The siege was beginning. Thousands of British and Canadian soldiers were gathered outside Fort Erie ready to attack. It was the summer of 1814 — two years since the Americans had first invaded. The war had taken a brutal toll on York and the rest of Upper Canada. But every time the Americans attempted to invade Canada, they’d been pushed back — and with Napoleon now defeated in Europe, the British could send even more troops to defend their Canadian colonies.
A few weeks earlier, the Americans had launched yet another invasion across the Niagara River into Upper Canada, but they’d failed to make much progress. They’d been forced to retreat to Fort Erie, a British fort they’d seized; the last on the Canadian side of the river. The British and Canadians had come to push them back across the river, back across the border into Buffalo, back out of Canada and into the United States. Maybe, this time, for good.
But it wouldn’t be easy. There were more than two thousand Americans inside the fort. They’d spent the last week hard at work improving its defences. They’d expanded the earthworks. Mounted cannons. Dug a ditch and lined it with sharpened sticks. They’d cut down all the surrounding trees so there would be nowhere for the attackers to hide. It was clear that the Siege of Fort Erie would be a bloody battle.
In fact, the blood had already begun to flow. The British had launched a raid across the river, trying to cut off the Americans’ supplies before the real battle got underway. But it ended in disaster: nearly a dozen men were killed. Two more were lost during a much more successful mission to seize the American ships bombarding them from the river. And now, the British commander was finally on the brink of mounting a full-scale assault on the fort. The cannons were ready to open fire, to pound away at the thick stone walls ahead of the attack. More men were surely about to die.
That’s when Captain James FitzGibbon asked if he could take some time off.
It was a wildly unexpected request. Captain FitzGibbon was no coward, far from it; he would go down in history as one of the great heroes of the war. He’d signed up with the army as a fifteen-year-old in Ireland, and he’d fought his first battle while he was still just a teenager. By the early 1800s, he’d found himself in Canada serving under Isaac Brock. Impressed by the young soldier, Brock had promoted him, making him an officer even though at the time it was usually necessary for a soldier to buy his way into those ranks. The decision paid off. When the Americans invaded, FitzGibbon quickly proved his worth: making a dangerous run down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, commanding troops at the Battle of Stoney Creek, leading a small group of soldiers on daring guerrilla raids. They called the unit he led “The Bloody Boys.” They called him “The Green Tiger.”
A year before the Siege of Fort Erie, FitzGibbon had cemented his place in Canadian history — thanks to a woman in Niagara. When American soldiers forced her to put them up in her home, it backfired spectacularly. Laura Secord was no fan of the invaders; she was still nursing her husband back to health after he’d been wounded at the Battle of Queenston Heights. When she overhead their plans to attack, she set off alone through the countryside, walking for thirty kilometres to find the British and warn them. It was Captain FitzGibbon she found. Thanks to her help, and the contribution of a few hundred Haudenosaunee warriors, FitzGibbon and the British won the Battle of Stoney Creek.
The victory helped turn FitzGibbon into a popular hero. No one doubted his bravery. But the war was growing ever more bitter. The Battle of York had sparked a new, more brutal phase of the conflict — a spiralling cycle of revenge. The War of 1812 had already claimed thousands of lives. FitzGibbon had seen dozens, even hundreds, of men fall around him. Brock had been killed. So had Tecumseh, his corpse torn apart by American soldiers in search of morbid souvenirs. There was no reason for FitzGibbon to believe he would be spared. With the Siege of Fort Erie about to begin, he was understandably worried that he would die there on the banks of the Niagara River. And while he was perfectly willing to lay down his life for Canada, he now had more to worry about than just himself. James FitzGibbon had fallen in love.
Mary Haley was the daughter of a retired soldier, a Loyalist veteran of the American Revolution who now ran an inn in Kingston. No one’s entirely sure how she met the young FitzGibbon, but it seems to have happened during his early days in Canada, when he was stationed at Quebec City serving under Brock. They say that Mary won his heart during those two long years of war by knitting him an endless supply of socks — having heard that provisions were so low on the Niagara front that some soldiers were forced to go barefoot. By the time FitzGibbon found himself outside the walls of Fort Erie, the couple was engaged. The only reason they weren’t already married was that FitzGibbon was worried about money, and was putting off the ceremony until he was financially secure.
But now, with death looming, FitzGibbon realized he might have waited too long. He came up with a plan. He approached his colonel and made his extraordinary request: he wanted three days leave, just as the siege was about to begin. He didn’t give any reason. He simply promised it was deeply important to him and that he would be back before the real battle began.
It was a spectacularly bold move. Most soldiers would have been denied. But there was no questioning the loyalty of the Green Tiger, no reason to worry he would run away and never return. The colonel granted his request.
FitzGibbon mounted his horse and rode like the wind. The journey took him hundreds of kilometres over rough roads — little more than dirt paths carved through deep forests — all the way around the Niagara Peninsula and then east toward Kingston. He sent word ahead to his fiancée; he asked her to meet him partway, outside the church in Adolphustown, near Prince Edward County.
It was there that the ceremony was performed. As soon as it was over, the soldier said goodbye to his new wife — right there on the steps of the church — got back up on his horse, and rode away, rushing back to the battle at Fort Erie.
Now, if he died, Mary wouldn’t be left empty-handed. As his fiancée, she would have gotten nothing. But as the wife of a captain, she was promised a pension if he died. If he was destined to take his last breath on that battlefield, FitzGibbon’s final act would be to take care of the woman he loved.
The siege was indeed bloody. The bombardment by the British cannons failed to make much of a dent in the fort’s big stone walls. And when the soldiers launched their initial assaults, marching forward through rain and darkness, they were cut to pieces. Officers were struck down by muskets. Soldiers were torn apart by cannonballs. Some panicked and fled. Others drowned in the river, swept away by the swift current as they tried to swim around the American defences. Even worse, in an echo of what had happened at Fort York a year earlier, a large supply of ammunition exploded, leaving hundreds of men dead or wounded, corpses burned black by the fiery blast. The attack was an utter disappointment. They’d failed to take the fort, and while there were only a few dozen casualties on the American side, nearly a thousand British and Canadian soldiers were dead or wounded. The surgeon was forced to work for three straight days and nights without rest, desperately stitching men back together. They say that at roll call the morning after the assault, soldiers openly wept at the number who were missing.
But all was not lost. The Americans were still trapped inside the fort. When they tried to fight their way out a few weeks later, they failed to break through. By the time the British withdrew — leaving the Americans with their small, useless foothold on the Canadian side of the border — winter was approaching. Yet another summer had passed without the Americans making any real headway in their invasion of Canada. Their grand plan — a sweeping march through Niagara, across the Burlington Heights, and on into the capital of York — had never gotten off the ground.
In fact, things had gone so badly that the United States was now in danger of being wiped out completely. The British attacked them head on, in the heart of their own country. At the same time FitzGibbon was fighting at the Siege of Fort Erie, the British attacked and occupied the American capital. British troops marched through the streets of Washington, DC, setting fire to the White House and the Capitol Building — in part, as revenge for the burning of York. It was only a great thunderstorm and a powerful tornado that finally drove them out of the city.
Before the winter fully set in, the Americans abandoned Fort Erie. And Canada with it. They retreated back across the border, blowing up the fort behind them as they left so the British couldn’t reclaim it. For three straight summers, they’d tried to conquer Canada. And for three straight summers, they’d failed. They would never try again. Just a few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, 1814, a peace treaty was signed. The War of 1812 was over.
We’ll never be able to fully understand the extent of the toll it took. The psychological trauma that would last for decades to come, the relationships strained and broken. Countless marriages and families had been torn apart. Tens of thousands of people had been killed. But James FitzGibbon wasn’t one of them. He was still alive.
With the war finally over, the captain and his wife began their life together. They moved to the capital, living inside Fort York itself. Mary would never be much of a socialite, but James became one of York’s leading citizens. The reputation he had built for himself during the war was only the beginning. FitzGibbon would spend the next three decades defending his city from violence, often acting as a peacekeeper between the warring factions that threatened to tear Toronto apart.
The American threat that had loomed over Upper Canada ever since the province was founded would eventually fade away. But blood would still be spilled in Toronto’s streets. Widows would be made; families struck down by grief. Next time, it wouldn’t be a foreign enemy threating the peace of the city, it would neighbour fighting neighbour. With the American invaders defeated, a new battle approached: a violent clash over the future of Canada and what kind of a country it should be.
The next time James FitzGibbon took up arms against an enemy, he’d be facing a very different threat. A quarter of a century after the Siege of Fort Erie, FitzGibbon would find himself on the front lines yet again. This time, he’d be fighting to defend Toronto from its own citizens.
Rebellion was brewing.