territory, so we didn't have to make up an excuse.