At the summit of the towering limestone pillar in Queenston stands the grey figure of Major General Isaac Brock, a hero of the War of 1812. An inscription says he fought the “invading enemy” — the Americans.
He was shot in the chest and died at Queenston Heights, a spot not far from the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge in Niagara Falls.
Brock brazenly faces the U.S. border, his right arm outstretched, a gloved hand pointing out over the winding Niagara River in the distance below, which is deep blue and still as a painting.
The gesture seems like a warning to the Yanks: Remember 1812? Don’t try it again.
As kids we spent what seemed like endless months studying “life in New France” and learning that Canada was not forged from war like our rowdy southern neighbours but that we evolved peacefully, built a railway, and ultimately made it law to put French and English on cereal boxes.
In fact, war on our land and water did forever shape the country that grew north of the 49th parallel.
We didn’t start it but the War of 1812, which lasted from June, 1812, to February, 1815, was Canada’s war, even as it was an event with global implications.
The federal government will spend about $30 million to commemorate the bicentennial of the war.
The Hamilton Spectator will publish a special section about the conflict, in which some of the critical battles were fought in Hamilton and Niagara.
That includes Queenston Heights. Here, Brock’s perch soars 56 metres, so high that his face is not visible; tourists must walk far away from the monument to fit it all in a camera frame.
“Pretty damn impressive,” says 21-year-old Mike Williamson, a student visiting from Australia.
A plaque says his “mortal remains” lie in a vault at the base of the structure.
Is there another historic figure in Canada so lionized? And Brock wasn’t even Canadian. He was British and lived here 10 years.
The monument is so bold some might call it un-Canadian, more on the scale of one in Washington or London, where it would, in fact, stand four metres taller even than the pillar the Brits built to honour Lord Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar.
The first Brock monument was dynamited in 1840 by terrorists, according to a Niagara Parks heritage website. The second, built in 1852, stood even taller than the first.
Invaders? War? Terrorists? On Canadian soil?
No, in 1812, Canada did not formally exist back then, that was still 55 years away.
The Americans knew who we were, though. They called us Canada. As in: “The conquest of Canada is in your power” (Henry Clay, speaker of the House of Representatives) and “the acquisition of Canada … will be a mere matter of marching” (author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson).
The notion that Upper and Lower Canada could be easily annexed was not a radical one back then.
But by the time the war was over, after nearly three years, the Americans had been held at bay, primarily by British troops, bolstered by professional Canadian soldiers, native warriors, and Canadian civilian militia all under British command.
Winston Churchill wrote that history is written by the victors. But more than one side claims victory in this war.
By one interpretation, the U.S. may not have won outright, but also did not lose, having fought the British to a draw and defeating them in naval battles, which had seemed unthinkable.
To the extent Americans think of it at all, some call the War of 1812 their Second War of Independence. It inspired their national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, which describes British bombardment of Fort Henry in Baltimore.
Certainly it could have ended worse for the U.S. A great “what if” of the war is that had the British not been preoccupied fighting Napoleon in Europe and defeated the U.S. soundly, Canada, in fact, might have expanded its border.
Instead, the war’s stalemate finish ended British illusions of rolling back the American Revolution and opened the door for U.S. expansion west (at the expense of native peoples).
For Canadians, the bottom line is that despite American aggression, the border did not move. Moreover, Washington was occupied and the White House burned by British redcoats.
“The acid test is, if we hadn’t won, we wouldn’t be independent, we’d be part of the U.S.,” says Western (Ontario) University historian Jonathan Vance. “Historians will bicker, but for me, that’s the test.”
Perhaps the war had been inevitable, but it might not have taken place in 1812 if not for war between Great Britain and Napoleon’s France, which led to renewed British-American hostilities.
The British had blocked American ships from transporting goods by sea to punish the French and initiated “impressment” — boarding U.S. ships and taking away sailors who were deemed of British roots. Six-thousand sailors were taken.
American leaders also took issue with what was seen as British support for natives who stood in the way of American expansion west.
While some congressional war hawks spoiled for a fight to defeat the British on the continent once and for all, the British were motivated to wage war as well, according to historian Jerald Podair, who teaches at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
“What the British want is a do-over of the American Revolution. And what do the Americans want? Well, Canada would be nice.”
Still, the U.S. itself was divided on whether to wage war, Americans in New England openly opposed it.
U.S. President James Madison delivered his war message to Congress, documenting a list of grievances. Congress voted in favour and Madison declared war on June 19, 1812.
The war was a critical moment in the evolution of Canada but in one sense it was simply the latest battle for supremacy in North America — the continent that had first been named on a European map in 1507, after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
The war also symbolized round two in the struggle between Great Britain and rebellious American colonists in the new world — a struggle in which Canadians had always been involved one way or another.
The U.S. won independence in 1781 following a revolutionary war in which British loyalists in Canada, such as Butler’s Rangers, fought Americans. After the war 38,000 British loyalists settled north of the border.
The War of 1812, writes historian Alan Taylor, became essentially a “civil war between kindred peoples, recently and incompletely divided by the revolution … the republic and the empire competed for the allegiance of the peoples in North America — native, settler and immigrant.”
Taylor quotes a British officer’s reflections after visiting an American encampment during the war: “Strange indeed did it appear to me to find so many names familiar as enemies; the very names of officers in our own army. How uncomfortably like a civil war.”
Among the loyalists who joined the fight against the Americans were blacks who had fled the U.S. and settled in Upper Canada. Blacks also fought for the U.S. side but, according to the Dominion Institute, thousands of black volunteers fought for the British, many of them fearing that the invading Americans would return them to slavery.
(British/Canadian freedom only extended so far: a black regiment still required a white officer in command.)
Historians have labelled the war many ways: a civil war, a forgotten war, the war nobody won. Shortly after the U.S. declared war, the British revoked the impressment policy that had done so much to stoke the fire.
That did not stop the war, which is why some historians also call it a needless war, especially considering no territory was lost or gained by either side and no regimes were toppled.
In the end, the U.S. suffered 2,260 combat deaths — half the total of losses in the American War of Independence. The British lost 1,600 in combat and perhaps 1,000 Canadian soldiers and militia died. It’s unknown how many natives died.
The casualty numbers are misleading because the prognosis for soldiers engaged in battle was never good. Scores more died in the weeks and months following combat from wounds and disease that medicine at the time could not treat.
Fighting at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls was particularly brutal, fought mostly after dark, five hours long, with about 3,000 British and Canadian soldiers facing 2,800 Americans.
Yet the War of 1812 did not nearly approach the total war carnage of the U.S. Civil War, for example, where whole cities were burned to the ground. (More than 212,000 American soldiers died in combat in that war; more American troops than in the revolution, the First World War, Korea, and Vietnam combined.)
Battlefield fighting in the War of 1812 was brutally violent but in the modern context of warfare still had the air of chivalry associated with it. Soldiers dressed not in camouflage but red (British) and blue (American); lined up and fired upon each other in the field with weaponry confined to musketry and cannons.
Unlike wars that would follow with prolonged trench warfare and combat in the streets and in the air, battles in 1812 were primarily in the field and on water and were over quickly.
Perhaps this is why war re-enactments today focus on battles of the 19th century, not the 20th.
“In the Battle of New Orleans (Jan. 8, 1815), the British marched out in the traditional way, wearing red, with bands playing, marching in lockstep, right on the open on a flat plain,” says Jerald Podair.
“It was like two armies stepping outside to fight. If you were civilian you could get out of the way. In the Civil War, armies fought right in living rooms, house to house.”
The war did, in fact, visit terror on civilians as well, however. When Americans gained control of Lake Erie, they freely landed on the Canadian shoreline and ransacked property.
“Americans raided properties east from Detroit to London and there was a lot of damage done, and considerable resentment built up,” says Jonathan Vance.
“For a lot of Upper Canadians it was personal. These were their farms burned, or family’s and friends’ farms. It hit as close to home as it possibly could and it took a long time for those animosities to heal.”
Then there was the Bloody Assize. At the site of the Coach and Lantern pub in Ancaster, 15 people were sentenced to death for treason. On July 20, 1814 they were hauled in a wagon to a makeshift gallows at Dundurn Street and York Boulevard. Standing in the wagon, nooses were placed around their necks, and the wagon pulled away. Following a court order, eight of the accused had their heads were cut off and displayed on stakes.
The bodies were buried in unmarked graves near what is now Hamilton Cemetery but their remains have never been located.
In the big picture, perhaps the most tragic upshot of the war was the outcome for native peoples.
While some natives, such as the Senecas, joined forces with the U.S., most joined the British. That included the legendary Shawnee native leader Tecumseh, who hoped in vain to unify all tribes to best protect their land interests.
While natives helped the British and Canadians turn back the Americans, they did not benefit from their efforts and sacrifice.
“The war was historically transformative, probably the first pivotal event in 500 years of contact (with Europeans),” says Donald Fixico, a native and professor at Arizona State University.
The upshot for natives was that the tide of American settlement in the west rose more rapidly, even though most natives had been on the “winning” side.
“The British leave the U.S. to their own; they can finish rebuilding their White House and armies and infrastructure. And they punish natives who had fought on the wrong side.”
Less than 20 years after the war, President Andrew Jackson enacted the Indian removal policy, forcing Indians to leave land east of the Mississippi. (Jackson had commanded troops as a general and made his name at the Battle of New Orleans.)
Thomas Jefferson previously had promoted the more benign view that natives were neighbours who could be taught to farm and assimilate into American society.
“The attitude changes after the war. It’s a new kind of nation trying to strengthen itself, and natives are seen in a negative way,” says Fixico. “Natives now had to defend their sovereignty. The balance is tipped against them. The war makes them subordinate to the sovereignty of the U.S.”
While historians agree that natives were the biggest losers of the war, Rick Hill, who has taught indigenous studies in this area for 30 years, says it depends how you look at it.
“You can win material things like land but if you lose your honour along the way to that victory, you have to ask ‘who lost the most?’
“What if the pledge of the Crown means nothing, if the promises of the president of the United States mean nothing? We are still here saying the same things we said in 1811: that we are a nation, this is our land, and our culture matters.
“In that way we are victorious because, despite the war, we haven’t changed. Two hundred years later we are still asking the Crown and the U.S. to live up to their pledges.”
The federal government will launch a campaign to commemorate the war. Visitors will take in Battlefield Park in Stoney Creek, site of a crucial battle on June 6, 1813, and Hamilton Cemetery, where, before it was a cemetery, the British camped and built earthworks as a strategic barrier that you can still climb on foot.
But other major participants in the war are not similarly engaged.
Historians say the British still think of 1812 primarily as the year Napoleon invaded Russia. The battle here was just one part of a global conflict in which they were engaged.
The U.S. doesn’t formally commemorate the war in any grand way, certainly not in the manner of other wars.
In part this is because there are no surviving veterans to push for monuments, as was the case with the Vietnam and Korean and Second World War monuments in Washington D.C.
Perhaps in part it’s because the outcome was, arguably, ambiguous.
“Our history is based mostly on myth and what we want to remember,” says Donald Fixico.
A recent poll of 1,015 Canadians showed that 25 per cent feel the War of 1812 contributed toward defining our identity.
The war did establish a simple yet fundamental thread in what would become our national fabric: the notion that while we share much in common with the Americans, we are not them.
Yet in that same survey, 53 per cent responded that our health-care system defines our identity.
Commemorate means to honour a memory. Should the war be celebrated?
Leaving aside the nuances of the cause and outcome of the war and who did much of the fighting, we could celebrate the fact that, in the words of one letter writer to The Hamilton Spectator, “we kicked the U.S.’s butt.”
Butt-kicking is the ethos of a sculpture erected in Toronto three years ago by Vancouver-based artist Douglas Copeland that shows a Newfoundland-based soldier standing triumphantly above a fallen American soldier.
“History with its flickering lamp,” wrote Churchill, “stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”
Sometimes we only notice shadows thrown by that illumination because, try as we might to have perspective on our past, the view is shaped by the lens of the present.
A history of the war published in 1852 by Gilbert Auchinleck described the role of Canadians this way: “It was by the side of a mere handful of British troops that our Canadian militia achieved the expulsion of the invading foe, and what is more, we do not regard it as an extravagant supposition that, had the Mother Country been unable to send a single soldier, their own true hearts and strong arms — so thoroughly was the spirit roused — would, unaided, have won the day.”
That sort of prose sounds like a national anthem.
Fifteen years later in 1867, The Maple Leaf Forever was written. The anthem’s lyrics invoked the Queen, God, heaven, and that “at Queenston Heights and Lundy’s Lane our brave fathers side by side; for freedom, homes and loved ones dear, firmly stood and nobly died.”
Jump ahead 143 years from when that song was penned. At the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, the great reveal for modern Canada to the world, B.C. singer Michael Bublé donned a red Mountie uniform, then stripped to a white dinner jacket to croon The Maple Leaf Forever.
The song lyrics had been completely changed years earlier. References to Queen and God and heaven and doing battle were gone, replaced by phrases such as “quiet strength,” blue skies, strong mountains, sparkling snow, and “a scent of freedom in the wind.”
The song is not forever. Neither is Canada, not the one of distant eras and wars.
Perhaps the good and noble campaign today, as an Upper Canadian might once have put it, is to reach back and remember 1812-1815, invoke the blazing failure and shining virtue of the human condition implicit in that war, and work to revive and preserve the best of what we were — even as we change, as a country, as individuals.
Interpretations change but history never does. It is there, it is real, and always there for the taking.
jwells@thespec.com
