March 18, 2015

Finest Hour 160, Autumn 2013

Page 36

By Peter H. Russel

29TH INTERNATIONAL CHURCHILL CONFERENCE, TORONTO, ONTARIO, 12 OCTOBER 2012

“Churchill’s Insouciance Over the War Of 1812’s native dimension is typical of the scholarship of his day. Given the material available to him, and the short space he allowed for it, I judge his account to be first-rate. Nevertheless, the War Of 1812 deserves a longer account in any history of the English-speaking Peoples.”

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In September 1759, a British army led by Major-General James Wolfe defeated a French force led by Lieutenant General Louis Joseph Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. English-speaking historians refer to that event as a “conquest,” but French-speaking historians refer to it as a “cession,” and they are right in doing so. For the British did not do to the Canadians what they had done to the Acadians of Nova Scotia a few years earlier. When some 10,000 French Catholic Acadians were unwilling to take an oath of loyalty to a Protestant King, they were forcibly removed from British North America. Now that is a conquest.

Such a move was not an option for the British after their victory in Quebec. A few thousand British troops could not crush the 75,000 Canadiens, who vastly outnumbered them and had substantial military resources. In April 1760, a large french army came down the St. Lawrence from Montreal and the battle of the plains of Abraham was fought in reverse.

The French drove the British back into the citadel of Quebec. When the British relief fleet appeared in the basin of Quebec, the French forces withdrew to Montreal. Four months later the French governor at Montreal capitulated—not because the French had lost a military battle but because Sir William Johnson, Britain’s emissary to the Indian nations, persuaded the Mohawks who guarded the gateway to Montreal to remain neutral. This enabled General Amherst’s British forces approaching from the west to land on the Island of Montreal without firing a shot.1

The terms of capitulation at Montreal and Quebec granted Les Canadiens freedom of worship and unfettered continuation of their civil law. Fifteen years later the British Parliament consolidated that policy in the Quebec Act, the magna carta of French Canada. Instead of adding a fourteenth colony to the thirteen, Britain nourished a separate colony that was French and Catholic— partly out of prudence, and partly out of principle. This was the beginning of “the States and Canada.”

The American Revolution

In the first war between the English-speaking Peoples, the Americans failed to make Canada a fourteenth state. In the autumn of 1775, a rag-tag American force led by Richard Montgomery made its way along what Eliot Cohen calls the Great Warpath from Lake Champlain and down the Richelieu River to Montreal, which they entered with little resistance.2 Later in November Montgomery’s force converged outside Quebec with another column of Americans, led by Benedict Arnold, that had come up the Kennebec route from Maine.

The Americans, to quote Churchill, “flung themselves at the Heights of Abraham,”3 but to no avail. Montgomery was killed and Arnold was severely wounded. In the spring, when British ships brought reinforcements, the American invaders withdrew. In Montreal, Benjamin Franklin, whom the U.S. Congress had sent with two other commissioners to offer French Canadians the opportunity of being “conquered into freedom,” suffered one of the rare diplomatic failures of his career. Les Canadiens were not particularly hostile to the Americans, but they had been given enough cultural freedom to make it clear that they were not about to join a rebellion against their British rulers.4

And so Canada remained mostly French and Indian, ready to take in my folks, “liberty’s exiles” to use Maya Jasanoff’s phrase—Americans loyal to King George, who would quickly populate the western end of Quebec that, in 1791, became the separate British colony of Upper Canada.5

Churchill’s Account of the War of 1812

In Book IX of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, wedged in between a chapter on Washington, Adams and Jefferson and a chapter on Elba and Waterloo, Churchill gives us a short, ten-page chapter on the War of 1812. Given the overarching ideal of unity that animates this four- volume work, it is interesting to see how Churchill treats this second war in which English-speaking people found themselves on opposite sides.

Churchill was not stirred by this war. Indeed he thought it “a futile and unnecessary conflict.”6 Although writing when he did, Churchill was without most scholarly work on the war—much of it written in the run-up to the war‘s bicentenary— he still provides a lucid account of the war and a shrewd analysis of its causes and consequences.

A highly acclaimed book is Alan Taylor’s The Civil War of 1812.7 Churchill by contrast does not at all present the conflict as a civil war. The cogency of Taylor’s title rests on the fact that the majority of the non-native population of Upper Canada, where most of the land battles took place, were newly arrived American settlers whose loyalty to the British Crown at the beginning of the war was far from secure. Adding to the war’s civil nature was strong Federalist opposition to it on the American side of the border. To a considerable extent, the War of 1812 was a war among Americans. Churchill’s account is entirely in terms of conflict between states, not peoples.

As for the causes of the war, Churchill distinguishes the ostensible reason for the Americans’ declaring war from what he considers to be the real reason. “The causes of the conflict,” he writes, “were stated in traditional terms: impressments, violations of the three-mile limit, blockades and Orders-in-Council.”8 But what tipped the balance in Congress in favour of war was the land hunger of congressmen from states like Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. “Their prime aim,” Churchill writes, “was to seize Canada and establish American sovereignty throughout the whole Northern continent.”9

Though Churchill’s analysis of American war aims has some validity, he has nothing to say about Great Britain’s uncertain and ambivalent policy in the “Old Northwest”—lands bordering the southern shores of the upper Great Lakes and extending down to the Ohio River. Under the Peace of Paris that ended the American Revolution, these lands lay in U.S. territory. Nevertheless, the British continued to man posts in areas they had taken from the French, and continued in a somewhat faint-hearted way to maintain alliances with native nations whose traditional lands were in that territory. This made for a continuing state of insecurity and conflict throughout the Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin territory, as well as much of Ohio.

In 1791, an alliance of Miamis, Potawatomis, Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots and other nations native to the area defeated two American armies sent to subdue them. The British encouraged aboriginal resistance by reconstructing an old post at Fort Meig. But when in 1794 the Americans sent another army against the Indians, British officers refused to afford their native allies the protection of the fort. At the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near Perrysburg, Ohio, the United States defeated the native confederacy. In the Jay Treaty of 1794, Britain agreed to abandon the western posts.

Though the treaty provided for unhindered passage of Indians over the Canada/U.S. border, it was seen by the Indian tribes as a massive betrayal by the British, and seemed to doom any hope of their being able to establish a buffer state against the relentless advance of European settlers.

The Jay Treaty did not bring peace to the Old Northwest. By 1805, that remarkable Shawnee chief Tecumseh (in Churchill’s words “their last great warrior”10), was mobilizing a new confederacy of tribes from Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi, to form a barrier against the advancing American frontier. In 1811, General William Henry Harrison led an army through the Indian territory to attack the Shawnee village of Tippecanoe (now Lafayette, Indiana). After inflicting considerably more casualties on the Americans, the Indians simply withdrew.11 Harrison proclaimed it a great victory and, with his running mate John Tyler, rode to victory in the 1840 presidential election under the banner of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The American-Indian war continued. Since the Iroquois and other tribes in Upper Canada supported the political aspirations of the western nations, and were counted upon by the British to aid in the defence of Canada, the War of 1812 really got started in 1811.

Churchill’s insouciance over the War of 1812’s native dimension is typical of the scholarship of his day. It is only more recently that the role and interests of indigenous nations have received consideration. Still, he does recognize the importance of 3000-4000 Indian “auxiliaries” on the Canadian side (a rather high estimate) and how much U.S. efforts to invade Canada were impeded by “Indian onslaughts on their columns.”12 But he makes no mention of the important role Iroquois warriors from New York reserves played in the American military, especially in taking Fort Erie and in defeating the British and their Indian allies at Chippewa in the final year of the war.

The Naval Aspect

Churchill is more technically astute in discussing the war at sea and on the lakes. At sea, unlike the situation on land, the Americans were seriously outgunned and outmanned. Against the ninety-seven ships of the British transatlantic fleet, the Americans had only sixteen. But three of these—forty-four-gun frigates, Churchill tells us— “surpassed anything afloat.”13 Though heavily timbered, “their clean lines under water enabled them to outsail any ship upon the seas.”14 One-on-one against British ships, they were virtually unbeatable. The American frigates, he notes, “within a year had won more successes over the British than the French and Spaniards in two decades of warfare.”15

Churchill was also impressed by the superiority of American fresh-water fighting ships—an important factor in their victory on Lake Erie, that paved the way for Harrison to lead American forces out of Detroit and chase British forces across what is now southwest Ontario. At the Battle of the Thames, near Chatham, Harrison’s army “destroyed a British army” and “Tecumseh was killed.”  The truth of the matter is that the British Army, led by Major-General Henry Proctor, was badly out-numbered, and fled east towards Burlington after a very short fight, while Tecumseh stood his ground, dying with many of his warriors. Of course Tecumseh and his men were fighting for their homeland.

Some readers might sense a triumphal note in Churchill’s comment that after the Battle of the Thames “the Indian Confederacy was broken.”16 Like it or not, from this point on, any possibility of the dream of a western native buffer state being realized would depend not on military resistance but on British diplomacy. The native nations of the Old Northwest could not have relied on shakier or more dubious support.

On Lake Champlain, the prowess of an American fleet again asserted itself, stopping the southern advance of a British army reinforced by troops available after Napoleon’s abdication. This was the largest British force assembled in the war. Without the Champlain victory, Britain might well have been able to seize and hold a major chunk of New York and Vermont. No wonder Churchill calls the American victory at Plattsburg “the most decisive victory of the war.”17

Churchill certainly cannot be accused of being excessively partisan in his account of the War of 1812. While giving the Americans full credit for their victory on Lake Champlain, he reserves his most damning remarks for the final battle of the war: Britain’s “most irresponsible onslaught” at New Orleans. He considers Sir Edward Pakenham’s decision to attempt a frontal assault on Andrew Jackson’s American forces “one of the most unintelligent manoeuvres in the history of British warfare.”18

The Outcome

Behind Britain’s acquiescence in the Treaty of Ghent, which left the Canadian-American border intact, Churchill sees Wellington’s good sense in recognizing that American naval superiority on the lakes would make it foolish to demand territory from them. He has no comment on British negotiators at Ghent dropping the demand for an Indian buffer state in the Old Northwest. Nor does he comment on Article IX, inserted by the British, forbidding the U.S. from punishing Indian tribes in its territory who had supported the King.

A reciprocal clause in Article IX called for the same thing with respect to tribes in Canada who had supported the USA. But that was a dead letter, because no pro-American native tribe remained in British territory. Article IX also proved irrelevant on the U.S. side of the border, because the British would not use force to secure compliance with it. There were soon serious breaches of it, including displacement of tribes from their traditional lands, and a Congressional ban on native Americans trading with British subjects.

Though the War of 1812 did not result in any boundary changes, Churchill assesses the peace as “solid and enduring.” For Americans, a key consequence was that “the United States were never again refused proper treatment as an independent power.”19 In that sense, it could be regarded as a second war of American independence.

It was also a “turning-point in the history of Canada,” Churchill adds: “Canadians took pride in the part they had played in defending their country, and their growing national sentiment was strengthened.”20 Canadian independence was not yet at hand, and would come through evolution rather than revolution. But the War of 1812, as Churchill rightly notes, created a condition for independence: a popular sense of national pride.

Churchill was fully aware of the tensions and disagreements that remained to shake Anglo-American relations after the war. The final chapter of Eliot Cohen’s Conquered into Liberty provides an excellent account of these episodes. Yet none of them, including the Fenian raids, ever amounted to serious warfare. As a result, Churchill concludes, “henceforward the world was to see a three-thousand-mile international frontier between Canada and the United States.”

Conclusion

I have criticized Churchill for not seeing the War of 1812 as a three-way struggle, with two non-losers (if not winners) and one real loser—the Indians. But his historical omission only reflects the commanding prejudices of his day. Given the material available to him, and the short space he allowed for it in his History of the English-speaking Peoples, I judge his account to be first-rate. Nevertheless we may well ask: does the War of 1812 deserve a longer account in any history of the English-speaking peoples? I think it does.

Dr. Russell ([email protected]) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, where he taught political science. He is a past chairman of the Churchill Society for the Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. An accompanying paper on the War of 1812 itself, by Troy Bickham, is available on Finest Hour Online or by email from the editor.

Endnotes:

1. See Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

2. See Eliot A. Cohen, Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath That Made the American Way of War (New York: Free Press, 2011).

3. Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 3, The Age of Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1957), 185.

4. Mason Wade, The French Canadians 1760-1967 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 66.

5. See Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2011). Upper Canada is present-day Ontario.

6. The Age of Revolution, 366.

7. See Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels & Indian Allies (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010)

8. Ibid., 359.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 358.

11. Robert S. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in Defence of Canada, 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn, 1993), 117.

12 Ibid., 360.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 361.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 362.

17. Ibid., 363.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 366.

20. Ibid., 367.