by James Laxer
With a hawk-like countenance, piercing eyes, and, as the years passed, an ever more unruly head of hair that took on the appearance of ruffled feathers, Calhoun wielded an eloquence and sharp intelligence that made him more feared than loved. During the early years of his political career, Calhoun was a nationalist who promoted American expansion and the use of the power by the federal government to promote internal development. However, as the slavery issue became ever more prominent, Calhoun became a fierce proponent of states’ rights, and he advanced the notion that slavery was a “positive good.” Convinced of the self-evident supremacy of whites, he argued that slaves benefitted from the paternalism of their masters. In a speech in the United States Senate in 1837, Calhoun spelled out his case: “I may say with truth, that in few countries [other than the United States] so much is left to the share of the labourer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his [the slave’s] condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe — look at the sick and the old and infirm slave on the one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.”
Twenty-nine-year-old Calhoun voted for Henry Clay’s elevation to the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives. He shared Clay’s hostility to Britain and was convinced that the United States and the old mother country were on the path to war. To those who warned of the costs of such a war, Calhoun retorted: “We are next told of the expenses of war, and the people will not pay taxes. Why not? Is it from want of means? . . . No; it has the ability, that is admitted; and will it not have the disposition? Is not the cause a just and necessary one? Shall we then utter this libel on the people? If taxes should become necessary, I do not hesitate to say the people will pay cheerfully.”14 For Southerners such as Calhoun, the alliance with the rising political power of the West was about land. While the lust for new land pointed west and north, it also pointed south. Although the Louisiana Purchase had carved out an empire for the United States west of the Mississippi, the Floridas remained in the hands of Spain. Southerners believed support for war with Britain would lubricate their effort to possess the Floridas.
Clay backed the drive for the Floridas. In 1810, while still a senator, he defended the Madison administration’s military occupation of a part of Spanish-ruled West Florida that had not been included in the Louisiana Purchase. Looking north, he declared ebulliently, “The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.”15
It has often been said that money is the mother’s milk of politics. In the early nineteenth century, land was the surest route to money and thereby to political influence. In turn, the state was the instrument of force and coercion through which more land could be obtained. The hunger for land was the appetite that bound the War Hawks together, whether they were southern slave owners or western settlers.
One man who understood the game and its objectives better than most was John Randolph, the maverick congressman from Virginia who coined the epithet “War Hawks” to describe Clay, Calhoun, and company.16 Many believed Randolph was deranged. If so, there was an analytical method to his madness. In the House, Randolph charged that what drove the War Hawks was “a scuffle and scramble for plunder,” and that a large chunk of the land they sought would come through the conquest of Canada. To the discomfiture of the war party, Randolph shrilled, “Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs came into the House, we have heard but one word — like the whip-poor-will, but one monotonous tone — Canada! Canada! Canada!”
He warned, with remarkable prescience, that territorial expansion would be perilous to the American Union, that it would bolster the anti-slavery forces and would ultimately compel the South to secede. Randolph opposed the conquest of Canada for that reason.17
In a head-to-head debate with Calhoun, Randolph cautioned that war with Britain could result in American slaves, inspired by the French Revolution, rising up against their masters. To this, Calhoun replied that while Randolph “may alarm himself with the disorganizing effects of French principles, I cannot think our ignorant blacks have felt much of their baneful influence. I dare say more than one-half of them have never heard of the French Revolution.”18
The House of Representatives elected in 1810, ever after to be known as the War Congress, included 59 freshmen members, among them Henry Clay and John Calhoun, out of a total of 142. The Republicans — who had begun to label themselves Democratic-Republicans — had 108 members to 36 Federalists. In the Senate, they outnumbered the Federalists 30 to 6.19
The presence of the War Hawks in Congress tilted the national debate toward war with Britain. And those in charge of British military and political strategy were acutely aware of the rising tensions with the United States.
* * *
¶ The writings of two nineteenth-century authors illustrate the unbridgeable gap between the two countries on the subject. In his classic work on the history of Britain’s naval power, written in the 1830s, British attorney-turned-naval-historian William James set forth the British position on why his country believed it had the right to retrieve its sailors from American vessels: “It is . . . an acknowledged maxim of public law . . . that no nation but the one he belongs to can release a subject from his natural allegiance, as that, provided the jurisdiction of another independent state be not infringed, every nation has a right to enforce the services of her subjects wherever they may be found. Nor has any neutral nation such a jurisdiction over her merchant vessels upon the high seas as to exclude a belligerent nation from the right of searching them for contraband of war or for the property or persons of her enemies. And if, in the exercise of that right, the belligerent should discover on board of the neutral vessel a subject who has withdrawn himself from his lawful allegiance, the neutral can have no fair ground for refusing to deliver him up; more especially if that subject is proved to be a deserter from the sea or land service of the former.”
In his rejoinder, written five decades later, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt pointed out that “the United States maintained that any foreigner, after five years’ residence within her territory, and after having complied with certain forms, became one of her citizens as completely as if he was native born.” Roosevelt conceded that “the American blockade-runners were guilty of a great deal of fraud and more or less thinly veiled perjury [in swearing that the British sailors on their ships were not British]. But the wrongs done by the Americans were insignificant compared with those they received. Any innocent merchant vessel was liable to seizure at any moment; and when overhauled by a British cruiser short of men was sure to be stripped of most of her crew. The British officers were themselves the judges as to whether a seaman should be pronounced a native of America or of Britain, and there was no appeal from their judgment. If a captain lacked his full complement there was little doubt as to the view he would take of any man’s nationality. The wrongs inflicted on our seafaring countrymen by their impressment into foreign ships formed the main cause of the war.”
Chapter 4
Isaac Brock and the Defence
of the Canadas
THE FATE OF THE GLOBAL ENTERPRISE that became the second British Empire — the first British Empire having been destroyed by the American Revolution — hung in the balance at the turn of the century. The struggle between Britain and France would determine which power would dominate the world in the nineteenth century. If the French succeeded in landing an army on British soil, Britain would lose the war and would be reduced to an offshore island in France’s imperial sphere. Political and military leaders in London were keenly aware that all means at their d
isposal must be mobilized for the struggle.
Britain had two services in its arsenal: the great shield provided by the Royal Navy, and the sword in the hand of the British army. Take away its naval supremacy and Britain would have been doomed. The leaders of the British government and the admirals of the Royal Navy were prepared to do whatever was needed to sustain British command of the seas around the world. In the years prior to the War of 1812, the dominance of the Royal Navy over the fleets of other states is captured in the fact that it deployed 152 ships of the line, compared with 46 by the French, 13 by the Netherlands, 28 by Spain, and 33 by Russia, with some of the Russian ships interned under British command. The Royal Navy had 183 cruisers, France 31, the Netherlands 7, Spain 17, and Russia 10.1
During the wars between Britain and France from 1793 to 1815, 103,660 men died while serving in the Royal Navy. Illness and personal accidents carried off 84,440 (81.5 percent) of these men. A further 12,680 (12.2 percent) of the deaths resulted from non-combat calamities, mostly shipwrecks, the foundering of vessels, and fires. Enemy action took the lives of 6,540 (6.3 percent) of the naval force.2
Over the course of the Napoleonic War, the Royal Navy was globally pre-eminent, not only as a weapon of war but also as an industrial enterprise. Together, the dockyards of the navy were the world’s leading industrial operations. In 1803, 100,000 seamen and marines served in the Royal Navy. The navy sustained this complement and then increased it to 145,000 men in 1810 and kept it at that level through 1812, after which the number of seamen and marines declined to 117,000 in 1814 and 90,000 the following year. Maintaining this huge fighting force severely strained the British treasury. In 1803, the Royal Navy received a grant of just over ten million pounds, and that sum increased year by year to a peak of just over twenty million pounds in 1813.3
The immense effort to sustain and expand the Royal Navy, in addition to the risks faced by men in the service, pressured those in charge of the Admiralty — the strategy was crafted by a small group of senior officers and civilians in the Admiralty Board Room in London4 — to take decisions that were bound to generate intense conflict, and possibly war, with the United States.
In theory, service in the Royal Navy and in the army was voluntary. In practice, the masters of the Royal Navy had to resort to desperate measures to keep up the complement of men on the ships. Impressment was the solution. The British state took unto itself the right to bodily carry off men for service — and not just the deserters they found on American ships. Lieutenants in British port towns organized gangs of ruffians to seize able-bodied men to serve on ships. Exempt were gentlemen (those of sufficient means), those under eighteen or over fifty-five, seamen already in the Royal Navy, fishermen, tradesmen, apprentices, and a few others. Royal Navy ships also stopped merchant ships returning to home ports and impressed their most promising sailors. Once impressed, men were often offered the opportunity to “volunteer,” which made them eligible to receive a bonus that varied over the period of the wars with France from one pound ten shillings to ten pounds. Genuine volunteers may have accounted for as few as one-quarter of those serving on the ships of the Royal Navy.5
Early-nineteenth-century warships combined the most advanced industrial technology of the day with the technology of a much earlier period. Wooden vessels, propelled by wind and deploying as much sail as possible to ensure maximum speed and manoeuvrability, coexisted with the rising firepower of guns — cannon, we would call them — and mortars. The ships of the line were packed with enormous firepower. They were the most concentrated engines of destruction in existence at the time. Although most of those who died while serving on ships were not killed in action, casualties were extremely high when naval battles erupted. When warships fought each other broadside, unleashing their firepower at close range, ships and masts were torn asunder and men were blown to bits.
The most crucial battle of the age was Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson’s decisive victory at Trafalgar in 1805, fought off the southwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Against the combined fleets of France and Spain, Nelson managed a triumph that was the very opposite of the normally inconclusive battles at sea. Nelson used his uncanny understanding of the dictates and tactics of naval war to achieve Britain’s most strategically important victory on the seas.6 And he died in the fight, becoming as a result Britain’s pre-eminent naval hero.
At Trafalgar the British did not overturn Napoleon’s empire, but they gained for themselves much needed protection against a French invasion of the British Isles. In the end, it would be a soldier, not an admiral, who would finish off Napoleon — the Duke of Wellington, at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Similarly, in North America, the Royal Navy would be indispensable to Britain’s defence of its holdings in North America. But it was soldiers who would have to mount a defence along an all-too-lengthy border when the Americans launched their war. While soldiers in the United States were most often farm boys, in Britain they were as likely to be recruited from the urban poor, from coal-mining or cloth-manufacturing towns.
The men who served in the army’s rank and file were drawn from among the poorest segments of society in the British Isles. English, Irish, and Scots, they manned the regiments that served at home and in the colonies. Common soldiers were paid a pittance — seven shillings a week — from which were subtracted sums to cover rations, personal equipment, and materials for washing and cleaning. The soldier was fortunate to receive one and a half shillings after these deductions. British soldiers were poorly housed and clothed and inadequately fed. They spent long periods of time stationed away from wives and children. A small number of wives — ranging from six to twelve, depending on where the unit was stationed — were allowed to accompany about one hundred men. These women were charged with doing the washing and often cared for the wounded and the sick.7
Officers, who regularly purchased their posts, came from higher rungs on the social ladder, from prosperous merchant families and families of the gentry. For them, as for enlisted men, the army was a calling for life. It was a tough, wearisome existence, especially for those posted in distant colonies. The generous consumption of alcohol made the drabness more endurable. Wars and battles punctuated army life with excitement, danger, and fear.
Reliability was the quality most prized in the British army. Regiments were trained to perform on battlefields the way the new machines in British industry performed. Soldiers were disciplined to follow orders while under fire, and officers learned how to give those orders and maintain cohesion when it counted.
Many of the top officers were better suited to politics or administration. But among them were men with genuine military talent, and, more rarely, warriors with the skills to inspire men and the foolhardiness and daring to throw caution to the wind on the battlefield. One of these was Isaac Brock.
Isaac Brock was a career soldier from a very early age. The British army was much more than his vocation. It was his entree to the world; it was his taskmaster, his school, his life.
Brock was born in a setting that could hardly have been more different from that of Tecumseh, his future comrade-in-arms. The two did share one crucially important commonality: both were born on the front line, Tecumseh in the Ohio country and Brock on the Channel Island of Guernsey, off the coast of Normandy, in a centuries-old conflict zone between England and France. Although Brock fashioned himself a British general in appearance and manners, and even in his exquisitely crafted letters and superb penmanship, he was at heart a Guernseyman.
The eighth son among fourteen children, Brock was born in St. Peter Port, the chief town and capital of Guernsey, on October 6, 1769. Brock’s father, John, had married Elizabeth de Lisle, the daughter of the bailiff of Guernsey. With deep roots in island society, the Brock family was linked to other leading families through marriage. Although John Brock died at the age of forty-eight while taking the waters at Dinan in Brittany for his heal
th, he managed to endow his wife and their large brood with the means for a comfortable middle-class life.
The Brock family traced its history in Guernsey to the sixteenth century, a turbulent time in the Channel Islands during an often violent transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. With Jersey only fourteen kilometres from the Norman coast at its closest point, and Guernsey farther west, the major Channel Islands were caught amid sociopolitical forces from England and France. The government of Elizabeth I wanted to impose Anglicanism on the islands, but the population was heavily influenced by French Calvinism as well as by the Protestantism of the Huguenots, some of whom fled to Guernsey and Jersey and the smaller Channel Islands to escape Catholic persecution in France. Pockets of Catholicism survived in the islands; among Anglicans, the Calvinist hue remained.
The societies of Guernsey and Jersey hummed with commercial energy. The leading families of Guernsey developed trading links with many parts of the world. They shared little in common with the English aristocracy — making money and dirtying their hands in commerce, much abhorred by the great English aristocrats, was the lifeblood of the Guernsey merchants. This put them on the leading edge of the rising international capitalism, much in the manner of Holland. Many of the leading Guernsey families, including the Brocks, set up as privateers, licensed pirates who obtained letters of marque from the English Crown. They attacked Spanish and French ships carrying bullion on the high seas, handing most of it over to the Crown but keeping an important share for themselves. It is not unlikely that some ambitious Guernsey privateers acquired letters of marque from France as well as England, which allowed them to attack English ships in addition to those of France and Spain. Energy, vitality, and the ability to adapt to changing conditions were the hallmarks of the leading families of Guernsey, and Isaac Brock was unmistakably in their mould.