Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

Altogether of a different order were the challenges of Upper Canada. Colonel John Graves Simcoe (1752–1806), who was commander of the Loyalist regiment the Queen’s Rangers in the American Revolutionary War, was appointed lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1791 and arrived in 1792. He was chosen by Grenville over Dorchester’s recommendation of Sir John Johnson, a veteran of relations with the native people and of the commerce and the politics of the fur trade. Simcoe was impetuous and favoured another war with the United States to push the frontier of the Empire as far south as the Ohio. Both he and Dorchester were outspoken hawks toward the United States, and Dorchester was officially rebuked for his polemical belligerency.

  While Simcoe’s ambitions for his colony were not immediately realistic, his constructive energy was useful. Initially, his capital was Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake), but he proposed to move it southwest to a new site safer from American attack, which he named London, situated on what Simcoe christened the Thames River (formerly the La Tranche River). Dorchester did not approve that move, though the Canadian city of London was founded. Simcoe’s second choice was Toronto, which he renamed York, after King George III’s second son, the Duke of York. Simcoe had expansive ambitions to create a model of British rule and government in the heartland of America, as a magnet and advertisement for the virtues of British rule. The idea that the United States would discern the error of its ways at this point was very far-fetched, but the consequence of the policy was a consistent and rather successful effort to attract American settlers to the rich farmland of what is now Ontario. Simcoe founded a military pioneer corps, which he named after his old regiment, the Queen’s Rangers, which was entrusted with the task of clearing and building roads that would pull the colony together. He laid out what are still Dundas Street, from Toronto to Burlington to London; Yonge Street, from the waterfront in Toronto into the interior; and the Danforth Road, from Toronto eastward to Kingston (all named after colonial officials). It was a microscopic replication of the colonizing methods of ancient Rome (which aroused as much respect from the British as an empire as it had hostility as a church).

  Simcoe spent a good deal of attention on the legislators, haranguing them with his ideal of British government in the American wilderness. His policy of advertising for settlers in the United States was rather visionary, and did bear fruit, but the arrivals were attracted by the quality of the land and virtual gift of it, not by British government and the Crown, and many retained republican sympathies. But the combination of British institutions and a blend of Loyalist and American attitudes did give Upper Canada the character that much of the future country of Canada still somewhat retains, of a creative melange of British and American sources for the nature of government and society. Less successful was Simcoe’s championship of the Church of England, and he favoured the establishment of both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland.

  This was not practical, although the Roman Catholics were not an obstacle in Upper Canada at this early date. Most of the population were non-episcopal Protestants: Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Mennonites, and they were strenuously opposed to an established church. Their will prevailed. Simcoe was only the resident chief of the colony for four years, as he had to return to Britain for health reasons in 1796 and resigned in 1798. He returned to active military service in the Napoleonic Wars in 1798 and was nominated military commander in India in 1806 but died before he could take up the post. Simcoe was a man of more energy than judgment in some respects, but also a far-sighted and a galvanizing leader, and he left a permanent and constructive imprint on what became within a few decades the largest province of the slowly emerging country that he had, in large measure, prophesied.

  As the nineteenth century began, Upper and Lower Canada and Nova Scotia were all in the hands of self-sustaining and self-promoting elites, the Family Compact in York, the Château Clique in Quebec, and the Halifax Ring. The Loyalists predominated in the English-speaking colonies, and in all three the factor that facilitated their unbreakable incumbency was their power over the sale and granting of public lands. The Iroquois had driven the other tribes out of most of Upper Canada, and there were vast acreages of arable land and farming and forest products that were available to be dispersed. Similar opportunities existed to the comparable ruling circles in the other colonies, and they enriched themselves and their friends. The steady inflow of American settlers to Upper Canada, which Simcoe assumed was inspired by monarchist anglophilia, was seen by his successors, Peter Russell and General Peter Hunter, to be a potential threat after the war with France resumed in 1803.

  Historians have disagreed ever since over who was responsible for the resumption of hostilities in Europe, and a case certainly can be made for Napoleon’s claim that he was provoked by British non-compliance with all terms of the Peace of Amiens. But he shortly declared himself holder of the new position of emperor of the French and arranged for a patina of referendary legitimacy for the putsch. His navy succeeded in luring the Royal Navy under Admiral Horatio Viscount Nelson to the Caribbean, but he could not embark his army quickly enough for England before Nelson returned and defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar on October 21, 1805. The standoff between the invincibility of Britain at sea and the pre-eminence of France on land was accentuated by Napoleon’s stunning defeat of the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, shattering the first of many coalitions and allegedly causing the death from demoralization and alcoholism of William Pitt the Younger, one of Britain’s greatest leaders, after a total of twenty years as prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, on January 23, 1806. Pitt was succeeded by his cousin, Grenville, in what would be known as the “ministry of all the talents,” as it began the British practice of coalition government in serious wars with other great powers. (Pitt’s foremost rival, Charles James Fox, was foreign secretary. The government’s principal achievement was the abolition in the British Empire of the slave trade in 1807.)

  Napoleon had already concluded that he would not be able to hold the interior of North America along the Mississippi that he had extorted from Spain in the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800, and in 1803 he sold it to the United States. Since 1801, Thomas Jefferson had been the president and James Madison the secretary of state, and James Monroe was special emissary to France to negotiate the purchase of what was now called Louisiana, 828,000 square miles bounded by the Gulf of Mexico and to the east the Mississippi, and extending to the Canadian border and west to what would become Montana and east to Lake Huron. Much of this territory was discovered and originally organized by French and French Canadians, especially La Salle and d’Iberville, as well as Jolliet and Marquette. Napoleon was undoubtedly correct that France could not maintain the whole Louisiana territory, and had lost the oceanic and colonial competition to the British at the Plains of Abraham, at the latest. He was also correct that in selling it at a bargain price to the United States he was accelerating the rise of that country to challenge Britain for leadership in the English-speaking world and the great world beyond Europe and across the seas. What he could not foresee was that as the Anglo-American balance shifted toward the Americans, the British would acquiesce in this and tuck themselves in under the Americans’ wing; instead of fragmenting the English-speaking world, Napoleon was making it stronger. The United States paid only fifteen million dollars virtually to double the size of the country.

  The implications of this for Canada were that the United States would grow more quickly even than had been anticipated, and would be more aggressive along the Great Lakes and to the west of them than had been feared. However, the correlation of forces on the continent changed in an unexpected way also: Jefferson, who believed in small and decentralized government, virtually disbanded the army that Washington and Adams had maintained. This removed a potential threat to the Canadian colonies, but it also removed the deterrence of Britain from resorting to her usual high-handed methods on the high seas. The removal of this
deterrence could prove too great a temptation for the Royal Navy and the government that controlled it, and provocations on the customary scale could bring the countries to war, in which, once again, for the third time in the lifetimes of people in their mid-fifties in 1810, invading armies would come again to the shores of Lake Champlain and the Niagara and St. Clair Rivers. Jefferson and Madison, extremely intelligent men who made an immense contribution to the founding and early development of their country, were possessed of the mad illusion that they could substitute economic warfare for a standing army on their northern border. Jefferson would famously say that the conquest of Canada was “a mere matter of marching.”26 So it was, but he deprived the United States of the forces to do the marching. (On a more positive note, he did found the military academy at West Point, upriver from New York City, which would provide the country with more than two hundred years of a non-political officer corps.)

  The British could not now resist the temptations of simple assertion of their unchallengeable naval might and routinely stopped and searched American ships, confiscated cargo, removed alleged deserters from the Royal Navy, and impressed American seamen into British service. In addition, the British reimposed strict rules on third parties removing cargo from the British West Indies. Napoleon imposed a European-wide boycott of Britain in 1806 from Berlin, having occupied the Prussian capital after another of his breathtakingly victorious campaigns, and Fox responded with a naval blockade of the entire Mediterranean and Atlantic coast of Europe from Gibraltar to Naples and to Copenhagen. A very galling incident occurred in 1807 off Virginia, when the British Leopard stopped the American Chesapeake, and, when the U.S. frigate resisted, subdued her with four broadsides that killed three and wounded eighteen Americans. The British ignored the resulting American demand for an apology and compensation, and Jefferson secured a complete trade embargo against all foreign countries (since Britain now controlled all sea commerce on the North Atlantic). His policy was a disastrous failure. The Northeast became a hotbed of British- and Canadian-encouraged smuggling. The embargo had almost no effect on Britain, which then imported from Latin America the foodstuffs it had previously bought from the United States, and none on France, which controlled almost all Europe and did not buy much from America anyway. American ships that were at sea when the embargo was imposed just ignored the American law, did not return to home port, and continued as international traders with the full support of the Royal Navy. The British benefited from the absence of American competition. Napoleon joined in the mirth at America’s expense by seizing ten million dollars’ worth of American shipping in European ports, saying that any such ships were obviously British, as no American flag vessels would ignore the laws of their country. Jefferson ignored the requirement of warrants for searches in enforcement of his embargo, declared the Lake Champlain area in a state of insurrection, and American exports and the resulting tax revenues plummeted by 75 per cent, as did living standards throughout New England and the main Atlantic ports. Jefferson himself was almost immobilized by migraines in his last year in office and signed the repeal of his embargo three days before the inauguration of Madison as his successor, on March 1, 1809. Peace in North America was more secure for a time.

  In Quebec, Napoleon’s spectacular and brilliantly engineered campaign victories naturally earned some pan-French enthusiasm, but it was fairly muted. There were periodic inflammations, however, as when Bishop Mountain in 1805 questioned the established status of the Roman Catholic Church in the colony. More vexing was the dispute in the Assembly and in the press between the English-Canadian argument for land taxes and the French-Canadian preference for customs duties to pay for the expansion of necessary services such as courts and other public works. To combat the English propaganda of the Quebec Mercury and the Montreal Gazette, three French-Canadian lawyers, including Jean-Thomas Taschereau, founder of one of French Canada’s greatest families (a cardinal, a premier, and chief justice of Canada and of Quebec), founded Le Canadien. The latter newspaper cleverly attacked the regime on exemplary British grounds of insufficient responsibility of government, especially in the unanswerability of the government’s advisers to the Assembly for the actions they proposed. In 1807, the new governor of British North America, Sir James Craig, badly botched the delicate political balance by overreacting to the French objection to the seating of the Jewish Ezekiel Hart of Trois-Rivières because they did not think he could properly take the oath, and by overruling their objection to the preposterous idea of judges sitting in the Assembly. Craig prorogued the Assembly in 1806, and again in 1809, when it presumed to expel Hart and a judge, and he dissolved the Assembly in 1810, when it prepared to vote on the issues of seating Jews and judges. He then seized the presses of Le Canadien, suspended the mails, virtually declared martial law, and arrested and detained without trial Taschereau and his associates. When the 1810 elections essentially replicated the previous Assembly, Craig reacted irrationally and sent his secretary, H.W. Ryland, to England to urge revocation of the Constitutional Act. The British made the much wiser choice of recalling Craig and replacing him with another in the numerous and colourful school of Swiss adventurers, Sir George Prevost. Prevost proved a perceptive governor on the political side, and accurately concluded that the greatest problem politically was not the attractions of Napoleonic France but the lack of responsible government: the accountability to the Assembly of the governor and his advisers in the Executive Council.

  The wartime economy, as is often the case, was booming. Wheat production and the fur trade expanded (and the Montreal merchants did not find the competition of either the Hudson’s Bay Company or John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company intimidating). And in the Eastern Townships, a potash industry arose. With the closing of the Baltic to Britain by Napoleon’s Berlin Decrees of 1806, Canada became the favoured supplier of British shipyards, filled to capacity with war construction. The white pines of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa River proved to be ideal masts for the Royal Navy. The great trees were cut in the winter and floated on rafts to the ports downriver.

  With steadily increasing immigration, both from the United States and the crofters and tenant farmers of Scotland and Ireland, the agitation steadily rose for government responsible to the local people and not only upward to the British government. Two notable colonizers, Lord Selkirk (1771–1820) and Colonel Thomas Talbot (1771–1853), were bold pioneers who brought substantial numbers of British colonists to settle on territory they had assembled. The real loyalty of the American settlers in Nova Scotia, the Eastern Townships, and Upper Canada was a matter of acute official concern, but as events developed it seemed that most of them were non-political and not the American agents that some had feared.

  Despite letdowns, most of the native people near Canada still favoured the British and Canadians over the Americans, as they were less numerous and had more integrity in upholding agreements. An offensive by General William Henry Harrison in 1811 against the Shawnee at Tippecanoe was claimed as a great victory by the Americans, but was in fact a drawn contest with the talented Indian leader Tecumseh. These endless advances of the Americans tended to push more native people into Canada as an informal but very talented militia. This was the condition of the continent as war with the United States again hove into view as a prospect, because America had failed to deter, and Britain could not resist, provocations on the high seas.

  In fact, Canada now needed a war, provided it was not overrun: it was time to start knitting together the fragments left over by the American Revolution, and to test loyalty to, and the viability of, a non-American entity to the north of the United States. As Jefferson had disbanded almost the entire U.S. Army, the prospects of surviving such a war were promising, provided assistance from Great Britain was adequate.

  6. The War of 1812, 1812–1815

  The War of 1812 was a response by the Americans to Britain’s high-handed exercise of her control over the world’s oceans, especially the North Atlantic and the Carib
bean. The unsubtle British and Canadian assistance to Tecumseh and his coalition in 1811 had naturally rankled with the Americans, and there were incidences of Indian raids from Canada into the United States that the Americans could hardly have been expected to tolerate in silence. It was also practically impossible for the authorities in Lower or Upper Canada to determine if the steady flows of immigrant settlers from the United States were Loyalists or merely opportunists taking advantage of the incentives provided for people who would populate and develop the Eastern Townships near Montreal and the fertile land along and just north of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. There were fears in more apprehensive quarters that much of this immigration was effectively a guerrilla movement orchestrated by American authorities, whose annexationist appetites for Canada had neither abated nor ceased to enjoy public expression. In fact, most of these people were fairly apolitical, came with or soon started families, and were legitimate homesteaders who weren’t a fifth column for the Yankees, but nor were they thirsting for the opportunity to take up arms for the timeless (if intermittently mad) George III, now lumbering determinedly through his sixth decade on the British throne.

  James Madison, one of history’s greatest law-givers, as chief author of the Constitution of the United States, effectively inherited the presidency from his mentor, Thomas Jefferson. He had earned high prestige but was not a particularly authoritative figure (as is illustrated by the fact that his vice president, George Clinton, simultaneously ran for president, a unique occurrence in the country’s history). Though Jefferson had cancelled his trade embargo on Britain and France in his last days as president, there were still trade restrictions in effect that were rather sketchily enforced. The inability of the United States to have the British and French take its sovereignty seriously was demonstrated in Madison’s amateurish floundering over these issues in his first months. The British minister in Washington, David Erskine, announced that the British would on June 10, 1809, revoke the orders-in-council that authorized seizure and search of foreign vessels and impressment of their sailors. Madison responded with a proclamation on April 19 of that year announcing the end of any trade restrictions with Great Britain. The British foreign secretary, George Canning, disavowed Erskine on May 30, and recalled him. Madison restored the embargo on August 9.