Canada Under Attack

by Jennifer Crump

  The Canadians had their spies too. While the American General Wade Hamp-ton was leading his 3,000 troops across the New York bush, intent on attacking Montreal, two Canadian farmers were tracking his every move. Hampton knew all about David and Jacob Manning. Early in October 1813, he had approached the brothers hoping to enlist them as spies for the Americans. But his offer had not quite elicited the response he had hoped it would. The Mannings were far more interested in what Hampton revealed about American military intentions than in what he was willing to pay them for their services. When Hampton finally returned to his troops empty-handed the Mannings quietly headed in the opposite direction. Some-where to the north, Charles-Michel de Salaberry was waiting with his Voltigeurs.From the Mannings he learned that the Americans were massing on the border, he also learned the size of the army and the route they intended to take. The informa-tion supplied by the Mannings helped ensure de Salaberry’s victory over the vastly larger American troops.

  The first army was led by General Wade Hampton. Its primary purpose was to divert attention from the main force that was massing at Sackets Harbour, New York, and preparing to sail up the St. Lawrence. As Hampton’s troops headed towards the Canadian border, the spy David Manning counted the guns, wagons, and soldiers. But Manning had more than numbers to report to de Salaberry. To everyone’s surprise, he also reported that 1,400 New York militiamen had refused to cross the border into Canada. By U.S. law, militiamen could not be forced to fight on foreign soil. The units from the northern states did not want to fight people they considered neighbours and friends. Nor were they anxious to be out in the elements during the harsh Canadian winter.

  Many of the militia who decided to stay with their general were from the southern states. They were poorly clothed and completely unprepared to face a harsh Canadian winter. Manning also learned about the other American force that was heading up the St. Lawrence under the command of Major-General James Wilkinson. De Salaberry was pleased to have learned so much. Hampton, although furious about the loss of so many of his militia, still felt confident about the coming attack. After all, he had more than 4,000 men with him. On September 21, he created a diversion at the town of Odelltown, just inside the Canadian border. The Americans surprised the small group of British soldiers stationed there, killing three and capturing six.

  De Salaberry knew that the Americans had crossed into Canada, but the force he commanded was far too small to launch any kind of counteroffensive. The best he could do was keep the Americans contained inside Odelltown. To that end, he sent out small units of Mohawks to intercept the American patrols. One of those units took down an American patrol. Fear of further encounters with the Native warriors kept the Americans inside the town. Thus, they remained ignorant of how very small de Salaberry’s force really was. Faced with what they believed would be a long, tough fight, and hampered by a shortage of water, General Wade Hampton once again retreated back across his own border.

  As soon as de Salaberry’s scouts reported that Hampton’s forces had abandoned Odelltown, de Salaberry led his men on a forced 24-hour march to the Châteauguay Valley. He knew Hampton would return and would then take his troops along this valley. The Canadians wanted to be there to greet him. De Salaberry left detachments of soldiers along the way to serve as communication outposts. He finally reached the valley, where he set up camp and waited for Hampton. Meanwhile, Hampton had set up camp at Four Corners, a small town just inside the American border at the southern end of the Châteauguay Valley, about 15 kilometres from de Salaberry’s camp. When de Salaberry learned of the Americans’ whereabouts from his spies, he sent a few units of warriors and Voltigeurs to pepper the encampment with sniper fire. They terrorized the camp every night for two weeks. The Americans were so alarmed that they would not venture outside the encampment at night.

  In the meantime, Lieutenant-Governor Prevost, who was in Kingston, had finally realized that Montreal was the Americans’ main target. He made plans to take reinforcements to de Salaberry by land. But first he went to one of his officers, Red George Macdonell, and asked him to get his first battalion to de Salaberry as soon as possible. Red George reached de Salaberry on October 24, but his even with his men the Canadians were still outnumbered three to one. Fifteen hundred Canadians speaking French, English, Mohawk, and even Gaelic were facing off against over 4,000 battle-hardened Americans. What de Salaberry needed was an edge. By that time, Hampton’s troops were very close. Close enough to see what they thought were hundreds of reinforcements marching towards de Salaberry’s camp. De Salaberry had used Brock’s ploy of having the same men march back and forth wearing what looked like different uniforms each time. Not actually having any different uniforms, the men just turned their jackets inside out so the white linings showed.

  Witnessing a near continuous stream of apparent reinforcements, Hampton was fooled into believing de Salaberry’s force was twice the size of his own. Therefore, he dismissed the idea of a head-on assault. Instead, on October 25, 1813, he sent a force of 1,500 men into the forests to attack de Salaberry’s flanks. The Voltigeurs scouts detected them. Red George and his men, along with a group of Voltigeurs, engaged the Americans and fought them off.

  That afternoon, Hampton decided he would have to try a head-on assault after all. The American troops advanced toward the ravines. He had an officer call out an offer, “Surrender, we wish you no harm.” De Salaberry raised his musket and fired his response. There was a furious exchange of fire and de Salaberry ordered his men to take cover behind the abatis. Thinking that the Canadians and British were retreating, the Americans began to cheer.

  De Salaberry encouraged his men to return the victory shouts. These shouts came from the top of every ravine. Then Red George’s men picked up the shouts from their reserve position in the woods. The Mohawks added to the ruckus with their war whoops. The Americans had stopped cheering. They fired volley after volley into the woods at what they believed to be thousands of warriors. Finally, de Salaberry sent his buglers into the woods to sound an imaginary advance. Silence fell over both armies. De Salaberry called out to one of his Voltigeurs in French, warning him to communicate solely in French so that the enemy would not understand. The man replied that the soldiers who had attacked their flanks that morning had regrouped and were attacking again.

  De Salaberry told him to draw the fight to the riverbank. When the Americans neared the river, the Canadians sank to their knees and began to fire. The Americans returned fire but the musket balls flew harmlessly over the heads of the Canadians. Of the Canadians aim, an American prisoner would later remark that they were horrifically accurate, few of their rounds failed to hit their mark. From across the river bank, de Salaberry and another corps of Voltigeurs also launched an attack on the hapless Americans. Finally, the Americans sent a messenger to Hampton to request permission to retreat. In the meantime, another American force had gathered in the clearing beneath the abatis and was firing ineffectually into the deep shadows of the forest where the ghostly cheers and war whoops from Macdonell’s men and the Mohawks still reverberated. Hampton, outsmarted by his enemy once more, ordered a general withdrawal. In the haste to retreat, the American dead and wounded were left in the ravines. De Salaberry had the American wounded taken to a nearby field hospital, along with his own wounded.

  While General Hampton was leading his troops back to the border, the other arm of the American invasion force, 7,000 men strong, was making its way up the St. Lawrence River in hundreds of light river boats. The flotilla made slow progress. From the Canadian side of the river they were bombarded by cannon fire. Their commander, General Wilkinson, was sick and in no state to rally his troops. The soldiers were not in a hurry to go anywhere either. It took eight days for them to cover 130 kilometres. Along the way, the American flotilla stopped to interrogate farmers on both sides of the border, hoping to get intelligence about the British and Canadian forces. The soldiers looted the homes and property of Canadian civilians, earning them the
lasting enmity of the local population. When the Americans interrogated them, the Canadians fed them a series of outrageous tales that magnified the strength of everything from the rapids ahead to the size of the army they would face. This time, it was the civilians who tricked the Americans into believing they were up against a huge army. Finally, on November 11, 1813, the American force reached a farm (near the present-day town of Long Sault, Ontario) owned by a man named John Chrysler. They knew they could go no farther by boat until they had disabled the cannons that were still firing at them from the Canadian side of the river. The dangerous Long Sault rapids were ahead, and they could not hope to navigate them while under fire.

  The Canadians and British, however, had expected the Americans to stop at Chrysler’s farm. They told the Chrysler family to hide in their cellar, and then positioned their troops in the surrounding fields.

  As always, the defending army was vastly outnumbered. Therefore, they scattered in small groups: a unit of Voltigeurs in the woods, a unit of Mohawks in a cornfield, and a unit of British regulars beyond the barns. Everywhere the Americans looked, they could see the enemy.

  The Americans had already received word of Hampton’s demoralizing defeat. When they saw the troops at Chrysler’s farm, they realized they would have to engage them. Wilkinson, still too ill to leave his bed, ordered his junior officer to engage the British in a staid military fashion, fighting first one unit and then the next. The officer followed his orders and the effects were debilitating. The Americans were continually harassed; just as they appeared to dispatch one unit of the enemy, another stood up to engage. Finally, Wilkinson called the retreat. The exhausted soldiers willingly piled into their boats and retreated across the river to the American side. The attack on Montreal was a rout.

  An equally savage war was being fought on the seas and the Great Lakes. If there is any debate about who won the War of 1812, there can certainly be no doubt as to who won the war on the eastern seaboard. By the time the Treaty of Ghent was signed, troops from Nova Scotia occupied no less than half of the state of Maine. Canadians privateers had captured four times as many ships as their American counterparts and placed a stranglehold on American trade that saw American exports reduced from $45,000,000 before the war to less than $7,000,000 when it ended.7 And while the Canadian maritime economies enjoyed unprecedented prosperity during and immediately after the war, the American economy suffered a deep recession from which they were very slow to recover.

  Over the course of the war 41 Canadian privateers ruled the waters between the Maritime colonies and states, taking literally hundreds of American ships as prizes. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland thrived on the profits brought in by these ships.

  On August 25, 1814, the Canadians and British swarmed into the naval base at Bladensburg, New York, and easily disarmed the militia guarding that entrance to Washington, D.C. By nightfall, the capitol itself had been set afire. Public buildings were looted and documents littered the city streets. While that fire was ravaging the American capital, representatives of Britain and America were meeting in the Belgian town of Ghent to discuss possible terms for peace. As the politicians continued their negotiations, soldiers were fighting more battles on land, lakes, and sea.

  By 1814, when the final battle of the war was fought on American soil, near the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the terms of peace had already been brokered. The war ended with the border much as it had always been. Farmers, merchants, and tradesmen from both countries once again crossed freely to conduct their business. But within Canada, much had changed. For the first time, the country and its people — Native, French, and English — had united against a common enemy and together they had halted a seemingly unstoppable invasion.

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  REBELS IN CANADA

  With the Americans threat contained, at least for the moment, the Canadian colonies were faced with a new threat. This one was not launched from foreign soil but rose from the centre of the Canadian colonies, fuelled by conflicts of race, economics, and class.

  In early November 1837, the threat exploded into war.

  The men had waited in silence for hours. The sudden peel of the church bells struck terror in the hearts of some, elation in others. Finally, the English had come for them. The words of their Patriote leader, Dr. Wolfred Nelson, an Englishmen who had married a French woman and adopted their cause as his own, rang in their ears, drowning out even the steady clang of the bells. “It is your lives they seek; sell them as dearly as you can. Stay steady, don’t drop your powder and attend to your duty — self-preservation.”

  When the first musket fired, it was clear to both the French and English that there could be no turning back. Civil war had begun.

  They may not have wanted to become the 14th colony, but that did not mean that Canadians were entirely happy with their government. Upper Canada was controlled by a small, wealthy group known as the Family Compact. In Lower Canada a similar group of elites known as the Château Clique were in control. Resentment simmered as the farmers and soldiers who had fought to protect Canada did not have much say in how they were governed and how their taxes were spent.

  Things had started slowly and with little evidence of the violent turn that things were about to take. A tidal wave of revolutions had swept through Europe and one by one the established governments of France, Greece, Belgium, and Poland had fallen; but very little had changed for the residents of Lower Canada. They were still ruled by Britain, which was also the major market for their goods and the source of most of the goods they purchased.

  But events soon conspired to change that relationship. Resentment simmered against the ruling elite, most of whom were English. During an election riot in 1832, three Frenchmen were shot and killed by British troops. The repeal of the Corn Laws meant that the Canadians no longer received preferential treatment for their imports or exports. In fact, much of the market in Britain had disappeared. A severe drought added to the misery of the farmers of Lower Canada and they were soon on the verge of starvation. Many lost their farms only to see them bought by new English immigrants, lured by a hierarchy eager to increase the English population of the colony. Worse, the new settlers brought cholera with them and it quickly spread to an already weakened rural French population.

  The Patriotes, who dominated the Lower Canadian Assembly, adopted a list of 92 Resolutions designed to limit the powers of the unelected, predominantly English upper house, and forwarded it to Britain. For three years the resolutions were ignored by the British. In frustration, the Patriotes refused to vote for any money to go toward government supplies and wages, effectively paralyzing the government. Finally, word reached the colonies that the British had rejected the resolutions and instead had adopted 10 separate resolutions, none of which served to change the power structure in Lower Canada. Protests broke out across Lower Canada. Numerous public demonstrations were held, many openly calling for the French to defy their English rulers.

  On October 31, 1837, over 5,000 Canadians gathered in Saint-Charles, where Louis-Joseph Papineau called on them to ignore the British resolutions and elect their own governments, judges, and militia officers,

  The long and heavy chain of abuses and oppressions under which we suffer, and to which every year has only added a more galling link, proves that our history is but a recapitulation of what other Colonies have endured before us. Our grievances are but a second edition of their grievances. Our petitions for relief are the same. Like theirs, they have been treated with scorn and contempt, and have brought down upon the petitioners but additional outrage and persecution. Thus the experience of the past demonstrates the folly of expecting justice from European authorities. 1

  But others, including Dr. Wolfred Nelson, called for a more violent response. Addressing thousands of supporters he suggested the time for talk had gone, “The time has come,” he said, “to melt down our tin spoons and tin plates and forge them into bullets.”2

  The establishmen
t, including the English merchants and the French Bishop of Montreal, listened in horror. The call to arms brought to mind the bloody horror of the French Revolution. In Montreal, frustrated by a government seemingly held hostage by a small group of disgruntled Frenchmen, the English Doric Club members attacked several newspaper offices and ransacked the home of one of the Patriote leaders. In response, the Patriotes flew into action. Across Quebec they disarmed government supporters, intimidated judges, and attempted to force the local militias to stay neutral in the conflict to come. Revolution, it seemed, was inevitable.

  The government response was swift. A list of Patriotes was drawn up and troops were dispatched to arrest them and bring them to Montreal for trial. Papineau was warned in time, but many others were not so fortunate. As Papineau fled to the United States, one group of arrested men was rescued by their fellow Patriotes, who attacked the convoy of soldiers bringing them in. Within Montreal companies of loyal militia were raised, primarily from amongst the English population, which at that time numbered half the city’s population. This freed the army to meet the rebels who were already massing at Saint-Charles. One troop of 300 soldiers departed from Montreal under Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Stephen Gore, determined to head off the rebels.

  They marched through the cold, wet snow of a late November storm that turned parts of the road into a pit of mud. As they marched they grew more tired, cold, and hungry. When they reached the village of Saint-Denis on November 23, 1837, they encountered a group of 800 rebels under the command of Dr. Wolfred Nelson. “At long last they came in sight of the place where they would breakfast and where they did breakfast on Powder and ball,”3 wrote George Nelson. From their barricaded positions on the top floors of the village houses, the poorly armed rebels were able to hit the advancing British troops with deadly accuracy. The peaceful village had been turned into bedlam itself. The church bells rang incessantly, villagers scurried to find shelter, and Patriote sympathizers from neighbouring villages streamed in, pitchforks and ancient muskets in hand. The British sank back and loaded their big guns, but even at that great a range, the snipers were able to pick off the gunners while the great guns themselves did scant damage. They were able to take a few houses, but after a pitched battle of over six hours that resulted in British casualties but no discernible movement in position, the British commander ordered a retreat, leaving the cannon behind in their hurry.