The American Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  Along the frozen shores of the River Raisin a great stillness has fallen. The cold is numbing; nothing moves. Those few settlers who still remain in Frenchtown do not venture outside their doors.

  In the little orchard across the river, along the narrow lane that leads from the Navarre home and beside the Detroit River road, the bodies of the Americans lie, unshriven and unburied. The Potawatomi have made it known that any white man who dares to touch the remains of any of the hated Harrison men will meet a similar fate.

  The naked corpses lie strewn for miles along the roadside in the grotesque attitudes of men who, in a sudden flash, realize their last moment has come. In death they bear a gruesome similarity, for each skull is disfigured by a frozen smear of fleshy pulp where the scalp has been.

  Here, contorted in death, lies the flower of Kentucky: Captain Hart and Captain Hickman; Lieutenant-Colonel John Allen; Captain John Woolfolk, Winchester’s aide-de-camp, who offered one thousand dollars to anyone who would purchase him but was tomahawked in spite of it; Captain John Simpson, Henry Clay’s fellow congressman and supporter; Ensign Levi Wells, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Wells of the 4th Infantry; Allen Darnell, whose brother looks helplessly on as he is shot and scalped because he cannot keep up with the others; and Ebenezer Blythe, a surgeon’s mate, tomahawked in the act of offering ransom. And here, like a discarded doll, is the cadaver of young Captain Price of the Jessamine Blues whose last letter home gave instructions for the upbringing of his two-year-old son.

  A few days after the battle, the French inhabitants, emerging at last from their homes, are treated to a ghastly spectacle. Trotting along the roadway come droves of hogs that have been feeding off the corpses and are now carrying off the remains-whole arms and legs, skulls, bits of torso and entrails clamped between their greedy jaws. The hogs, too, are victims of the war, for they seem now to be as demented as the men who fight it, “rendered mad,” according to one opinion, “by so profuse a diet of Christian flesh.”

  The war, which began so gently, has turned ugly, as all wars must. The mannerly days are over. New emotions-hatred, fury, a thirst for revenge, a nagging sense of guilt-distort the tempers of the neighbours who live on both sides of the embattled border. And it is not over. Peace is still two years away. The blood has only begun to flow.

  WITH THE BATTLE OF FRENCHTOWN, the campaign of 1812 ended. It was too cold to fight. The war was postponed until spring, when it would become a new war with new leaders and new followers. The six-month volunteers from Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states went back to their farms, refusing to enlist for another term of service. Harrison withdrew up the Maumee to start work on a new outpost, Fort Meigs. Along the Niagara River the American regulars moved back ten miles while others went into winter quarters at Sackets Harbor, Burlington, and Greenville. The only American fighting men in Canada were the prisoners of war at Quebec.

  It was as if both Canada and the United States were starting from scratch. America had a new secretary of war, John Armstrong. Most of the old commanders-Brock, Hull, Van Rensselaer, Smyth, Winchester-were gone. Dearborn’s days were numbered as were Sheaffe’s. Only two major leaders remained from the early days of 1812, Tecumseh and Harrison, old adversaries fated to meet face to face at the Thames in the autumn of 1813.

  Now Canada had time to breathe. With Napoleon’s army fleeing Russia, some of the pressure was off Great Britain. A detachment of reinforcements was dispatched to Bermuda, there to wait until the ice cleared in the St. Lawrence. The United States, too, had time to rethink its strategy-or lack of it-and to plan more carefully for the future. It was not the war that the Americans, inspired and goaded by the eloquence of Henry Clay and his colleagues, had set out to fight and certainly not the glamorous adventure that Harrison’s volunteers expected. The post-Revolutionary euphoria, which envisaged the citizen soldiers of a democratic nation marching off to sure victory over a handful of robot-like mercenaries and enslaved farmers, had dissipated. America had learned the lessons that most nations relearn at the start of every war-that valour is ephemeral, that the heroes of one war are the scapegoats of the next, that command is for the young, the vigorous, the imaginative, the professional. Nor does enthusiasm and patriotism alone win battles: untrained volunteers, no matter how fervent, cannot stand up to seasoned regulars, drilled to stand fast in moments of panic and to follow orders without question. It was time for the United States to drop its amateur standing now that it intended to do what its founding fathers had not prepared for-aggressive warfare.

  It was clear that possession of the water held the key to victory. Britain, by seizing Michilimackinac and Detroit, both commanding narrow channels, effectively controlled all easy transit to the northwest and thus to the fur trade. Two other strong points, Kingston and Montreal, commanded the entrance to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence lifeline to the sea. And so, as winter gave way to spring, the ring of hammers on the Lakes announced a different kind of contest as both sides engaged in a shipbuilding race.

  Immediately after Hull’s defeat, Madison and Eustis had awoken to the fact that the disgraced commander’s original proposals had been right. And so to Sackets Harbor that winter-the only available harbour at the eastern end of Lake Ontario-a new commander, Captain Isaac Chauncey, quickly dubbed a commodore, was dispatched with 700 seamen and marines and 140 ships’ carpenters to help construct two fighting ships, each of thirty-two guns. Jesse Elliott, hero of the previous summer’s attack, had added the captured Caledonia to the vessels he was already building. Brock had rightly seen that event as a serious and significant loss. At Erie, Pennsylvania, two twenty-gun brigs and several gunboats were also under construction. With Elliott’s warships these formed the backbone of the fleet with which Oliver Hazard Perry would in the summer of 1813 seize control of the lake from the British, thus opening up Amherstburg and the valley of the Thames to American attack.

  The British were also building ships-one big vessel at the protected harbour of Kingston, another at York, wide open to attack, a split decision that proved costly when Chauncey’s fleet appeared off the capital in April. At Amherstburg a smaller vessel was under construction. But the British suffered from a lack of supplies, of mechanics, and, most important, of trained seamen. Already, following some skirmishing outside Kingston Harbour in November, control of Lake Ontario was in doubt. Was it possible that the upstart Americans could outsail, outmanoeuvre, and outfight the greatest maritime power in the world? On the Atlantic, in single engagements-the United States? versus the Macedonian in October, the Constitution versus the Java in December-the Americans were the winners. After a season of reverses on land, these victories, though not significant in military terms, gave the country hope.

  British strategy remained the same: to stay on the defensive. An attempt would be made to dislodge Harrison from his threatening position at Fort Meigs on the Maumee, but with Brock gone there was no hint of offensive warfare. The Americans planned to open the campaign with attacks on both Kingston and York to destroy the new warships, then to seize Fort George at the mouth of the Niagara and march on Fort Erie. By spring Dearborn had watered down this plan, eliminating Kingston, which was held to be too strong for an attack.

  The United States remained deeply divided over the war. Following Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow, the Russian minister in Washington proposed to Madison (now serving his second term as the result of the November election) that his emperor, Alexander I, mediate between the two belligerents. After all, with the Orders in Council out of the way the only real impediment to peace was the matter of impressment, and with the war in Europe apparently winding down, that would soon be of academic interest. Madison agreed, but before the issue could be negotiated, Alexander, to England’s fury, made a separate peace with Napoleon. Russia, the British felt, like America before her had stabbed them in the back. And so the war went on.

  The New England states continued, in effect, to be at peace with their neighbours in Bri
tain’s Atlantic colonies. But across the nation a new and savage emotion, which since the beginning of history has acted as a unifying force among peoples, was beginning to be felt. The contempt and disdain once felt for the British had been transformed into rage. Procter was the villain; his officers were seen as monsters. Harrison’s troops, especially, thirsted for revenge and would get it finally when autumn reddened the leaves in the valley of the Thames.

  In Kentucky, the failure at the Raisin cut deep. When the news reached Lexington, Governor Shelby was attending a theatrical performance. He hurried out as whispers of the defeat rippled from row to row. People began to leave, some in tears, all distressed, until by the play’s third act the house was empty. Scarcely a family in the state was not touched in some way by the tragedy at Frenchtown. The idea of a swift victory was shattered. For hundreds of families, weeping over lost sons and lost illusions, the war that at the outset seemed almost like a sporting event had become a horror. Some did not learn for months whether their men were alive, dead, or in prison. Some never knew.

  Captain Paschal Hickman’s mother did not recover from the blow. “Sorely distressed about the massacre,” in the words of her husband, “...she pined away and died on June 9, 1813.”

  Captain Hart’s widow, Anna, suffered a similar end. Prostrated over her husband’s fate, she was sent by relatives to New Orleans and then to New York in the hope that a change of scene would lighten her grief. It failed. She set out again for Lexington but could go no farther than Philadelphia, where she died at twenty-seven.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Allen’s widow, Jane, hoped against hope that her husband was not dead but a captive of the Indians. For eight years she watched and waited at her home on the Lexington-Louisville road, keeping the shutters open each night that he might see the candle she kept burning there. At last, with all hope extinguished, she, too, wasted away from grief. In February, 1821, she died.

  It was not only in Kentucky that the tragedy struck home. All of America was dumbfounded. In the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, the citizens at a public meeting resolved to wear black crepe on their arms and in their hats for ninety days out of respect for those who “gloriously fell in the field defending the only free government on earth.” In Kentucky, a new slogan arose and was used to stimulate recruiting: Remember the Raisin! Nine counties were named in honour of nine officers slain on its frozen banks. Now the government’s war loan, only two-thirds subscribed, was taken up in a new wave of patriotic fervour, partly as a result of the efforts of John Jacob Astor, whose own patriotism had been called in question as the result of his actions of the previous summer.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Procter, the subject of almost universal excoriation in America, brushed off the massacre at the Raisin as he would an annoying insect. In his dispatch to Sheaffe he simply wrote that “the zeal and courage of the Indian Department never were more conspicuous than on this occasion, the Indian warriors fought with their usual courage.” In a later report he referred to the massacre briefly and with regret but stated that the Kentucky soldiers too killed the wounded and took scalps; all perfectly true. That, however, scarcely justified the General Order issued at Quebec on February 8, which was enough to make the American prisoners grind their teeth:

  On this occasion, the Gallantry of Colonel Procter was most nobly displayed in his humane and unwearied exertions in securing the vanquished from the revenge of the Indian warriors.

  That was not the view of some of Procter’s people. Dr. Robert Richardson, two of whose sons fought at the Raisin, was outraged by the massacre and wrote to his father-in-law, John Askin, “We have not heard the last of this shameful transaction. I wish to god it could be contradicted.”

  Crowded into a small wood yard at Amherstburg, without tents, blankets, or fires, unprotected from rain and snow, Procter’s prisoners shivered in their thin clothing for almost two days before being moved to a chilly warehouse. Eventually, they were marched five hundred miles by a roundabout route through the back country to Fort George, where the regulars were sent to Quebec City and the volunteers paroled to their homes under the guarantee that they would not take up arms against Great Britain or her allies until exchanged in the regular way.

  Allies? When one Kentuckian sarcastically asked a British officer who Great Britain’s allies were, the reply was evasive and shamefaced: Britain’s allies, said the officer, were well known; he did not wish to continue the discussion. Nor did Henry Procter want to talk about the massacre, half convincing himself that it had never happened. In Detroit, when a group of citizens asked for an inquiry into the killing of the prisoners, he flew into a rage and demanded firm evidence that any such atrocity had occurred. Like Brock before him, Procter was a virtual prisoner of the Indians, whose American captives languished that spring in the villages of the Potawatomi. His own force, badly mauled at Frenchtown, was smaller than Harrison’s on the Maumee. Indian support was essential to even the odds, and he knew that he would not get it if he tried to interfere with time-honoured rituals. He refused to bow to demands that the Indians release all their captives to him, agreeing to ransom them but for no more than five dollars a head-an empty gesture when the going rate in Detroit started at ten dollars and ran as high as eighty.

  The Indians scattered that spring to their hunting-grounds. Tecumseh was still in the south, pursuing his proposal to weld the tribes into a new confederacy. The British saw eye to eye with his plan for an Indian state north of the Ohio; it would act as a buffer between the two English-speaking nations on the North American continent and make future wars unattractive. The idea had long been at the core of British Indian policy.

  But the Indians were soon ignored. In the official dispatches they got short shrift. The names of white officers, who acted with conspicuous gallantry were invariably recorded, those of the Indian chieftains never. Even the name of Tecumseh, after Brock’s initial report, vanishes from the record. Yet these painted tribesmen helped save Canada’s hide in 1812:

  At Michilimackinac and Detroit, their presence was decisive. In each case the threat of an Indian attack broke the morale of the defenders and brought about unconditional surrender.

  At the River aux Canards and Turkey Creek, Tecumseh’s warriors, acting as a screen, contributed to Hull’s decision not to attack Fort Amherstburg. At Brownstown and Maguaga, the same mixed group of tribesmen was essential to the British success in preventing Captain Brush’s supply train from getting through to Detroit.

  At Queenston Heights, the Mohawk advance guard so terrified Scott’s militiamen that hundreds fled to the woods before the battle was joined, while the forward American scouts were prevented from probing the strength and position of Sheaffe’s forces. The war-whoops of Norton’s followers, echoing across the gorge, sent a chill through thousands more, confirming them in their refusal to cross the river.

  And at Frenchtown, the Wyandot and Potawatomi turned Winchester’s right flank and caused the surrender of his entire force.

  Perhaps if Brock and Tecumseh had lived, the Indian claims might have received greater consideration. Brock’s attitude to the tribes was ambivalent, but he believed in keeping his promises; his dispatches to Prevost underline his concern for the Indian position. But with Brock gone, Tecumseh’s death at the Thames in the fall of 1813 (the Indians fighting on after Procter and the British fled) meant an end to Shawnee aspirations for a native confederacy.

  It was among the white settlers in Upper Canada that a new confederacy was taking shape. There the war was no longer looked on with indifference. In the muddy capital of York a new leader was about to emerge in the person of the Reverend Dr. John Strachan, perhaps the most significant and influential Canadian of his time, a product of the War of 1812. In December of that first war year Strachan presided over the formation of the Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada, organized to provide winter clothing for the militia and, later, to help their families and others who had suffered from the war. The directors of the Loyal and Patrioti
c Society included Strachan’s proteges and the elite of York-the tight ruling group that would soon be known as the Family Compact.

  Thus the key words in Upper Canada were “loyalty” and “patriotism”-loyalty to the British way of life as opposed to American “radical” democracy and republicanism. Brock-the man who wanted to establish martial law and abandon habeas corpus-represented these virtues. Canonized by the same caste that organized the Loyal and Patriotic Society, he came to represent Canadian order as opposed to American anarchy- “peace, order and good government” rather than the more hedonistic “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Had not Upper Canada been saved from the invader by appointed leaders who ruled autocratically? In America, the politicians became generals; in British North America, the opposite held true.

  This attitude-that the British way is preferable to the American; that certain sensitive positions are better filled by appointment than by election; that order imposed from above has advantages over grassroots democracy (for which read “licence” or “anarchy”); that a ruling elite often knows better than the body politic—flourished as a result of an invasion repelled. Out of it, shaped by an emerging nationalism and tempered by rebellion, grew that special form of state paternalism that makes the Canadian way of life significantly different from the more individualistic American way. Thus, in a psychological as well as in a political sense, we are Canadians and not Americans because of a foolish war that scarcely anyone wanted or needed, but which, once launched, none knew how to stop.