by Mark Zuehlke
The relationship between Canadians and the native tribes differed dramatically from the American pattern, where frontiersmen relentlessly sought to displace them from traditional lands. Between the arrival of Samuel de Champlain in 1609 and New France’s conquest by the British in 1763 there had been a state of almost perpetual war, with the Indian nations aligning either with one side or the other. The fur trade added economic ties to these military alliances, and the unceasing efforts, particularly by the French clergy, to convert the tribes to Christianity led to their being further interwoven into the fabric of Canada. Yet the colony’s need to have the natives out in the forests trapping and hunting for the furs that formed the basis of its economy resulted in the mostly church-driven efforts to transform the tribes into mock Europeans, who tilled the soil and dragged the plough, being more half-heartedly pursued than was true in the United States. Intermarriage was also common, particularly with regard to the French traders, resulting in the development of the Métis, who provided a bridge between white and native cultures. The competition between natives and whites for land was also less fierce than in the United States. The far smaller white population tended to settle along the banks of the St. Lawrence and other major rivers because these served as the highways running between communities and to the ports through which furs, timber, and agricultural products were exported back to Europe. When settlers moved into Upper Canada this pattern continued, with farms and villages generally being situated along the shores of the Great Lakes and any major rivers flowing into them. Although the native tribes were displaced from some of the best sites for villages, particularly in Upper Canada, by 1812 they were still not competing for use of much of their traditional territories. Consequently, few Canadians saw the tribesmen in their midst or out in the woods beyond as posing any particular threat to their survival. And they correctly realized the potent force that the warriors could bring to the battlefield during times of conflict.
Upper Canada was also not a place where British tyranny was in evidence. There were no taxes, no heavy-handed troops terrorizing or repressing a helpless populace. Furthermore, it was not the slightest bit like the American frontier with which men like Hull were familiar. “This is a pioneer society,” one writer observes, “not a frontier society. No Daniel Boones stalk the Canadian forests, ready to knock off an Injun with a Kentucky rifle or do battle over an imagined slight. The Methodist circuit riders keep the people law abiding and temperate; prosperity keeps them content. The Sabbath is looked upon with reverence; card playing and horse racing are considered sinful diversions; the demon rum has yet to become a problem. There is little theft, less violence. Simple pastimes tied to the land—barn raisings, corn huskings, threshing bees—serve as an outlet for the spirited.”32
The Americans did not confine themselves to just marching about the surrounding countryside distributing Hull’s proclamation. Hull, who tended to fret inordinately about being insufficiently supplied, ordered a foraging party under Ohio Militia commander Lt. Col. Duncan McArthur to raid area farms for food, equipment, and fodder for the army’s animals. Ranging over an area of about sixty miles, McArthur’s men pillaged the small farms they encountered. There was little resistance, as most of the farmers had gathered up their families and fled before the Americans arrived. Those who didn’t stood by helplessly as McArthur looted anything of value. The American commander dismissively assured any who complained that the U.S. government would eventually compensate them once its hold on Upper Canada was consolidated. A few skirmishes were fought as British regulars, Canadian militia, and allied native warriors brushed up against the American foraging parties. After one such encounter, the Ranger commander Capt. William McCullough was the first American to collect an Indian scalp. He wrote a letter to his wife describing the act of using his teeth to tear the scalp from the dead warrior’s head. Several Americans were also killed in these exchanges that were too often punctuated with the savagery of scalping. After five days, McArthur returned to Sandwich dragging wagons loaded with two hundred barrels of flour, stocks of whisky, cloth, ammunition, guns, salt, and hundreds of blankets. In their wake his men left burned grain fields, wrecked homes, cut-down orchards, and broken fences.33
Any chance of Hull’s proclamation winning the hearts and minds of the local populace was undone by McArthur’s work. Afterward, most settlers still hoped to avoid a fight with Americans that they were ill trained or armed to carry out, but many were willing to do their duty to defend Upper Canada from further depredations. Even the recent American immigrants failed to rally to Hull, and sufficient numbers stood beside the other Canadian militiamen to make a difference. In doing so they inevitably dashed the misguided American expectation that Canada would prove an easy conquest, providing that vital bargaining chip Madison’s administration and Congress had expected was theirs for the taking to then trade for maritime concessions from Britain in order to secure its return.
EIGHT
Failures of Communication
SUMMER 1812
The failure of his proclamation to either rally the American immigrants or frighten the Canadian militia into deserting the British thoroughly demoralized Brig. Gen. William Hull. Although skirmishers sent toward Fort Malden reported the British few in numbers, Hull still refused to act. At every turn the American commander found reason to delay, and with each passing day his inactivity encouraged the growing enemy to probe the Americans for weakness. A large supply column was supposedly headed his way, but none of his scouts had been able to contact it. Hull worried that it might be massacred en route by the Indians he imagined lurked everywhere in the surrounding forests. While his men huddled behind breastworks in Sandwich, Hull returned to Detroit on July 21 and contented himself with writing fatuous letters to Eustis.
His cannon were useless, he reported, requiring new gun carriages. Replacing them would take at least two weeks. Despite this setback, he wrote, it “is in the power of this army to take Malden by storm, but it would be attended in my opinion with too great a sacrifice under present circumstance … if Malden was in our possession, I could march this army to Niagara or York in a very short time.”1 After pleading for another 1,500 men and a great deal more supplies, Hull continued his vigil in Detroit, growing ever more despondent. About July 30, he received unconfirmed reports that the British, rather than sensibly remaining on the defensive, had sallied forth with a small force from the fort on St. Joseph’s Island and seized the small garrison at Fort Mackinac, at Michilimackinac in the northwestern corner of Lake Huron, almost three hundred miles by boat from Fort Detroit. The loss of this small fur trade outpost was irrelevant to Hull’s operation. But his spirits sagged and he found in the fort’s loss explanation for why the Wyandot tribe living near Detroit suddenly abandoned their camps and crossed into the British lines. Hull’s fear of the Indians now became so magnified that he feared Detroit would be overrun and its inhabitants all slaughtered. He contemplated retreating from Sandwich to enable his army to better defend Detroit from the safety of its fort.
On July 30, across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and his cabinet had just learned that the United States had declared war.2 The news rocked them, particularly Viscount Castlereagh. The secretary of foreign affairs had been confident that steps taken in recent weeks to appease American discontent would avert hostilities. A ship had sailed in mid-June with news that should have prompted President James Madison to step back from the abyss of war. That ship, of course, would just now be entering American waters. The Americans, impatient as children, had acted with impetuous haste.
Castlereagh knew the Americans believed themselves aggrieved by the orders-in-council and impressment, but he had not divined from reports by his minister in Washington or discussions with the American chargé Jonathan Russell that war was at hand. Frankly, he had thought America so ill organized and divided that it was incapable of embarking on a war. Most everyone sitting in the House of Commons and the House of Lords had agreed wi
th this assessment.
Russell had correctly interpreted the British mood. Reporting to James Monroe on March 20, 1812, he wrote, “I cannot perceive the slightest indication of an apprehension of a rupture with the United States—or any measures of preparation to meet such an event. Indeed such is the conviction here of our total inability to make war that the five or six thousand troops now in Canada are considered to be amply sufficient to protect that province against our mightiest efforts.”3
Castlereagh, a master of complex international diplomacy, had been caught flat-footed by the American action. When the orders-in-council were first introduced in 1807 he had been secretary for war and the colonies and had realized they posed a source of trouble between the two nations. He had wondered then if war might result. If the United States managed to organize its military along European lines and invaded Canada, it was likely that all of British North America save Newfoundland could be lost. After examining America’s military organization, however, he had considered it unlikely that they could muster sufficient unanimity to field a large army. So long as the Royal Navy remained “alert and proper defensive exertions are made [in Canada] the Americans are not likely to attack in force, more especially in view of the fact that the northern States of the Union … are those which are least disposed to a contest with us.” Still, he had thought that “while relying mainly upon the local Canadian militia to defend themselves, it might be well to reinforce it by a regular corps of 10,000–12,000 men.”4
The Peninsular campaign in Portugal the following year rendered this deployment to Canada impracticable. When each passing year brought little from the Americans but diatribes and ineffectual attempts to cut the flow of trade between the two countries, Castlereagh was lulled into a complacency interrupted only by Madison’s war declaration.
Augustus Foster’s reports on the debates during the unusually prolonged sitting of the Twelfth Congress had caused Castlereagh a slight inkling of concern. But he had expected more bluster and perhaps some new version of the Non-intercourse Act or a return to the curiously self-defeating embargo. Still, it had seemed wise to avoid incidents that might provide fuel for the War Hawks. Accordingly, in May, the British Admiralty had instructed its commanders operating in American waters to “take especial care” to avoid clashes with U.S. warships and to show “all possible forbearance towards the Citizens of the United States.” These orders were shortly followed by ones directing all British warships to withdraw to a boundary fifteen leagues off the American coast.5 Asked on June 8 whether he thought continuation of the orders might incite the United States to war, Castlereagh had emphatically rejected the possibility.6
At the same time, despite his ardent support for the orders-in-council, Castlereagh was facing increasing political pressure to consent to their repeal. Perceval was dead and the new government struggling to demonstrate its legitimacy. Lord Liverpool was less convinced of their necessity and sympathetic to the manufacturing and merchant lobby’s claims that the orders were ruining them. Robert Banks Jenkinson might be a lord, but he was not one of those noblemen who disdained the man who turned his hand to commerce. Liverpool had “been bred up in a school where he had been taught highly to value the commercial interest.”7
The prime minister was also given to compromise. At forty-two he was young for the office, but such had been the nature of his career since election to the House of Commons in 1790. A handsome, slender, tall young man noted as a graceful, engaging conversationalist, he had given an impressive maiden speech. Then prime minister William Pitt “the Younger” declared it “not only a more able first speech than had ever been heard from a young member, but one so full of philosophy and science, and strong and perspicuous language, and sound and convincing arguments, that it would have done credit to the most practised debater and the most experienced statesman that ever existed.”8
Pitt marked him for rapid advancement, and in 1792 he became a member of the Board of Control for India. From there his career advanced in strides encompassing three years of service at a time in the positions of master of the mint, foreign secretary, two terms as home secretary, and by 1812, secretary for war and the colonies.
But Liverpool’s appointment as prime minister came as a surprise and was generally considered the result of more suitable candidates, who believed the government would be short-lived, turning the position down. Given the crisis brought on by Perceval’s death, an almost immediate non-confidence vote in the House of Commons, and the ensuing resignation of the entire cabinet, the Prince Regent had initially sought Whig and Tory coalition, but the two parties were irreconcilable. The Tories supported the Peninsular War and opposed Catholic emancipation while the Whigs opposed the former and supported the latter. Finally, in what seemed a fit of pique more than reasoned decision, the Prince declared Liverpool prime minister. On June 8, Liverpool accepted the position. Two days later, he commented in a letter that with “respect to myself I feel placed in a most arduous and difficult situation from which I should have been most happy on many accounts to have been relieved; but could not have shrunk from it with honour, and I owe it now to the Prince to use my best endeavours for carrying on his government.”9
Liverpool asked Castlereagh to return as foreign secretary and to assume the duty of house leader. He also sought to include George Canning despite the bad blood that lingered between Castlereagh and this veteran Tory. In the late summer of 1809 the two had respectively held the posts of secretary for war and the colonies and foreign secretary in the Duke of Portland’s government. With the duke on his deathbed, Canning had been at the centre of a web of cabinet ministers conspiring to eject Castlereagh from cabinet in such a public manner that it would necessarily besmirch his honour. Learning of the plot in mid-September, Castlereagh resigned. Then, on September 19, he wrote a three-page letter that set out with cold precision his understanding of Canning’s hand in the matter. That Canning had every right to seek his dismissal, Castlereagh acknowledged, but he asserted that this should not have been pursued “at the expense of my honour and reputation.”10 Given the manner in which Canning had proceeded, Castlereagh wrote, “I must require that satisfaction from you to which I feel entitled to lay claim.” When Canning opened the letter the following evening, he declared, “I had rather fight than read it, by God.” He quickly dashed off a response. “The tone and purport of your Lordship’s letter (which I have this moment received) of course precludes any other answer, on my part, to the misapprehensions and misrepresentations, with which it abounds, than that I will cheerfully give to your Lordship the satisfaction that you require.”11
The two met at six on the morning of September 21 at Lord Yarmouth’s cottage on Putney Heath. En route Castlereagh had calmly talked with Yarmouth, who was acting as his second, about Catalinia, a currently fashionable opera singer, and hummed several bits of an aria she had popularized. As their carriage crossed over a bridge to gain the cottage, the river below had looked grey and murky, the water matching the sky overhead. Although Castlereagh had not fired a pistol since leaving Ireland to enter the British House of Commons, he had always been a good shot. Canning, however, had never before fired one. Standing several paces apart and sideways to each other, the two men exchanged a first round in which both missed their target. Castlereagh said he remained unsatisfied as Canning had not yet apologized. The guns were reloaded. Canning fired and the ball nicked a button free from Castlereagh’s coat. Aiming deliberately, Castlereagh shot his opponent in the leg. The seconds rushed to where Canning had collapsed in a huddle to the ground. The wound proved nasty but not life-threatening.
“We each fired two pistols,” Castlereagh wrote his father, “my second shot took effect, but happily only passed through the fleshy part of his thigh. Mr. Canning’s conduct was very proper on the ground.”12 That two cabinet ministers would duel caused a great stir in the British press, and Canning was forced to follow up Castlereagh’s resignation with his own. For Castlereagh the exile from ca
binet lasted two and a half years, until he returned in March 1812 as Perceval’s foreign secretary.
Liverpool had always walked a fine line between these two men, seeking the friendship of each and to moderate their sharp differences because he admired and respected both. Summoned to a meeting, both acknowledged the other with formal politeness. Castlereagh, knowing how much Liverpool wanted Canning, offered to relinquish the post of foreign secretary but retain management of the House of Commons. Canning said he wanted both positions, as he could not in conscience serve under Castlereagh in the House. Downcast, Liverpool refused to dismiss Castlereagh and the meeting broke up. Castlereagh retained the two positions Liverpool had originally assigned him.
Canning remained a sharp critic speaking from the Tory backbenches. If Liverpool resented this, he typically gave no sign. His was a moderate, always reasonable, self-effacing character. The many years spent at the forefront of the nation’s public service had taken their toll on the once lanky young man. One observer noted that “the cares of office stamped their marks upon his face, but though his expression had hardened, his broad brow and thoughtful gaze showed his calm and even character.”13 Another considered Liverpool “kind by temperament,” possessing “an instinctive tact in dealing with others. His conciliatory manner smoothed away innumerable personal difficulties. He was a man whom it was almost impossible to dislike.”14