The Invasion of Canada (4 page)

The only group of Americans who truly thirsted for war, apart from the handful of congressmen known as War Hawks, were Tecumseh’s followers. In revenging themselves on the hated Long Knives they hoped to regain the lands from which they had been driven. It was a wistful fantasy, doomed to failure. One of the several ironies of this foolish and unnecessary war is that the warriors who helped save Canada gained nothing except a few American scalps.

The role of the Indians and that of the British regulars was played down in the years following the war. For more than a century it was common cant that the diverse population of Upper Canada – immigrants, settlers, ex – Americans, Loyalists, Britons, Scots, and Irish – closed ranks to defeat the enemy. This belief still lingers, though there is little evidence to support it. Certainly the old Loyalists and their sons rushed to the colours, and in the capital of York the British aristocracy (whose leading ornament was the Reverend Doctor John Strachan) glowed with patriotic fervour. But the mass of the people were at best apathetic and at worst disaffected. Some five hundred of the latter have been officially identified – men and women who either fled to the other side or supported the enemy by word or deed. Who can guess how many more kept prudently silent or worked in secret for the invaders? The reluctance of the militia to do battle when the war went badly suggests that the number was not small.

Traditionally, a common enemy unites a people in a common cause, especially when family farms are overrun, crops despoiled, homesteads gutted, livestock dispersed. But again there is little evidence of a united front against the enemy on the part of the people who suffered these disasters; it is doubtful if they were any angrier at the Americans than at the British and Indians, who actually caused a third of the devastation. The total bill for war losses came to almost a million dollars at a time when a private soldier’s daily pay was twenty-five cents. Compensation was not paid until 1824 and never paid in full. None of that helped make the cause universally popular.

Yet, in an odd way, the war did help to change Upper Canada from a loose aggregation of village states into something approaching a political entity. The war, or more properly the
myth
of the war, gave the rootless new setders a sense of community. In the end, the myth became the reality. In the long run it did not matter who fought or who did not, who supported the cause or who disdained it. As the years went by and memories dimmed, as old scars healed and old grudges evaporated, as aging veterans reminisced and new leaders hyperbolized, the settlers began to believe that they had repelled the invader almost single-handed. For the first time, Upper Canadians shared a common tradition.

It was a tradition founded to a considerable extent on a rejection of American values – a rejection encouraged and enforced by the same
pro-British ruling elite who fed the myth of the people’s war and who made sure that the province (and eventually all of Canada) would embark on a course markedly different from that of the people to the south. They were, after all, “the enemy,” and to be pro-American in post-war Upper Canada was to be considered vaguely traitorous. This attitude affected everything – politics, education, civil liberties, folkways, architecture. It affects us to this day, even those who do not think of themselves as Upper Canadian.

Thus the war that was supposed to attach the British North American colonies to the United States accomplished exactly the opposite. It ensured that Canada would never become a part of the Union to the south. Because of it, an alternative form of democracy grew out of the British colonial oligarchy in the northern half of the continent. The Canadian “way” – so difficult to define except in terms of negatives – has its roots in the invasion of 1812–14, the last American invasion of Canada. There can never be another.

A
BOARD THE BRITISH FRIGATE
Melampus
, lying off Hampton Roads, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, February, 1807.

The decks are clear of officers, for an entertainment is in progress. Music. Laughter. The tinkling of glass and silver. Leaning over the rail is an oddly assorted trio of impressed American seamen. One, William Ware, is an Indian from Pipe Creek, Maryland, a one-time wagoner who had served aboard the U.S. frigate
Chesapeake
until he was impressed, fifteen months ago, by a British boarding party in the Bay of Biscay. Another, Daniel Martin, is a Negro from Westport, Massachusetts, impressed at the same time as Ware. The third is a white man, John Strachan, also from Maryland, pressed on board
Melampus
off Cape Finisterre in 1805.

For two years Strachan has been waiting for a chance to escape, and now it has come. Because of the festivities, every boat except the captain’s gig has been hoisted in. There is no chance of pursuit. Strachan and his companions leap into the gig and cast off. Somebody hails them: where do they think they’re going? They shout back that they are going ashore, and as they pull for land, a hail of musket balls rains upon them. Unharmed, they reach Lowell’s Point, haul the boat onto the beach, carefully place the oars on the seats, give three hearty cheers, and dash away to freedom.

It is short lived. At Hampton Roads, the three sign up for service in the American navy aboard
Chesapeake
and soon find themselves at the centre of the “
Chesapeake
incident,” which brings America to the very brink of war with Britain.

The date is June 22, 1807. The American frigate is a few hours out of Hampton Roads, bound for the Mediterranean. As she passes a British squadron anchored in American waters, a fifty-gun man-of-war,
Leopard
, the flagship of Vice-Admiral George Berkeley, detaches itself and slips off in pursuit. James Barron,
Chesapeake
’s captain, knows exactly what is happening: the British dander is up; the captain of
Melampus
wants his men back. On the streets and quays of Hampton Roads, where British and American sailors and officers mingle, the presence of known deserters has not gone unnoticed. The Royal Navy has been especially infuriated by one Jenkin Ratford, a British deserter intemperate enough to shout gibes and insults at his former officers. In vain the British have asked for Ratford; the Americans have refused to give him up. Nor will they return the three men who stole the captain’s gig from
Melampus
. Now, all four men have thumbed their noses at the British and are safely aboard
Chesapeake
, which is heading out to sea, its lower decks apparently crowded with other British deserters, all well known to the captain but concealed under assumed names. This is too much for Vice-Admiral Berkeley. Off goes an order to every British vessel to stop
Chesapeake
at sea and take the deserters by force. As it happens, Berkeley’s own flagship is the one that will essay the task.

Stopped by
Leopard
, Captain Barron cannot believe the British will attack and so makes no attempt to clear
Chesapeake
’s decks for action. A young lieutenant comes aboard, demands the return of the four men-the only ones he can identify since the
Melampus
deserters have not taken false names and Ratford, who is now called Wilson, is easily recognizable from his earlier intemperate encounters. Barron, who has all four hidden below, feigns ignorance. After some fruitless talk, the Englishman leaves.
Leopard
’s captain continues the discussion through a loud hailer. When Barron refuses his demands, Leopard fires a shot across
Chesapeake
’s bow. No reply.

It is too late now for the British to back down.
Leopard
opens fire with her port guns, and a ten-minute cannonade follows. Twenty-one cannonballs tear into
Chesapeake
’s starboard hull. Another shatters her mizzen-mast. Her mainmast topples, her sails are shredded, shrouds cut away, spars splintered. By the time Barron strikes his colours, three of his men are dead and eighteen, including himself, are wounded. The British board the battered frigate but refuse to accept it as a prize. All they want are the three deserters from
Melampus
and the wretched Ratford, whom they will proceed to
hang at Halifax to their own great satisfaction and the fury of the American public.

The Americans are in a ferment. The man on the street finds it intolerable that British boarding parties can seize sailors from American ships on the pretext that they are Royal Navy deserters, then force them to serve in the hell hole of a British man-of-war. There is some doubt that the
Melampus
trio
were
impressed (the British insist they volunteered, and certainly two are thoroughgoing rogues), but that evidence is kept secret. To the Americans it is a flagrant attack on national sovereignty. In the words of John Quincy Adams, “No nation can be Independent which suffers her Citizens to be stolen from her at the discretion of the Naval or military officers of another.”

But to Britain, impressment is a necessity. Her navy has trebled in size since the war with France began. She cannot man her ships with volunteers. Worse, thousands of British sailors are deserting to American merchantmen, lured by better conditions and better pay-four times as much. Who can blame the British for recapturing bona fide deserters in time of war? Certainly not the British public; they applaud it.

But who is a bona fide deserter? Americans and British speak the same language, look alike, dress alike. British boarding parties, hungry for men, do not always bother with the niceties. They grab whom they can. No one knows how many American seamen have been pressed into British service (the figures run between three and seven thousand), but it takes only a few publicized cases to enrage the American public. Even when a case of mistaken identity is proved and admitted, months elapse before the seaman is returned. Service in the British Navy is like a prison sentence or worse, for as Samuel Johnson once remarked, “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Some American seamen have been known to cut off their hands to avoid impressment; some who refuse to serve are flogged unmercifully by the British; and a few, including the three escapees from
Melampus
, are prepared to risk death to get away.

Their recapture from
Chesapeake
touches off an international incident. Riots break out in New York, where a mob does its best to dismantle a British ship. The British consul is forced to seek police protection while an English diplomat on a tour of the Union finds it prudent to assume an incognito. Public meetings throughout the land denounce the perfidious British. In Quebec, Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac
Brock notes that “every American newspaper teems with violent and hostile resolutions against England, and associations are forming in every town for the ostensible purpose of attacking these Provinces.”

The future general is right: the country is emotionally ready for war, more so, in fact, than it will be in 1812. But its leaders are not ready. The President, Thomas Jefferson, threatens war but does not mean it-a dangerous posture. “If the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand, we will take Canada which wants to enter the Union,” he tells the French minister to Washington. The Frenchman takes these bellicose remarks languidly and reports to Paris that he does not believe that either Jefferson or his foreign secretary, James Madison, wants war. Jefferson bans British warships from American waters, enforces an embargo preventing all ships from sailing out of U.S. ports for foreign destinations, and hopes that these threats will force the British to abandon impressment. But the British do not yield and the embargo is a failure. The public’s ardour for war cools quickly. The crisis passes.