Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (51 page)

The British were also building ships—one big vessel at the protected harbour of Kingston, another at York, wide open to attack, a split decision that proved costly when Chauncey’s fleet appeared off the capital in April. At Amherstburg a smaller vessel was under construction. But the British suffered from a lack of supplies, of mechanics, and, most important, of trained seamen. Already, following some skirmishing outside Kingston Harbour in November, control of Lake Ontario was in doubt. Was it possible that the upstart Americans could outsail, outmanoeuvre, and outfight the greatest maritime power in the world? On the Atlantic, in single engagements—the
United States
versus the
Macedonian
in October, the
Constitution
versus the
Java
in December—the Americans were the winners. After a season of reverses on land, these victories, though not significant in military terms, gave the country hope.

British strategy remained the same: to stay on the defensive. An attempt would be made to dislodge Harrison from his threatening position at Fort Meigs on the Maumee, but with Brock gone there was no hint of offensive warfare. The Americans planned to open the campaign with attacks on both Kingston and York to destroy the new warships, then to seize Fort George at the mouth of the Niagara and march on Fort Erie. By spring Dearborn had watered down this plan, eliminating Kingston, which was held to be too strong for an attack.

The United States remained deeply divided over the war. Following Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow, the Russian minister in Washington proposed to Madison (now serving his second
term as the result of the November election) that his emperor, Alexander I, mediate between the two belligerents. After all, with the Orders in Council out of the way the only real impediment to peace was the matter of impressment, and with the war in Europe apparently winding down, that would soon be of academic interest. Madison agreed, but before the issue could be negotiated, Alexander, to England’s fury, made a separate peace with Napoleon. Russia, the British felt, like America before her had stabbed them in the back. And so the war went on.

The New England states continued, in effect, to be at peace with their neighbours in Britain’s Atlantic colonies. But across the nation a new and savage emotion, which since the beginning of history has acted as a unifying force among peoples, was beginning to be felt. The contempt and disdain once felt for the British had been transformed into rage. Procter was the villain; his officers were seen as monsters. Harrison’s troops, especially, thirsted for revenge and would get it finally when autumn reddened the leaves in the valley of the Thames.

In Kentucky, the failure at the Raisin cut deep. When the news reached Lexington, Governor Shelby was attending a theatrical performance. He hurried out as whispers of the defeat rippled from row to row. People began to leave, some in tears, all distressed, until by the play’s third act the house was empty. Scarcely a family in the state was not touched in some way by the tragedy at Frenchtown. The idea of a swift victory was shattered. For hundreds of families, weeping over lost sons and lost illusions, the war that at the outset seemed almost like a sporting event had become a horror. Some did not learn for months whether their men were alive, dead, or in prison. Some never knew.

Captain Paschal Hickman’s mother did not recover from the blow. “Sorely distressed about the massacre,” in the words of her husband, “… she pined away and died on June 9, 1813.”

Captain Hart’s widow, Anna, suffered a similar end. Prostrated over her husband’s fate, she was sent by relatives to New Orleans and then to New York in the hope that a change of scene would lighten
her grief. It failed. She set out again for Lexington but could go no farther than Philadelphia, where she died at twenty-seven.

Lieutenant-Colonel Allen’s widow, Jane, hoped against hope that her husband was not dead but a captive of the Indians. For eight years she watched and waited at her home on the Lexington-Louisville road, keeping the shutters open each night that he might see the candle she kept burning there. At last, with all hope extinguished, she, too, wasted away from grief. In February, 1821, she died.

It was not only in Kentucky that the tragedy struck home. All of America was dumbfounded. In the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, the citizens at a public meeting resolved to wear black crêpe on their arms and in their hats for ninety days out of respect for those who “gloriously fell in the field defending the only free government on earth.” In Kentucky, a new slogan arose and was used to stimulate recruiting:
Remember the Raisin!
Nine counties were named in honour of nine officers slain on its frozen banks. Now the government’s war loan, only two-thirds subscribed, was taken up in a new wave of patriotic fervour, partly as a result of the efforts of John Jacob Astor, whose own patriotism had been called in question as the result of his actions of the previous summer.

Lieutenant-Colonel Procter, the subject of almost universal excoriation in America, brushed off the massacre at the Raisin as he would an annoying insect. In his dispatch to Sheaffe he simply wrote that “the zeal and courage of the Indian Department never were more conspicuous than on this occasion, the Indian warriors fought with their usual courage.” In a later report he referred to the massacre briefly and with regret but stated that the Kentucky soldiers too killed the wounded and took scalps; all perfectly true. That, however, scarcely justified the General Order issued at Quebec on February 8, which was enough to make the American prisoners grind their teeth:

On this occasion, the Gallantry of Colonel Procter was most nobly displayed in his humane and unwearied exertions in securing the vanquished from the revenge of the Indian warriors.

That was not the view of some of Procter’s people. Dr. Robert Richardson, two of whose sons fought at the Raisin, was outraged by the massacre and wrote to his father-in-law, John Askin, “We have not heard the last of this shameful transaction. I wish to god it could be contradicted.”

Crowded into a small wood yard at Amherstburg, without tents, blankets, or fires, unprotected from rain and snow, Procter’s prisoners shivered in their thin clothing for almost two days before being moved to a chilly warehouse. Eventually, they were marched five hundred miles by a roundabout route through the back country to Fort George, where the regulars were sent to Quebec City and the volunteers paroled to their homes under the guarantee that they would not take up arms against Great Britain or her allies until exchanged in the regular way.

Allies?
When one Kentuckian sarcastically asked a British officer who Great Britain’s allies were, the reply was evasive and shamefaced: Britain’s allies, said the officer, were well known; he did not wish to continue the discussion. Nor did Henry Procter want to talk about the massacre, half convincing himself that it had never happened. In Detroit, when a group of citizens asked for an inquiry into the killing of the prisoners, he flew into a rage and demanded firm evidence that any such atrocity had occurred. Like Brock before him, Procter was a virtual prisoner of the Indians, whose American captives languished that spring in the villages of the Potawatomi. His own force, badly mauled at Frenchtown, was smaller than Harrison’s on the Maumee. Indian support was essential to even the odds, and he knew that he would not get it if he tried to interfere with time-honoured rituals. He refused to bow to demands that the Indians release all their captives to him, agreeing to ransom them but for no more than five dollars a head—an empty gesture when the going rate in Detroit started at ten dollars and ran as high as eighty.

The Indians scattered that spring to their hunting-grounds. Tecumseh was still in the south, pursuing his proposal to weld the tribes into a new confederacy. The British saw eye to eye with his plan for an Indian state north of the Ohio; it would act as a buffer between the two English-speaking nations on the North American continent and make future wars unattractive. The idea had long been at the core of British Indian policy.

But the Indians were soon ignored. In the official dispatches they got short shrift. The names of white officers who acted with conspicuous gallantry were invariably recorded, those of the Indian chieftains never. Even the name of Tecumseh, after Brock’s initial report, vanishes from the record. Yet these painted tribesmen helped save Canada’s hide in 1812:

At Michilimackinac and Detroit, their presence was decisive. In each case the threat of an Indian attack broke the morale of the defenders and brought about unconditional surrender.

At the River aux Canards and Turkey Creek, Tecumseh’s warriors, acting as a screen, contributed to Hull’s decision not to attack Fort Amherstburg. At Brownstown and Maguaga, the same mixed group of tribesmen was essential to the British success in preventing Captain Brush’s supply train from getting through to Detroit.

At Queenston Heights, the Mohawk advance guard so terrified Scott’s militiamen that hundreds fled to the woods before the battle was joined, while the forward American scouts were prevented from probing the strength and position of Sheaffe’s forces. The war-whoops of Norton’s followers, echoing across the gorge, sent a chill through thousands more, confirming them in their refusal to cross the river.

And at Frenchtown, the Wyandot and Potawatomi turned Winchester’s right flank and caused the surrender of his entire force.

Perhaps if Brock and Tecumseh had lived, the Indian claims might have received greater consideration. Brock’s attitude to the tribes was ambivalent, but he believed in keeping his promises; his dispatches to Prevost underline his concern for the Indian position. But with Brock gone, Tecumseh’s death at the Thames in the fall of 1813 (the Indians fighting on after Procter and the British fled) meant an end to Shawnee aspirations for a native confederacy.

It was among the white settlers in Upper Canada that a new confederacy was taking shape. There the war was no longer looked on with indifference. In the muddy capital of York a new leader was about to emerge in the person of the Reverend Dr. John Strachan, perhaps the most significant and influential Canadian of his time, a product of the War of 1812. In December of that first war year Strachan presided over the formation of the Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada, organized to provide winter clothing for the militia and, later, to help their families and others who had suffered from the war. The directors of the Loyal and Patriotic Society included Strachan’s proteges and the elite of York—the tight ruling group that would soon be known as the Family Compact.

Thus the key words in Upper Canada were “loyalty” and “patriotism”—loyalty to the British way of life as opposed to American “radical” democracy and republicanism. Brock—the man who wanted to establish martial law and abandon habeas corpus—represented these virtues. Canonized by the same caste that organized the Loyal and Patriotic Society, he came to represent Canadian order as opposed to American anarchy—“peace, order and good government” rather than the more hedonistic “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Had not Upper Canada been saved from the invader by appointed leaders who ruled autocratically? In America, the politicians became generals; in British North America, the opposite held true.

This attitude—that the British way is preferable to the American; that certain sensitive positions are better filled by appointment than by election; that order imposed from above has advantages over grassroots democracy (for which read “licence” or “anarchy”); that a ruling elite often knows better than the body politic—flourished as a result of an invasion repelled. Out of it, shaped by an emerging nationalism and tempered by rebellion, grew that special form of state paternalism that makes the Canadian way of life significantly different from the more individualistic American way. Thus, in a psychological as well as in a political sense, we are Canadians and not Americans because of a foolish war that scarcely anyone wanted or needed, but which, once launched, none knew how to stop.

CODA
William Atherton’s War

MICHIGAN TERRITORY, APRIL
, 1813.
To William Atherton, captive of the Potawatomi, home seems to be on another planet. Adopted into a Potawatomi family to replace a son killed at Frenchtown, he now lives as an Indian, wears Indian buckskin, hews to Indian customs. He hunts with bow and arrow, engages in the corn dance, sleeps in a wigwam, exists on boiled corn and bristly hogmeat. He neither hears nor speaks English
.

His one contact with civilization is a tattered Lexington newspaper, found among the Indians’ effects. This is his sole comfort: he reads and rereads it, clinging to the brittle pages as a reminder that somewhere beyond the brooding, snow-covered forests there really is another world—a world he once took for granted but which comes back to him now as if in a dream. Will he ever see it again? As winter gives way to spring, Atherton gives way to despair, stealing out of camp for moments of solitude when he can think of home and weep without being discovered
.