Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (123 page)

Adams has come to admire Gallatin, in whose character he sees “one of the most extraordinary combinations of stubbornness and flexibility that I ever met within man.”

Indeed, Adams has come to respect the members of the commission with whom he has been closeted since July. He admires the once-despised Bayard for “the most perfect control of his temper … real self command” and has a good word for Russell, who has taken a lesser part in the negotiations. And Clay? Well, he understands Clay, in spite of their differences of belief and inclination. Both suffer from fits of temper, and Adams is nothing if not ruthlessly honest
with himself. In Clay he sees his emotional mirror image. “There is the same dogmatical, overbearing manner, the same harshness of look and expression, and the same forgetfulness of the courtesies of society in both.” But “nothing of this weakness has been shown in our conferences with the British plenipotentiaries. From two of them, and particularly from Mr. Goulburn, we have endured much; but I do not recollect that one expression has escaped the lips of any one of us that we would wish to be recalled.”

It is all but over. Ghent, which has been their home for six months, will soon recede into memory. Adams’s long solitary walks by the canal, Clay’s all night card parties, the brittle social repartee with their antagonists, the long, lazy dinners, the manoeuvring, the wrangling, the casuistry, Goulburn’s frustrations, Gambier’s pontifications, Gallatin’s mediation—all this is part of history.

On the morning of December 24, most of the plenipotentiaries on both sides are occupied by scribbling—they must prepare fair copies of the new treaty, six in all. The ceremony of signing is set for three o’clock, but the Americans are not ready and cannot meet for another hour. At four, their carriage draws up before the big, grey convent of Chartreux and, with their secretary, Hughes, the five men in long dark coats embroidered in gold enter the long dark room for their final duties.

A few small errors remain to be altered. Then with pen and ink, sand and sealing wax, the documents are rendered official, subject to ratification in Washington and London. Lord Gambier hands the three British copies to John Quincy Adams, whereupon the future president of the United States turns his over to the Admiral, remarking, as he does so, that he hopes this will be the last treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States. It is half-past six on Christmas Eve—an appropriate anniversary for a peace treaty.

And what does the treaty say? In eleven articles and more than three thousand words it says very little. Nothing about impressment or blockade, those bitter bones of contention that caused tempers to flare, swords to be unbuckled, and war to explode. Nothing about fishing rights, captured territory, boundaries, control of the lakes, or any of the other fractious issues over which the representatives of two countries have broiled and bickered. And so little about the Indians that this question too amounts to nothing.

It is as if no war had been fought or, to put it more bluntly, as if the war that was fought was fought for no good reason. For nothing has changed; everything is as it was in the beginning save for the graves of those who, it now appears, have fought for a trifle:

Porter Hanks, late of Michilimackinac, torn in two by a British cannonball; Isaac Brock, dead with a rifle bullet in his heart on the slippery slopes of Queenston; Henry Clay’s brother-in-law, vainly pleading for his life at the River Raisin, slaughtered and scalped; Zebulon Pike, pillowed on a British standard, gasping out his last moments; young Cecil Bisshopp, expiring from gangrene after the debacle at Black Rock; Robert Barclay’s shoulder mangled, Shadrach Byfield’s arm sliced off, John McClay’s skull cracked open—all for eleven pages of paper that change nothing.

And more: a seven-year-old child, Jervis Gillette, slain on the streets of Lewiston in December, 1813; a bewildered immigrant, Jacob Overholzer, rotting in a Kingston jail; Métoss’s small son shot dead before Fort Meigs; Sally Lovejoy, killed in her front parlour at Buffalo; and a nameless, sixty-year-old farmer dying in his wife’s arms in a makeshift tent near Lundy’s Lane—for what?

History will ignore all but a handful of these victims. In the official statements, and the unofficial ones, too, the war will be described as if it were a football game, with much emphasis on strategy and tactics, on valour and “honour,” but much less on cowardice, shame, horror, and confusion. Lake Erie and Fort McHenry will go into the American history books, Queenston Heights and Crysler’s Farm into the Canadian, but without the gore, the stench, the disease, the terror, the conniving, and the imbecilities that march with every army.

Men will write that the War of 1812 was the making of the United States: for the first time she was taken seriously in Europe; that it was also the making of Canada: her people were taught pride through a common resistance to the invaders; that bloody and insane though it may have been, Lundy’s Lane and Stoney Creek produced the famous undefended border between the two nations.

True. But in terms of human misery and human waste—the tall ships shattered by cannonball and grape; the barns and mills gutted by fire; villages put to the torch, grain fields ravaged, homes looted, breadwinners shackled and imprisoned; and thousands dead from cannon shot and musket fire, gangrene, typhus, ague, fever, or simple exposure, can anyone truly say on this crisp Christmas Eve that the game was ever worth the candle?

AFTERVIEW
The Legacy

LIKE A RUNAWAY MACHINE
, the war, which ended officially at the close of 1814, continued on its own momentum into the new year. It is entirely characteristic of this bloody and senseless conflict that its bloodiest and most senseless battle should have been fought a fortnight after the peace treaty was signed. The secretary of the commission, Christopher Hughes, was still on the high seas on January 8, the document in his dispatch case, when Wellington’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham, led eight thousand troops in an ill-timed and badly planned frontal attack against Andrew Jackson’s army near New Orleans. In half an hour, Jackson’s collection of American regulars, Kentucky sharpshooters, and bayou pirates, secure behind their bulwarks of cotton bales, smashed the assault, killing or wounding some two thousand British soldiers. Pakenham himself was slain.

The foray against New Orleans had been ordered by the British government weeks before, even as the commissioners bickered in Ghent. Its purpose was to hasten the peace negotiations and, with a victory, to force better terms from the Americans. Ironically, the final document was signed almost at the moment when the doomed Pakenham took up his new command.

But no one on the swampy shores of the shallow Pontchartrain knew that the war was over; nor would they know for another month. The Battle of New Orleans, renowned in song and story, had no military significance, was fought to no purpose. In Andrew Jackson, however, the Union had a future president and in the victory a cause for rejoicing after the shame of Washington.

The news of the battle reached the capital early on February 4. Six days later, Christopher Hughes arrived with the treaty. The American commissioners had been nervous about its reception, but now, with the bells pealing and the bonfires blazing, there was no cause for worry. The country entered into a paroxysm of joy. Nobody cared about the details; few ever inquired. The words on everybody’s lips were VICTORY and PEACE.

Having won the last battle, the Americans were convinced that they won the War of 1812. Having stemmed the tide of invasion and kept the Americans out of their country, Canadians believed that
they
won the war. Having ceded nothing they considered important, the British were serene in the conviction that
they
won it. But war is not a cricket match. The three nations that celebrated peace were beggared by the conflict, their people bereaved, their treasuries emptied, their graveyards crowded. In North America, the charred houses, the untended farms, the ravaged fields along the border left a legacy of bitterness and distrust.

But the real losers were the Indians. When Black Hawk of the Sauks heard the details of the Peace of Ghent, he wept like a child. A few weeks before he had delivered a prophetic speech: “I have fought the Big Knives and will continue to fight them, until they retire from our lands.” And fight them he did. In 1832, the Black Hawk War rekindled Tecumseh’s dream of an Indian confederacy. It was a war doomed, as all Indian revolts were doomed, to failure.

The news of the peace did not reach Mackinac Island until May. Lieutenant-Colonel McDouall, still in command, was “prostrated with grief.” For three years the British had held the key to the Northwest; now they were giving it up. Clearly the British negotiators, “egregiously duped,” in McDouall’s bitter phrase, had no comprehension of Mackinac’s significance. The Peace of Ghent meant the end of British influence and British fur trade in the Upper Mississippi.

The Indians knew betrayal when they saw it.
“Father!”
Sausamauee of the Winnebago cried out to McDouall in his anguish, “you promised us repeatedly that this place would not be given up … it would be better that you had killed at once, rather than expose us to a lingering death.… The peace made between you and the Big Knives
may
be a lasting one; but it cannot be for us, for we hate them; they have so often deceived us that we cannot put any faith in them.”

The tribes realized that the British had deceived them, too. Three summers before, Brock and Tecumseh had ridden proudly together into the defeated fort at Detroit, symbols of mutual respect between the British and the natives. What price now the pledges of the Great White Father to his children? What meaning the long years of sacrifice by Robert Dickson, starving with his adopted people in the land of the Sioux and Winnebago? Like the Indians, Dickson was ruined by the war. Unable to return to the Upper Mississippi, he moved west to the Red River settlement and ended his days in obscurity.

For the Indians, the conflict was waged for real goals, not empty phrases. Political and military leaders constantly used the clichés of warfare to justify bloodshed and rampage. Words like
honour … liberty … independence … freedom
were dragged out to rally the troops, most of whom, struggling to save their skins, knew them to be empty. But for Tecumseh, Roundhead, Métoss, Black Hawk, and all the native statesmen for whom this war meant tribal survival, these words were real. Honour stood for personal bravery, not a carefully ambiguous document announcing peace. Liberty meant freedom to roam the plains and forests, not the right to be independent of Great Britain. Of the thousands who fell in battle—reluctant Canadian farmers, drafted American militia, career British regulars, foreign mercenaries—few fought for an ideal. But the Indians did.

It is true that the young braves, like so many of their white counterparts, were also in the war for loot and drink, for adventure and glory, for escape from routine. But when the war ended, the white soldiers knew that if they lived they could go home. Where was home for the Indians?

All three English-speaking nations could be sure that when peace was declared, business would continue as before. But not the Indians. The British gave back Mackinac and Fort Niagara; the Americans returned Amherstburg to Canada. Boundary disputes were resolved by commission; a treaty ended the shipbuilding war on the Lakes; the Undefended Border was proclaimed with pride. But the Indians did not get back their hunting grounds.

In the summer of 1815, the United States signed fifteen treaties with the tribes, guaranteeing their status as of 1811. But it did not return an acre of land. The dream of an Indian state never came true. Did the British ever believe it would? The war that bolstered national feeling on both sides of the border crippled the pride of the native peoples. As civilization marched westward, the Indians retreated. Tecumseh’s tribe, the Shawnee, found themselves drifting from reservation to reservation in Kansas and Oklahoma. The Winnebago of Green Bay, ravaged by war and disease, moved to Iowa, then Minnesota, and finally Nebraska. The Miami ended on reservations in Kansas, the Potawatomi in Oklahoma.

By that time, the War of 1812 was remembered only in terms of catchphrases:
Don’t give up the ship … We have met the enemy and they are ours … Push on, brave York Volunteers
. History gave the conflict short shrift; and yet, for all its bunglings and idiocies, it helped determine the shape and nature of Canada. Like the Battle of Waterloo, it was, to use Wellington’s phrase, “a near run thing.” The balance might have been tipped another way had the leadership on either side been more incisive, the weather less capricious, or the Gods of War less perverse. A change of wind on Lake Champlain could have led to the capture of upper New York State. The sniper’s bullet that killed Isaac Brock undoubtedly helped prolong the struggle.

Events, not individuals, it is said, control the course of history. The War of 1812 suggests the opposite. Canada’s destiny, for better or for worse, was in the hands of human beings, subject to human caprices, strengths, and emotions. If the ambitious Winfield Scott had waited for the army at Lundy’s Lane, if the haughty Commodore Chauncey had deigned to support Jacob Brown at Fort George, could Upper Canada have held out? Tecumseh was unique. If he had not been born, would another have risen in his place?