War of 1812 Bicentennial

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In 1807 General Craig came out as Governor, the last man to pour oil on the troubled waters. England's action towards neutral trade in her struggle with Napoleon had involved her in chronic difficulties with the United States. War was expected, and Craig, an old and tried soldier, was sent out on that account. Kindly and honest, he had no pretensions to statesmanship, unless an invincible Toryism be accounted one, and quite unjustly he remains a black sheep among Canadian Governors. He sent the House of Assembly about their business in curt fashion several times, rating them for their futile waste of the public time in empty talk and their impudent pretensions to govern the country single-handed. Personally, however, he was liked, while many admired what they regarded as his firmness and common sense. But he was ill, and old even for sixty. If he had arrived at Canada a sound man in the year he left it a dying one, a better appointment could hardly have been made. If the man who succeeded him in 1811 had come out in 1807 and retired in his favour, a more felicitous exchange of two capable but respectively ill-placed officials could not be found in history. For Prevost, who came out to be a war Governor, as it proved, was as ineffective in that situation as he was capable in the year of peace preceding it. Craig went home to die, though not before emphasis in person what he had endeavoured to drive in by despatches, that Canada required at least thrice the four thousand troops now stationed there to secure the country against her powerful neighbour.

Sir George Prevost was another Swiss, son of a brother-officer of Haldimand, Cramahé and Bouquet in the Royal Americans. Himself in that regiment, he had won a baronetcy by distinguished service in the West Indies, and made a popular Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. He had winning manners, wealth, a handsome presence, and spoke French like a native. In the short interlude prior to the war Prevost's conciliatory attitude worked wonders, for everyone liked him. He induced the Lower House to vote supplies for enrolling 2,000 militia. The stationary militia were, in part, actually mustered and drilled, a regiment of Voltigeurs raised under a French seigneur and officer in the 60th Rifles, de Salaberry, and £250,000 was voted. There were also in the province three battalions of regulars, two provincial corps of British Fencibles, and a few artillery.

War was declared by the United States on June 18, 1812. It was regarded in England, under the pressure of her titanic struggle with Napoleon, merely as an undesired, regrettable side-issue, and a further blow to oversea trade. The average Englishman gave little thought to Canada. But to Canada it meant life or death. Everyone knows that the two chief indictments put forward by the United States against Great Britain. Firstly, the right of search for deserters in American ships; secondly, the various Orders in Council which, briefly summarised, prohibited neutrals from trading with countries under the sway of Napoleon. These Orders were replies to similar edicts of Napoleon against Great Britain. But there was another and still stronger object with that majority in the States represented by the Government at Washington, not much dwelt on by our historians, and that was the conquest and annexation of Canada. For this seemed in truth a simple achievement.

Now the Right of Search was an admitted principle: the difficulty here lay in identity of language. The high pay of the American navy had attracted great numbers of British seamen, and the impressment of American citizens became a contingent grievance. The ethics of that day did not hold that a man could legally throw off his nationality in a moment. It was a new American idea convenient to that country but repellent to Europeans. The Orders in Council had been meekly accepted in America from Napoleon, but there he could not effectively enforce them, though he had burnt on one occasion a million pounds' worth of their shipping. But Napoleon to the war-party was a demi-god. The home-keeping American to this day knows little enough of Europe. At that period they, or at least the South, the "War-hawks," were all stay-at-homes and knew still less. Their leaders, under Jefferson's inspiration, were mostly raw, heady, young and provincial. Madison, having just been elected as a "War President," had to swallow his own more temperate inclinations. These liberty-loving slave-owners regarded Napoleon as the destroyer of thrones and tyrannies, and just now he was marching to Russia to complete, as they thought, his democratic conquest of Europe, before settling with Great Britain.

The moment seemed admirable for injuring the Mother-country and seizing Canada. The New England States, speaking broadly, opposed all this vigorously. They hated Napoleon, and had no wish to quarrel with England. As a better-educated and sea-going people too, they knew more of the world and could make more allowance for England's hard-driven situation. They held meetings of protest all over the country, and in some cases threatened secession. What is more important, however, they in the main held aloof and took very little part in the war. Had they acted otherwise there is little doubt that the issue would have been different.

As it was, the situation of Canada seemed desperate enough. Congress voted the immediate enrolment of 35,000 regulars and 50,000 militia. In Canada there were about 4,000 regulars, the larger half in the French Province, the lesser in Upper Canada, under the command of Major-General Isaac Brock, who was also Lieutenant-Governor. His providential presence there probably altered the course of history. Of a well-known Guernsey family, Brock had risen by active service in Europe to command the 49th Regiment at the age of twenty-eight. Ten years' subsequent service with it in Canada had cut him off from distinction in European battlefields, but he had sone spade-work in this remote corner of infinitely more importance to the Empire. He had designed fortifications, kept the troops in a high state of efficiency, and done much for the militia. Above all, in view of the coming struggle, he had inspired affection and respect among all classes of the British Canadians.

Brock understood both the theory and practice of war. Robust and active, he combined a fiery zeal for the service of his country with a personal magnetism well qualified to impart it to others. It became at once apparent that Upper Canada was to bear the brunt of the American attack, though its population was only 80,000, as against over 300,000 in the Lower Province. The ex-American disaffected or doubtful element too was strong, but that of the United Empire loyalists was stronger still and far more determined in the cause they represented, which was resistance to the death to their hereditary foes. A still larger proportion perhaps, though not disloyal, lacked ardour.

There was but one whole regiment in the Province (41st Welsh) and some other fragments, making in all 1,500 men. The U.E. loyalists volunteered wholesale, but there were only arms at first for about a thousand, and very little money or war material. To this was added a large wagon-transport, supplied and manned by farmers, while six hundred Indian warriors of the Reservations under the finest and noblest of all Indian chiefs, Tecumseh, came out to fight for their lands and their King. The lake and river frontier to be defended, from Lake Huron to Kingston, was about six hundred miles in length. Two American armies were to fling themselves upon it; a third to strike at Montreal. There was no hope of assistance from the 2,000 regulars and French militia required in the Lower Province, and little from England, as there were few troops to spare, while the now omnipotent British fleet could not reach the Canadian lakes, nor was the little fleet, indispensable on these last, yet built, as it should have been.

Such was the parlous condition of the Canadas in the summer of 1812.

It is as regrettable as it is imperative that this three years' heroic defence of Canada against enormous odds, so glorious to the small British garrisons and the loyal Canadians who aided them, must be dealt with here in rather summary fashion. American historians have so treated it for obvious reasons. Our own, absorbed in the Napoleonic wars, and bored by numerically small movements in remote, unfamiliar scenes they cannot visualise, have never attempted to understand it. The bare incidents are perfunctorily related, while, following American writers, a few American victories in frigate duels, which had hardly more effect on the war and its vital issue than so many yacht-races, are duly chronicled as an offset to these reverses by land. The war is finally dismissed and with obvious relief as an inconclusive one. When it is remembered that none of the conditions for which the American formally contended were even mentioned in the Peace Treaty of 1815, and that the great object for which they really fought, the conquest of Canada, was a dismal failure, one is inclined to ask, What then is defeat and what is victory?