Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (125 page)

Sir George Prevost
, recalled to face a court martial in connection with his defeat at Plattsburgh, died in 1816, one week before the hearing.

Henry Procter
, suspended as a result of his defeat on the Thames, died in 1822.

The Prophet
, Tecumseh’s mystic brother, was given a small pension by the British government and died in Kansas in the mid-1830s.

Phincas Riall
was named governor of Grenada in 1816, was knighted in 1833, and died in Paris, a full general, in 1850.

John Richardson’s
works include his long poem
Tecumseh, Warrior of the West
, his novel
Wacousta
, his personal history of the war, and a number of further novels, the best-known being
The Canadian Brothers
. His military career included three years of service with the British Auxiliary Legion in Spain from 1834 to 1837. In the early 1840s he edited two periodicals from Brockville. He moved to Montreal and later to New York, where he died in poverty at the age of sixty.

Eleazar Ripley
demanded a court martial to vindicate his character after Jacob Brown blamed him for losing the guns at Lundy’s Lane. But President Madison held that Congress’s gold medal was vindication enough. Ripley left the army in 1820 and became a politician. He died in 1839.

Frederick Philipse Robinson
was briefly Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada in the summer of 1815. He died, a full general and a Knight Commander of the Bath, in 1852, in his eighty-eighth year.

John Beverley Robinson
rose to become Chief Justice of Upper Canada, Speaker of the Legislative Council, and president of the Executive Council. He was one of the guiding spirits of the Family Compact, was created a baronet in 1854, and died in 1863.

Jonathan Russell
continued as U.S. Minister to Sweden and Stockholm until 1819. In 1822 he became embroiled in a bitter controversy with his former colleague, John Quincy Adams, arising from a dispute between Clay and Adams at the time of the Ghent negotiations. Adams successfully accused Russell of treachery and the resultant controversy is said to have caused Russell’s retirement from public life. He died in 1832.

Charles-Michel de Salaberry
, created a Commander of the Bath in 1817 for his victory at Châteauguay, was appointed to the Legislative Council of Lower Canada the following year. He died in 1829.

Winfield Scott
became general-in-chief of the U.S. Army in 1841. Victorious in the war with Mexico in 1847, he ran for the presidency in 1852 but was badly beaten by Franklin Pierce. He retired in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War and died five years later at the age of eighty.

Sir Roger Hale Sheaffe
rose to become a full general. He died at Edinburgh at the age of eighty-two.

John Strachan
, one of the pillars of the Family Compact, was a member of the Executive Council of Upper Canada from 1818 to 1836. In 1839 he became Bishop of Toronto. He was the first president of King’s College—the future University of Toronto—and also the founder of Trinity College. He died in 1867, in his ninetieth year.

John Vincent
achieved the rank of full general. He died in London in 1848 at the age of eighty-three.

James Wilkinson
talked himself into an acquittal before a court martial of his juniors—much to President Madison’s disgust—and spent his declining years justifying his career in three carefully edited volumes of documents,
Memoirs of My Own Times
. He died in Mexico in 1825.

Sir James Yeo
died on a voyage home from Africa in 1818, aged thirty-five.

Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

This book is the second of two dealing with the War of 1812 as it affected Canada and Canadians. Except for a short account of the burning of Washington, I have confined the narrative to the border struggle. Other events, such as the siege of Baltimore, the Battle of New Orleans, and the naval encounters along the Atlantic seaboard have already been dealt with capably by British and American writers.

My own work, which looks at the war from a Canadian point of view, is not intended primarily as a military or political history. These exist. Thus, I have not thought it necessary to list every military unit that fought along the border between 1812 and 1815. Nor have I attempted to go into minuscule detail on minor tactical points. Some lesser skirmishes—Prevost’s attack on Sackets Harbor in 1813, Wilkinson’s abortive attempt against the Lacolle Mill in 1814, to name two—have been omitted.

This is, rather, a
social
history of the war, the first to be written by a Canadian. I have tried to tell not only what happened but also
what it was like;
to look at the struggle not as a witness gazing down from a mountaintop but as a combatant struggling in the mud of the battlefield; to picture the war from the viewpoints of private soldiers and civilians as well as from those of generals and politicians; to see it through the eyes of ordinary people on both sides—farmer and housewife, traitor and spy, drummer boy and Indian brave, volunteer, regular, and conscript.

For this reason, both books have been based largely on primary sources—letters, military dispatches, documents, reports, diaries, journals and memoirs. I have invented nothing. Dialogue is reproduced exactly as reported by those who were present. If I have on occasion entered the minds of the participants it is because they themselves reported their own thoughts and feelings. This raw material, scattered over two continents, was gathered by my assistant, the indispensable Barbara Sears. I find it difficult to express properly my admiration for her industry and tenacity.

She and I would like to thank the various people and institutions who helped search out the documents which form the underpinnings of these books:

From the Metropolitan Toronto Central Library, Edith Firth and the staff of the Canadian History Department; Michael Pearson and the staff of the History Department; and Norma Dainard, Keith Alcock, and the staff of the newspaper section. From the Public Archives of Canada, Patricia Kennedy, Gordon Dodds, Bruce Wilson, Brian Driscoll, Glenn T. Wright, and Grace Campbell. From the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
, Robert Fraser. From Parks Canada, Robert Allen of Ottawa and the staffs at Fort George and Fort Malden. And these individuals: Peter Burroughs, Esther Summers, Bob Green, Paul Roney, and Patrick Brode.

Also: the Public Archives of Ontario; the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington; the U.S. National Archives; the Public Record Office, London; the Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky; the National Library of Scotland; the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; the Indiana State Library; and the historical societies of Vermont, New York, Rhode Island, Buffalo and Erie County, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania; and the Lundy’s Lane and the Niagara Falls Historical Societies.

I am again grateful to those friends and professionals who read the manuscript in draft form and made so many useful suggestions, especially to Janice Tyrwhitt, Charles Templeton, Jack McClelland, Maggie Dowling, and Elsa Franklin. My wife, Janet, the best proofreader I know, again prevented me from grammatical embarrassment, and my editor, Janet Craig, rescued me once more from inconsistency. Research notes were organized under the supervision of my secretary, Ennis Armstrong, who also typed much of the manuscript in its various stages. To all these I say thank you. There will be errors; I hope they are minor; they are all mine.

Kleinburg, Ontario

March, 1981

Notes

Abbreviations used:

PRELUDE: NEW BRUNSWICK GOES TO WAR

1
l.33
Le Couteur, pp. 490–500,
passim;
Squires, pp. 118–36,
passim
.

OVERVIEW

1
l.2
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 151, regulations; Sheaffe, “Letterbook,” p. 346, Sheaffe to Prevost, 13 March 1813.

2
l.16
Dunlop, p. 40.

3
l.20
Scott, p. 31.

4
l.26
Ibid., p. 35.

5
l.29
Jackson,
Black Hawk
, p. 71.

6
l.13
Ibid.

7
l.17
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 87, Dearborn to SW, 3 March 1813.

THE CAPTURE OF LITTLE YORK

1
l.3
PAO, Strachan Papers, Strachan to Brown, 26 April 1813.

2
l.12
Ibid.

3
l.23
Ibid.

4
l.33
Strachan,
Letterbook
, p. 18, Strachan to McGillivray, n.d.

5
l.7
Ibid.

6
l.22
PAO, Strachan Papers, Strachan to Brown, 20 Oct. 1807.

7
l.23
Ibid., Strachan to Brown, 21 Oct. 1809.

8
l.32
Ibid., Strachan to Brown, 13 July 1806.

9
l.17
Strachan,
Sermon
.

10
l.35
Niles Register
, 28 Oct. 1815.

11
l.7
Hollon, pp. 205–6.

12
l.11
Quoted in Lossing, p. 586.

13
l.12
Ibid.

14
l.16
Terrell, pp. 130–31.

15
l.25
Ibid., pp. 27–28.

16
l.2
Quoted in Hollon, p. 202.

17
l.25
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 162–63, Brigade orders, 25 April 1813.

18
l.34
Cumberland, pp. 14–15.

19
l.6
Ibid.

20
l.7
Humphries, p. 7.

21
l.13
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 147, Sheaffe to Bathurst, 5 April 1813; W. Wood, SBD, II: 89, Sheaffe to Prevost, 5 May 1813.

22
l.15
W. Wood, SBD, II: 92, Sheaffe to Prevost, 5 May 1813.

23
l.22
Firth, p. 279, Ely Playter Diary, 26 April 1813.

24
l.24
Magill,
passim
.

25
l.30
PAC, UCS, RG 5, A1, vol. 17, no. 116, McGill to Sheaffe, 17 May 1813.

26
l.5
PAC, UCS, State Books, vol. F, report on Mrs. Derenzy’s application; Derenzy to De Rottenburg, 5 July 1813; deposition signed by Leah Allan, S. Heward, W. Loe, 23 July 1813.

27
l.18
Firth, p. 292, Wilson to Wilson, 5 Dec. 1813.

28
l.23
Ibid., p. 279, Ely Playter Diary, 26 April 1813.

29
l.29
The Yankee
(Boston), 2 July 1813.

30
l.34
Firth, p. 279, Ely Playter Diary, 26 April 1813.

31
l.3
Ibid., p. 294, Strachan to Brown, 26–27 April 1813.

32
l.13
PAO, Strachan Papers, Strachan to Brown, 9 Oct. 1808.

33
l.27
Ibid.

34
l.33
Firth, p. 294, Strachan to Brown, 26 and 27 April 1813.

35
l.14
Ibid., pp. 279–80, Ely Playter Diary, 27 April 1813.

36
l.28
PAC, RG 8, vol. 923, pp. 12–16, Brock to Lt.-Col. Green, 8 Feb. 1804.

37
l.3
C. Elliott,
Scott
, p. 73.

38
l.10
W. Wood, SBD, II: 89–91, Sheaffe to Prevost, 5 May 1813.

39
l.12
Ibid., p. 89.

40
l.31
Ibid., pp. 89–90.

41
l.33
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 193, Chewett, Strachan, et al. to?, 8 May 1813.

42
l.6
W. Wood, SBD, II: 89–90, Sheaffe to Prevost, 5 May 1813.

43
l.12
Firth, pp. 304–5, Pearce account.

44
l.14
Cumberland, p. 17.

45
l.6
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 179–80, Fraser to?, May 1813.

46
l.13
Firth, p. 304, Pearce account.

47
l.6
Cruikshank,
Documentary History
, V: 180–81, Fraser to?, May 1813; ibid., p. 207, Finan journal; W. Wood, SBD, II: 90, Sheaffe to Prevost, 5 May 1813; Loyal and Patriotic Society, p. 229.