Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (124 page)

Human failings frustrated American strategy. If Kingston or Montreal had fallen, Ontario would be an American state today. But Dearborn and Wilkinson were flawed commanders. An American Brock might have pierced the heartland of the nation and cut the jugular between the two provinces. But the invaders were reduced to hacking vainly at the country’s extremities.

The war helped set the two countries on different courses. National characteristics were evolving: American ebullience, Canadian reserve. The Americans went wild over minor triumphs, the Canadians remained phlegmatic over major ones. Brock was knighted for Detroit, but there were no gold medals struck, no ceremonial swords, banquets, or fireworks to mark Châteauguay, Crysler’s Farm, Stoney Creek, or Beaver Dams. By contrast, Croghan’s defence of Fort Stephenson was the signal for a paroxysm of rejoicing that made him an overnight hero in the United States.

American hero worship filled the Congress, the Senate, and the state legislatures with dozens of war veterans. Three soldiers—Harrison, Jackson, and Zachary Taylor—became president. But there were no Canadian Jacksons because there was no high political office to which a Canadian could aspire. The major victories were won by men from another land who did their job and went home. Brock and de Salaberry were Canada’s only heroes, Laura Secord her sole heroine. And Brock was not a Canadian.

The quality of boundless enthusiasm, which convinces every American school child that the United States won the war, is not a Canadian trait. We do not venerate winners. Who remembers Billy Green, John Norton, Robert Dickson, or even William Hamilton Merritt? The quintessential Canadian hero was a clergyman, not a soldier, a transplanted Scot, a supporter of entrenched values, a Tory of Tories. Dour, earnest, implacable, John Strachan acquired a reputation for courage and leadership that made him a power in Upper Canada and helped freeze its political pattern.

Strachan’s thrust was elitist. He believed implicitly in everything the Americans had rejected: an established church, a limited franchise, a ruling oligarchy. He despised Americans, loathed Americanisms. “Democracy” and “republicanism” were hateful words. The York elite, linked by intermarriage and soon to be dubbed the Family Compact, wanted no truck with elected judges or policemen, let alone universal male suffrage.

The war helped entrench certain words in the national lexicon and certain attitudes in the national consciousness. Three words—
loyalty, security
, and
order
—took on a Canadian connotation.
Freedom
, tossed about like a cricket ball by all sides, had a special meaning, too: it meant freedom from the United States.
Liberty
was exclusively American, never used north of the border, perhaps because it was too close to
libertine
for the pious Canadians. Radicalism was the opposite of loyalty, democracy the opposite of order.

Loyalty meant loyalty to Britain and to British values. Long after Confederation, John A. Macdonald could bring an audience to its feet by crying: “A British subject I was born; a British subject I will die”—meaning that he would never die an American. On this curiously negative principle, uttered by the first prime minister of an emerging nation, did the seeds of nationalism sprout.

At the start of the war, Upper Canada was largely American, though its leaders were not. But by 1815, the Americans had become The Enemy. They had ravaged the Thames Valley, burned every house along the Niagara, and laid waste the St. Lawrence. It was no longer prudent to espouse American ideas: in 1813 farmers had been jailed in York for that crime. The example of Willcocks, Markle, and Mallory, the three turncoats, could not go unremarked. Before the war, as elected members of the lower house, they had opposed the established order. Now they stood convicted,
in absentia
, of high treason.

British colonial rule meant orderly government, not the democracy of the uneducated mob. The war enshrined national stereotypes: the British redcoats were seen as a regimented force, the Kentucky
militia as an unmannerly horde. The pejorative was “Yankee.” In the Canadian vernacular, Yankees were everything the York and Montreal elite were not: vulgar, tobacco-chewing upstarts in loud suits, who had no breeding and spoke with an offensive twang. Tiger Dunlop, the British surgeon, captured this attitude when he described how a servant told Red George Macdonell that a Yankee officer was waiting to sell him some smuggled beef. He knew he was a Yankee, he said, “for he wore his hat in the parlour and spit on the carpet.” The stereotype persisted into the next century as the political cartoons of the post-war years demonstrate.

The Invasion of Canada did not initiate that snobbery: it had been part of the English attitude toward the upstart colony since the days of the Revolution. But the bitterness of war made it acceptable, even desirable, in Canada.

Angered by the strident boastings of American generals that this was “a war of extermination” (Hull) or “a war of conquest” (Smythe); hardened in the crucible of fire that destroyed old loyalties and encouraged new hatreds; goaded by those who had a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo;
and inspired by a new nationalism springing from the embers of conflict, few Canadians found it possible to consider, at least openly, the American way as a political choice for the future.

The alternative was already in place—the British colonial way: comfortable, orderly, secure, paternalistic. From that, for better or worse, we have never entirely detached ourselves. The flames of war have long since died; the agony has been forgotten, the justification long obscured. But the legacy of that bitter, inconclusive, half-forgotten conflict still remains.

Aftermath

John Quincy Adams
became Secretary of State in 1817 under President James Monroe and, with Henry Clay’s help, defeated Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1824. He did not serve a second term but was a congressional representative from 1831 to 1848, the year of his death.

William Allan
became a member of the Legislative Council of Upper Canada in 1825 and served on the Executive Council from 1836 to 1840. A pillar of the Family Compact, he died in 1840.

John Armstrong’s
political career ended with the burning of Washington. Failing in an attempt to be elected to the Senate, he spent his remaining days in farming and writing. In his
Notices of the War of 1812
he attempted to vindicate his record. He died in 1843.

Robert Barclay
waited eleven years after the Battle of Lake Erie before he achieved post rank. He was made a captain in 1824, fathered eight children, died in 1837.

James Bayard
died in June, 1815, six months after the conclusion of the peace talks at Ghent.

Alexander Bourne
helped found a town on the Maumee, named it Perrysburg, became canal commissioner for Ohio, and laid down most of the waterways in that state. He died in 1848.

John Boyd
was discharged from the army in 1815. Toward the end of his life he was naval officer for the Port of Boston. He died in 1830.

Jacob Brown
became commander of the U.S. Army in 1821, continuing until his death in 1828.

Cyrenius Chapin
continued his medical practice in Buffalo until his death in 1838.

Isaac Chauncey
continued his naval career, helped negotiate a treaty with Algiers, and ended his years as president of the Board of Navy Commissioners, charged with the administration of the service. He died in 1840.

Henry Clay
again became Speaker of the House of Representatives, entered the Senate in 1831, ran unsuccessfully against Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1832. He remained in public life until his death in 1852.

George Croghan
married a member of the powerful Livingston family of New York, served as postmaster in New Orleans in 1824 and inspector general of the regular army, and fought in the Mexican War. Drink clouded his last years. He died of cholera in New Orleans in 1849.

Henry Dearborn
left the army in 1815 after being turned down for the post of Secretary of War. In 1822 he was made Minister to Portugal. He died in 1829.

Robert Dickson
helped Lord Selkirk establish his colony on the Red River. He died in 1823.

David Bates Douglass
returned to West Point as an instructor and later taught civil engineering and architecture at New York University. From 1834 to 1836 he was engineer in charge of New York City’s water supply.

Gordon Drummond
succeeded Sir George Prevost as Governor General. He returned to England in 1816, was promoted to full general. He died in London in 1854.

Dominique Ducharme
was appointed Indian agent at Lake of Two Mountains, Quebec, a post he held until his death in 1853.

William “Tiger” Dunlop
became a journalist in England, returned to Canada with John Galt, in the service of the latter’s Canada Company, and represented Huron Riding in the Legislative Assembly from 1841 to 1846. He died in 1848.

Jesse Elliott
remained in the navy, becoming commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1835. Disgruntled officers preferred thirteen charges against him, and he was suspended from the navy for four years. A new administration in Washington remitted part of the suspension and he was given, in 1844, command of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He died in 1845.

James FitzGibbon
rose to become a full colonel and acting adjutant-general. He was leader of the loyalist forces at Montgomery’s Tavern who helped suppress William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebellion in 1837. He returned to England in 1846, was appointed military knight of Windsor, and died in 1860.

Edmund Gaines
took part in several Indian wars, quarrelled openly with Winfield Scott, successfully defended himself at a court martial for insubordination during the Mexican War, and was a constant thorn in the War Department’s side. He died, unrepentant, in 1849.

Albert Gallatin
became U.S. Minister to France and later to Great Britain. In 1831 he became president of the National Bank in New York. He died in 1849.

George Gleig
fought at Waterloo then studied at Oxford, took orders, was named chaplain general of the British forces in 1844. A prolific writer, he produced biographies of Wellington and Clive. He died in 1888.

Henry Goulburn
became a member of the Privy Council in 1821 and chief secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. For most of his parliamentary career after 1828 he held cabinet posts, notably that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. He died in 1856.

Billy Green
lived all his life in Saltfleet township. He ran a sawmill on the original Green land and died in his eighty-fourth year in 1877.

Wade Hampton
was reputed to be the wealthiest planter in the United States at the time of his death in 1835.

Jarvis Hanks
had a long career as a teacher, signpainter, silhouette artist, and portraitist; he studied medicine, exhibited with the National Academy of Design in New York, fathered ten children, and died in Cleveland in 1853.

William Henry Harrison
entered Congress in 1816 and became a Senator in 1825. In 1840 he nudged out Henry Clay as Whig presidential candidate. His military record and his slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too” won him a landslide victory. One month after his inauguration, he died of pneumonia.

John Harvey
became successively Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, Governor of Newfoundland, and Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. He was knighted in 1834 and at the time of his death, in 1852, was a lieutenant-general.

Thomas Jesup
rose to be Quartermaster General of the American army. His distinguished forty-two-year service in that post has never been equalled. He died in 1860.

Richard Johnson
ran for vice-president in 1837 using the slogan “Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.” His four years in office were undistinguished. He died in 1850.

Morgan Lewis
became president of the New York Historical Society and a founder of New York University. He lived to be ninety, dying in 1844.

Thomas Macdonough
was promoted to captain immediately after the naval battle on Lake Champlain. He died at sea of tuberculosis in 1825 at the age of forty-two.

Alexander Macomb
rose to become commanding general of the U.S. Army, a post he held from 1828 until his death in 1841.

Benajah Mallory
was outlawed and his Canadian property forfeited. He lived in Rochester after the war, but his subsequent career is not known.

Abraham Markle
also forfeited his lands. After the war he moved to the Wabash and died in obscurity. His family remained at Newark.

William Hamilton Merritt
became an enthusiastic promoter of the first Welland canal and one of the great figures in canal transportation in Canada. He entered politics in 1832, served as president of the Executive Council of the Province of Canada from 1848 to 1851, was Chief Commissioner of Public Works, and later a member of the Legislative Council of Canada. He died in 1862.

Joseph Morrison
served in Ireland, India, and Burma, was promoted to brigadier-general, and died at sea in 1826.

Usher Parsons
enjoyed a distinguished academic and medical career after leaving the navy. He helped organize the American Medical Association and published fifty-six books and articles. He died in 1868.

Oliver Hazard Perry
died in Venezuela of yellow fever while descending the Orinoco River six years after his great victory.

Peter B. Porter
ran unsuccessfully for Governor of New York in 1817, served on the boundary commission that followed the Treaty of Ghent, and was briefly Secretary of War in 1828–29. He died at Niagara Falls in 1844.