A Miserable War

Until the occupation in Iraq turned ugly, the War of 1812 looked obscure and confusing. By 2007, however, it has begun to look eerie. In 1812 and in 2002, there were similar underlying motives: the liberation of another country from tyranny in favour of American-style democracy and the pursuit of resources. In both cases there were improbable pretexts—in 1812, it was British conduct on the high seas. Likewise, Washington’s campaign planners had expected a “cakewalk” from Detroit into Canada and a joyous welcome from the inhabitants, but instead of flowers and candy there was outrage. Where victories did occur, there were never enough troops to hold the territory. The secretary of defence, it turned out, had had no real plan for the war, and after sporadic fighting a beleaguered President Madison, seeking re-election, found himself shunned even by members of his own party. Despite growing anti-war sentiment, alarmed Americans re-elected him with a majority. Still, his war secretary was forced to resign under popular pressure. With bad news from the front, anti-war sentiment escalated, few recalling that the opposition had voted for the war. As in Iraq, the conflict declined into military manoeuvring and labyrinthine negotiations for peace with honour.

And so, history, with its amnesia, has given us weapons of mass destruction instead of British naval impressment, Bush instead of Madison, Rumsfeld instead of Eustis and an “exit strategy” instead of the Treaty of Ghent.

Many Americans would bridle at Mark Zuehlke’s assertions in his book, For Honour’s Sake: The War of 1812 and the Brokering of an Uneasy Peace, that Washington had intended to annex Canada. And Zuehlke, while eloquent, vivid and persuasive, does have a Canadian bias. On the other hand, what are we to make of President Jefferson’s comment that “if the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand, we will take Canada, which wants to enter the Union,” or the insistence of the “war hawks” of Tennessee that nowhere is it “written in the book of fate that the American Republic shall not stretch her limits from the capes of Chesapeake to Nootka Sound, from the isthmus of Panama to Hudson bay”? It was in the popular imagination, in the newspapers, in the discussions of senators. Only in the most official proclamations, as in Iraq, was it stated solely in moral and defensive terms.

Instances of moral outrage, as usual, were ready to hand. In the 1790s, American settlers, taking large tracts of land as they pushed though the Ohio Valley, were clashing with the Indians as far as the Mississippi. There were depredations on both sides but Indiana governor Henry Harrison portrayed his people as victims at the hands of tribes abetted by British outposts. Meanwhile, he managed to bribe stooge tribal chiefs into making treaties by which the Indians were cheated of their lands. The great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, attempted a concentration and revival of the tribes at Prophetstown, Indiana, but U.S. troops burned it to the ground.

Contrary to the claims of Harrison, the British had cautioned the Indians against provoking the Americans. But they did give the Indians passive support in the form of refuge and supplies. The Indians, after all, were trappers and traders and Canada was a trapping and trading colony, so the British and the Indians got on. America was, by contrast, populous and land hungry and the Indians were in the way.

Consequently, Harrison had no trouble convincing Washington that Britain and the tribal federations were in league. One who was watching carefully was the Republican Kentucky firebrand, Henry Clay. Clay was looking for the “slam dunk” pretext that would push his country to declare war.

As it happened, America and Britain were chafing more directly on the high seas. While England was distracted by its fight with Napoleon, Washington was all the happier to have England and France tied up in war. But each suspected the United States of friendly trade with the other. Britain and America each attempted to cut off the other’s sea trade. Tensions rose when London enacted impressment, a law enabling British ships to board American vessels in search of deserters. Henry Clay did everything he could to compound the furor against impressment with the alleged Indian-British conspiracy on the northern border.

On June 1, 1812, after intense lobbying by Clay, the U.S. Congress voted for war. Secretary of War William Eustis had no real war plan and getting the young democracy to approve troop levies was like pulling teeth. In Canada, meanwhile, the cautious British governor, George Prevost, thought it best to do nothing for fear of provoking the Americans into enthusiasm and unity.

As a small American army under General Hull trundled listlessly toward Detroit, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, attempted to head off a war by offering to repeal impressment if the Americans would open their ports to British trade. As Washington attempted its own last-minute diplomacy, words evaporated in the agonizing tardiness of transatlantic diplomatic communication. Hull was in Detroit preparing to invade.

The proclamation that Hull sent across to the people of Upper Canada promising liberation from British tyranny along with punishment for resistance was rejected with outrage. Soon the seasoned British general Sir Isaac Brock, allied with Tecumseh’s warriors, turned the tables and took Detroit without a fight.

The Americans now decided that the key to victory was control of lakes Erie and Ontario and the Niagara peninsula that separated them. The Americans attempted an invasion across the Niagara River but were defeated by General Brock, just as Brock himself fell to his legendary death at Queenston Heights.

American spirits were low. Although Madison was re-elected, Eustis was reviled and Congress would not vote the necessary troop increases. Moreover, America was then a democratic rarity where political divisions and dissent over an ill-conceived war were plain for the world to see—much as they are in 2007. On the Atlantic, meanwhile, a string of U.S. victories against the British shook the legend of England’s invincibility at sea. But this ray of light was quickly extinguished by events in Europe, where most things in the New World were decided. Britain was near to victory in Spain and would soon be able to increase its efforts in Canada.

Then Washington saw an opening. Another keystone was the upper St. Lawrence—Kingston and Montreal—which, if taken, would cut British supply to Upper Canada. In 1813, Washington’s new secretary of war, John Armstrong, wanted to strike there, but his naval commodore, Chauncey, thought Kingston too well defended. Instead he turned west to capture Toronto, which his men burned and terrorized.

If strategy meant control of Niagara and the upper St. Lawrence, the trophy was still the western Lake Erie–Ohio region, where Tecumseh’s confederacy remained the bane of the Americans and the hope of the British. Tecumseh wanted a southward offensive to recover Indian lands while Britain’s General Proctor preferred a defensive war. Corresponding indecision dogged the Americans in Niagara where they got themselves ambushed by a British-Mohawk force, famously alerted by Laura Secord, at Beaver Dams.

Still, the British knew that there was no hope of winning the war without control of Lake Erie. Accordingly, in September 1813, British and American ships went at one another at the western end of the lake in a battle that ended in an American victory. Here, author Zuehlke’s thumbnail, yet photographic, capacity for describing military engagements surpasses itself. The horrors of smoke, fallen rigging and blood-washed decks are unforgettable; throughout he brings the strangeness and horror of war to a conflict that history keeps wanting to forget.

The Americans were now able to land anywhere along Lake Erie, so that Proctor had to retreat eastward. Along the way, the British and Indians were routed and Tecumseh killed at Moraviatown. With the British in disarray, the time was now ripe for the Americans to cut the St. Lawrence with a move on Montreal. But underestimation of the crack French-Canadian militia cost the Americans the battle of Châteauguay. Moreover, Washington had not anticipated French loyalty to the British, who had left Quebec’s culture, land tenure and religion more or less untouched. Shortly afterward, the Americans lost again at Chrysler’s farm.

The listlessness of American efforts on the upper St. Lawrence was due in part to War Secretary Armstrong’s growing obsession with Niagara. A series of British and American attacks and reprisals there only increased Armstrong’s fixation while Washington, again like the Americans in Iraq, combined hell-bent stubbornness with the search for a way out.

But the far-reaching tremors of events in Europe would give the bush war in Canada an aura of tragic futility. Napoleon’s defeat by Russia had already pre-empted Tsar Alexander’s pet project of brokering a peace between England and America. And London, foreseeing victory in Europe, was less driven to find a settlement with Washington. John Quincy Adams, the American ambassador in St. Petersburg of whom Zuehlke draws a masterly flesh and blood portrait, had been joined by a delegation of American peace commissioners, including former treasury secretary Gallatin, only to find themselves left in limbo as London mused, with breezy arrogance, about whether to hold the talks in London, Stockholm, Amsterdam or Ghent.

Meanwhile, Armstrong lost whatever military capital the Americans might have brought to the table when they were defeated in 1814 at Lundy’s Lane—again in Niagara. Having lost control of Lake Ontario as well, the Americans withdrew once and for all.

If Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813 further strengthened Britain’s hand, London still felt that the fastest way of ending a wasteful and unpopular war was at the bargaining table. Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh appointed the combative Henry Goulburn to lead the British side. Here, Zuehlke paints a living picture of the sojourn of Washington’s commissioners in the rainy city of Ghent. In chilly rooms, the British seized the initiative by declaring the issues to be the Indians, the border, impressment and U.S. fishing in British waters. At the heart of it was Goulburn’s devotion to the Indians; so the main British demand had little to do with their policy of impressment. Rather, they wanted an independent Indian nation to act as a buffer between Canada and the United States. The Americans, claiming security and not greed for land, rejected the putative Indian nation with fury.

The talks dragged on and the story of Ghent makes for some heavy going. But Zuehlke has made it move as well as anyone could, painting in servants, the weather and furnishings, not to mention forbearing diplomatic wives, daily habits and personal spites. (It is interesting: since the extraordinarily successful publication of Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919, writers seem to have taken to serving up history with generous helpings of gossip.)

As often happened, the negotiations were outstripped by events across the Atlantic. The British had massed their navy against the American coastline and actually succeeded in taking Washington and burning some of the government buildings. When this news reached the American commissioners in Ghent, they realized that to bargain now was to lose, so they dug in their heels.

By intuition or luck, it was a brilliant stance. Lord Castlereagh was becoming nervous; the war’s weakening of the British position at the Congress of Vienna, threats of a Bonapartist revival in France and British public opinion conspired to demand a quick end to the conflict. He instructed Goulburn to drop the demand for an “Indian nation” in favour of a return to the pre-war status of the Indians and the frontier. Both sides accepted it with bitterness. The treaty was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, only days before Andrew Jackson belatedly crushed a British attack on New Orleans.

The Treaty of Ghent put an end to a futile war while doing much to forge the national identities of two young nations. And Canadians, until their nation came of age with the First World War exactly a century later, looked to themselves and to Britain rather than to the United States.

Zuehlke has made an extraordinary silk purse out of the sow’s ear of a protracted and desultory bush war and the claustrophobic tedium of the negotiations that ended it. One can nit-pick about his stage managing of North American and European events, but when all is said and done, it could not have been handled better. And he has done it with a point of view, one which could raise a few American hackles, not to mention some questions about whether America’s sense of its own destiny and the means of achieving it have, in essence, changed very much between the fall of Toronto and the fall of Baghdad.