Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  The British did send another fourteen thousand men from the Duke of Wellington’s peninsular army to America in June 1814, and as peace discussions began, Castlereagh employed the classic negotiating tactic of escalating hostilities. He tightened the blockade even on New England and New York, and ignored Madison’s olive branch of lifting the embargo. After the experiences in Europe, the British were now vastly more competent than they had been in the Seven Years and Revolutionary Wars. Both sides adopted the usual three-pronged attack plan: at Detroit and Niagara, and along the shores of Lake Champlain. The British added the ravages of shore parties landing at Chesapeake Bay and moving inland, and this time the British ability to conduct amphibious warfare would pay off. For the 1814 campaign, the Americans had thirty-four thousand men in their regular army, and they were now pretty good troops. The commanders, Harrison, Scott, and the rising General Andrew Jackson, were also capable. The British and Canadians had almost as many soldiers with now imminent prospects of reinforcements. The Americans had more militiamen, about one hundred thousand, but they were useless outside their own states and a mixed bag there. The Americans controlled Lake Erie; the Canadians controlled Lake Ontario; the Anglo-Canadians held all the St. Lawrence; and the Royal Navy could roam and maraud at will along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. It was becoming a standoff pretty close to where it began, but there was some hard fighting left.

  Winfield Scott led the Americans to a fine victory at Chippawa, near Niagara, in July. Three weeks later, there was a drawn engagement at Lundy’s Lane, near Niagara Falls, with both sides taking about 850 casualties, but the Americans withdrew and then ceded Fort Erie to the British. Sir George Prevost, the cautious British commander in Lower Canada who had so hampered the much lamented Brock, mishandled his expedition south to Ticonderoga with eleven thousand men and was defeated by a smaller force. He was deservedly sacked. More successful was the main landing on Chesapeake Bay on August 19 of four thousand veterans of the British Army in Spain embarked directly from France with only a short stopover in Bermuda. With Madison and his cabinet looking on, the bumbling American commander failed with seven thousand reservists to stop the shore party at Bladensburg, nine miles from Washington. The government fled, Madison on foot because of problems with his horse, and the British entered Washington unopposed on August 24. In revenge for the burning of York, the British burned all the government buildings except the patent office. The executive mansion was gutted inside and the walls scorched; it was later whitewashed, earning it the name it has held ever since. Mrs. Dolley Madison coolly removed what she could and left with the official portrait of George Washington under her arm (she was refused lodging by an irate woman in the Virginia countryside who resented the recent conscription of her husband). The British observed correct discipline and there was no looting or abuse of the civil population. They re-embarked, unmolested, by sea on August 25, and after two days the itinerant American government returned to an unenthusiastic welcome from the populace. The British moved unsuccessfully against Baltimore three weeks later, where Francis Scott Key wrote what became “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which would become the national anthem, following the attack on Fort McHenry. The Washington foray was not important strategically, but it was a stunning propaganda victory and was seen throughout and well beyond the British world as a well-administered and much deserved whipping of the upstart republic by the great empire from which it had seceded but was now emerging as unambiguously the greatest power in the world. The British occupied Maine, but apart from that the frontiers remained pretty much as they had been.

  Madison dismissed the war secretary, Armstrong, and took the step, unique to this day in the country’s history, of calling upon James Monroe, the secretary of state, to be simultaneously the war secretary, with a mandate to bring the war to an end by whatever combination of fighting and negotiating would achieve that end. This made Monroe a virtual co-president and, if he could end the war satisfactorily, almost certainly the fifth president, and the fourth to come from Virginia. When the news of the burning of Washington was received in London and Vienna, British terms in the continuing peace conference stiffened, but they moderated again with news of the defeat of Prevost at Lake Champlain. The Duke of Wellington was offered the command in Canada, but he enjoyed his position in Vienna and having fought many hard battles in Spain, and before that in India, he was not eager for the position. There is no doubt that under his command his army would have defeated any American army it encountered, but the entire British Army was only ninety thousand men and the United States now had eight million people, and not much that would be permanent would be accomplished except perhaps a southern adjustment of the frontier west of the Appalachians. The British, once again, would have to withdraw eventually, though as a result of attrition, not a disaster like Yorktown. Europe was at peace, so there was no need for any blockade, search and seizure of ships, or impressment of sailors. The British would not pay reparations, and neither side would make any concessions of borders. Wellington advised that the facts on the ground did not justify any changes of borders, and if Britain wanted to establish an Indian buffer zone or regain any other territory conceded in 1783, it would have to send Wellington’s army to take it by force and hold it against a country that would be steadily increasing in strength and numbers. This was not judged worthwhile and the British negotiating position was modified to conform with these realities on November 26, 1814, at Ghent, and peace was signed there on December 24.

  The war was not quite over, as, before word of the peace had reached North America, Wellington’s brother-in-law, General Sir Edward Pakenham, landed forty miles east of New Orleans on December 13 with 7,500 men. The U.S. commander of the southern military district was General Andrew Jackson, a drummer boy in the Revolutionary War and veteran of successful operations against the southern Indians. He was a violent man who had survived much personal combat and many duels, and he was a fierce and anglophobic nationalist. Ignoring his orders from Monroe not to disturb Spanish Florida, he had already occupied Pensacola, and he bustled back to New Orleans on December 15 to be in position to attack the British expeditionary force on December 23. He spent the next two weeks building fortifications and obstacles around New Orleans and was heavily entrenched with artillery and sharpshooters deployed on the flanks of all likely approaches to the town when Pakenham attacked with 5,300 of his regulars on January 8, 1815. The British redcoats walked upright and in tight formation straight into the trap ringed with Jackson’s artillery and his long-rifled Tennessee and Kentucky sharpshooters, deadly shots. It was an insanely unimaginative plan of attack, but the British tried it bravely twice. Pakenham was killed and the British took more than two thousand casualties, compared with eight American dead and thirteen wounded. The British withdrew, decisively beaten for the first time in the war in a relatively large action. News of the New Orleans victory arrived in the still-scarred rubble of official Washington a few days later, and news of the Treaty of Ghent arrived there on February 11. Jackson was well on his way to being America’s leading political figure over the next thirty years (though Monroe was now assured of the succession, in the Virginia dynasty, to Madison, having saved the administration’s chestnuts in both the War and State departments).

  It was, in its origins – as the Americans could have avoided it by building an army capable of occupying Canada, and the British by being less high-handed at sea – a silly war, and, as has been recorded, was declared by the Americans after the British had announced a readiness to remove the casus belli, and was apparently won by the Americans, at least on balance, after it had ended. The economic cost to America had been huge and the strain on national unity very great. The opportunity to take Canada had been lost and would only come again, fleetingly and at considerably greater risk, much later. Though an inept war leader, Madison had redeemed his standing by his modesty and preparedness to admit error, and in the end the Americans made their point that they could not
simply be treated as a complete geopolitical irrelevancy at the ends of the earth. Next to the five great European powers – Britain, Russia, France, Austria, and Prussia – the United States was in the second rank of the world’s nations, and rocketing upward to become their peer. Spain, Turkey, even China, were in descent, and others, such as the Dutch and Swedes, stood still. Overcoming such a terrible division in the country, holding its own in the New World with the British, and forcing Britain’s merchant shipping into convoys, with no help from the French, was an achievement for the United States, even allowing for the distraction of the British in Europe. Britain had not won the war, though it certainly was, with Russia, the big and (more durable) winner of the Great War in Europe. But the Americans, if they had been wiser, could have taken Canada and didn’t, so Britain, like America, won something and lost nothing.

  Largely unappreciated, the victor of the war was Canada. For the first time since Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, Canada was not in imminent danger. New France had been threatened by the British until the Quebec Act in 1774, when it responded to Carleton’s blandishments and jumped to the British side in the opening Anglo-American schism, and the French and new British Canadians had been under threat from the Americans for the following forty years. Now, with peace reigning in Europe, the Americans would not dare tangle with Britain, and the Canadians, who were an enigma of centrifugated fragments before the War of 1812 in the eyes of their colonial captors and inheritors, bulked more distinctively in the eyes of the British, with whom they had shown a will to associate that tickled both the self-interest and the bewitching mystique of the colonial vocation that was to take hold of British public policy over the next century. In accepting and honouring the informal agreement of 1774, the French Canadians showed a political acuity at dealing with the British and with English Canadians that they have never lost. The doughty French habitant and coureur de bois, and the rugged Loyalist or simply transplanted American who had defended his land against the Yankees, all of whom made first-class militiamen, had earned the paternal goodwill of their transoceanic king-protector. With the ingenious and fierce natives, they were the forerunners of the vast Kiplingesque gallery of the local pillars of empire, from Gunga Din to Shaka to the bushmen of Africa, the Maori of Australasia, and the gentle cannibals of Tonga, and most of all the rugged British and Irish who, whether from a love of adventure or the force of desperation, carried the British flag and civilization to the farthest corners of the world. Canada, though only half-formed and with limited relations between its main parts, had demonstrated a collective will to live, and even a preliminary community of interest between its principal components. “The essence of the War of 1812 is that it built the first storey of the Canadian national edifice.”29 Champlain and Carleton had laid the foundations.

  7. The Early Struggle for Responsible Government, 1815–1830

  Even before the War of 1812 ended, the Canadian settlements were pushing west. The Earl of Selkirk (1771–1820), who had evacuated some poor Scots to Prince Edward Island in the early years of the century, established, as a shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a settlement of Scots and Irish in the Red River Valley, near the modern Winnipeg, which he called Assiniboia, with the idea of blocking the access to the west of the competing North West Company. The Nor’Westers stirred up the Métis (of mixed European and Indian descent) against Selkirk’s settlers, objecting to the export of pemmican (Indian beef), which the Nor’Westers needed to feed their canoers to the west and north. The settlers were driven out in 1814 and came back in 1815, but were broken up again after the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816. Selkirk himself re-established the settlement in 1817, but a British government commission was established and litigation proceeded through Canadian courts until the two competing companies were merged under British government auspices in 1821, with, between them, 173 posts. The governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and de facto viceroy of Western Canada from 1820 to 1860 was the redoubtable Sir George Simpson, who in the course of his long career negotiated with the U.S. government and with British prime minister Sir Robert Peel over the Oregon boundary, with the kings of France and Belgium and British prime minister Lord Aberdeen over the sovereignty of Hawaii, and with the Russian government over rights along the Alaska coast. He ruled his vast but underpopulated domain from a large house in Lachine, west of Montreal, a community so named (Chapter 1) because the Indians represented it as being near the gateway to China.

  The Treaty of Ghent was rounded out by the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, which demilitarized the Great Lakes except for police vessels, and, in parallel agreement, extended the northern boundary of the United States along the forty-ninth parallel from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. The Americans made some concessions on fisheries, and it was agreed to govern jointly the Oregon territory between the Russian- and Spanish-administered areas (Alaska and California). Rush-Bagot drew out representatives of the very highest ability for both countries.* Their agreement demarcated the approximate spheres of influence between Great Britain and the United States in North America and has been a complete success these nearly two centuries. The United States had about eight million people and the Canadas and maritime colonies about seven hundred thousand, so the ratio of about eleven to one was a reduction of the previous imbalance of about thirty to one faced by New France opposite the Americans.

  Nova Scotia had about eighty thousand people and had enjoyed representative government for nearly sixty years. The governor controlled a large Crown revenue and appointed his council, which was executive, legislative, and judicial. It was a strange little fiefdom, but it worked well, having neither the Anglo-French frictions of Lower Canada nor the rough and ready boisterousness of Upper Canada. Newfoundland was as wild and woolly as Prince Edward Island was bucolic and tranquil. Nova Scotia shipping and shipbuilding flourished between 1815 and 1830, when the British advocates of free trade opened up the West Indies to greater penetration by the Americans.

  Only in Lower Canada was there the separation of political power from racial majority, as the English effectively controlled the province through the British governor and his appointed council, and through the commercial dominance of Montreal’s English merchants. Democracy and nationality were conjoined, as in Ireland, though the oppressions of the majority by the minority would prove much gentler and easier to overturn than they were in Ireland. In Quebec, the French majority would chafe at their exclusion from political and commercial power, exemplified by the fact that their most formidable political leader, Louis-Joseph Papineau, would be the speaker of the Legislative Assembly from 1815 to 1837 but was never in government.

  In Upper Canada, the population was growing quickly, but resentment would grow, because the Family Compact perpetuated its power by doling out to relatives and protégés large quantities of disposable Crown land. One of the early agitators against this oligarchy was the Scottish social and political reformer Robert Gourlay (1778–1863), who advocated universal suffrage to literate men in Scotland and fair wages for workers in England. He came to Canada in 1817 and campaigned from the start for a fair distribution of Crown land, and in 1819 was imprisoned and deported for his trouble, only returning in 1856. Gourlay fell right in with the spirit of the Reformers, and especially with their gift for polemical hyperbole, claiming, typically, that “corruption, indeed, has reached such a height in this province that … no part of the British empire witnesses the like.”30 (It was a good thing for everyone that he didn’t visit Ireland, much less India.) The rest of British North America, from Labrador to Lake Superior and then west between the Rush-Bagot forty-ninth parallel and the North-West Territory to the Rockies, was Rupert’s Land. Both Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territory were governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company after its merger with the North West Company in 1821.

  Shortly after the War of 1812, the Canadian agricultural areas began producing ever-larger surpluses, initiating a pattern of growth that continued to world-significa
nt heights when the western prairies yielded to general and efficient cultivation later in the century. Upper Canadian lumbering and farming were greatly facilitated by postwar canal-building: the Lachine Canal to go round the rapids west of Montreal, begun in 1821; and the Rideau and connecting canals between 1826 and 1834, which opened an alternate route between the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with military defence in mind. (The same thought inspired the even more ambitious Erie Canal in New York State, which connected the Hudson above New York to the Great Lakes but proceeded about twenty miles south of Lake Ontario to steer clear of British and Canadian navy vessels on Lake Ontario. Since there would never be serious animosity along that frontier again, neither country need have bothered. The Canadian Welland Canal, to bypass Niagara Falls and try to rival the Erie Canal for traffic into the western Great Lakes, was also built in the 1820s.