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Crucible of FlamesCanada’s War of 1812

Year One

Contents Introduction by Kenneth Kidd

1 The Fuse Is Lit by Jim Coyle

2 Brock Braces for War by Jim Coyle

3 War Comes to the Great Lakes by Kenneth Kidd

4 The Madness of William Hull by Kenneth Kidd

5 Queenston Heights: Canada on the Brink by Kenneth Kidd

Appendix A The War of 1812: A Glossary by Kenneth Kidd

Appendix B Little York, on the Eve of War by Kenneth Kidd

Appendix C Time Travel: Camping Out With the Militia by Kenneth Kidd

Bibliography

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Introduction

It’s become axiomatic among historians that Canadians know they won the War of 1812, Americans somehow think they won, and the Indians — who would continue to cede land to American ex-pansion — definitely know they lost, despite fighting alongside British regulars and Canadian militia.

The British, of course, have scant memory of the War of 1812, it being a distant, grubby affair that seemed at the time almost in-significant next to their titanic struggle against Napoleonic France. But the implications on this side of the Atlantic were profound. Roughly 35,000 people would perish through three years of a bit-ter war that pitted brother against brother, cousin versus cousin.

The War of 1812 is what ultimately gives both Canada and the United States their sense of identity. Just as there was a part of the planet widely known as “America” and peopled by “Americans” long before the U.S. Declaration of Independence, so, too, had the geography to the north in present-day Quebec and Ontario been called “Canada” and its population dubbed “Canadians” for cen-turies before Confederation in 1867. When former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson famously boasted at the onset of war that “the conquest of Canada” would be “a mere matter of marching,” no one had any doubts about what part of the planet he had in mind.

Yet neither Canadians nor Americans then had a fully formed sense of national identity. The United States that emerged from the Revolutionary War was scarcely a cohesive entity. The internecine wounds from the fight to create the union — Loyalist versus Pa-triot — lingered still, and individual states jealously guarded their own turf and autonomy.

The War of 1812 eventually helps change that, not least by cre-ating another set of founding mythologies, this time around the

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Battle of New Orleans and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Much the same occurs north of the border, with patriotic stirrings formed around the likes of Isaac Brock and Laura Secord, and how Da-vid had stood up and vanquished Goliath. Canadian identity was, even then, being defined by what it was not: American, republican and given to rule by disorderly mob.

The mindset that leads to Confederation and the “peace, order and good government” of the British North America Act large-ly dates to the War of 1812, and it shows in the kind of wartime ballads that became so popular north of the border, among them “Come All Ye Bold Canadians:”

Those Yankees did invade usTo kill and to destroy

And to distress our countryOur peace for to annoy.

—

May the news of this great conquestGo all the province round.

Come all ye bold Canadians,Enlisted in the cause,

To defend your country,And to maintain your laws;

Being all united,This is the song we’ll sing:

Success unto Great Britain,And God Save the King.

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1 The fuse is lit by Jim Coyle

It’s Nov. 7, 1811. In the still-dark forest where almost 1,000 U.S. troops are camped, sentry Stephen Mars hears a rustle in the bushes and fires a rifle shot that shatters the night’s uneasy quiet. Gen. William Henry Harrison, civil and military commander of the Indiana Territories, scrambles from his tent into the cold misty drizzle of a November morning, calling for a horse.

The Indian attack, urged on by the Shawnee chief Tenskwatawa chanting war songs from atop a boulder, is already buckling the northwestern flank of American lines. As U.S. soldiers gather their wits and weapons, native warriors storm the tents. Some Ameri-cans are tomahawked and scalped. Other warriors take easy aim at Harrison’s men, silhouetted against flickering campfires.

A horse is brought to Harrison, who mounts and rides to the camp’s western flank. There, he finds Capt. Robert Barton’s regi-ment shredded, the rifle corps of Capt. Frederick Guiger “entirely broken” and “a monstrous carnage.”

The heaviest enemy fire comes from a stand of trees perhaps 20 paces from the camp’s front lines. The general orders the attackers dislodged. Rifle fire blasts bark from the towering oaks. But Maj. Joseph Daveiss, jumping to Harrison’s command, is shot dead and his party driven back.

Amid the infernal din of gunfire, war whoops and the groans of the wounded, the air acrid with gun smoke and the stench of death, Harrison bellows for reinforcements. This time, an infantry company led by Capt. Josiah Snelling routs the natives from their lethal position.

Still, Harrison frets. Few of his men have seen action before. His aim is to hold his lines until daylight, then rally a counterat-

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tack over the unfamiliar terrain. The Battle of Tippecanoe — the showdown Harrison decided on weeks before — is on.

The Battle of Tippecanoe (Credit: Universal History Archive/ Getty images)

As governor of the Indiana Territories since 1800, Harrison has played one tribe off against another in a series of land-grabbing treaties, putting what once were Indian hunting grounds to the axes and plows of settlers. Most of the Ohio and eastern Indiana territories are now open to settlement. The young republic is 17 states strong. Harrison’s latest ambition is control of the rich farm-land along the Wabash River. But by 1805, the Shawnee chief Te-cumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa are building a confederacy of tribes to halt white encroachment and establish an independent Indian nation.

Three years the younger, Tenskwatawa has turned from alcohol abuse to temperance, calls himself The Prophet, claims to speak for the Great Spirit, boasts supernatural powers and urges natives to reject white culture and return to traditional ways. Harrison pub-

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licly denounces The Prophet as an imposter and “fool who speaks not the words of the Great Spirit, but those of the devil and of the British agents.”

Harrison is less sanguine, however, about Tecumseh’s grow-ing confederacy. He warns that “if some decisive measures are not speedily adopted, we shall have a general combination of all tribes against us.”

In 1808, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa establish a settlement at the junction of the Wabash and Tippecanoe Rivers — Tippecanoe from the native Keth-tip-pe-can-nunk, a trading post once located there.

Prophetstown becomes headquarters of the growing Indian confederacy. As it does, Harrison negotiates another treaty, whee-dling from a number of tribes three million acres straddling the Wabash. There is one tribe Harrison does not invite to the negotia-tions: Tecumseh’s Shawnee.

Until mid-August 1810, Harrison does not set eyes on Tecum-seh.

From his childhood in the Ohio country, Tecumseh — the name means “shooting star” or “leaping panther” — carries the aura of leadership and greatness. In his early 40s, he looks 10 years younger. He is, says one U.S. army officer, “perhaps the finest-look-ing man I ever saw.”

Upon his return to the Wabash from travels building his con-federacy, Tecumseh is outraged at Harrison’s latest land deal. He vows to keep the ceded lands from being surveyed or settled. In August 1810, Tecumseh paddles down the Wabash to the territo-rial capital of Vincennes, arriving at the head of 400 warriors in 80 canoes to demand Harrison repeal the treaty. Tecumseh says his people have “been made miserable by the white people, who are never contented, but always encroaching. . . We are determined to go no farther.”

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Harrison is awed by the visitor. He tells the war secretary that “if it were not for the vicinity of the United States, (Tecumseh) would perhaps be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru. No difficulties deter him.”

So, as the chief heads south to build his confederacy, the gov-ernor decides on a pre-emptive strike. He will destroy Prophet-stown and rid the frontier of the Indian menace. Harrison leaves Vincennes on Sept. 26, 1811, with a force of 1,000 men. En route they build Fort Harrison to establish a presence in the disputed lands. On Nov. 6, cutting through swamp and dense thickets, they approach Prophetstown.

A party is dispatched to request a meeting. Both sides are suspi-cious. They agree to a council the next day. Harrison asks where his troops might camp overnight. He is directed to an oak-covered knoll. Pleased with the site, but wary of its vulnerability, Harrison sends his troops to bed fully clothed, with guns loaded and bayo-nets fixed.

At Prophetstown, where young warriors of many tribes are as-sembled, bark-sided dwellings overlook the river. A council house and medicine lodge face out onto prairie. Below is a large clearing for cultivation. Canoes are beached by the water.

The Prophet is under orders from Tecumseh not to engage the Americans until the Indian confederacy is strong. But the former suspects Harrison is here to attack, not talk peace. The Indian force of perhaps 500 is no match for the American long knives should they attack in full battle order on the morrow. The Prophet seeks the counsel of the spirits.

He tells his warriors that, with his potions, not only will the intruders be surprised by a night attack, but their gunpowder will turn to sand and the Indians will be made bulletproof. The war-riors, he says, must kill Harrison in his tent at the centre of the American camp. Then his men will scatter like rabbits. Shortly

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after 4 a.m., commanded by chiefs White-loon, Stone-eater and Winnemac, hundreds of braves advance under starless skies to the encampment’s edge.

Hearing something, Stephen Mars fires his shot.With The Prophet’s assurances of invincibility, the warriors

fight in the open rather than in customary fashion among the trees and rocks. They buckle, but don’t breach, the American lines. Even so, U.S. casualties mount. Several times, Harrison falls back to re-group.

Then, with the light, Harrison sees that the Indians are of in-ferior numbers. And with dozens of bullet-riddled corpses litter-ing the landscape, the attackers see the falseness of their Prophet. Through the dawn, the Americans turn the tide. Harrison’s cavalry counterattacks on the Indian flanks. Soon, the warriors are in re-treat through marshland, back to Prophetstown.

The Americans fear another attack — or Tecumseh’s arrival — and fortify their camp. They tend their wounded, bury their dead. They venture out to scalp Indian corpses left behind. The next day, the Americans march on Prophetstown. They find it deserted. Large quantities of corn, some hogs and domestic fowl are a boon to the famished army. The settlement is looted and torched.

And, with the Battle of Tippecanoe, lasting just over two hours, the course of history is changed. The Americans tally yet another grievance against the former mother country, accusing Britain of arming and agitating the Indians. Tecumseh is driven into British arms, swearing “eternal hatred” of the Americans. The fuse to the War of 1812 is lit.

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2 Brock Braces for War by Jim Coyle

Shakespeare called it the “February face,” a demeanour full of frost and storm and cloudiness. Maj.-Gen. Isaac Brock, who had the works of the playwright in his personal library, understood too well what the term and the season meant. Brock was glad enough that the deepest month of winter was over in the little town of York in 1812. Still, he foresaw, as if ordained by fate, where time’s pas-sage was leading.

The Battle of Tippecanoe the previous November — U.S. army troops and militia against Shawnee-led Indian warriors in Indiana — had sharply increased anti-British sentiments south of the bor-der. The warmongers who would profit from an expansion north-ward beat their drums ever more loudly.

For months, if not years, the man overseeing both civil and military matters in Upper Canada had been doing all he could to fortify the province for an American attack he deemed inevitable. Given his druthers, Brock — a tall, robust man of 42 and no fan of life in the colonies — would have returned to England to be as-signed to service with the British army fighting in Spain. In fact, his deployment to the continent had been authorized near the end of January 1812. But quitting Upper Canada had become impos-sible as the warlike temper between Britain and the United States continued to rise.

What a box his sense of duty had put him in. He had few trained troops, the “dubious characters” of a ramshackle militia and few resources to equip them. Moreover, Brock had no good opinion of the fighting spirit in the society he led: “A full belief possesses them that this Province must inevitably succumb. . . Most of the people have lost all confidence. I however speak loud and look big.”

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Brock had a long frontier to defend. Intelligent disposition of scarce resources was essential. He thought the Americans were most likely to make their bid for Canada at the frontier between Niagara and Fort Erie.

The Meeting of Brock and Tecumseh (Credit: Library and Archives Canada)

On Feb. 4, 1812, Isaac Brock opened the session of the legisla-ture at York warning of war’s imminence, urging the adoption of such measures “as will defeat every hostile aggression.” He sought amendments to the 1808 Militia Act, hoping to bolster his forces.

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When he lost his bid for some increased arbitrary powers, Brock lamented the failure by members of the house — “(who) are by their ignorance easily betrayed into error” — to see war’s advance.

In a Feb. 12 letter to Gov. Gen. Sir George Prevost, Brock de-scribed “an approaching rupture between the two countries” and sought formal permission to remain in his present command. In a letter that same day to Col. Edward Baynes, Brock stressed the im-portance of securing Michilimackinac and Detroit. He had already bolstered Fort Amherstburg with the dispatch of 200 regulars. He made the case for additional resources: “I have not a musket more than will suffice to arm the active part of the militia from Kingston westward. . . Every man capable of carrying a musket, along the whole of that line, ought to be prepared to act.”

On Feb. 24, Brock issued a Proclamation Against Sedition, warning of the entry into Upper Canada of persons of “seditious intent,” bent on disturbing the tranquility and alienating the minds of “His Majesty’s Subjects.”

On Feb. 27, in his study in York, Brock wrote a coded commu-nication to a man named Robert Dickson, called Mascotapah, or “the red-haired man,” by the Dakota Sioux. Brock sought to turn American excesses to his advantage — seeing salvation among the Indian tribes alienated along that nation’s frontier. His letter to Dickson, which would not be answered for months, sought help mustering Indian collaboration with the British.

For Brock knows, as February turns into March 1812 and the onset of war is but 100 days away, that the security of Upper Can-ada will depend on aboriginal support.

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3 War Comes to the Great Lakes by Kenneth Kidd

. . . Unless Detroit and Michilimackinac be both in our possession at the commencement of hostilities, not only Amherstburg but most probably the whole country, must be evacuated as far as Kingston.

— Maj.-Gen. Isaac Brock, February 1812

The limestone cliffs rise a good 60 metres above the narrow stretch of land that separates them from Lake Huron, giving the heights a commanding view of the straits leading west to Lake Michigan. Not far north sits the entrance to Lake Superior. Con-trol this place, these heights, and you essentially control the Upper Great Lakes, the reason Michilimackinac (now better known as Mackinac) gets likened to Gibraltar. Its importance is scarcely lost on Brock in the months leading up to the War of 1812.

If Upper Canada is to fend off an American invasion from the south and west, controlling this faraway island in northern Michi-gan is key. Seize the American fort at Michilimackinac and you secure the fur-trading empire run out of Montreal, on which the Indians depend. But more importantly, you show British resolve in helping the Indians thwart continued American expansion into their lands, in what are now Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.

As Brock well knows, Indian allies will be crucial if he’s to de-fend Upper Canada, given the relative handful of British regulars at his disposal and the untested state of Canadian militia. This is where, fittingly enough, the moccasins come in.

Long before formal hostilities, Brock dispatched a certain Fran-cis Rhéaume to go off in search of Robert Dickson, the tall, red-haired Scot so revered by the Indians he’d come to know and live with around the Upper Great Lakes. Rhéaume is armed with a let-

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ter in which Brock asks, in the event of war, how many of Dickson’s “friends” might be favourable to the British cause, and whether they would “assemble, and march under your orders.”

The envoy and a companion travel hundreds and hundreds of kilometres trying to find Dickson, a quest that is almost doomed when the two are arrested and searched by the Americans at Fort Dearborn (Chicago). They are released when a too-cursory search reveals nothing, since Brock’s letter is hidden in the soles of their moccasins.

Dickson is finally found on June 18, 1812, the same day the United States declares war. He quickly sends a note back to Brock, saying he has up to 300 “friends” and will make his way to the British post on St. Joseph’s Island, northeast of Michilimackinac, arriving June 30.

For soldiers, a posting to Fort St. Joseph is hardly a prize. There is but one blockhouse, a leaky edifice that lets in the cold winds of winter, and virtually all the other buildings are in ill repair. The minute detachment of British regulars more or less apes these sur-roundings. The commanding officer, Capt. Charles Roberts, is a 20-year veteran and well respected as a soldier, but he’s now in poor health, suffering from, as he puts it, a “great debility of the stomach and the bowels.”

His men are in no better shape. The garrison consists of a ser-geant and two gunners from the Royal Artillery, plus 44 officers and men of the 10th Royal Veteran Battalion — essentially old sol-diers deemed unfit for much more than guard duty. Roberts de-scribes them as “so debilitated and worn down by unconquerable drunkenness that neither the fear of punishment, the love of fame or the honour of their country can animate them to extraordinary exertions.”

Dickson duly arrives at Fort St. Joseph with 130 Sioux, Win-nebago and Menominee warriors, and four days later Roberts gets

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a visit from Toussaint Pothier, an agent for the South West Com-pany, a transnational operation owned by the American John Ja-cob Astor and his Montreal partners at the North West Company.

As soon as war had been declared, Astor dispatched messen-gers northward, hoping to safeguard a fortune in furs stored at Michilimackinac before the news reached Canada through official channels. But as a loyal subject, Pothier also passes this informa-tion on to the British, giving them a huge tactical advantage, since their American counterparts on the frontier won’t learn that war has begun until days and sometimes weeks later.

Michilimackinac by William Dashwood (Credit: Mackinac State Historic Parks Collection)

Roberts puts his men on alert, while Dickson’s Indians are joined by more than 250 Ottawa and Chippewa led by John Askin Jr., an interpreter at Fort St. Joseph and son of a famous fur trader known throughout the Great Lakes.

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On July 8, Roberts finally gets official confirmation of the war from Brock, and he knows what’s expected of him. The North West Company has already promised to put its ships at British disposal in the event of war, so Roberts duly takes control of a gunboat, Caledonia. A South West Company official is then tasked with rounding up and organizing close to 200 Canadian voyageurs for the war effort.

No sooner has Roberts seen to all this than another dispatch from Brock tells him to hold off doing anything. Brock’s superior in Quebec is still stalling, hoping (against all hope) that the Ameri-cans will realize their folly and call off the war. This is problem-atic for Roberts, Dickson and Askin. The Indians are spoiling for a fight, so any British indecision threatens to reduce both the num-ber of warriors available and their ardour.

But just three days later, another dispatch comes from Brock, telling Roberts to “adopt the most prudent measures either of of-fence or defence which circumstances might point out.” Roberts needs no schooling in what those couched terms really mean.

The next morning, July 16, he sets off with the officers on board Caledonia, roughly 200 Canadian voyageurs in 10 bateaux and close to 400 Indians in painted canoes. They must paddle hard if they’re to make Michilimackinac under cover of darkness.

It’s approaching midnight when the flotilla comes across Mi-chael Dousman in a canoe headed toward St. Joseph’s Island. At Michilimackinac, the U.S. commander, Lt. Porter Hanks, has heard reports of Indians assembling on the Canadian side and sent Dousman to investigate. A resident of the island, Dousman is technically part of the U.S. militia, but he is first and foremost a fur trader, well-acquainted with the Canadian voyageurs heading in the opposite direction.

Although often called a “prisoner” in U.S. accounts, it’s more likely Dousman finds himself in a reunion with old and trusted

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friends. The last thing any of them wants to see is an Indian mas-sacre at Michilimackinac.

So, an arrangement is reached. Dousman agrees that, once they arrive at the island, he won’t breathe a word to Hanks about the invading force. Instead, he’ll quietly warn the villagers living below the fort and herd them into a local distillery, where a couple of British redcoats will later be sent to protect them from any Indians who might come threatening in the heat of battle.

Since any attack on the fort from beneath the cliffs would be futile, the flotilla instead pulls into a cove about three kilometres northwest. It’s 3 a.m., July 17. Once on land, the Canadian voya-geurs and barely more than 40 British redcoats take the central position, flanked on either side by the Indians. Through the night, they slowly make their way uphill through dense forest, the Ca-nadians hauling a six-pound cannon with the help of oxen from Dousman’s farm.

The British originally built the fort during the American Revolution, so they know it’s vulnerable to attack from the rear, something the Americans have since done nothing to correct. By mid-morning, the invaders assemble on a ridge above the fort, the cannon aimed directly at the fort’s weakest point. The American commander isn’t completely surprised by their presence. Dous-man may have kept his word, but the fort’s doctor, who lives in the village, has already raced up to tell Hanks what is imminent.

He’s done what he could to prepare, but Hanks has just 57 men fit for duty. Outnumbered 10 to one, he knows the situation is hopeless. Roberts sends a summons for Hanks to surrender, com-plete with a stark warning to the Americans that, “if a single In-dian should be killed before the Fort, it would be impossible to protect them from their fury and thirst for blood.”

Michilimackinac is now in British hands without a single ca-sualty, a punishing first strike to which Fort Detroit will soon be

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added. As Hanks will later tell his superior: “This, Sir, was the first information I had of the declaration of war.”

Postscript

Wars are full of irony and strange twists, and Michilimackinac proves no exception.

After the fort falls to the British, Hanks is paroled back to the American fort at Detroit, where the hapless Gen. William Hull is in command. He’s already rattled by the fall of Michilimacki-nac, fearing that its loss will unleash a horde of “Savages from the North” sweeping down on him. Hull’s nerves get no better when a British cannonball cuts through the officers’ mess at Fort Detroit, dismembering three officers, among them Hanks.

The Americans, though, are determined to recapture Mich-ilimackinac, whose supply lines across Lake Huron later become tenuous in the wake of growing American dominance on the wa-ter. In the early morning of July 26, 1814, an American fleet ap-pears within sight of the fort. One of the ships is the Caledonia, captured in late 1812, giving it the rare distinction of taking part in both a British and an American invasion of Michilimackinac.

But the American effort is marred from the outset by disputes within its leadership and one great embarrassment: the cannons on board U.S. ships cannot be angled high enough to fire at the fort. Several days of bad weather put everything on hold until plan B kicks in on Aug. 4, with the Americans landing more than 600 troops at the same spot where the British, Canadians and Indians arrived two years earlier.

This time, though, there is no element of surprise. The fort’s British commander, Lt.-Col. Robert McDouall, leaves 50 Cana-dian militiamen behind and sets out to meet the Americans with artillery and a core group of 140 soldiers — mostly members of

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the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and the Michigan Fencibles, whose ranks are largely filled with Canadian voyageurs.

Though outnumbered, McDouall lines his troops on top of a ridge at Dousman’s farm, at what is now the first tee of the Wa-washkamo golf course. About 350 Indians take up flank positions in the woods. The battle is brief. Under fire from three sides, the Americans soon retreat to their ships, and Michilimackinac will remain in British hands until 1815, after the Treaty of Ghent re-stores the prewar border between Canada and the United States.

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4 The Madness of William Hull by Kenneth Kidd

Those Yankee hearts began to ache,Their blood it did run cold,To see us marching forwardSo courageous and so bold.

Their general sent a flag to us,For quarter he did call,

Saying, “Stay your hand, brave British boys,I fear you’ll slay us all.”

— From the 1812 campfire ballad “Come All Ye Bold Canadians”

There’s a plaque on the side of the Comerica Bank building, at the corner of Fort and Shelby Sts. in downtown Detroit. It tells how this spot was once the southwest bastion of Fort Lernoult, built by the British in 1778-79.

Detroit and the rest of Michigan technically became part of the United States after the American Revolution, but the British lin-gered until 1796 as a way of securing the region’s rich fur trade. The rest of the plaque reads as follows: “In 1812, Fort Lernoult was surrendered to the British, but was regained by the Americans in 1813 and renamed Fort Shelby.”

As an act of public amnesia, that concision might be breath-taking, but it is also, in its way, understandable. What happened here 200 years ago was one of the biggest blunders in American military history, made all the more arresting by the bombast that preceded it. The implications on both sides of the border would be profound, shaping the course of a continent.

A fledgling U.S., then teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, was already deeply divided over plans to conquer Canada, and

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the huge American embarrassment at Detroit helped spawn se-cessionist movements across New England. On the other side of the Detroit River, the effect was precisely the opposite — a spine-stiffening moment that cemented the Canadian resolve in warding off American invasion, completely dashing former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson’s grand hopes for “the addition of Canada to our confederacy.”

For Upper Canadians, having already endured public threats and the ransacking of farms by U.S. raiding parties, it didn’t hurt that the American general who’d authorized both would be the one to suffer such an epic and ultimately comic humiliation: William Hull.

A hero in the American Revolution, Hull went on to become a successful Republican politician in Massachusetts but a failed land speculator in Vermont. He hopes to rebuild his fortune as gov-ernor of the pre-state Michigan territory, a job he lands in 1805. By early 1812, though, he’s lobbying Jefferson and then President James Madison for the right to lead an invasion of Canada.

There is already much belligerent clamour in Washington, and by early April — more than two months before the formal declara-tion of war — a three-pronged strategy is set in place. Rather than attempt a single invasion of Lower Canada via Lake Champlain, as the Americans tried during the Revolution, they plan simultane-ous attacks on Montreal and, through Detroit and Niagara, Upper Canada.

But in picking generals to execute that plan, Madison relies on distant glory. One, Henry Dearborn, is so old and corpulent that his own troops privately call him “Granny.”

Hull, at 59, is of similar ilk, but with a weakness for boasting and adding as much superfluous plumage to his uniform as pos-sible. “If an army was made up of fiddlers and dancers and nothing else was to be done but . . . drink wine and brandy, he would make

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a good general to command it,” says one American officer.

American Gen. William Hull by James Sharples, Sr. (Credit: City of Philadelphia)

Nor are Hull’s plans much of a secret. In early May, one Balti-more newspaper publishes a report from Pennsylvania that Hull is passing through on his way to Detroit, “whence he was to make a descent upon Canada with 3,000 troops.”

He raises about 1,600 militiamen in Ohio and, together with 400 regular troops, is soon embarking on his month-long journey to destiny and Detroit. By early July, his army finally reaches the Maumee River, which flows into Lake Erie, and Hull’s foolishness begins in earnest: he decides to send his personal luggage ahead to Detroit by schooner.

Still unaware that war has been formally declared, Hull seems blithely unconcerned that the schooner will have to sail through a narrow passage on the Detroit River in full view of British cannon at Amherstburg.

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But before it can get that far, the ship encounters a Canadian Provincial Marine longboat under the command of Lt. Frederic Rolette. The British and Canadians, courtesy of John Jacob Astor’s fur empire, already know war is underway.

A 29-year-old French Canadian, Rolette is no stranger to com-bat. He’s already fought under Lord Nelson at two of the era’s epic sea battles, the Nile and Trafalgar, and he isn’t about to fool around now. Before the startled American crew realizes what’s happen-ing, Rolette boards and seizes control of the ship, locking 30 sick American officers and men in the hold.

The real prize, however, is Hull’s luggage: two trunks contain-ing details of the general’s strategy, the number of troops under his command and his correspondence with U.S. Secretary of War Wil-liam Eustis. The trove is promptly shipped to Gen. Isaac Brock at York (Toronto), who’s frantically preparing to ward off the attacks everyone knows are coming.

His eventual foe, Hull, finally reaches Detroit on July 5. Even the locale now seems to unnerve him — an odd development for the territory’s ostensible governor. The area’s nearly 5,000 settlers are 80 per cent French and, by dint of trade, language, religion and intermarriage, they have far more in common with the roughly equal number of inhabitants on the Canadian side of the river. As Hull notes, he’s “surrounded by a Savage foe, in the mist of a peo-ple, strangers to our language, our customs and manners.”

With a two-to-one advantage in manpower, however, Hull could easily overwhelm Amherstburg in short order. He opts instead to invade the village of Sandwich, present-day Windsor, and issue a proclamation, printed in English and French, which initially casts the Americans as would-be liberators who “come to protect you not to injure you.”

But Hull also wants to frighten Canadian militia into neutrality and, ever wary of Indians, he threatens that if “the savages are let

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loose to murder our citizens and butcher our women and children, this war will be a war of extermination. The first stroke with the Tomahawk, the first attempt with the scalping knife will be the signal for one indiscriminate scene of desolation.”

Hull’s gambit has some initial success, as the militia at Amher-stburg dwindles to fewer than 500 from more than 800 in barely a week, but he soon negates that advantage. Still incensed by the seizure of his luggage, Hull takes his revenge by plundering the homes of Sandwich’s leading men, including Col. François Bâby, whose house sits directly across from Fort Lernoult, by now bet-ter known as Fort Detroit. Raiding parties begin seizing flour and livestock from local farmers. Entire orchards are cut down for fire-wood. Rather than friendly liberators, the Americans now look like barbarous thieves.

Still, Hull dithers at Sandwich for weeks without striking Am-herstburg, ostensibly awaiting cannon to be readied at Detroit and shipped across the river. What advance troops he does send to-ward Amherstburg are rebuffed with such relative ease that Brit-ish officers can scarcely contain their laughter. With the Canadian militia returning, and Brock on his way, the British quickly shelve all thoughts of abandoning Amherstburg.

For Hull, the bad news is only starting to pile up. He now knows that Michilimackinac has fallen, giving the British control of the Upper Great Lakes, and Hull will soon respond by ordering the evacuation of Fort Dearborn (now Chicago).

The Wyandot tribe, living southwest of Detroit, decides to shed its neutrality and decamp to the Canadian side of the river. Hull’s supply lines, meanwhile, are long and tenuous and coming under regular attack by Tecumseh’s Indians. The mutilated American corpses left in the wake of one skirmish seem to spook Hull to his core.

Just two days later, on Aug. 7, Hull retreats to the relative safety

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of fortress Detroit. But Tecumseh’s raids have also produced an-other rich harvest: U.S. mailbags, whose letters reference the deep discord in the American camp and the near-mutiny of senior of-ficers exasperated by Hull’s reign of indecision. One letter in par-ticular, from Hull to Eustis, is a kind of welcoming gift for Brock. It tells of Hull’s great worry that an Indian siege is imminent — a fear Brock will soon use to superb advantage.

Major-General Sir Isaac Brock by John Wycliffe (Credit: Library and Archives Canada)

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Isaac Brock may be a great hero in Canada today, but this is scarcely his preferred side of the Atlantic. Born in Guernsey in 1769, Brock enlists as an ensign at 16, and a year after seeing action with Nelson at Copenhagen in 1801, he’s posted to Lower Canada. By 1811, he’s acting lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, and dreadfully unhappy.

While his peers are covering themselves in glory as part of the Duke of Wellington’s campaigns against Napoleon, Brock is lan-guishing. As he writes in one 1810 letter, he fears “fate decrees that the best portion of my life is to be wasted in inaction in the Cana-das.” The War of 1812 finally offers him, if not an equal alternative to the Napoleonic war, at least a chance to make his mark.

At 42 and six-foot-three, Brock is an imposing figure, but he also knows how much is resting on his shoulders. His British su-periors have initially allotted him only 1,200 British regulars to defend the entire border of Upper Canada. If he’s to fight off any American invasion, he’ll need both Canadian militia and the Indi-ans — and more than a dash of daring and good luck.

On Aug. 13, Brock finally arrives near Amherstburg as part of a motley flotilla carrying about 400 men. He wastes little time before his now legendary first meeting with Tecumseh, the great Shawnee leader. The two practically fall over each other in mutual admira-tion. Of Tecumseh, Brock says: “A more sagacious or a more gal-lant warrior does not, I believe, exist.” Tecumseh remarks of Brock: “This is a man.”

Rather than await Hull’s next move, Brock decides to attack as soon as possible. He now has roughly 1,900 men at his disposal: 385 British regulars, 133 lake sailors, 807 Canadian militia and 600 Indians. Hull has a larger force — about 2,500 — but Brock, having read the captured letters, knows that morale at Detroit is tanking, its leadership in disarray. Once at Sandwich, Brock sends a mes-sage to Hull on Aug. 15, demanding his immediate surrender.

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“It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination, “writes Brock, “but you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops, will be be-yond my control the moment the contest commences.”

Hull refuses to surrender, but Brock has cleverly planted a seed in Hull’s increasingly enfeebled mind: Indians, extermination…

At the back of Col. Bâby’s house, which Hull had used for his headquarters in Sandwich, Brock sets up an 18-pound cannon. A block away, at the foot of present-day Ouellette Ave., sit two 12-pounders. Two brigs, the Queen Charlotte and General Hunter, are also brought upriver, putting their 18-pounders within range of Fort Detroit. That evening, the British shelling begins in earnest.

Drinking heavily, the American general is soon rattled when a cannonball rips through the officer’s mess. It isn’t a pretty sight. As one of Hull’s officers later recalls: “His lips (were) quivering, the tobacco juice running from the sides of his mouth upon the frills of his shirt.”

Early the next morning, Brock sets out with roughly 1,300 men to cross the river downstream from Detroit, embarking near the current site of a power plant at Brighton Beach. Canadian John Richardson, an officer with the British army and future novelist, would later write of the crossing that “a soft August sun was just rising, as we gained the centre of the river.” Mixed in with their boats are “numerous canoes filled with Indian warriors, decorat-ed in their half nakedness for the occasion, and uttering yells of mingled defiance of their foes and encouragement to the soldiery.”

Once on American soil, Brock is the perfect foil to Hull, riding so nonchalantly at the head of his troops that even his own officers beg Brock to make himself a less conspicuous target. But Brock will have none of it, and reputedly replies that “many men follow me from a feeling of personal regard, and I will never ask them to go where I do not lead them.”

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Brock’s troops are almost within range of American cannon before they wheel sharply to the left and the protection of a small ravine.

A shrewd judge of character, Brock also has psychology in his arsenal. He’s already had Canadian militia dress in discarded Brit-ish uniforms to make them appear to be hardened redcoats. Now he has Tecumseh’s Indians file across a meadow, within full view of the fort but out of range, then disappear into the forest where they circle back to cross the meadow again in a continuous loop. The Americans are duped: they think Tecumseh’s band of painted, screeching warriors is enormous.

Hull is so terrified of a massacre that he quickly resolves to sur-render and sends word to Brock, asking for three days to prepare the evacuation. Brock gives him three hours, after which he says he’ll attack.

It’s a stunning, bloodless victory.Hull is soon handing over 2,500 American troops, along with

33 cannon and nearly 3,000 muskets, plus tons of gunpowder and lead. Some of Hull’s own officers, suddenly realizing they’ve been beaten by a force barely half as large, break swords over their knees in protest. One Ohio volunteer will soon write bitterly to the U.S. secretary of war that Hull has caused “so foul a stain upon the na-tional character.”

More than 2,000 American militiamen are “paroled” — sent home on pledges they won’t fight again until their names are ex-changed for those of similarly paroled Canadians. Hull and more than 500 U.S. regulars are duly marched to Quebec as prisoners, a parade expressly designed to boost Canadian morale.

But the British shrewdly release Hull in September, knowing his arrival in the U.S. will roil the republic, where he’s being dubbed a “gasconading booby.” Tried for cowardice, he is spared the firing squad only by a presidential pardon, but his reputation is in tatters.

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As Madison himself will later write, Hull “sunk before obstacles at which not an officer near him would have paused, and threw away an entire army.”

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5 Queenston Heights: Canada on the Brink by Kenneth Kidd

“By putting the best face that your situation admits, the enemy may be induced to delay an attack until you will be able to meet him and carry the war into Canada. At all events, we must calculate on pos-sessing Upper Canada before winter sets in.”

— U.S. Maj.-Gen. Henry Dearborn to Maj.-Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer, Sept. 26, 1812

There is scarce need of a degree from Royal Military College to grasp the significance of Queenston Heights, a soaring piece of hard limestone more than 100 metres above the swirling eddies and whirlpools of the Niagara River. On a clear day, the unaided eye can easily identify each major tower in Toronto’s faraway sky-line. Command these heights and you’re on your way to being lord of Niagara, a point that isn’t lost on any of the combatants 200 years ago.

For the Americans, victory here would help erase the bitter taste of two stunning and embarrassing defeats at Michilimacki-nac and Detroit — losses that had only embittered the great di-vide between pro-war Republicans and anti-war Federalists south of the border. Another defeat along the Niagara River would em-bolden the separatist movements in anti-war New England, three of whose (Federalist) governors have openly defied U.S. President James Madison’s order to call up their militias.

For the sometimes fractious alliance with Canadians and Indi-ans that British Gen. Isaac Brock has cobbled together, the loss of Niagara would be monumental, handing control of western Upper

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Canada to the Americans just a few months after war has been declared. No matter how the inevitable contest ends, it’s bound to become a signal event in Canadian history, a kind of crucible. Memories of it will still be so vivid that they’ll become enshrined in Canada’s unofficial national anthem, “The Maple Leaf Forever,” penned more than five decades later:

At Queenston Heights and Lundy’s Lane,Our brave fathers, side by side,For freedom, homes and loved ones dear,Firmly stood and nobly died.

An invasion along the Niagara frontier had been in the works even before the Americans formally declared war in June 1812, and the job of carrying that out now falls to a certain Maj.-Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer, whose appointment has more to do with political cunning than military expertise.

A prominent politician, Van Rensselaer has been pencilled in as the next Federalist candidate for governor of New York. But he’s also a militia leader, albeit with no battlefield experience. Which is precisely why the state’s incumbent Republican governor, Daniel Tompkins, offers the region’s top military post to his would-be gu-bernatorial rival. Van Rensselaer can scarcely refuse — he’d be pil-loried as a coward — but by accepting, he’s also absenting himself from the electoral fray. Tompkins even raises the stakes by making potential victory seem easy: “I feel a confidence that we shall make ourselves masters of Canada by Militia alone.”

So Van Rensselaer duly finds himself by the river in Lewiston, N.Y., about halfway between Niagara Falls and Lake Ontario, com-manding an American force that is short of just about every sup-ply imaginable. There is relatively little ammunition on hand, not enough uniforms or even shoes, too few bayonets and tents, in-

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sufficient cooking pots and hospital stores, and a lack of axes and shovels to build defensive earthworks.

The shortfalls inevitably take on a political hue, courtesy of Lt.-Col. Solomon Van Rensselaer, the general’s younger but more militarily experienced cousin, hired as aide-de-camp. Solomon is quick to blame the supply problems on New York quartermaster Peter Porter, a prominent Republican war hawk and, in Solomon’s considered opinion, “an abominable scoundrel.” Solomon’s sneer-ing condemnation is so public that Porter eventually challenges him to a duel, which is averted only when the senior Van Rens-selaer intervenes.

If the general needs any more proof of the chasms within his ranks, Van Rensselaer certainly finds it beginning on Aug. 23, 1812. On the Canadian side, amid much red-coated pageantry, U.S. Gen. William Hull and roughly 500 American prisoners from the fall of Detroit are being marched along the river, en route to Quebec, the wounded in open carts. This massed show of British power has precisely the effect Brock intends. Fear and doubt begin spreading in the U.S. militia, while the war hawks among them, especially the Republican officers, are panting for revenge.

“The public mind in this quarter is wrought up almost to a state of madness,” Porter writes to Tompkins. “Jealously and mistrust begin to prevail toward the general officers, occasioned perhaps by the rash and imprudent expressions on politics of some of the per-sons attached to them, but principally to the surrender of Detroit, which among the common people is almost universally ascribed to treachery (by Hull).”

Ever the shrewd judge of character, Brock has once again man-aged to sow fear and division within enemy ranks, just as he did at Detroit. While Van Rensselaer deals with his roiling camp, Brock is bouncing all over Upper Canada, hailed as a national hero. Brock may be giving out final instructions to his officers at the likes of

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York (Toronto) and Kingston, but he’s also using his new-found celebrity to rally the Canadian militia.

Privately, the general has long harboured doubts about the loy-alty and likely effectiveness of the militia, but he’s now publicly lauding them. In one deft exaggeration, he even says he might not have attempted his bold strike at Detroit without the militia by his side. Brock doesn’t return to Fort George and nearby Niagara (present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake) until Sept. 6, and he’s more than a little alarmed at how the Americans have used a temporary armistice to bring in more troops and supplies.

There are, however, some developments to buoy his spirits. He has shifted a few companies of his old regiment, the 49th Foot, to Fort George from Kingston. Several hundred Mohawk warriors have, as a result of Detroit, cast off their neutrality and are now headed to Niagara under John Norton, the Scot turned adopted Mohawk chief. Meanwhile, the number of American deserters is growing, especially from the U.S. regular army. They arrive with tales of poor morale, bad food and disease. And Brock, at any rate, has never had much respect for the “enraged democrats” of the U.S. militia, who “have neither subordination nor discipline. They die very fast.”

But the British regulars and Canadian militia along the Niagara River are still greatly outnumbered by the American troops op-posite. Brock’s biggest concern is that one of his two flanks will be turned: that either Fort George at one end or Fort Erie at the other will fall, allowing the Americans to move inland and attack Brit-ish positions from behind. With that in mind, Brock puts most of his troops on the flanks, with the heights at Queenston only thinly defended, although there is a cannon battery about halfway up the steep slope on a little triangle of flat land — a redan, in military parlance.

Defence, however, is not Brock’s natural instinct. He still thinks

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that, if he acts boldly enough, he can easily replicate his success at Detroit. Which is precisely what his superior at Quebec, Sir George Prevost, doesn’t want. Mired in their gargantuan struggle with Na-poleon, the British want merely to defend Upper and Lower Cana-da and the Maritimes with as few resources as possible. Brock is to take no offensive action, a leash that clearly chafes. As Brock writes to his brother, this is “a most awkward predicament,” since “I could at this moment sweep everything before me from Fort Niagara to Buffalo. . . ” Instead, he feels left on the shelf while his peers stand with Wellington in the big show that will lead to Waterloo.

A temporary armistice along the Canada-U.S. border — pro-posed by Prevost and agreed to by Dearborn — would have tied Brock’s hands at any rate. But that truce finally expires Sept. 8, and the date offers a ready comparison with Europe and the reasons for British restraint in the Americas. It’s only a day after Napoleon wins the Battle of Borodino en route to Moscow, a clash involving 250,000 combatants and combined casualties of more than 80,000 in a single day. War in North America is microscopic by compari-son, and the British are determined to keep it that way.

Along the Niagara, Brock has just 1,200 or so British regulars, 800 Canadian militia and perhaps 500 Indians at his disposal. On the opposite side of the river sits an American force of 4,000 mi-litia and 2,300 regulars, the latter soon bolstered by the arrival, near Buffalo, of 2,000 more troops under U.S. Brig.-Gen. Alexan-der Smyth. The British across the lake at Fort Erie are naturally alarmed, but what they don’t know is that Smyth — a bombastic regular-army general with near-complete disdain for mere militia — has no intention of co-operating with Van Rensselaer, techni-cally his superior.

Van Rensselaer hoped to mount a two-pronged invasion, with his own force taking Queenston Heights while Smyth’s regulars lay siege to Fort George. But Smyth ignores every piece of communi-

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cation Van Rensselaer sends him and refuses to travel to Lewiston for any meetings to plan the invasion of Canada. Van Rensselaer will be on his own, and his hand is about to be forced.

Queenston Heights. Artist unknown (Credit: RiverBrink Art Museum)

At Black Rock, part of present-day Buffalo, the Americans are busy building three ships when their navy supervisor, Lt. Jesse El-liott, notices two British ships anchored near Fort Erie. One of them is Caledonia, which had earlier helped capture the U.S. fort at Michilimackinac; the other is a U.S. brig captured at Detroit and renamed in honour of that victory. For the Americans, the sight is far too tempting.

Elliott is soon leading about 100 men in two longboats on a daring raid. It is past midnight, and they must row against strong currents, but by 3 a.m., Oct. 9, they’re pulling alongside the un-suspecting British ships. Caledonia is quickly overwhelmed and sailed to the American side, loaded with valuable furs and pork. A heated battle ensues for Detroit, but Elliott can’t manoeuvre the

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now anchorless ship, which drifts downstream and runs aground on Squaw Island. Under heavy British fire, the Americans have no choice but to strip what they can and set Detroit alight.

After months of farcical setbacks, the U.S. finally has a victory and the buoyant mood all but forces Van Rensselaer to undertake what he once thought suicidal: a single attack on Queenston alone. There are, after all, more than just strategic advantages to captur-ing the Canadian side of the Niagara. Compared with the tangled forest of the American shore, the western side of the river is a posi-tive Arcadia. The tidy villages of Queenston and Niagara are sur-rounded by prosperous farms and orchards. If Van Rensselaer and his men must stay on through the winter, better there than on the U.S. side. For nearly all of September, the Americans have had to endure not just supply problems, but near constant rain and wind. Action, any action, would be better than suffering in situ.

Finally, on Oct. 10, Van Rensselaer issues a strict order for Smyth to start marching his men to Lewiston. Smyth complies. His men tear down their encampment and begin the long trek south amid a huge downpour. But they’re only about halfway there when Van Rensselaer calls them off. The weather is too dreadful, and yet he has to do something soon. He resolves to cross the river in the early hours of Oct. 13, without Smyth, the first mistake in what will become a litany of others.

Weeks earlier, Dearborn told Van Rensselaer that he’d need enough boats to carry 5,000 men and their cannon across the river all at once. But Van Rensselaer has arranged for only 13 bateaux, each one capable of holding just 25 or so men, despite the nearby presence of many more watercraft.

The Americans begin embarking in the wee hours, but no of-ficer has been assigned the task of marshalling the many hundreds of troops waiting to climb aboard. The scene is chaos, yet the first wave manages to navigate Niagara’s tricky and sometimes contra-

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dictory currents to land at a narrow beach about 500 metres up-stream from the main docking area in the village of Queenston. The general’s cousin, Solomon, is ostensibly in charge of the inva-sion party, though he ends up in one of the last boats to cross.

At Queenston, British Capt. James Dennis has 420 men at his disposal, a mix of British regulars and the flanking (or elite) com-panies of the 5th Lincoln and 2nd York militias. They engage the invaders, but are forced to retreat around 5 a.m. By then, British gunners at the redan have figured out where the Americans are embarking on the opposite bank and start pummelling the area with “spherical case” — a thin-cased iron sphere filled with gun-powder and musket balls, invented by Col. Henry Shrapnel and capable of sending a lethal hail into enemy ranks. The Americans retreat to the safety of a nearby ravine.

Brock himself is soon riding hard from Niagara to Queenston, and this raises the first of several questions about his conduct. If he still expects the main attack to come against Fort George, why would he personally investigate a seeming diversion at Queenston rather than delegate that task? En route, Brock passes members of the 3rd York Militia who, having heard the din of musket and can-non, are similarly making their way to Queenston. If Brock ever does utter the words “Push on, brave York Volunteers,” it’s most likely at this point and not, as legend has it, while leading an uphill charge against the Americans.

The river itself now adds another wrinkle, for its currents have deposited a subsequent wave of American troops too far down-stream, in the town of Queenston itself. They are easily over-whelmed in the ensuing carnage, but their arrival induces Dennis and/or Brock to make an incomprehensible mistake: the British forces atop Queenston Heights are ordered to descend to the vil-lage. What’s so odd about this decision is that, circa 1812, every British officer has been schooled in Gen. James Wolfe’s conquest

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of Quebec in 1759, when his forces ascended a steep cliff to gain the Plains of Abraham — precisely the approach the Marquis de Montcalm never expected.

Now the Americans are handed a similar opportunity, and they manage to find a narrow fishermen’s trail up the cliffs. Once atop Queenston Heights, they easily overwhelm the British redan be-low them and rotate its cannon to fire on the village. Realizing the error of abandoning the heights, Brock quickly rounds up the light company of the 49th Foot along with parts of the 5th Lincoln and 2nd York militia for an uphill attack on the Americans.

It’s about 7:30 a.m. when Brock makes another mistake. Rather than let a junior officer lead the charge, Brock races to the front himself, his sword drawn. One musket ball grazes his left hand, but Brock forges on into the teeth of American fire until he’s finally hit in the chest. York’s George Jarvis, a 15-year-old who joined the 49th just the previous month as a “gentleman volunteer,” runs up to the general: “Are you much hurt, sir?”

Brock clutches his chest and makes no reply. It’s almost as if the lasting glory of a battlefield death is what he so deeply wanted.

By now, Fort George and the American Fort Niagara across the river are engaged in a fierce artillery duel as the British make a second attempt to regain the heights. This also fails, but the battle is now underway in earnest. There is skirmishing all over the place, with Norton’s Grand River warriors harassing the Americans at almost every turn. Overall command of the British and Canadians has fallen to Maj.-Gen. Roger Sheaffe, and what was an American victory in the morning is starting to dissolve. Gen. Van Rensselaer, who has stayed on the American side of the river, gets to see this up close when he goes down to the embarkation point.

Nearly all of the U.S. regulars have made the crossing, as well as several hundred members of the militia, but now the remain-ing militia — more than 3,000 men — are refusing to get into any

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of the available boats. Having sat around for hour after hour as battle raged across the river, they’ve had time to reconsider their position, serenaded by the blood-tingling war cries of Norton’s In-dians.

None of Van Rensselaer’s orders or threats can get the militia to budge. They’re now invoking their constitutional right not to fight on foreign soil. Momentum is shifting as Sheaffe starts as-sembling the biggest force he can muster. Troops are arriving from Fort George along with field artillery. By 1 p.m., Sheaffe has about 650 men, but, unlike Brock, he’s not about to do anything as rash as the faint hope of an uphill charge.

Instead, he takes his men on a circuitous route inland, so that they can ascend to Queenston Heights far to the west of the Ameri-cans, who are mostly facing north toward the village of Queenston or to the south. The American ranks, however, have been shrinking steadily all morning, and they have fewer than 500 on the heights. With further reinforcements, Sheaffe has more than 900 men with him by 3 p.m., and he orders the British lines forward.

Outnumbered on the heights, the Americans make plans to retreat toward the river, and then downhill to the north. But it’s too late. The British regulars and militia advance quickly, send-ing forth a wall of musket fire. The flank companies and Norton’s warriors, at either side of the main British line, move even faster and are soon upon the Americans. In the ensuing chaos, panicked Americans are hurling themselves off the cliff rather than die by Indian hands. Those do who manage to get down the hill are soon dismayed to find hundreds of their fellow soldiers cowering be-neath the cliffs, where they’ve been for much of the battle, awaiting retreat in boats that never came.

All of Van Rensselaer’s poor planning and the supply prob-lems have conspired to turn apparent victory into a crushing and humiliating defeat. Estimates of American losses range from just

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160 total casualties to roughly 500 killed and drowned, but there’s little dispute about the number of American prisoners: 925, almost evenly split between regulars and militia.

The butcher’s tab is comparatively tiny for the British, Cana-dians and Indians: only 25 or so killed and just 85 wounded. The bulk of these are British regulars, but the tally includes two dead and 17 wounded from the York militia, and five dead among the Grand River warriors.

The loss of Brock comes as devastating news to the Canadian colonists. But apart from a meaningless naval victory in the Atlan-tic, the first year of warfare has been a seemingly incessant stream of American defeats, including November’s Battle of Frenchman’s Creek along the Niagara River. As Capt. William Hamilton of the Provincial Light Dragoons will write in the wake of Queenston Heights: “So ends the Campaign of 1812, one of the most disas-trous ones to the American arms and a most glorious one for the troops and inhabitants of Upper Canada.”

Little does he know how much he’s tempting fate, for the fol-lowing year will be very, very different.

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Appendix A The War of 1812: An A-Z Glossary by Kenneth Kidd

As both Canada and the United States mark the bicentennial of a

war that proved so crucial to their respective identities, herewith

an alphabetical introduction to some of the people, places and

events that will figure prominently in the War of 1812:

A Amherstburg, Upper Canada: Small villages have a way of tak-ing on a larger life in war, and this one is a prime example, as it becomes a recurring obsession for American strategists and politi-cians. Located along the Detroit River near Lake Erie, it is home to both the Amherstburg Navy Yard and Fort Malden, and a key base for the Provincial Marine when war breaks out.

BBrock, Maj.-Gen. Isaac: There’s a reason so many Ontario towns and cities have streets and schools named Brock: if it weren’t for him, the Americans may well have succeeded in conquering Can-ada in the summer of 1812.

Tall and handsome, Brock is a commanding presence. Born in 1769, he joins the British army at 16 and quickly rises through the ranks, arriving at Lower Canada (now Quebec) in 1802 as a lieutenant-colonel. Eight years later, he becomes commander of all troops in Upper Canada (now Ontario). But with so many of his peers winning fame in the war against Napoleon, Brock longs to be back in Europe fighting alongside the Duke of Wellington. The

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War of 1812 suddenly presents an alternative opportunity.Little wonder that, when ordered to take only defensive action

at the outset of the War of 1812, Brock opts for a very liberal inter-pretation of what that means. Although he has just 1,200 British regulars at his disposal, Brock manages to rally Canadian militia and Indians to three stunning victories over the Americans — at Michilimackinac, Detroit and Queenston Heights — as hostilities begin in earnest.

Re-enactment of the Battle of Longwoods

(Credit: Glenn Lowson for the Toronto Star)

C Crysler’s Farm, Battle of: After so many humiliating disasters, the United States is growing desperate for a bold victory, one that might silence raging dissent on the home front. So, rather than attack Kingston, the Americans decide to borrow a page from Na-poleon and strike at the heart of the enemy: Montreal.

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Commanded by U.S. Gen. James Wilkinson, 300 boats carrying 7,000 men start their descent down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario. If they reach Montreal, they’ll face 3,000 British regulars and 5,000 Canadian militia members settled into heavy fortifica-tions. But Thomas Jefferson is confident of victory, declaring that Americans “are rejoicing in the expectation that Canada above the Sorel is ours, and that the earlier disgraces of the war are now wiped away.”

On their trip downriver, the Americans are harassed by about 1,200 British troops, so, on Nov. 11, 1813, Wilkinson sends 2,100 U.S. troops ashore to face the enemy directly. Although outnum-bered nearly two to one, the disciplined British regulars fire volley after volley until the Americans break ranks and flee to the river. The U.S. casualties: 102 killed and 237 wounded, against 22 dead and 148 wounded for the British.

Châteauguay, Battle of: Only a day after defeat at Crysler’s Farm, Wilkinson gets more bad news. For the final assault on Montreal, 4,500 American soldiers were supposed to move north from Lake Champlain and join up with Wilkinson’s troops. Instead, Wilkin-son learns they’ve been met and defeated on the Châteauguay Riv-er by a mere 460 French Canadians and 22 Abenaki warriors led by Lt.-Col. Charles de Salaberry.

Salaberry had stationed his men behind a barricade that stretched from the river at one end to a swamp at the other, and when the Americans attempted a pincer movement, they ended up firing on each other. Another 1,100 Canadian militiamen and In-dians soon arrived as reinforcements and the Americans retreated back to Plattsburgh, N.Y.

Clay, Henry: Although just 34 years old and newly elected from Kentucky, Clay is such an eloquent and savvy Republican that he

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quickly becomes a major player, both as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and as leader of the War Hawks, an especially belligerent group of Republicans.

As the war drags on, Clay is vociferous in countering rival federalist claims that the U.S. invasions and plundering raids are targeting innocent Canadians: “Canada innocent? Canada unof-fending? Is it not in Canada that the tomahawk of the savage had been moulded into its deathlike form? Has it not been from Ca-nadian magazines, (Fort) Malden and others, that those supplies have been issued?”

D Detroit, Battle of: When war comes, Detroit is a village of some 300 houses. Three-quarters of the population speaks French. Its sprawling fort, originally built by the British and later repaired by the Americans, boasts heavy fortifications and armaments. But in the summer of 1812, it’s commanded by the tragicomic U.S. Gen. William Hull. He’d actively lobbied President James Madison for a chance to invade Canada. Even before Congress formally declares war on June 18, 1812, Hull is making preparations to seize control of Amherstburg.

By July, he and his army reach Detroit, and Hull soon issues a proclamation that is widely distributed in southwestern Upper Canada. It includes a warning to members of Canadian militias: “No white man found fighting by the side of an Indian will be tak-en prisoner. Instant destruction will be his lot.”

As fatalism about an imminent U.S. invasion spreads among Canadian settlers and the militia, Brock realizes he needs to take decisive action by defying orders and attacking Hull directly. Brock is handily outnumbered. He has only 1,925 men: 385 British regu-lars, 133 lake sailors, 807 Canadian militiamen and 600 Indians.

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Yet he crosses the Detroit River with an even smaller force of 1,300, and cleverly plays on Hull’s terror at the prospect of an In-dian massacre. As the French Canadians among the Detroit militia start defecting to the British, Hull asks for a three-day truce. Brock instead gives him three hours to surrender, and Hull cracks. With scarcely a shot fired, the Americans surrender 2,500 men and hand over control of 33 cannons and 3,000 muskets.

EElliott, Matthew: A Pennsylvania Irishman who joined the Brit-ish during the Revolutionary War, he’s gone on to lead numerous Indian raids against Americans. He is so hated by the Americans that it’s said he fears crossing the Detroit River from his palatial home in Amherstburg. As an agent of the British Indian Depart-ment during the run-up to the War of 1812, Elliott becomes a key figure in the ever delicate negotiations with the Indians, whose al-legiance will be crucial.

F FitzGibbon, Lt. James: A favourite of Brock, FitzGibbon was born to a poor family in Ireland and enlisted in the British army as a teenager.

In 1813, he organizes an independent company of 50 rangers to counter American looting raids along the Niagara Peninsula. Because most of the rangers are Irish, they variously dub them-selves the “Irish Greens” and the “Bloody Boys.” Their ethnicity and green uniforms prove greatly confusing to the Americans, who tend to associate the Irish with republican causes. The Bloody Boys are so successful in thwarting American raids that a large invading force is sent to track them down.

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Thanks to a tip-off courtesy of Laura Secord, the Americans instead walk into a nightmare ambush at Beaver Dams, where FitzGibbon’s Bloody Boys and nearly 500 Mohawk warriors are ly-ing in wait. After suffering 30 casualties in three hours of fierce fighting, the Americans surrender; FitzGibbon walks away with 492 prisoners.

G Ghent, Treaty of: In August of 1814, eight men — five Americans and three Britons — arrive in the Flemish city of Ghent to negoti-ate an end to a war still raging an ocean away, but one in which relative power is threatening to shift dramatically. With the defeat of Napoleon, the vast British military, which now dwarfs the size of British forces during the American Revolution, suddenly becomes available. The Royal Navy alone has grown from fewer than 17,000 sailors in 1793 to roughly 120,000.

The United States, meanwhile, is teetering on the verge of bank-ruptcy. In December 1814, the secretary of the treasury estimates it will cost $56 million to continue waging war the following year, but that taxes will raise only $15 million.

Still, the talks drag on for months, with each side hoping for some development in the field to strengthen their hands, until a peace treaty is finally signed on Christmas Eve, 1814. The Treaty of Ghent essentially restores the prewar boundaries, with the Ameri-cans effectively exchanging occupied Amherstburg and Sandwich (now Windsor) for the return of Michilimackinac, Fort Niagara and much of eastern Maine.

H Harrison, Gen. William Henry: As governor of the Indiana Terri-

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tory, Harrison is relentless in trying to wrest control of land from the Indians. In the lead-up to war, he negotiates land treaties with as many older chiefs and small tribes as he can, moves that out-rage more powerful Indian leaders, none more important than two Shawnee brothers: Tenskwatawa, a self-styled prophet, and Tecumseh, the great warrior.

It was Harrison who led a force of 1,200 soldiers to raze the Indian settlement of Prophetstown in November 1811, while Te-cumseh was away, but not before being ambushed by an Indian force at Tippecanoe. That battle, and the fact that the Indians had British-made muskets, did much to inflame pro-war sentiment in Washington.

Re-enactment of the Battle of Longwoods (Credit: Glenn Lowson for the Toronto Star)

IIncorporated Militia: The Incorporated Militia of Upper Canada were created in 1813 to help fight off American invasion. As new,

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full-time regiments, they were in addition to the existing part-time militia (which tended to train infrequently) and the fencible regi-ments, such as the Glengarry Light Infantry (militia trained as if they were regular British army). For the soldiers, being in the In-corporated had its advantages. While serving, they would be free from taxes, and couldn’t be sued or arrested for any outstanding debt less than £50. Since the Incorporated were created and paid by the parliament of Upper Canada, they weren’t technically part of the British army, unlike the fencible units.

Izard, Gen. George: At the Battle of Châteauguay, Izard’s bri-gade was supposed to attack the French-Canadian barricades from the front while another force attacked from the rear. But Izard ends up charging the barricade after the Americans falsely assume that sniper fire from the Canadians means the rear attack has begun. Exposed, Izard’s troops suffer heavy casualties.

The following year, in 1814, Izard is ordered to march his army of 3,500 regulars from Lake Champlain to the Niagara front. This takes 40 days, during which Izard’s force is unavailable for an at-tack on Canada or the defence of any meaningful U.S. territory. Izard ends up being nicknamed “our meandering general.”

J Jay’s Treaty: The American Revolution may have gained indepen-dence for the fledgling United States, but it scarcely settled all dif-ferences. There are many, including John Graves Simcoe, the first governor of Upper Canada, who believe the British foolishly con-ducted a limited war during the revolution and that a large invad-ing force from Canada could sweep south and regain the American colonies. The Canada-U.S. border is, after all, still a fuzzy affair of rival claims, unclaimed land and Indian territories, with the Brit-ish still manning forts on the western frontier of the United States.

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But to Simcoe’s dismay, London is conciliatory. In 1794, Jay’s Treaty is signed. It calls on Britain to abandon the disputed posts by 1796 and relax some restrictions on American trade with the British West Indies. The deal reduces tension, but still leaves much unresolved.

K Key, Francis Scott: With the Napoleonic struggle winding down in Europe, the British hope to bring the War of 1812 to a close with a series of raids along the Atlantic coast. Having razed Washing-ton, the British set their sights on Baltimore, but the Americans have deliberately sunk two dozen of their own ships in the harbour to thwart any landing of British troops.

The British opt instead to simply bombard Fort McHenry from the water. If it falls, fine; if not, the British plan to withdraw the fol-lowing day, Sept. 14, 1814. On board one Royal Navy ship is Key, an American lawyer hoping to arrange the release of a physician captured in Washington and pressed into service treating British soldiers.

With the bombardment about to begin, neither Key nor his friend is allowed to disembark, but they’re permitted to watch from the deck. It’s then that Key pens the poem “Defence of Fort McHenry.” Later set to the tune of a then popular British drink-ing song, Key’s ode is renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which the U.S. Congress would formally adopt as the national anthem in 1931.

L Lundy’s Lane, Battle of: Coming in late July 1814, this proves to be one of the bloodiest battles in Upper Canada. After days of

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manoeuvring, with the two sides feigning attacks on the other’s supply lines, more than 1,000 American troops finally move for-ward to face an opposing force of 1,600 arrayed atop a low hill in present-day Niagara Falls, Ont.

Aping Brock’s decisiveness, the Americans attack the British lines directly and achieve some initial success until another 1,200 British regulars and Canadian militiamen arrive from Burlington and the Americans surrender the field. But the hand-to-hand com-bat takes a heavy toll. The American casualties run to 171 dead, 572 wounded and 110 missing, but the British and Canadians don’t fare much better: 84 dead, 559 wounded and 193 missing.

M Michilimackinac: Originally built in 1715 by the French, this fort subsequently passed into British and then American hands. Guarding the straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, its strategic importance is obvious to Brock, who arbitrarily decides that the British policy of taking only defensive action doesn’t apply to the hinterland.

Brock writes a sly letter to Capt. Charles Roberts, commander of the tiny British garrison at Fort St. Joseph, in which he suggests that the war presents a great opportunity to reclaim the fort. Rob-erts takes the hint and musters 25 British regulars, 200 Canadian boatmen and 400 Indian warriors. On July 17, 1812, they over-whelm 61 American soldiers without suffering a single casualty.

Until Roberts arrives demanding surrender, the Americans at Michilimackinac don’t yet know that Washington has declared war the previous month. By seizing the fort, Brock has not only se-cured the fur trade, but impressed the Indians, whose sometimes wavering sympathies now swing decidedly in favour of the British.

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N New Orleans: If Americans recall much about the War of 1812, it’s likely their dramatically lopsided victory over the British at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Facing an exposed enemy from protected positions, Gen. Andrew Jackson’s army manages to kill 290 Britons, wound nearly 1,300 and capture 484 prisoners in less than an hour.

After so much military ineptitude, victory here gives the Amer-icans a huge psychological boost, even though it comes two weeks after the peace treaty has been signed in Ghent. It also creates an agreeable myth: that plucky riflemen from the American frontier won the day, rather than the regular army’s artillery, which actually inflicted most of the damage.

O Ogdensburg, N.Y.: As the war unfolds, British officers are invari-ably puzzled that the Americans don’t attempt to control the St. Lawrence River, the key supply line to Upper Canada. The answer lies, at least in part, in the huge commercial ties linking upstate New York and Upper Canada, no more so than at Ogdensburg.

David Parish, a German capitalist who had settled in Philadel-phia in 1806, was soon the owner of 200,000 acres on the Ameri-can side of the St. Lawrence Valley, with his agents stationed in Ogdensburg, across the river from Prescott.

Without access to the Montreal market for their flour and lum-ber, the valley’s settlers wouldn’t be able to pay Parish and the area’s other large landowners. By lending millions of dollars to Madison’s administration in Washington, Parish is able to secure a tacit un-derstanding that the government will keep its troops away from Ogdensburg. That local neutrality will eventually collapse in the wake of U.S. raids on Gananoque and Brockville, but not before

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Ogdensburg’s leading lights try to procure an understanding with British officers. In the same spirit, some Canadians put up a sign on the north side of the river depicting an American eagle and a British lion, with the legend: “If you don’t scratch, I won’t bite.”

P Prevost, Sir George: Brock’s superior, Prevost was born in New Jersey in 1767 to a Swiss immigrant who’d remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War. Careful and diligent, he won acclaim as an administrator and had governed Nova Scotia before being promoted to command at Quebec. Although Prevost duly follows London’s instructions to take only defensive positions during the War of 1812, he’s a key figure in rallying the French-Canadian militia.

Prevost has some history on his side. After the Conquest, the British are at pains to preserve the language, laws and customs of the former French colony. And those in Montreal and Quebec, who’d refused to join up with the American rebels, have no fond memories of the previous American invasion in 1775.

Re-enactment of the Battle of Longwoods (Credit: Glenn Lowson for the Toronto Star)

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Q Queenston Heights, Battle of: As the third big defeat of the Amer-icans in 1812, this is probably best remembered as the battle that costs Brock his life when he arrives with reinforcements and leads an uphill charge to retake the high ground from the Americans. But the battle also reveals a recurring weakness in American at-tempts to conquer Canada.

Shocked by the sight of so many dead and the war cries of In-dians, more than 1,800 American militiamen balk at boarding the boats that would ferry them across the Niagara River and into bat-tle. They do so by invoking their constitutional right, as members of state militia, to refuse to fight on foreign soil.

The battle also gives rise to a crucial myth that steels resistance north of border and strengthens faith in the Canadian militia. The day after Brock’s funeral, the Kingston Gazette reports that Brock’s dying words were: “Push on, brave York Volunteers.” If Brock ever uttered those words, he could only have done so when he passed the marching York Volunteers en route to Queenston. Brock dies amid the British 49th Regiment.

R Republicans and Federalists: If the revolution had deeply divided American colonists between those with Loyalist and Patriot sym-pathies, the War of 1812 initially gives similar struggles a new life.

Madison’s Republican party hopes a decisive conquest of Cana-da will silence the Federalists, particularly in New England, where opposition to the war and sympathy for the British are strongest. Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island all refuse to provide militia for the war, while in Vermont the Federalist majority treats American troops like an occupying army that is disrupting trade with Canada.

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At Quebec, the British delight in telling American prisoners of war that the beef they’re eating has been freely purchased in New England. By 1814, there’s talk throughout New England of seced-ing from the fledgling union and there are calls for the negotia-tion of a separate, state-by-state peace with Britain. The governor of Massachusetts even sends an emissary to Nova Scotia seeking military protection from the British should hostilities continue.

S Secord, Laura: There are probably few Canadians who don’t know about Secord’s march through the forest to warn James FitzGib-bon of an impending American attack, giving the British a decisive advantage at the Battle of Beaver Dams. She is to Canadians what Paul Revere is to Americans.

Thirty-five years old at the time, and a mother of five, Secord has by then already nursed her militiaman husband back to health after he was wounded at Queenston Heights. Less well-known is that she was born in Massachusetts and that her father moved the family to Canada not as Loyalists, but in search of more and cheaper land in 1795.

T Tecumseh: As American settlers pushed relentlessly into Ohio, In-diana and Michigan, the great Shawnee dreamed of forging a vast Indian confederacy from Florida to Lake Erie, one strong enough to resist American expansion.

When Tecumseh finally meets Brock, their mutual admiration becomes legendary. As Brock will soon write to London, “a more sagacious and gallant warrior does not I believe exist.” Tecumseh, in turn, tells an aide: “This is a man!”

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Like Brock, though, Tecumseh will die in battle, in his case fac-ing an old nemesis, William Henry Harrison, at the Battle of the Thames in southwestern Upper Canada. Harrison’s army is twice the size of the combined British and Indian force, and when the British lines break, some fleeing, some surrendering, Tecumseh stays on to fight until felled. Rather than let Tecumseh’s body fall into the hands of the hated Harrison, Tecumseh’s followers quickly spirit the corpse away.

V Van Rensselaer, Gen. Stephen: As Brock parades the American prisoners captured at Detroit along the west bank of the Niagara River, the U.S. commander is determined to uphold a temporary armistice. But the Republican volunteers in his ranks think other-wise, defying orders by shelling the British as they unload the pris-oners from boats and capturing a British guard post on an island.

Van Rensselaer, a Federalist, is furious and sends his cousin, Col. Solomon Van Rensselaer, to find the captured guards and re-turn them to the British. Instead, the colonel finds the “prisoners” dining with their alleged captors at a local inn. It turns out that the six Britons are deserters, yet Van Rensselaer still insists on hand-ing them back to the British, which follows a common pattern. All along the border, Federalist officers often have more respect for their British opposites than for Republican officers and volunteers.

W Washington, D.C.: As part of their plan to bring the war to a close, the British sweep into Washington in late August 1814, burning government buildings, the Capitol and the White House. At the time, Washington counts little more than 5,000 inhabitants, but

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the symbolism matters.The levelling of Washington is immediately styled as revenge

for the American plundering and burning of Dover, on the north shore of Lake Erie; St. David’s on the Niagara frontier; and York, the Upper Canadian capital that will soon revert to its earlier name, Toronto.

Y York, Upper Canada: Barely the size of Washington, York also has the distinction of being a seat of government. But unlike Kingston or Montreal, it is only lightly defended, hence its appeal as a target, especially after all the American setbacks of 1812.

In late April 1813, a squadron of 14 American ships carrying an army of 1,750 men and their artillery shows up just offshore from today’s Exhibition Place. To the east, at Fort York, Gen. Roger Hale Sheaffe has scarcely more than 700 British troops. In this battle, at least, luck is on the American side, since strong winds push the landing boats even further west, away from the anchored squad-ron. As a result, neither the British regulars nor Canadian militia can move to counter the landing without exposing themselves to the guns of the American ships.

The American soldiers are soon marching toward the town of York, but not before Sheaffe orders the fort’s magazine to be set on fire. The ensuing blast kills or wounds 250 advancing Americans, including Gen. Zebulon Pike, as Sheaffe begins the long retreat toward Kingston. The Americans depart on May 8, but only af-ter much pillaging and the burning of the provincial parliament buildings, from which they first remove the Speaker’s ceremonial mace and a carved lion. The mace is finally returned more than a century later, in 1934, but the lion remains in the U.S. Naval Acad-emy Museum.

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Appendix B Little York, on the Eve of War by Kenneth Kidd

The little town that would later revert to an earlier name, Toronto, was only the faintest shadow of today’s metropolis as the War of 1812 approached.

Barely 5,000 people lived in what’s now Greater Toronto, but what they lacked in number, they made up for in activity, not least around Christmas 1811.

The yuletide then was a constant parade of dances, card parties, weddings, open houses and feasting on a scale that seems tiring to contemplate.

Dinners, eaten at midday, would range over much of the fol-lowing: hearty soups and fresh bread, fish and oysters, roasted beef, pork or fowl, sundry root vegetables from carrots and tur-nips to potatoes and parsnips, followed by three standard desserts: a rich plum or carrot pudding, a fruitcake packed with dried fruits and spice, and mince pies. This would all be washed down with tea, ginger beer, wine, sherry, dandelion wine, cider and whisky.

It’s doubtful anyone was in any danger of being swept up in a windstorm after that. In which case, you’d still be around for late afternoon tea, consisting of the cold leftovers and a whole assort-ment of cakes, pies, fruit, cheese, preserves and biscuits.

But lest you think the little town that became Toronto was all fun and gluttony, it had taken weeks and weeks of relentless labour to make all this largesse possible. They deserved a feast.

These days we tend to view the 19th century through a festive, mid-Victorian lens that would feature the fruits of industrializa-tion and the ensuing store-bought wares. This would have been

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almost unimaginable to people in 1811, not least those living in a provincial outpost, notes Dorothy Duncan, author of Canadians at Table: A Culinary History of Canada.

Whether you were a rich farmer or a prosperous innkeeper, you had to make just about everything from scratch. “Everyday life was no fun,” says Duncan. For starters, you had to cultivate, catch, raise or hunt most of the provisions you’d need to get through a long winter. All but the richest would have their own cow and chickens to ensure a supply of milk, eggs and butter, and at least a small vegetable patch, along with fruit trees.

The women and servants would have spent much of the fall lay-ing down all manner of preserves and pickled items, smoking and drying meat, and packing root vegetables in sand in a cool, dry place.

Shopkeepers would have stocked up on all the whole spices, dried fruit, currants, raisins and dates their customers would need for Christmas and winter. Oranges would be arriving from Spain, picked green and shipped in the hope they would ripen and change colour during their long voyage across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence. There’d be candied orange peels to prepare, and Scots settlers would be busy making marmalade.

Apples and pears would have been locally abundant, preserved or stored in a cold cellar for the winter. Duncan suspects there may also have been imported pomegranates, already popular in England, although she has yet to find any specific reference in early Canadian books, diaries or letters. And almost since York’s found-ing, oysters had arrived from the Maritime colonies, packed in straw inside 50-pound barrels. Oyster soup was common.

An 1808 account of winter preparations in a Saint John house-hold, similar to what would have happened in York, notes that “all supplies were laid in early in the winter — beef by the quarter, a pig, poultry of all kinds, and maybe some moose meat and cari-

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bou. All the meats, not salted or pickled by the mistress, were kept frozen in a place prepared in the barn.”

The cellar was also home to “a cask of Madeira, another of port and one of sherry, and chief among them, the mainstay of the sup-ply, a cask of Jamaica rum, very old and very fragrant.” Which also meant you’d be both well supplied and ready to do a little celebrat-ing. Christmas certainly seems to have been the launch of the so-cial season.

Lady Jane Hunter, wife of Gen. Sir Martin Hunter, wrote in 1804, while stationed in Fredericton: “Our gay season does not commence until after Christmas when the river gets quite frozen, and then everybody is flying about in sleighs in the morning, and going to gregorys and dances in the evening. I have been at one or two gregorys — stupid card parties, where you are crammed with tea, coffee, cakes and then in an hour or two, cold turkey, ham and (a) profusion of tarts, pies and sweetmeats; punch, wine, porter, liqueurs and all sorts of drink; so you can see these parties are no joke.”

Soon, she laments, it will be her turn to play hostess, putting a heavy burden on her kitchen staff. “Next week, the General says, I must begin, but it must be the end of the week, I think, for it will take Betty two or three days to make all the cakes, jellies and pastry.”

At York, says Duncan, it would also have been the season of open houses, in which a group of ladies would invite unmarried gentlemen to stop by for dandelion wine and biscuits, everyone sizing up the others as potential partners — a provincial rendition of Jane Austen’s society.

Marriage, in fact, was a big theme at this time of year. Since extended families were already coming together, sometimes over long distances, a lot of marriages took place in the days before and after Christmas. The young women would each take home a small

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piece of wedding cake to put under their pillow as a way of foster-ing dreams of a future husband.

There may also have been the odd chivaree, a common cus-tom in 18th-century Lower Canada that later became the norm in Upper Canada. It was certainly well known in York by the 1820s. In Canadians at Table, Duncan quotes an 1828 journal entry that describes friends of the bridegroom “assaulting the dwelling of a newly married pair with every species of noisy uproar that can be devised, for the purpose of extorting whisky.”

It was also a superstitious time, with pennies (signifying wealth to come), nutmeg and thimbles (a portent of impending matri-mony) hidden in puddings for guests to discover, along with their fate. “They’d be looking for signals about what the new year was going to bring,” says Duncan.

But there was far less common ground on how to mark Christ-mas Day, and the German tradition of decorating a Christmas tree wouldn’t become a British staple until after Queen Victoria had married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. Angli-cans and Roman Catholics might head to church Christmas Eve, but the sterner Protestant groups tended to view any undue cel-ebrations of the day itself as a sign of popery.

And the Scots, then as now, put far less stock in Christmas than in Hogmanay, or New Year’s Eve. The weeks leading to Hogmanay were a time to clean the house and barn, pay off debts and seek forgiveness from anyone with whom they’d clashed in the preced-ing year.

Then it was time to sit at home and await the “first-footer,” the ideally dark-haired man who’d arrive at midnight with gifts of whisky, salt or a piece of coal to symbolize warmth. “It was begin-ning to be, even then, a multicultural country,” says Duncan.

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Appendix C Time Travel: Camping Out With the Militia by Kenneth Kidd

It’s 5 a.m. when Jim Niddery coaxes the previous night’s coals into a fresh fire, readies two blackened coffee pots on the grill, and then retreats to his tent for a few winks. An hour later, the coffee is bub-bling away as another soldier from the Incorporated Militia of Up-per Canada emerges from his small white tent and settles himself uneasily onto a nearby chair.

“How’s the old head?” Niddery wonders.“I don’t get pain. I just get dizzy.”“Want another drink?” taunts Niddery.There were many drinks scant hours before, in what has become

a first-night tradition whenever those portraying the Incorporated Militia come together to help recreate a War of 1812 battle, in this case the 1814 Battle of Longwoods near present-day London. This would be the ritual port tasting in a large, white tent that serves as officers’ mess, with 13 bottles on offer the previous night, among them a 20-year-old tawny port from Taylor Fladgate.

But before any lips could embrace a port-laden silver glass, an-other tradition had to be observed: the first of three formal toasts, one customarily given by the man most recently enlisted. Which would, in the event, be yours truly, a freshly minted private with the 2nd Lincoln Militia Artillery.

“To his grand and glorious majesty, King George III, his heirs and successors. Gentlemen, the King.”

All: “The King.”There followed a toast to the regiments — with sundry mem-

bers of the Incorporated Militia, the Glengarry Light Infantry Fen-

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cibles (the “Glennies”), the Royal Newfoundland Regiment (the “RNRs”), the 2nd Lincoln Militia and even the opposing 102nd U.S. Infantry in attendance — and then a toast to the fallen, the absent friends. This was all starting to seem like a lovely little war.

Until, that is, you come to the buttons, which in period costume means a great many. There are buttons on your woollen vest and buttons on your woollen jacket, both of which cover a long-sleeved white cotton shirt that drapes to your knees. This is a little prob-lematic when it comes to the buttons on your trousers, what with all that cotton inevitably bunched up around your middle.

There are, to begin, the three buttons that secure your trousers at the waist. Then comes the trickier bit involving a kind of draw-bridge flap just below that; you have to fold it in on itself and then raise one end up to the waist, where it’s secured with two more but-tons. The bunched-up cotton, the folding of the flap — it all makes you feel so paunchy that you start wondering whether all the wor-thies portrayed in old oil paintings were really as fat as they seem.

There is, however, another problem. The black boots on offer from John Sek of the 2nd Lincoln are several sizes too small. So it’s time to improvise, which involves the story’s only connection to fly-fishing: I grab my felt-soled wading boots from the truck. Dark green and black, at least they won’t be as conspicuous as white sneakers. “Nobody looks at your feet,” assures Sek, who came up with the offer of a uniform after learning that my great-great-great-great-grandfather had been wounded in the Battle of York in 1813, while serving with the 1st York Militia.

Now suitably garbed in white trousers, red vest, blue jacket and blue-and-red cap, it’s easy to start feeling the part. It’s also funny how tunes from H.M.S. Pinafore start popping into your head, un-bidden, the music of one performance art migrating to another. For he himself has said it / And it’s greatly to his credit / That he is a Englishman / That he is-is a-a E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-enggglishman.”

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Off in the woods, the more zealous enthusiasts are already doing an early morning skirmish — essentially an excuse to run around the forest, hide behind trees and fire muskets before the real business gets underway. “Why you get into this stuff is per-sonal,” says Sek. “Some guys are absolute purists, but the majority of us are here to have fun.”

Sek’s personal delight is firing his custom-built replica cannon, a two-pounder for those keeping score at home. During battle re-enactments, he and all the others will use only gunpowder, sans cannonballs or grapeshot. But the guys with cannons all seem to have friends with enough acreage elsewhere to let them safely fire away with all sorts of projectiles when they’re not off on re-enact-ing weekends — everything from golf balls to pig-iron window weights cut into smaller pieces.

Then there’s the particular genius of Richard Waddington, who’s discovered that tall and slim beer cans, cut in half and filled with plaster, make for dandy ammunition. He’s here portraying the gun crew of a landing party from H.M.S. Magnet, the latest iteration of a re-enactment career that’s already spanned 37 years. Wadding-ton confides that his fascination with all things military goes back to when he was 7 years old, on D-Day. Now he’s the proud owner of a full cannon rig, a three-pounder that set him back $6,000. “I cancelled my life insurance, paid for my funeral and bought my cannon,” he says, grinning.

For others, it’s a love of history, one reason Norm Drouillard, a private with the Glengarry Light, has been doing it for 25 years, although he’s cut back to maybe six events per year from as many as 15 in the past. “I have a good, loving wife I hope to keep as a good, loving wife.”

Drouillard says the real attraction is social, and since the Battle of Longwoods kicks off the marching season, there’s an extra fris-son in the air, which is why he can scarcely get to the washroom

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without being stopped every few paces by someone he hasn’t seen in months.

And the older you get, the dicier such delays become. “It can get critical really quick,” he says. And then there are all those buttons.

Richard Feltoe, the mutton-chopped Geordie who’s captain of the Incorporated Militia, is barking out a long series of commands, all set in 4/4 time.

Present armsReverse armsRest on arms reversedAttentionPresent armsShoulder armsThe drilling began in earnest after breakfast, but this is a new

one, which essentially starts with twisting and turning your mus-ket out front of you and then putting it under your left arm with the barrel sticking out behind, which you then secure by reaching behind your back with your right arm.

As the token guest from the 2nd Lincoln, yours truly has be-come the sole member of the Incorporated’s third rank, behind two other lines of men when firing. We spend a goodly amount of time drilling (Secure arms / fix bayonet / shoulder arms . . .) and then drilling some more (Make ready / p’sent / fire), as well as much marching (To the right, oblique) and regrouping in various ways (Dress left).

It’s all about building muscle memory, so you don’t have to think about any of the commands, which come thick and furious in the field. Wielding a standard-issue, 12.5-pound “Brown Bess” musket just inches from the next soldier, there’s no room for error when it comes to bayonets and ramrods. Hence the strict rules about the formation and movement of British Army and Canadian militia units, since in any battle they all come together and act in

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unison.As a British Army “Book,” or manual, from 1807 insists, it’s all

about conformity: “To attain this important purpose, it is neces-sary to reconcile celerity with order; to prevent hurry, which must always produce confusion, loss of time, unsteadiness, irresolution, inattention to command, &c; to ensure precision and correctness, by which alone great bodies will be able to arrive at their object in good order, and in the shortest space of time. . . ”

On this day — hosted by those playing the Royal Scots, a regular army regiment dating to 1633 — there are several hundred recre-ators on site, portraying more than two dozen regiments. They’ve come from as far away as Ottawa and Ohio, and almost all of them have camped out overnight in period tents, cooking on open fires.

Re-enactment of the Battle of Longwoods (Credit: Glenn Lowson for the Toronto Star)

By mid-afternoon, all the British and Canadian regiments are coming together for the first real battle. As was the custom 200 years ago, we march and wheel (or turn sharply) in a long, narrow

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column, designed to let us turn quickly in any direction to fire on the enemy. After marching along a gravel roadway, we halt. Several regiments ahead of us continue marching up a hill and beyond some trees. The sound of musket fire and cannon is soon rever-berating.

Then it’s our turn to march up the hill, this time in front of the trees, until we come to the top of a small meadow. The whole column quickly reassembles as a line, two and three men deep, to face the enemy, who’ve already been engaged by the first regiments to climb the hill. The air is thick with the smoke of cannon and musket fire. The Americans in the meadow look more like a very loose huddle, with those portraying the Kentucky Volunteers, the 19th U.S. Infantry and the like firing on bended knee.

They’re no match for the wall of musket fire coming from the British and Canadian line, which begins to advance, sidestepping those playing dead, until the Americans flee into the nearby woods. Just behind the Incorporated, a redcoat is lying face down on the grass next to a Kentucky rifleman, the two convulsed in giggles.

This isn’t how the actual Battle of Longwoods played out all those years ago. In 1814, the Americans had lined up behind a log barricade and, thus protected, managed to rout a British and In-dian force almost twice as large. But it’s become a tradition on re-enactment weekends that one side is triumphant on the Saturday, with the other claiming glory on Sunday. Come the morrow, says Feltoe, “we die like carp.”

This is partly a practical matter. Relatively few re-enactors come from the U.S. to take part in War of 1812 battles, which the Ameri-cans lost more often than not. “If you’ve got guys from the U.S. and they are constantly getting the crap beaten out of them, they wouldn’t be too keen on always turning out,” says Feltoe.

And even at that, Canadians often end up portraying Ameri-cans just to get the numbers right. The Royal Newfoundland Regi-

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ment ends up doing this so often they’ve been dubbed “the cross-dressers” by some of their peers.

“It’s a game,” says Feltoe. “We’re all in this for fun.”Or, as our sergeant, Paul Kelly, likes to put it: “You get to be 12

years old.”

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Selected Bibliography

Historic Fort York by Carl Benn; The Invasion of Canada and Flames Across the Border by Pierre Berton; Guidebook to the Historic Sites of the War of 1812 by Gilbert Collins; Redcoated Ploughboys and The Call to Arms: The 1812 Invasions of Upper Canada by Richard Feltoe; The War of 1812 by John Grant and Ray Jones; The Incredible War of 1812 by Donald Graves; Laura Ingersoll Secord: A Heroine and Her Family by David Hemmings; Tecumseh and Brock: The War of 1812 by James Laxer; A Very Brilliant Affair: The Battle of Queenston Heights,1812 and Capital in Flames: The American Attack on York, 1813 by Robert Malcolmson; The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 by Benson Lossing; Tecumseh: Shooting Star, Crouching Panther by Jim Poling Sr.; The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies by Alan Taylor; For Honour’s Sake: The War of 1812 and The Brokering of an Uneasy Peace by Mark Zuehlke.

KENNETH KIDD, a National Newspaper and National Magazine

Award winner, is currently a Toronto Star feature writer. He is a

graduate of Trinity College, University of Toronto.

JIM COYLE spent 12 years as a reporter for The Canadian Press

and was for seven years provincial affairs columnist at the Ontario

Legislature for the Ottawa Citizen before joining the Toronto Star in

1997. Over his career, Coyle has had four tours through the Queen’

Park Press Gallery, as well as working as a reporter on Parliament

Hill. He has filed from every province and territory in Canada,

covered papal and royal tours, judicial inquiries, Grey Cups, the

Calgary Olympics and more elections and leadership conventions

than he cares to recall. Coyle and his wife, Toronto Star reporter

Andrea Gordon, have four sons.

© 2012 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

All rights reserved. Published in Canada by Toronto Star Newspapers Limitedunder the imprint StarDispatches.

Toronto Star Newspapers LimitedOne Yonge St.Toronto, ONM5E 1E6

Publisher: John D. CruickshankEditor: Michael Cooke

StarDispatches:Editorial Director: Alison Uncles Project Editor: Susan Renouf Copy Editor: Margaret BreamCreative Director: Nuri DucassiPage Design: Anda Lupascu

Crucible of Flames: Canada’s War of 1812

ISBN: ePub3 978-0-88785-523-8 Mobi 978-0-88785-524-5 webPDF 978-0-88785-525-2

Cover photo: Library and Archives Canada

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