The Invasion of Canada (12 page)

L
ITTLE YORK, the muddy capital of Upper Canada, February 27, 1812; Brock, in his study, preparing a secret memorandum to that spectacular frontier creature whom the Dakota Sioux call
Mascotapah
, the Red-Haired Man.

His real name is Robert Dickson, and though born a Scot in Dumfriesshire, he is as close to being an Indian as any white can be. His wife is To-to-win, sister to Chief Red Thunder. His domain covers the watershed of the upper Mississippi, some of the finest fur country on the continent, a land of rolling plains, riven by trough-like valleys and speckled with blue lakes, the veinwork of streams teeming with beaver, marten, and otter, the prairie dark with buffalo. He is out there now, somewhere – nobody knows quite where – a white man living like an Indian, exercising all the power of a Sioux chieftain. Brock must find him before the war begins, for Brock is planning the defence of Upper Canada – carefully, meticulously – and the Red-Haired Man is essential to that plan.

Isaac Brock has been preparing for war for five years, ever since the
Chesapeake
affair when, as colonel in charge of the defences of Lower Canada, he forced a grudging administration into allowing him to repair and strengthen the crumbling fortress of Quebec. Now he has power. He is not only a major-general in charge of all the forces in Upper Canada, he is also, in the absence of Francis Gore, the province’s administrator, which in colonial terms makes him close to being a dictator, though not close enough for Brock’s peace of mind. His years in Canada have been a series of frustrations: frustrations with
the civil authorities, whom he views as a nuisance and who prevent him from getting his own way; frustrations with his superior, the new governor general Sir George Prevost, who keeps him on a tight leash lest he do something precipitate and give the Americans cause for war; frustrations with the militia, who are untrained, untidy, undisciplined, and unwilling; frustrations with the civilian population, who seem blithely unaware of the imminence of war; frustrations over money, for he is in debt through no real fault of his own; frustrations, one suspects, over women, for he loves their company but has never been able to bring himself to marry; and finally, frustrations over his posting.

More than anything else, Brock yearns to be with Wellington on the Peninsula, where there is opportunity for active service and its concomitants, glory and promotion. He does not care for Canada, especially this wretched backwater of York with its tiny clique of pseudo-aristocrats, its haggling legislature, and its untutored rabble. In Quebec at least there was sophistication of a sort, and Brock is no rustic: a gourmet, a lover of fine wines, an omnivorous reader, a spirited dancer at society balls, he longs for a larger community.

For all his days in Canada he has been trying to escape his colonial prison. The irony is that this very month the Prince Regent, through Governor General Prevost, has given him leave to depart. Now he cannot go. Duty, with Brock, takes precedence over personal whim. The gentlemen who form the Prince Regent’s government may not believe that war is coming, but General Isaac Brock believes it, and “being now placed in a high ostensible situation, and the state of public affairs with the American government indicating a strong presumption of an approaching rupture between the two countries, I beg leave to be allowed to remain in my present command.”
Etc. Etc
. Or is it, possibly, more than a strict sense of duty that holds Brock in Canada? Expecting war, does he not also welcome it? May he not now hope to encounter in the colonies what he has longed for on the continent? Glory, honour, adventure all beckon; all these – even death.

His colleagues, friends, subordinates, and adversaries are scarcely aware of the General’s inner turmoil. Though his features are not always expressionless – he was once seen to shed a tear at the execution of a soldier – he keeps his frustrations to himself. He is a remarkably handsome man with a fair complexion, a broad forehead, clear eyes of grey blue (one with a slight cast), and sparkling white teeth. His portraits tend to make him look a little feminine – the almond
eyes, the sensitive nostrils, the girlish lips – but his bearing belies it; his is a massive figure, big-boned and powerful, almost six feet three in height. He has now, at forty-two, a slight tendency to portliness, and the flush of middle age is on his cheeks; but he is, in his own words, “hard as nails.”

He is popular with almost everybody, especially the soldiers who serve him – a courteous, affable officer who makes friends easily and can charm with a smile. But there is also an aloofness about him, induced perhaps by the loneliness of command; on those rare occasions when he does take somebody into his confidence it is likely to be a junior officer of the volunteer army rather than one of his immediate subordinates.

He has no use for democracy. It is an American word, as treasonous in his lexicon as communism will be to a later generation of military authoritarians. Even the modest spoonful of self-determination allowed the settlers of Upper Canada annoys him. He has gone before the legislature this very month to ask that the civilians, who train part time in the militia, be forced to take an oath of allegiance. The militia in his view contains “many doubtful characters.” In addition, he wants to suspend the age-old right of habeas corpus. The House of Assembly turns him down on both counts, a decision that, to Brock, smacks of disloyalty: “The great influence which the numerous settlers from the United States possess over the decisions of the lower house is truly alarming, and ought immediately, by every practical means, [to] be diminished.” To Brock, the foundations of the colonial superstructure are threatened by treacherous foreign democrats, boring from within, but he cannot convince the Assembly of that.

So he turns to military matters and the secret message to the Red-Haired Man. As a good military commander, Brock has put himself in the boots of his opposite numbers. He is confident that he knows what the Americans will do.

Through their hunger for land they have managed to alienate almost all the tribes on their northwestern frontier. The Indians, then, are the key to American intentions. In other circumstances, it would make sense to hit Canada in the midriff, at Kingston and Montreal, cutting off the supply routes to the upper province, which then must surely fall. But Brock knows that this militarily attractive option is no option at all as long as America’s left flank is in flames. The Indians must be subdued, and for that enterprise a very considerable force will be required, drawn principally, Brock believes, from Ohio, whose
people are “an enterprising, hardy race, and uncommonly expert on horseback with the rifle.” To meet this threat he has already dispatched two hundred regulars to reinforce the garrison at Fort Amherstburg, across from the American military base at Detroit. These will not be enough to counter any American thrust across the Detroit River, but Brock hopes that their presence will stiffen the resolve of the militia, and more important, convince the Indians that Britain means business. For it is on the Indians that the security of Upper Canada depends. If he can rouse the Indians, the United States will be forced to concentrate much of its limited military strength on the northwestern frontier, thereby weakening any proposed thrust along the traditional invasion routes toward Montreal and the St. Lawrence Valley.

Brock views the Indians as a means to an end. His attitude toward them changes with the context. They are “a much injured people” (a slap at American Indian policy), but they are also a “fickle race” (when some insist on remaining neutral). To Brock, as to most white men, Indians are Indians. (It is as if Wellington lumped Lapps with Magyars and Poles with Scots.) He makes little distinction between the tribes; Sioux and Shawnee, Wyandot and Kickapoo are all the same to him – savages, difficult to deal with, inconstant but damned useful to have on your side. Brock means to have as many oddly assorted Indians on his side as he can muster, and that is the substance of his secret communication with the Red-Haired Man.

The Indians, in Brock’s assessment, will fight the Americans only if they are convinced the British are winning. If he can seize the island of Mackinac in the far west at the outset of the war, he believes the Indians will take heart. Some will undoubtedly help him attack Detroit (for Brock believes the best defence is offence), and if Detroit falls, more Indians will join the British – perhaps even the Mohawks of the Six Nations, who have been distressingly neutral. The main American invasion, Brock believes, will come at the Niagara border along the neck of land between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Anything else will be a diversion.

To put his domino theory into practice, at the outset Brock needs Indians to subdue by their presence, if not their arrows, the defenders of Michilimackinac. He expects the Red-Haired Man to supply them. The secret letter is deliberately couched in euphemisms, and even Brock’s immediate superior, the cautious Governor General Prevost, is not aware of it:

Almost five months will pass before Brock receives an answer to this memorandum. And when on July 14, at Fort George at the mouth of the Niagara River, an Indian runner finally arrives with a reply from Robert Dickson, it will already be outdated by events. Long before that, the Red-Haired Man and his friends, anticipating Brock, will have departed for the British post at St. Joseph’s to prepare for the invasion of the unsuspecting island of Mackinac.

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 20, 1812. Spring has come to the capital after an unseasonably cold winter. It is, as one newspaper points out, excellent weather for campaigning; the roads are no longer rivers of mud and slush. Why are the troops not moving north?

At the British legation on Pennsylvania Avenue this bright afternoon,
a young officer arrives with dispatches from the British foreign secretary. They tell a familiar tale. In the face of French intransigence, the British government cannot – will not – repeal the Orders in Council that are at the heart of the dispute between the two nations. Lord Wellesley has felt that decision important enough to justify chartering a special ship to rush word of it across the Atlantic.

The Minister Plenipotentiary to America, who must now carry this news to the President, is the same Augustus John Foster who once swore he would not return to Washington for ten thousand pounds a year. Nevertheless, he is back, and no longer in a junior post. His absence from the London social scene since the spring of 1811 has lost him his intended – a priggish young woman named Annabella Milbanke, who will later conclude a loveless and disastrous marriage with Lord Byron. But how could any ambitious young diplomat refuse such a promotion?

How, for that matter, could His Majesty’s government have selected Foster to be its eyes, ears, and tongue at this most critical of times? To the clear indications of approaching war Foster’s eyes are uncommonly blind, his ears remarkably deaf, and, in his dispatches, his tongue lamentably silent. At thirty-three, with his round, boyish face, he is, to quote one politician, “a pretty young gentleman … better calculated for a ballroom or a drawing room, than for a foreign minister.”

He spends a good deal of time in ballrooms, drawing rooms, and at dinner tables, entertains as many as two hundred guests at a time and lavishly overspends his expense account (perhaps to counteract the impression conveyed by his juvenile looks, for which, as he complains to his mother, the new Duchess of Devonshire, he is “greatly abused”). He seems to know everybody, rubs shoulders with all the major participants in the dangerous game being played out in the capital this spring, yet manages to miss the significance of what he sees and hears. He dines with the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, whom he describes as “very warlike,” John C. Calhoun, the fiery young congressman from South Carolina, Peter B. Porter, the bellicose leader of the House committee on foreign relations, and other members of the ginger group known as War Hawks, but he does not believe that war will come.