6
A colonial townscape: King Street, Toronto, Upper Canada, 1830s.
The Revolutionary War altered the political shape of eastern North America. And yet, as of 1783, the physical appearance of the continent was much as it had been. The forests and mountains of Appalachia, largely unbreached, separated the Atlantic coast from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. The most obvious, and certainly the most numerous, animal residents of America were the beaver in the Canadian Shield and the bison on the Great Plains. As for people, the Native inhabitants of northern (British) North America outnumbered the Europeans and their descendants.
The land in the northwest was still unknown, shading off into white on maps. The question of who owned the continent had been theoretically settled, but was practically unresolved. The Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence, and the heights of land dividing watersheds formed the boundaries between British and American sovereignty—but nobody was quite sure where the heights of land were, and in any case the British continued to occupy forts south of the Great Lakes. Their occupation of American territory suggested that the treaty of 1783 was unfinished or at least incomplete, and that peace might be little more than an interval of a few years until the next war.
To the west, beyond the Mississippi, Louisiana belonged to Spain, which did not have the strength to occupy most of it. Its white inhabitants were French, left behind in forts along the great river when Louis XV withdrew. Fur traders roamed the Great Plains, but no white explorers had ever crossed the Rockies. Had they done so they would have found on the habitable coast prosperous Native villages devoid of European occupation, as the British explorer Captain James Cook did at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in 1778. To the south, there were a few Spanish missions and small garrisons in California; to the north, there were a couple of Russian trading posts in Alaska.
In the thirty years after 1783 much of this changed. Explorers filled in the gaps on the maps as fur traders from Montreal followed the great rivers of the west to the Arctic (1789) and then the Pacific (1793). The Spanish advanced north up the coast from California, to Nootka Sound, and then retreated in the face of British pressure. The United States doubled its territory by purchasing Louisiana in 1803 from the French, who had briefly reclaimed it from the Spanish. This tipped the political balance on the continent, but the demographic balance tipped even more. The American population doubled between 1790 and 1810; of that country’s 7.2 million inhabitants, almost 300,000 lived across the Appalachians in the new territories south of the Great Lakes. There was a continent-wide flow of immigration to the west, past and through the Appalachians, up the St. Lawrence, and on to the western end of the Great Lakes.
The population of rocky, swampy, icy British North America was much smaller, and the figures are less reliable. As best we can tell, there were roughly 166,000 white inhabitants in the land covered by the provinces of Nova Scotia and Quebec in 1784, and 392,000 in 1806.1
Travelling meant scows and barges along the navigable rivers, and portages around the many rapids or over the heights of land that divided the Atlantic from the interior. Some incomers were politically inspired, the prime example being the migration of loyal Americans—Loyalists—to British territory north of the new frontier. But when disloyal Americans reached the limits of British territory, coming later from the south and east, there was nothing to stop them—and much to entice them, for the inhabitants were sparse and the land plentiful. The logic of settlement dictated development, and development demanded population. Population there was, but it came from the United States.
Once settlers arrived, settlement was painful. Farms would provide subsistence, but they had to be cleared, chopping trees and hauling and burning stumps at the rate of a few hectares a year. It took time and money and luck before a farm, or a range of farms, could produce crops to sell in local markets that, thanks to the state of the roads, might be days if not weeks away. The best transport was by water, but in British North America (which was coming to be called Canada) transport was a seasonal thing, regulated by thaw and freeze-up and of course by the fall of snow on the roads. There were small sailing ships on the lakes, and canoes and barges on the rivers, but the supplies they could bring were limited.
To the inhabitants of British North America, Europe seemed a formidable distance in space and in time. News at best took weeks to arrive on the Atlantic coast, and far longer in the interior. Yet news, goods, ideas, and fashions did arrive, and were all the more prized because they came from faraway Europe. The colonists’ identity, their self-image, was bound up with Europe, and with the mother country, Britain. British North America made no sense except as a projection of Great Britain, and decisions made in Great Britain profoundly affected the colonial societies on the other side of the ocean.
And not just the colonies; beyond them were the nations of Native America. By the 1780s, most North American Indians had direct or indirect contact with Europe and Europeans. Those close to the line of settlement were profoundly influenced and in many respects dependent on European commodities—cloth and metal, most obviously.2 The Plains Indians had captured stray horses brought to Mexico by the Spanish: by the eighteenth century, hunting and warfare on the plains were conducted on horseback, and with guns.
The traders sought fur, especially beaver, and the farther west and the farther north they travelled, the better the fur became. Northern beaver grew thicker pelts, desirable and lucrative in the markets of London, and the best beaver were to be found in the Athabasca country at the northwest end of the Great Plains, in the lakes and rivers that flowed north, away from the Mississippi and Hudson Bay. Traders from Montreal had reached that far by the beginning of the 1780s. Nothing in the peace treaty would prevent them from going farther.
THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE
Quebec was the largest territory remaining to the British Empire after 1783, and in terms of population, the largest colony of settlement. It was neither the richest nor the most economically important British possession, but because of its history and location it was, for the time being, politically significant.
The North American colonies were costly. In a belated attempt to appease American opinion, Parliament had in 1778 passed a Declaratory Act that renounced its power to tax the colonies. That Act remained on the books and governed all future British relations with the colonies. In practice, it meant that taxes raised in a colony must be spent there. But there was another principle at work: the inhabitants of Quebec had no means of giving their consent to taxes, which must either be imposed by fiat or not levied. Giving consent involved constituting an assembly, and assemblies had to be elected. Something would have to be done, but what that would be no one could imagine.
The revolution did not change the British conception of empire as an enclosed political space, regulated if no longer directly taxed by the metropolitan government. The home country would produce goods for the colonies, which the colonies would exchange for their raw materials. Nova Scotian or Newfoundland fish would supply the British slave colonies in the West Indies, while Quebec wheat or New Brunswick timber would supply British needs. The colonies were assumed to be politically stable, and if they were not, it was the business of government to make them so.
The Loyalists thus formed part of a larger political equation. They were deeply disappointed by the outcome of the Revolution, for which they blamed their former neighbours, the rebels, and the incompetence of British generals in about equal measure. They were loyal but also sceptical, not automatically enthralled by each and every action of the British government; rather, they looked to that government to make amends.
Some forty thousand Loyalists arrived on Canadian shores. Many had fought for the king in the Revolution, and found themselves and their units in Canada when the war ended. They also found themselves largely without property, which the rebels back home had confiscated. In the short term they had to be housed and fed; eventually, they would have to be compensated for what they had left behind.
Rank-and-file Loyalists received land grants of two hundred acres (just over eighty hectares). Officers got up to five thousand acres (two thousand hectares), depending on rank. Because it would take time and effort to render the grants habitable and profitable, the government provided tools, housing, and food. Towns rose out of what one Loyalist described as a “howling wilderness.” In the single year 1783, fifteen hundred houses were built in the new town of Saint John, New Brunswick. More were built at Shelburne, across the Bay of Fundy.
Saint John, as it happened, was well sited, with a good harbour and a fertile river valley behind it. Shelburne was not, and eventually the Loyalists there drifted away, some to go elsewhere in Nova Scotia, some to go back to the United States, and some to go as far away as Upper Canada.
Strictly speaking, neither New Brunswick nor Upper Canada existed in 1783. The government created them in 1784 and 1791 respectively, largely in response to Loyalist demands for an accountable local authority equipped with familiar and compatible institutions. Loyalty, it appeared, was not unconditional—these were loyal Americans who happened to differ with their American cousins about certain aspects of politics, or rather, politics as a later age would define them. On other issues, such as elected, representative assemblies, they did not disagree at all.
Politics in the late eighteenth century, in Britain as in North America, was barely differentiated from factionalism, and political parties were a very uncertain thing. The national interest, embodied by the monarch or, in the new United States, the president, stood above politics. The British governors of Quebec and Nova Scotia would not have differed from George Washington on this point. The problem, as always, was discovering the national interest, and getting the various politicians to agree to it.
Across the border, George Washington, a general, became president under the new American constitution, just adopted. In Canada, General Sir Guy Carleton became governor of Quebec for the second time in 1786, replacing Frederick Haldimand, another general, in the post. Carleton’s younger brother, Colonel Thomas Carleton, was already presiding over New Brunswick.
GOVERNMENT, LAND, AND THE INDIAN QUESTION
Government in the 1780s was a relatively simple affair. There was the central administration, governors, councillors, and clerks. There were the courts, using English criminal law, and, except in Quebec, English common law as well. There was the military, army and navy, and a militia, in which every able-bodied man between sixteen and sixty was expected to serve. There were revenue collectors, exacting customs and other fees. There was a post office, and an Indian Department.
The courts weren’t a free-standing estate, but rather a part of government: judges were often councillors as well and intimately linked to the various governors and their policies. Governors controlled public offices, with their highly prized salaries and fees (officeholders sat in the executive council), and they distributed land. Land was the basis of wealth in Great Britain, as it was in the colonies. Aristocrats and gentry in the British Isles inherited, accumulated, and exploited great estates, often driving off their inhabitants who could then be used to populate the distant colonies.
It wasn’t unusual for the friends of government to be rewarded with thousands of hectares of land. In one case, Colonel Thomas Talbot, an Anglo-Irish gentleman, and secretary to the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, received a grant of five thousand acres (just over two thousand hectares). Talbot soon left the province to carry on soldiering, but during a brief truce in the wars with France in 1803 he returned to Upper Canada and struck a deal with the government. He became a land agent and speculator. Talbot was to settle immigrants on fifty- or hundred-acre (fortyhectare) plots and in return would receive 150 acres for each. A tract of land was set aside on the north shore of Lake Erie for his operations. It was an unequal bargain, but it worked: Talbot’s settlers eventually cleared twenty-seven townships from the Detroit River to Long Point.
The colonel ruled his domain (his “principality” as he called it) eccentrically but not unfairly. He gave his settlers his personal supervision—not always appreciated because Talbot insisted that the settlers clear and farm ten acres (four hectares) of land forthwith and clear the road fronting their grant. Only then could they have security of tenure, and if they didn’t comply they were summarily dispossessed. By the end of the 1820s Talbot had secured the construction of a road almost five hundred kilometres long from the head of Lake Ontario to the Detroit frontier.3 When the government needed his help—during the War of 1812 or the Upper Canadian rebellion of 1837—it was given. Talbot, despite his gentrified ancestry and his military rank and connections, lived much like the settlers around him. He operated from a window cut into the side of a log cabin, dispensing land and favours or retaliating against those who had displeased him. Unlike other speculators, Talbot poured his own money into developing his lands, and at the end of a long life—he lived until 1853—he may well not have been much better off than when he arrived in Upper Canada. He granted his lands to anyone who came along—to people differing in religion, and with different ideas on how best to order society. Talbot wasn’t a feudal aristocrat in the Canadian forests, nor did he found a backwoods dynasty. His habits were those of an unreformed British officer—indifferent where religion was concerned, hard-drinking, and bawdy in his conversation, to the horror of his later Victorian biographer.4 When he died, unmarried and childless, he left his property to his servants.
What was truly different from the experience of earlier generations was the absence of hostile Indians. Essentially, the pre-revolutionary regime still applied on British land—and was governed by older agreements between the British and Indian nations (the Treaty of Halifax of 1752 with the Mi’kmaqs is an example) but above all by the Proclamation of 1763. The proclamations laid down principles governing white settlement of the interior and the peaceful acquisition of Indian land through purchase.
The Indian nations occupying the territory still deemed to be British weren’t inclined to take up arms against the new settlers. In part, this was because some nations were almost entirely dependent on the British—the Six Nations refugees in the western part of Quebec were a good example. And in part it was because the Indians were too few in number to put up serious resistance, and were linked to British traders from Montreal through the fur trade. Finally, many of the Indians perceived the Americans as a much greater threat than the British. Against the Americans, they still hoped, experience to the contrary, that the British would assist them.
In the meantime, British administrators in Quebec negotiated with local Indians—the Ojibwa north of the Great Lakes—to buy land for the Loyalists and for the Iroquois along the Bay of Quinte and in the “Haldimand Tract” along the Grand River beside their white Loyalist counterparts. The Ojibwa were hardly in a position to resist, for their numbers were few: according to one estimate, barely two hundred lived in the territory north of Lake Ontario. They found British offers of trade goods desirable, certainly; and it’s unclear whether the Ojibwa who ceded lands to the crown entirely understood that the land, once ceded, was gone for good. As they saw it, they were ceding use of the land, or trading land for security and support for the indefinite future. This latter confusion would later spawn political debate and legal argument two centuries on, but for the time being it allowed the free and peaceful settlement of thousands of crown-sponsored immigrants.
The history of the Grand River Iroquois, under their leader Joseph Brant, was unhappy. Brant hoped for a parallel destiny for his people, leasing land for income and thereby improving the land and securing a regular cash income. But Brant was frustrated in his design, as were the Iroquois who had remained on American territory.
Had it been up to the Loyalists, or to local British administrators, the Indians south of the new border might have been in luck. The decision, however, lay in London, and the main concern of the British government was to re-establish the national finances and recover from the war. That policy dictated peace with the United States and limited armaments. Fortunately for Great Britain, the war had left France and its European allies even worse off financially, and the 1780s passed without any serious foreign entanglements.
Government could hardly be complete without a source of revenue, and this was the weakness of the post-revolutionary colonial system. The problem began with the best of intentions. The British government had tried to learn from the experience of the American Revolution. First, it accepted that it could no longer hope to tax the colonies for imperial purposes.5 British garrisons in what was left of America had to be maintained by the British taxpayer, and colonists would not be asked to contribute to paying off the British debt, even if it was incurred in defence of the colonies. The colonies could levy local taxes for their own purposes, but those taxes would stay where they were raised. It was an important limiting condition on imperial dreams. Second, taxation of any kind presupposed the consent of the governed, that is, of the remaining British subjects in the colonies.
But how to secure the consent of the governed?
LAND AND LOYALTY
The peace of 1783 lasted not quite ten years. In 1789 a revolution began in France that by 1792 had toppled the French monarchy and established a republic whose leaders ruled through a reign of terror. The monarchs of Europe combined against the revolutionaries and invaded France. When the French in response executed their dethroned king, Louis XVI, the British reluctantly joined the war, in January 1793.
The revolutionaries should have been able to count on their fellow revolutionaries in America, out of republican solidarity and to fulfill the American alliance with France, which had helped win the revolution against the British. The British were at war with France; could the Americans be far behind? If the Americans joined in, surely the French of Canada would take up the cause of revolutionary France. A larger, stronger United States could swiftly topple the British army in Canada while Britain was preoccupied in Europe. The future of the British Empire in America seemed very dim.
But the events of the 1790s and 1800s did not follow this logical scenario. The Americans didn’t join in the war in 1793. Instead, the alliance with France was quietly allowed to expire and, if anything, American relations with France worsened in the course of the decade. Though the French war continued with only a slight interval in 1802–03 until 1815, and though the United States did finally join in, in 1812, the Americans did not succeed in conquering Canada. And, finally, the French of Canada did not join the French of France to overthrow British rule. Despite British forebodings, the Canadian French—the Canadiens— cultivated their gardens and prospered as never before. They enjoyed the protection of their own laws, the security of their elected assembly, their own Catholic religion, and the autonomy of a province, Lower Canada, in which they were, for the indefinite future, a majority.
The creation of Lower Canada was the culmination of a complicated rearrangement of boundaries that reflected the economic and demographic developments of the 1780s. The problem was that the Loyalists were living in a province designed as a French-speaking and Catholic reserve, with no elected assembly to represent them. The contradictions mounted. Many of the new settlers were Catholics, either Loyalists or soldiers in disbanded British Highland regiments. Half a century before, they had rebelled back in Scotland against the Protestant English (actually German) king, George II; by the 1780s they had become one of the mainstays of the British military for his successor, George III. After the Revolutionary War, many settled north of the St. Lawrence in what they later named Glengarry, after their original home in Scotland.6
By the end of the 1780s, ribbons of settlement stretched along the east side of the Bay of Fundy, up the St. John River, and along the St. Lawrence west of Montreal as far as King’s Town, the former Fort Frontenac, at the east end of Lake Ontario. (King’s Town was soon contracted into Kingston.) Farther west there were pockets of settlement along the north shore of Lakes Ontario and Erie, the Bay of Quinte (where a group of Iroquois had been granted lands), the Grand River (another Iroquois tract), and the Thames River.7
The presence of the settlers expanded direct British control as far as the Detroit River. The greatest expansion of British influence, however, occurred farther west, beyond the Great Lakes. There, fur traders based in Montreal competed with traders from the Hudson’s Bay Company posts along the shore of Hudson Bay. The Montreal traders had a commercial advantage: they brought their goods directly to their customers, while the Bay traders hung back; when the Bay Company penetrated the interior it took years to overtake the Montrealers.
Not all the Native–white contacts were a happy convergence of market forces. Traders sometimes used force on unfaithful clients, or relied on addiction—to alcohol or tobacco—as a means of attracting customers. And there was always debt, binding a luckless Native consumer to a rapacious trading system.
In 1789 a Montreal fur trader, Alexander Mackenzie, travelled downstream more than two thousand kilometres from Fort Chipewyan (established the year before) on Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Ocean; the great river he followed was named the Mackenzie, after him. Mackenzie was disappointed: he had hoped to reach the Pacific, not the Arctic. In 1793 he repeated his performance, crossing the Rockies and finally reaching the Pacific at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, the first white man to travel overland across the continent.
Mackenzie represented a new coalition of Montreal interests, the North West Company, dominated by Simon McTavish and the Frobisher brothers but including a variety of British-born and American traders. They used a traditional technology, the birchbark canoe, inherited from the French and before them from the Indians, but expanded into the great canot du maître, with crews of six to twelve men and carrying up to 1360 kilograms of cargo. They travelled from Montreal up the Ottawa River and across the Great Lakes to the Grand Portage that linked the St. Lawrence system to the rivers of the west, supplying a series of posts that stretched from Lake Superior to the Rockies. The effort was huge, but the profits were very gratifying. The Montreal partners bought seigneuries, married aristocratic heiresses, socialized in their “Beaver Club,” and built mansions—“Beaver Hall” for one of the Frobishers—that displayed their wealth.
Mackenzie’s discoveries added to the gratification, for it was from the Athabasca region—up from 55 degrees north latitude, between 110 and 120 degrees west longitude—that the best, the thickest, the most luxuriant furs came.8 The furs were transported by the canots du maître to Montreal and traded for the cloth, firearms, and firewater shipped up by the merchants there. Those merchants were, by the 1780s, almost entirely English-speaking, for it was they who had the connections, the capital, and the access to the fur markets of London—which, under the mercantile system, was effectively the only market.9
The emergence of a mercantile elite in Montreal, closely connected to trade and finance in London, added weight to the argument, bypassed at the time of the Quebec Act of 1774, that Quebec was too big and too important to be deprived of representative political institutions. A London Committee representing Montreal interests was established to press the British government to reform the government of Quebec. The influx of Loyalists into the distant western half of the province reinforced the argument that changed circumstances demanded new measures. The British government had to nerve itself and make Quebec a colony like the others.
CONSTITUTING BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
The old colonies of North America, those lost in 1783, had been entirely separate entities, each with its own governor and with a variety of governmental systems. The early British governors of Quebec and Nova Scotia had the same status as the governors of New Hampshire or Georgia, no more, no less. This changed after 1783: Cape Breton, St. John’s Island, and New Brunswick all received lieutenant governors, a first step toward the consolidation of British North America under a single government.10 It was only a first step: the governor in Quebec City received the titles, but not the authority, of “governor” in each of the British North American colonies, a toothless formula that gave little but formal pre-eminence.11 In each of the colonies, except Lower Canada, it was the lieutenant governor who dealt with affairs, communicated with London, and managed the colonists as best he could.12
Sir Guy Carleton received the title in 1786—less than he had wanted, but he harvested another, Baron Dorchester, to speed his passage to Quebec. The appointment was a sign of favour, and an indication that the government—a Tory administration, headed by William Pitt the younger—would heed Dorchester’s advice on the matter of governing and keeping the colonies that were left. The government also believed that Dorchester, as the principal author of the Quebec Act of 1774, would not be in a hurry to change it for another system.13 Their hopes were justified: Dorchester temporized and dithered, and failed to produce any conclusive advice on what to do. Naturally, this only stimulated demands for change, demands that reached the ears of the opposition in Parliament, in London.
A Canada Bill was introduced, debated, and passed in Parliament in the spring of 1791. It appeared under Pitt’s authority, of course, and the prime minister took a vigorous part in the debate, but its main sponsor was William Grenville (later Lord Grenville), secretary of state in the cabinet. Interestingly, the debate of 1791 lasted longer, and was more significant in British politics, than any subsequent parliamentary consideration of Canada—indicating that, in the opinion of the leading British politicians, more than the government or even the possession of Canada was at stake.
First, as a result of the proposed Canada Act, Canada was to receive the blessings of the British constitution and to serve as beacon for British political principles. The intended audience was the United States, but in the spring of 1791, with a revolution in France and the scent of violence wafting across the English Channel, the British principles of the Canada Act applied closer to home.
The approximation to the British model—Lords, Commons, and King—was closer in the Act than was later realized. Parliamentarians spent much time debating what was in effect a Canadian House of Lords—an appointed legislative council. There was even provision for hereditary councillors, but in any case the members of the council were appointed for life. There would be an elected assembly, elected every four years (Pitt had proposed seven, like the British Parliament). There was to be an executive council, similar to the British cabinet, to advise the governors or lieutenant governors of Canada. The similarity went only so far. The members of the Canadian executive council held office at the pleasure of the governor, not by heredity or for life, or by election. They were accordingly entirely dependent on and advisory to the governor—very like the members of the American cabinet, then just being constituted under the first president, George Washington. No one in the 1790s could have predicted how the American system of government would actually function, but the principle of checks and balances among the estates of the American constitution was already explicit. In the Canadian colonies, Pitt and Grenville had supplied the checks without the balance, for beyond the abstract motivations of patriotism or the notion of the public good, there was little incentive for the revenue-producing element, the assembly, to work with the revenue-spending machine, the governor and the executive council.
The Quebec Act of 1774 accepted that the Roman Catholic Church was better than no church at all and accordingly lent the force of law to the support of that Church, through tithes, by its sometimes unwilling members. The Act of 1791 could hardly repudiate what had been granted not very long before, but it laid out at great length the true object of the British government, namely the establishment of a Protestant Church— the Church of England—in the colonies. The Canada Act endowed the Anglicans with what was virtually the only negotiable asset in the colonies: land—a seventh part of the value of land in each township. The land could be kept or sold, but the revenues were to go to the local clergy of the Church of England, independent of anything a local assembly might wish to do. As far as the British government could manage it, the established Church was made independent of local politics and politicians.
In Quebec, that also meant that the Church of England was independent of the Catholic majority—90 percent of the population in 1790. There would be two provinces in place of one, both called Canada. (It was already the common term for most of British North America; the Canada Act made it official.) The western province would be Upper Canada, underpopulated and underdeveloped, but overwhelmingly English-speaking and, for the time being, overwhelmingly Loyalist. The eastern province, down the St. Lawrence, would be Lower Canada, very largely French-speaking, with a considerably better developed economy. Economically, however, the language of Lower Canada was English, not French, and it’s not surprising that the fur barons of Montreal opposed the division of Quebec, leaving them a small linguistic island in a French-speaking sea.
In some respects the Canada Act was the last appearance of the old British Empire, dominated by colonies of settlement that reproduced as far as they could the characteristics and institutions of the mother country. Such colonies were, and were expected to remain, dependent, framed by a restrictive trading system, mercantilism, in which Great Britain prescribed the pattern of colonial government, society, and trade for the benefit of the mother country. There was room for local variation in this system, but not for any radical departures. Its faithfulness to the original British model was its strength and its inspiration. It was what the Loyalists had fought for.
WAR AND THE HEALTH OF THE COLONIES
The debate of 1791 was the last time for more than three decades in which Canada got the attention of Great Britain. There were new crises to preoccupy the British government—for example, tension with Spain over the Pacific northwest, where imperial claims overlapped in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. (This crisis, once resolved, consigned what is now the coast of British Columbia to British suzerainty and limited the Spaniards to California.)
The troubles with Spain paled compared with the danger the British government perceived from France. The French monarchy collapsed in 1792, replaced by a revolutionary, republican government. The powers of continental Europe attempted to replace the French king on his throne, only to have the revolutionaries march the ex-king to the guillotine in January 1793. Great Britain now declared war on France, a war that would last for a generation, until 1815.
The war, or wars, of 1793–1815 were more than the usual dynastic squabble. France had experienced a social and political revolution that appeared to threaten the foundations of government, order, and society. The legitimacy of monarchical rule seemed to be at stake even in Great Britain, where revolution in the seventeenth century had produced a compromise between monarch, unelected noble grandees in the House of Lords, and an elected House of Commons—the balanced system of the eighteenth century, mediated by politicians like Pitt who tended to their governments by securing parliamentary majorities while keeping an eye posted for signs of royal favour or disfavour. Attention if not devotion to the position of the monarch, George III, was a crucial aspect of the British political system and of the British political class.
The rulers of Great Britain were alarmed by the French Revolution. Revolutionary sentiments were thought to be contagious, and Pitt’s government kept a wary and repressive eye on presumed revolutionaries. The liberal gestures of 1791—the Canada Act—were forgotten in the rush to shore up authority at home and in the colonies—at any cost. The year 1792, when the new Upper Canadian and Lower Canadian legislatures met for the first time, was also the year of revolutionary violence, the storming of the king’s palace in Paris, and the beginning of a bloody reign of terror in France. As the colonists held celebratory banquets and toasted British liberty in honour of their new legislatures—“May liberty extend to Hudson’s Bay” was one toast—British ministers began to see the idea of “liberty” as a dangerous French import.14
Events in Europe were distant but not foreign to the colonials of British North America. Even though weeks, or more usually months, passed before word of European events could reach the colonies— frequently via New York—they were not less exciting or moving because of the lapse of time. It occurred to some in the colonial government that what had happened in France could happen in French-speaking Quebec. Those with a vivid imagination looked south with dread, to the republican United States, and envisioned the spread of the democratic contagion from the republic north to the British colonies. In that case, the danger wasn’t so much in Lower Canada as in Upper Canada—English-speaking, British, but also, through the Loyalists, American.
The war did not go well. Revolutionary France repelled its enemies, and then conquered most of the adjacent parts of Europe—the Rhineland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and most of Italy. The Royal Navy cruised the coasts of France and the Mediterranean, safeguarding the British Isles and overseas commerce, but it could do nothing to impede the victorious French on land. Meanwhile, France became first a dictatorship and then an empire under the brilliant leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. Painfully aware that he could not defeat the British at sea, Bonaparte reached for the economic weapon, forbidding trade with the British. Cut off from many of its (closer and cheaper) European sources of supply, of food and, especially, timber to build ships for the navy, the British looked to their colonies. The North American colonies produced what Britain most needed, grain and timber. The British adjusted tariffs and subsidies so as to discourage unreliable European imports and encourage colonial production, with gratifying results. The British traded subsidy for security, and got an assured supply; the colonies acquired a predictable and newly lucrative market. The mercantile system that linked the colonies’ trade to Britain now enjoyed an Indian summer, and the colonies experienced unprecedented prosperity.
The colonies also exported to the empire. They sent food, wheat and fish, to the West Indies, a trade formerly supplied by the Americans. The Americans objected to this, ultimately successfully, but for over forty years it was a rich source of dispute between Britain and the United States, and of incidental profit to the British North American colonies.
The two colonies most affected by the changes brought about by war were Lower Canada and New Brunswick. Their lands were heavily forested, especially with white pine, tall and straight and suitable for masts, and both had broad rivers reaching deep into the hinterland. The technology of the timber trade was simple: using a broad axe, lumbermen cut down trees and then “squared” them into rectangles. The resultant square timber was then rolled into nearby rivers and floated in booms or rafts toward the nearest seaport, usually Saint John or Quebec, and loaded onto timber ships—the square shape made it easier to pile, and it wouldn’t roll in Atlantic storms—for transport to Great Britain. Where there were no great rivers, but merely forests, as in Nova Scotia, the industry languished. Once the forests accessible by sea were cut down, the business moved on.
The timber trade brought immigrants and reshaped settlement patterns. In 1800 Philemon Wright led a party of Massachusetts settlers up the Ottawa River; by 1806 he was sending timber rafts downriver to the St. Lawrence and on to Quebec. Wright started his own firm, but sometimes timber merchants were employees of British companies— William Price, who arrived in Quebec in 1809, was one such. Price’s company, Price Brothers, dominated the timber and lumber business in the Quebec region well into the twentieth century.
The quantities of timber exported were impressive: nine thousand loads in the early 1800s, twenty-seven thousand by 1807, and ninety thousand by 1809. In Lower Canada agriculture and timber displaced fur as the “staple” export of the colony: while fur continued to feed the fortunes of the merchants of Montreal, only a small and diminishing proportion of the province’s population was employed in the trade.
Prosperity attracted immigrants and encouraged families: the population of New Brunswick rose from an estimated thirty-five thousand in 1806 to seventy-four thousand in 1824. The increase in population in Lower Canada was truly remarkable: from 165,000 in 1790 to 300,000 by 1815—more than four times what it had been in 1760. In New Brunswick, settlements spread along the rivers, while in Lower Canada the population spread north and south, away from the St. Lawrence to the limits of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachians. The numbers of English speakers grew too, to roughly 15 percent of the province’s population by 1815, assisted by immigration from Vermont into what would become the Eastern Townships, south and east of Montreal. Lower Canada’s cities also increased, but not as fast as the countryside.
UPPER CANADA
The opening of the Upper Canadian legislature took place in Newark, later Niagara-on-the-Lake, in September 1792, in the presence of the new lieutenant governor, Colonel John Graves Simcoe. Simcoe had commanded a Loyalist regiment in the Revolution; his experiences and those of his men made him bitterly anti-American or, as he saw it, anti-revolutionary. He relied on Loyalist veterans to staff his tiny administration, and on British troops to build the necessary infrastructure for his small—population twenty thousand—colony. Simcoe, finding his capital, Newark, too close to the American border, moved it across Lake Ontario to the shores of a spacious harbour framed by islands. He named the site York, and laid out roads, north from Lake Ontario (Yonge Street) and west (Dundas Street), naming them after British ministers. He dubbed another settlement to the west London, which was naturally placed on the Thames, a muddy stream snaking west to Lake St. Clair. (The capital actually moved to York in 1796, and the legislature first met there in 1797.)
Simcoe organized land surveys and settlement patterns, establishing a checkerboard pattern of farms alongside concession roads, interspersed with the clergy reserves mandated by the Canada Act. The British government had given very large land grants to senior Loyalist officers, which certainly served to differentiate them from the lower ranks, but it didn’t work quite as planned. Without the necessary capital to clear the land and turn it into productive farms, the grantees often left it as they found it— a private forest awaiting the efforts of its neighbours to develop the land around it. Land-owning gentry became speculators, a drag on the development of the province. Leaders, as often as not, became scavengers.
Simcoe’s reforms, providing transportation, defence, regular communication, and an orderly land settlement, were essential to retaining and attracting population. In that regard Simcoe and his policies were spectacularly successful. The population of Upper Canada soared from the twenty thousand he found in 1792 to an estimated seventy thousand in 1806. Some of that was natural increase, but most of the growth reflected a steady immigration from the adjacent United States. Simcoe had made land available, and on reasonable terms. It was good land, accessible by water and increasingly by road, but those who came to occupy it were, inevitably, Americans.
Simcoe had hoped that his province, and British North America in general, would be insulated by the bitter experience of its founders from the contagion of republicanism and rebellion. He wanted “the utmost attention … paid to British Customs, Manners, & Principles in the most trivial as well as serious matters [and] … inculcated to obtain their due Ascendancy to assimilate the Colony with the parent state.”15 But geography got the better of him, just as, in a different sense, it had prevailed over the British generals in the Revolutionary War. There was not time, nor were there resources, to deal with trivialities, and as for serious matters, what mattered most was to put the colony on a sound economic footing and eventually to relieve the British taxpayer of the burden of North American loyalty.
Simcoe did the best he could, but it was never enough. By coincidence, about the time of Simcoe’s departure American settlers, who might or might not once have been Loyalists, began to flow into Upper Canada. They got two hundred acres (eighty hectares) each, on condition of occupying and improving the land—attractive enough terms, especially because Upper Canada’s fertile lands lay athwart the most direct land connection between upstate New York and Michigan. Simcoe’s successors would preside over a province that in its natural endowment was a reproduction of the states south of the lakes—similar in terrain, climate, and fertility, and ultimately in society and economy.
Similar, in fact, in all but politics, and even there, were things truly different? There was, it was true, a Loyalist tradition, and a requirement of loyalty as well as a dread of the creeping republicanism of the United States. Yet by 1812 one reliable observer estimated the later-arriving “American” portion of the population at not less than 60 percent.16 Simcoe, through rational settlement policies, helped ensure that Upper Canada was a competitive destination for immigrants; in this as in many other ways he was the true founder of the province of Upper Canada. It’s ironic that he would not have found its later development very much to his liking.
LOWER CANADA
The establishment of a Lower Canadian legislature was a calculated risk, and its British sponsors regarded it uneasily. The voting franchise was widely distributed—indeed some women were able to vote in early Lower Canadian elections before male privilege prevailed and closed any gender loopholes. But it wasn’t so much democracy that worried the British as the certainty of a French-speaking political majority. Their misgivings seemed to be justified when, in the first elections in June 1792, there was disorder along ethnic lines. Yet the ethnic differences can be exaggerated—as they were at the time, for largely partisan purposes. In the first Lower Canadian assembly of fifty members, sixteen were English speakers, although the English minority could not have been larger than ten thousand out of a total population of 156,000.17
The legislature did what might have been expected. It elected a speaker from the ranks of the French majority, and it resolved that its debates and legislation should be bilingual. It also passed the necessary financial legislation to keep the province’s government afloat (1795) and established a system of courts. Not everyone was pleased: one British merchant darkly wrote in 1792 that he feared many of the Canadian members were “infested with the detestable principles now prevalent in France.”18 He was probably wrong on that point: although there is no precise way of gauging the attraction of French revolutionary ideas in Lower Canada, there wasn’t much public sympathy for France or the French cause in the war just beginning.
There was much suspicion, to which French diplomacy contributed. The French minister to the United States summoned French Canadians to rise against their British oppressors and join the cause of liberty. It’s not clear how many French Canadians heard the call. For those who did, mainly the clergy and the seigneurs, it was an unpleasant reminder that the French Revolution had overturned order, authority, privilege, and the Catholic religion. They assured the government of their loyalty, and swore to protect the lower orders, the habitants, from revolutionary thoughts. The Bishop of Quebec instructed his clergy in November 1793 that “all the loyalty and obedience which they formerly owed to the King of France, they now owed to His Britannic Majesty,” and he periodically renewed his exhortations in the years that followed.19
The Lower Canadian elite, French- and English-speaking, was frightened. Members of the lower orders—the habitants, for the most part— were insufficiently deferential and even insubordinate. An attempt by Dorchester to raise the Lower Canadian militia was resisted. Habitants refused to work on repairing the roads. The red “liberty cap” made an appearance—more than one, it was reported. The French revolutionary anthem, “La Marseillaise,” wafted into frightened ears. Was revolution in the air? Would the loyal, Catholic inhabitants put their priests to the sword or into exile as their cousins did in old France? The clergy, the seigneurs, and the government hoped not, but they weren’t sure. In November 1793 the legislature accordingly suspended the right of habeas corpus—and kept it suspended. The government could now imprison without trial, and without showing cause.
Perhaps those who weren’t tried were the lucky ones. This was effectively demonstrated when a real revolutionary conspiracy occurred, the better for the government and all loyal subjects to take fright. The conspiracy centred in Vermont, where a group of politicians plotted with the French to invade Canada and arouse the French Canadians, and to that end the French government contributed twenty thousand muskets for the arming of the habitant population. What the habitants would have done with the muskets we shall never know, since they were intercepted in the English Channel by the Royal Navy. One conspirator, David McLane, was convicted and hanged for treason in Quebec in July 1797. His head was then cut off and his body disembowelled. His judge was hailed as “the Queller of Riots and Seditions in the New World.”20
The Quebec assembly, dominated in this period by seigneurial representatives in combination with the wealthy English-speaking merchants of Montreal, was effusively loyal. In 1799 it voted £20,000 to the British government for the prosecution of the war. Admiral Nelson’s victory over the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile in 1798 was the occasion of public rejoicing and celebratory masses. After Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in 1805, the merchants of Montreal erected a column to his memory. By then the war had resolved into a straightforward battle against French aggression and tyranny, for the revolution had given way to dictatorship and then to the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte fought to dominate the world, and the British resisted, often alone.
It is less the Napoleonic period than the earlier, extreme or Jacobin, phase of the French Revolution that is of interest in Canadian political and cultural history. The possibility of revolution, the idea that the people of Lower Canada—and the inhabitants of the other provinces, for that matter—were not deeply attached to religion and monarchical authority, was eventually forgotten. The fact that there hadn’t been a rebellion, or a revolution, was what mattered. As the Bishop of Quebec put it, there was now a clear break between French Canada and its French past. The conquest of 1760 had been a blessing in disguise, saving Quebec from the horrors of revolution and atheism. The message was reinforced by royalist and Catholic refugees, including fifty priests, from old France. Highly educated and fervently persuasive, they had a strong influence on the literary and religious culture of French Canada.21 They brought the message that old France had abandoned true religion and that the conquest of 1760 had not been a deplorable historical accident, but the workings of Providence.22 British Protestantism was preferable to French atheism, and fortunately the Canadiens had the liberty—British liberty—to choose.
True liberty was regularly contrasted with revolutionary enthusiasm, and the tyranny that revolution brought in its wake. For this line of argument, France was a handier example than the United States, and “Jacobin” conspiracies an easier target than plots with the American government. The problem with Jacobin conspiracies was that after 1797 there were none, except in the fevered minds of the authorities.
There was, however, an active political life in the province, which centred, naturally enough, on money—how to raise it and how to spend it. The Montreal merchants favoured a tax on land, while the rural majority favoured anything but. The appointed councils differed with the elected assembly, and English speakers with French speakers. A local party, loosely organized, emerged—the parti canadien, which by 1810 was urging, on the best British principles, a government responsible to the legislature and dependent on the consent, and votes, of the elected majority.
This brought the parti canadien into a clash with the appointed government, and the governor. The governor of the day was General Sir James Craig, who held the office from 1807 to 1811. Craig freely interpreted dissent as disloyalty, imprisoned the parti canadien’s leader, and dissolved the assembly in the hope of securing a better result with new elections. He did not, and the consequent uproar moved London to replace Craig with a less belligerent general, Sir George Prevost, previously lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.
Prevost succeeded where Craig had failed—politically, that is. That was what London needed, for relations with the United States were deteriorating and, by 1811, pointing to war.
THE WAR OF 1812
War began in North America long before it was officially declared. In a manner of speaking it had never stopped, because the American occupation of the land beyond the Appalachians, the territory conceded in the treaty of 1783 and confirmed by Jay’s Treaty in 1794, conflicted with the desires of the existing inhabitants, the Indian nations of the Ohio Valley. Through a combination of military force and shrewd diplomacy, the United States government sliced off successive strips of territory, forcing the Indians farther and farther back. The Indian nations were depleted by hardship and disease as well as war: they couldn’t compete with the incoming Americans, who by 1800 heavily outnumbered them.
The American government did not seek conflict: it attempted, as best it could, to place its relations with the Indian nations on a secure and steady basis, concluding the first in a long series of treaties (eventually over four hundred) with the Natives. The Americans tried, with some success, to break the economic links that tied the Indians to the British and Montreal, but that process was slow and, by 1812, incomplete.
The Iroquois no longer dominated the other Indian nations. The Revolutionary War had broken their military power and permanently fragmented the Iroquois confederacy. Many Iroquois had followed the British north, to Upper Canada, and those who remained were scattered in small reservations in northern New York, surrounded by American immigrants. There was, however, a spiritual revival among the Iroquois that paralleled in some respects religious revivals among their neighbours. Its leader, Handsome Lake, preached a religion that stressed Iroquois traditions while urging adaptation to some, at least, of the Americans’ ways—enough to guarantee Iroquois survival in what would otherwise have been an alien and destructive environment.23
Two brothers, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, from another nation, the Shawnee, took up the theme of Native survival, but where Handsome Lake had tacitly accepted that their future lay in a world dominated by whites, the Shawnee brothers had not. Tenskwatawa (known as “the Prophet”) proclaimed visions that urged “personal and social repentance” as a means of not only recovering spiritual integrity but victory over the whites. Both brothers condemned accommodation with the whites and urged the various Indian nations to combine against the Americans.
The Americans, however, struck first, moving against Tenskwatawa’s camp in November 1811 while Tecumseh, the more militarily gifted of the two, was away. In the skirmish that followed, Tenskwatawa’s spells failed to protect his warriors and as a consequence his message was discredited.
War between the United States and Great Britain was by then imminent. There had always been contact between British Indian agents and the Natives of the American northwest. With war looming, the flow of presents and encouragement increased. The British commander in Upper Canada, Isaac Brock, encouraged Tecumseh to rebuild a coalition of the Indian nations. Brock, who felt he could rely on only a small and, he believed, inadequate force of regular British troops, needed all the help he could get.
The actual outbreak of the war was complex. American diplomacy had failed to protect the right of American ships to trade freely with the European combatants, Britain and France. The British, who had naval dominance off the French coast, blockaded French ports and confiscated the cargos of ships trading with the enemy. As the navy searched American ships for contraband goods, it also combed them for contraband sailors— British sailors who had left their country and its ships for more lucrative employment on American vessels. At the same time, the French asserted the same rights over neutral shipping, though without the same kind of power to enforce their claims as the British.
Two American presidents, Thomas Jefferson (1801–09) and his successor James Madison (1809–17), had tried to deal with the problem of “neutral rights” but failed in the face of the realities of economic warfare. The British, weak on land, ruled the sea. Napoleon, powerless at sea, forbade his subjects, and any other country he could occupy or overawe, to traffic with the British.
The British handled the Americans badly, resisting American pressure even as it became apparent that war was a possible outcome. The French, with nothing to lose, appeared to concede to American demands. Meanwhile, domestic American politics were increasingly dominated by demands for war. To the American “war hawks” it was all too easy. The British were the enemy of 1776. They had been beaten then, and could be, would be, again. The British were preoccupied by war in Europe, and could not respond effectively. The British army in Canada was weak, but British influence over the warlike Indians of the northwest was strong. The recent American immigrants to Upper Canada would rise to support an American invasion, which would therefore be less a war than a triumphal progress. All North America would be united in a single republic, and the work of the Revolution finally completed.
On the other hand, the American army was weak too, with under four thousand men scattered over half a continent. Though the Republican party of President Madison had a majority in Congress, it faced a strong Federalist party opposition. The Republicans drew their strength from the south, far from the border, and from the west, where the population was as yet small and dispersed, and for the most part far from the frontier. In New England and New York there was no enthusiasm for the war, and yet effective attacks on Canada would have to be based in those two regions. Though the British army in Canada was small, it was being reinforced. The Royal Navy ruled the seas, including the waters off North America, and the American navy, while competent to fight single engagements, was too small to defeat the number of ships the British could bring to bear. The disruption of American shipping was certain, once war was declared. Finally, the war in Europe wasn’t going badly. A British army under the marquis of Wellington had tied down a large French army in Spain, and in 1812 Wellington was advancing. Napoleon was at the other end of Europe, preparing to invade Russia with the greatest army yet seen, which meant that his army in Spain was weaker than ever before, and hence prey for Wellington.
The Americans nevertheless declared war, on 18 June 1812. The news travelled fast, testament to far better communications than in 1776. The governor in Quebec, Prevost, heard the news within a week, and Brock, the commander and acting lieutenant governor in Upper Canada, soon after. So did British fur traders in the northwest, who promptly put themselves and their Indian clients at the disposal of the British army. Using fur traders and the threat of the horrors of Indian warfare, a local British commander secured the surrender of the American fort at Michilimackinac.
Michilimackinac was a small post, far away. Fort Detroit was closer to the action, and had a large American garrison—large, that is, by the standards of the war that was beginning, in which a force of five thousand would be very large indeed. (By comparison, Napoleon’s army invading Russia in June 1812 numbered 691,000, while the largest single British army assembled during the war was 10,351 strong, for an attack on Plattsburgh, New York, in 1814.) The American commander at Detroit, William Hull, inspired by memories of the Revolution (he was a veteran) and encouraged by the belief that the inhabitants of Upper Canada would rise to join him, crossed the Detroit River to begin his march on the provincial capital at York (Toronto). He issued a proclamation that informed the inhabitants of Upper Canada that he was coming to liberate them. Consequently, all well-disposed Upper Canadians should take up arms against the king and join Hull’s army. Should they resist, and be so misguided as to be captured fighting alongside their Indian allies, they would be hanged—“murdered without mercy” for keeping their oaths to the king and resisting their invaders, in the words of an American Baptist minister living in Upper Canada.24
Hull was not entirely mistaken in believing that many of the inhabitants of Upper Canada, being Americans, did not want to fight him. General Brock, his opponent, agreed, and despaired of being able to raise an army. But Hull’s proclamation offended many, and his inertia gave those who favoured the United States no encouragement. Brock had a chance, and seized it. With a tiny regular force, and enlisting Tecumseh’s warriors, he moved against Hull. Hull, dreading an Indian massacre, fled with his small army—albeit larger than Brock’s—to Detroit. There he succumbed to psychological pressure, the terrors of the forest and the Indians, and surrendered the fort. Hull had defeated himself.
Hull’s defeat was decisive. His invasion represented the best opportunity the Americans had of first neutralizing and then absorbing the American inhabitants of Upper Canada. His defeat reversed the demoralization of the colonial government and its supporters, and inspired the local regular forces to resist long enough for reinforcements to reach them from Montreal.
The next invasion occurred at Niagara on 13 October 1812. Part of an American army crossed the Niagara River in small boats, to be met on the other side, on Queenston Heights, by a British force commanded by Brock. Brock was killed, but British resistance continued. Then American reinforcements, New York state militia, refused to cross the river. The failure of reinforcements to arrive doomed the Americans on the other side, who had to escape or surrender.
Worse than the defeat at Queenston was the failure of the Americans to cut the St. Lawrence supply route. The border ran down the middle of the river, the only serious connection between Upper and Lower Canada, but the Americans were unable to cut British river traffic bringing supplies and reinforcements from Montreal to Kingston. Montreal itself, less than fifty kilometres from the border, also remained untouched by American action. Better still, from the British point of view, Vermont farmers and merchants were happy to supply the British garrison in Lower Canada, while from the French-Canadian perspective British purchases of supplies and services for the troops were a shot in the arm for the local economy. (The colonial government enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Catholic bishop and his clergy, who denounced the wickedness of the American invasion and the duty of every subject to rise to the colony’s defence.)25 In Nova Scotia the lieutenant governor, Sir John Sherbrooke, another general, offered to leave the inhabitants of New England and especially Maine undisturbed—provided they did the same for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.26 The Maritime provinces did, however, fit out privateers (private vessels licensed to attack enemy vessels and their cargo) to prey on American shipping, to their considerable profit.
Supply and transport proved critical for the next two years of the war. Supplies flowed easily across the Atlantic, as far as Quebec and Montreal. The St. Lawrence was safeguarded by a passive American policy—no U.S. troops were even stationed at Ogdensburg, the principal border town, after early 1813.27 The British and American navies ran a construction contest on Lake Ontario, as each side strove to build more and bigger ships. In April 1813 the Americans raided the provincial capital, York, where they burned public buildings and stole the speaker’s mace from the legislature. The York raid was an isolated incident. Neither side achieved dominance, which meant that the British could maintain an army in Upper Canada, even though 1813 saw the loss of naval control of Lake Erie and consequently of the western part of the province (and Detroit) and the defeat and death of Tecumseh in the Battle of the Thames. An American invasion across the Niagara achieved partial success, but on the St. Lawrence and on the Lower Canadian border the Americans failed to break the British supply lines. By not losing to locally superior forces, and by keeping their Upper Canadian army intact, the British had in effect won again.
The naval war was, from the British point of view, even more satisfactory. There were individual losses in engagements with American ships, but the British had far more ships than the Americans, and succeeded in bottling up the ports of Boston and New York. Most humiliating of all, the Royal Navy established a base in Chesapeake Bay and levied “contributions” on the bayside towns in return for not burning them to the ground.
The same kind of depredations characterized the fighting in Upper Canada. After the British army withdrew from Detroit to Niagara in 1813 there was no authority and no force for order all along the northern shore of Lake Erie. There, guerrillas—partly made up of those few Upper Canadians who had cast their lot with the United States—roamed at will, plundering their former neighbours and burning their farms, mills, and houses. Even the presence of regular armies was no safeguard: when the Americans burned Queenston on a cold night in December 1813, leaving its inhabitants to fend for themselves, the British and Canadians retaliated by burning Buffalo and Black Rock. As much as anything else, the nature of the war in Upper Canada confirmed the formerly American inhabitants in their hostility toward the American army. By permitting the guerrilla war, American commanders abandoned any chance of securing their earlier objective in the war, namely the acquisition of Canada.
Meanwhile, the American government had difficulty recruiting, training, and keeping in the field any kind of sizeable force. The engagements fought along the Upper Canadian frontier were important strategically, but tactically they didn’t compare to the great bodies of troops simultaneously manoeuvring in Europe. What is generally overlooked is that by 1813 the British had succeeded in assembling a very considerable army in Lower and Upper Canada, fifteen thousand all told, which compared very favourably with what the Americans could field on the Canadian frontier. (The fifteen thousand, though, were spread over thirteen hundred kilometres, and were never assembled in a single force.)
All this had the effect of depleting American enthusiasm for the war. It was also clear by the end of 1813 that the odds against American victory were increasing. Napoleon was foiled in his invasion of Russia, and lost most of his army in the process. The countries of central Europe threw off French rule, and combined to chase the French army and its emperor across Germany. The British invaded France from the south, where Wellington, now a duke, had liberated Spain from the French and restored the Spanish royal family. It was only a matter of time until the victorious British army under its great general could be redeployed across the Atlantic, if the American war continued.
The European war ended with the abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte in April 1814. The British government informed Governor Prevost that reinforcements were indeed on the way, fifteen thousand of Wellington’s best troops, appropriately commanded. Hopes were high for a favourable end to the conflict, including the retention of Forts Niagara and Detroit, with Michigan to become Indian territory. There was no thought of conquering the United States, or reversing the outcome of the American Revolution: Wellington doubted the practicability of large-scale war on the European model in North America, and in any case emphatically told the government that he had no wish to go to America.
But 1814 proved to be another stalemated year. Heavy fighting—especially the battles of Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane—continued along the Niagara frontier, with the British gradually improving their position but with no decisive change of fortune for either side. On the east coast, Sherbrooke occupied eastern Maine and diverted the revenues from taxes and tariffs there to Halifax, where they ultimately served to endow Dalhousie University. The British government dithered, balancing the possibility of renewed war in Europe against the possibility of using its new preponderance of force in North America to seek a decisive military victory and an advantageous peace. Wellington advised making peace, arguing that a decisive victory was unlikely and that enough had already been done to prove the defensibility of Canada. “[It] is my opinion,” he wrote, “that the war has been a most successful one, and highly honourable to the British arms.” It was true that the Americans still held some Upper Canadian territory, but that could be exchanged for American territory—eastern Maine and Fort Niagara—held by the British.28
And so it was. British and American representatives gathered in the neutral town of Ghent, in Belgium, and on Christmas Day 1814 signed a treaty of peace that returned to the status quo ante bellum, with borders and other arrangements to be just as they had been before the declaration of war in June 1812. The peace of 1814 concluded years of hostilities that had begun with the Revolutionary War. It was in many respects an affair of a generation—those who had fought in the Revolutionary War as youths were still in authority during the War of 1812, like President Madison or his secretary of state, James Monroe. Others, like the future secretary of state and president, John Quincy Adams, or his rival Andrew Jackson, remembered the war from childhood.
The war was now over. British power had not won against a revolutionary movement with strong popular support, outstandingly led. They had beaten back a feeble American invasion, indifferently led and doubtfully supported by American public opinion. As for the British provincials, in the Canadas or in the Maritimes, they had not rallied to the American cause at the outset, and afterward were sufficiently provoked by American actions to lend their support to their own, colonial, government. The provinces of British North America, American by geography, cultural affinity, and—except in Lower Canada—language and style, remained British. The British Empire, as of 1814, offered great and obvious benefits, in trade and defence, to its colonies. The empire would, reasonable colonists hoped, offer the same kind of substantial advantage in the future.