The Invasion of Canada (15 page)

Like Tecumseh, Clay is a master of persuasion. In the fall, when the Congress met, few of its members had made up their minds. By June, the majority has become convinced that war is the only answer. John Smilie of Pennsylvania speaks for the formerly uncommitted when he declares: “If we now recede we shall be a reproach to all nations.” Inch by inch Smilie has been nudged into a hawkish position, voting a little grudgingly for the various military proposals that have pushed the nation closer to war, but believing almost to the end that commercial retaliation is the answer. James Madison, too, is prepared by spring to go along with war, even though, like his predecessor Jefferson, he has struggled against the idea of involvement in a European conflict. He is a small man, benign of temperament, soft-voiced, distant in his relationships, a scholar, modest and moderate, who owns a single black suit and once lost an election for refusing to supply free whiskey to the voters. His outward composure is sometimes mistaken for weakness; the Federalists think him a pawn of Henry Clay. He is not. Though he dislikes the idea of war, he too comes to believe that his country has no other course. Apart from other considerations, submission would badly damage the Republican Party. Party politics and party unity are important considerations. He is prepared to accept the results of a vote in Congress.

Ironically, during these same weeks the British are preparing to back down. Reports from America are conflicting; Augustus Foster, who is supposed to man their listening post in the capital, continues to believe that the Americans are bluffing; but the oratory in the war congress and Sir George Prevost’s warning from Quebec convinces many in Parliament that war is actually possible. Britain responds by dispatching three battalions of regulars to Canada and begins to consider the possibility of a repeal of the Orders in Council. By June, Foster too has changed his mind and reports that the Yankees mean what they say.

The British government, which has been bumbling along, holding a series of sedate hearings into the Orders in Council, now starts to move with uncharacteristic speed. Unfortunately, political affairs have
been thrown into disarray by an unprecedented act, the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in the lobby of the House of Commons. It is June 16 before the formal motion to repeal the Orders is announced. The move comes too late. There is no Atlantic cable to alert the men of Washington. On June 18, the United States proclaims that a state of war exists between herself and Great Britain. When the news reaches the War Mess on New Jersey Avenue, Calhoun flings his arms about Clay’s neck and the two, joined by their fellow Hawks, caper about the table in an approximation of a Shawnee war dance. But would Clay be so boisterous if he could foresee the tragedy that will be visited on his family in less than a year on the frozen banks of the River Raisin?

The news that America is at war brings a more mixed reaction across the nation. The tolling of church bells mingles with the firing of cannon and rockets; flags fly at half-mast while drums beat out the call for recruits; there are parades, cheers, hisses and boos, riots and illuminations depending on the mood of the people, which is divided on both regional and political lines. Five days later, the British motion to repeal the Orders becomes law and the chief reason for the conflict is removed.

At this point, General Hull’s army of twenty-two hundred men is in sight of Detroit and within striking distance of the lightly held British fort across the river at Amherstburg. If Hull can capture the fort and disperse his enemies, the route lies open to the capital at York on Toronto Bay. The object is to seize Canada, not necessarily as a permanent prize (although that is in the minds of some) but to hold her hostage to force concessions from the British. Canada, after all, is the only portion of the empire that is open to American attack. Only later in the war, when American defeats are supplanted by American victories, will Madison and his foreign secretary, James Monroe, consider clinging to the conquered nation as part of the Union.

It is a long-held and almost universal belief that Canada is entirely vulnerable, an easy prey to American attack. The campaign, it is thought, will last a few weeks only. The freshman War Hawk, Calhoun, has already declared that “in four weeks from the time that a declaration of war is heard on our frontier the whole of Upper and a part of Lower Canada will be in our possession.” Clay’s words to the Senate in 1810 are recalled: “… the conquest of Canada is in our power.…” Felix Grundy, Clay’s fellow boarder at the War Mess,
declares: “We shall drive the British from our continent,” and adds, charitably, that he is “willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren.”

The general optimism is reflected in the words of Jefferson himself, who writes to a friend at the outset of war that “upon the whole I have known no war entered into under more favourable circumstances … we … shall strip her [Great Britain] of all her possessions on this continent.” The Hawk press reflects these sentiments. In the words of the Kentucky
Gazette
, “Upper and Lower Canada to the very gates of Quebec will fall into the possession of the Yankees the moment the war is started, without much bloodshed, for almost the whole of Upper Canada and a great part of the Lower Province is inhabited by Americans.”

At first glance it
does
seem a mere matter of marching. The United States has ten times the military potential of Canada. Congress has authorized a regular force of thirty-five thousand men to serve for five years and undertaken a military call-up of one hundred thousand. But the country is so badly divided that by June only about four thousand regulars have been recruited, bringing the total force to ten thousand, almost half of them untrained recruits and only half available for service in the north. As for the militia, nobody can be sure how many are available or whether they can legally be forced to fight on foreign soil. Like the generals who lead them, few have experience of war.

Even at that, the American forces outnumber the British. In all of British North America there are only forty-five hundred troops, thinly distributed. In Upper Canada a mere fifteen hundred regulars are available to receive the main thrust of the American attack. But as in most wars, the events to follow will be determined not so much by the quality of the men as by the quality of the leadership. The Americans pin their hopes on Hull and Dearborn. Canada is more fortunate. She has Tecumseh, the Leaping Panther, and she also has that impulsive but consummate professional, Major-General Isaac Brock.

T
HE WISCONSIN – FOX PORTAGE, ILLINOIS TERRITORY, June 18, 1812.

On the very day that war is declared, Brock’s courier catches up at last with the Red-Haired Man, Robert Dickson. The courier’s name is Francis Rheaume; he and a companion have logged two thousand miles scouring the plains and valleys seeking their man. At Fort Dearborn (Chicago), their quest was almost aborted when the American military commander, Captain Nathan Heald, sniffing treachery, had them arrested and searched. Heald found nothing; the two men had hidden Brock’s letters in the soles of their moccasins. So here they are at last, after three months of travel, standing on the height of land (and also on Brock’s letters) where the water in the little streams trickles in two directions – some toward the Gulf of Mexico, the rest north to the Great Lakes.

Dickson reads Brock’s message, scrawls an immediate reply. He has, he writes, between two hundred and fifty and three hundred of his “friends” available and would have more but for a hard winter with “an unparalleled scarcity of provisions.” His friends are ready to march. He will lead them immediately to the British post at St. Joseph’s Island and expects to arrive on the thirtieth of the month.

With his report, Dickson encloses copies of speeches by three of the chiefs who will accompany him. They leave no doubt about the Indians’ sympathies: “We live by our English Traders who have always assisted us, and never more so, than this last year, at the risk of their lives, and we are at all times ready to listen to them on account of the friendship they have always shown us.”

The Wiscosin-Fox Portage

The Prophet’s message has also penetrated this lonely land: “We have always found our English father the protector of our women and children, but we have for some time past been amused by the songs of the bad Birds from the lower part of the River – they were not songs of truth, and this day we rejoice again in hearing the voice of our English Father, who never deceives us, and we are certain never will.” So speaks Wabasha of the Sioux. The others echo his sentiments.

The Indians will follow Dickson anywhere. Here in this land of chiefs and sub-chiefs he is the real chief – their friend, their protector, and in this last harsh winter their saviour. When he arrived the previous August from St. Joseph’s Island with his cargo of winter supplies, he found them starving. A disastrous drought had withered their crops and driven away the game. Dickson beggared himself to save his people, distributing all his provisions – ten thousand dollars’ worth – among the tribes. He did this out of patriotism as well as humanity, for he knew that American agents were moving about the country, doing
their best to influence the Indians. He assumes American hostility toward Britain, but fortunately, as he tells Brock, he is “possessed of the means of frustrating their intentions.”

He is a man of commanding presence, a massive and genial six-footer with a flaming shock of red hair and a ruddy face to match. Everybody likes him, for there is an easy sociability about Dickson, a dignity, a sense of honour and principle. Men of every colour trust him. He is of a different breed from Elliott, McKee, and Girty. Highly literate, he is also humane. He has tried to teach the Indians not to kill and scalp when they can take prisoners; the greatest warriors, Dickson tells his people, are those who save their captives rather than destroy them. The infrequent explorers who cross the empty continent are attracted by Dickson. Zebulon Pike, the young army officer who has given his name to the famous peak, writes of his open, frank manner and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the country. Another, William Powell, reports that the Indians reverence and worship Dickson, who is “generous to a fault.”

What is he doing out here in this lonely land? Living often in great squalor, existing for weeks on wild rice, corn, and pemmican or sometimes on nothing but melted snow, going for months without hearing his native tongue, trudging for miles on snowshoes or struggling over long portages with back-breaking loads, he is a man never at rest, like the Cut Head Yanktonais, the roving Sioux with whom he travels, knowing no real home but moving ceaselessly along his string of trading posts like a trapper tending a trapline.

His two brothers, who have also emigrated from Dumfriesshire, prefer the civilized life. One is a rising barrister and future politician at Niagara, the other a well-to-do merchant and militia colonel at Queenston. But Robert Dickson has spent twenty years in Indian country. Why? Certainly not for profit, for he has little money; the fur trade is a risky business. Nor for glory, for there is no glory. For power? He could have more in the white man’s world. The answer seems to be that he is here, like so many of his countrymen, for the adventure of the frontier, the risks, the dangers, the excitement, and now, perhaps, because after two decades these are his people and this wild, untravelled country is his home. Who else but Dickson has trekked alone across that immense tract – larger than an American state – that lies west of the Mississippi between the Des Moines and the Missouri? He is a man of extraordinary energy and endurance; nowhere else, perhaps, can he feel fulfilled. In the Canadian Northwest,
beyond the Great Lakes and the great bay, there are others like him, living among the Indians, exploring the land. Most are Scotsmen.

Dickson likes the Indians for themselves. He is faithful to his Indian wife, prides himself that he is educating his half-Indian children, is angered by the treatment his people receive from American frontiersmen who see the Indian as a dangerous animal to be exterminated. Added to these grievances against the Americans are the strictures enforced against British traders who still insist on flying the Union Jack over American territory. To evade the recent NonImportation Act, by which the Americans have tried to prevent British traders from bringing goods into the United States, Dickson has been forced to become a smuggler. So incensed was he over this outrage that he knocked down the customs officer at Michilimackinac who tried to make him pay duty on his trade goods. His patriotism needs no fuelling. He is more than delighted to aid his countrymen.