The Invasion of Canada (19 page)

At last, on July 12, a bright and lovely Sunday, Hull resolves to make the crossing, even though two hundred of his men continue to stand on their constitutional rights. He fears further mutinies if he keeps his troops inactive, and it is also his fancy that the Canadian settlers will feel themselves liberated from the British yoke once he lands and that they and the Indians will stay out of the war.

Hull’s landing is unopposed. Colonel Cass is the first to leap from the lead boat, and thus the first American to set foot on Canadian soil. He immediately unfurls the Stars and Stripes while Hull’s staff searches about for a headquarters.

Sandwich is a placid little garden village, almost every house set in a small orchard where peaches, grapes, and apples flourish. The conquering general seizes the most imposing residence – a new brick home, built in the Georgian style the year before, its interior still unfinished, belonging to Lieutenant-Colonel François Bâby, a member of a distinguished pioneer fur-trading family. The Bâbys and the Hulls have been on intimate terms, but when James Bâby, a brother and also a militia colonel, protests (his own home not far away is quickly pillaged), all Hull can say is that
circumstances are changed now,
a phrase which Lieutenant-Colonel Bâby will throw back at him a month later.

Hull has scarcely landed when he insists on issuing a proclamation intended to disperse the militia and cow the inhabitants, many of whom are either terrified of his troops or secretly disposed to his cause. Most have fled, but those who remain welcome the invaders as friends, waving white handkerchiefs and flags from the windows and crying out such phrases as “We like the Americans.” At Amherstburg, Beall encounters similar sentiments and confides to his journal that many solicit secret interviews with him, and when these are refused “occasionally and slily say ‘Success to the Americans and General Hull’, ‘Let us alone and we will take Maiden [Amherstburg] ourselves’,
et cetera, and many expressions showing their warmth for us and the Americans and their detestation of the British.”

Yet Hull cannot resist issuing a bombastic proclamation that seems designed to set the Canadians on edge. He has it printed, rather imperfectly, in Detroit, borrowing the press of a Roman Catholic priest. It is soon the talk of the countryside:

The General, who is afraid of the Indians, hopes that this document will force his opposite number at Fort Amherstburg to follow the lead of the United States and adopt a policy of native neutrality, at least temporarily. At the very minimum it ought to frighten the settlers and militia into refusing to bear arms. That is its immediate effect. In Brock’s phrase, “the disaffected became more audacious, and the wavering more intimidated.” The proclamation terrifies the militia. Within three days the force of newly recruited soldiers has been reduced by half as the farm boys desert to their homes.

Yet Hull has overstated his case. These are farmers he is addressing, not revolutionaries. The colonial authoritarianism touches very few. They do not feel like slaves; they already have enough peace, liberty, and security to satisfy them. This tax-free province is not America at the time of the Boston Tea Party. Why is Hull asking them to free themselves from tyranny? In the words of one, if they had been under real tyranny, “they could at any time have crossed the line to the United States.”

Hull has made another error. He threatens that anyone found fighting beside the Indians can expect no quarter. That rankles.
Everybody
will be fighting with the Indians; it will not be a matter of choice. Some of the militiamen who secretly hoped to go over to Hull in the confusion of battle have a change of heart. What is the point of deserting if the Americans intend to kill them on capture?

Precipitate action does not fit the Upper Canadian mood. This is a pioneer society, not a frontier society. No Daniel Boones stalk the Canadian forests, ready to knock off an Injun with a Kentucky rifle or do battle over an imagined slight. The Methodist circuit riders keep the people law abiding and temperate; prosperity keeps them content. The Sabbath is looked on with reverence; card playing and horse racing are considered sinful diversions; the demon rum has yet to become a problem. There is little theft, less violence. Simple pastimes tied to the land – barn raisings, corn huskings, threshing bees – serve as an outlet for the spirited. The new settlers will not volunteer to fight. But most are prepared, if forced, to bear arms for their new country and to march when ordered. In the years that follow some will even come to believe that they were the real saviours of Upper Canada.

MONTREAL, LOWER CANADA, July 4, 1812. Sir George Prevost has moved up from his capital at Quebec to be closer to the scene of action. An American army is gathering at Albany, New York, poised to attack Montreal by the traditional invasion route of the Lake Champlain water corridor. If it succeeds, Sir George is perfectly prepared to abandon all of Upper Canada and withdraw to the fortress of Quebec.

At this moment, however, the Captain-General, Governor-in-Chief, Vice-Admiral, Lieutenant-General and Commanding Officer of His Majesty’s Forces in Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Cape Breton, Newfoundland and the Bermudas is faced with a crisis on his own doorstep. A riot has broken out at Lachine over the Militia Law, which provides for the drafting of two thousand bachelors for three months’ training. Some of the men from the parish at Pointe Claire have refused to go, believing – or pretending to believe – that the act has not been properly passed and the
government is simply seizing an excuse to turn young French Canadians into soldiers.

When the army tries force, a mob resists and marches off to Lachine to seize a flotilla of boats in which the draftees hope to escape. The Riot Act is read; shots whistle over the insurgents’ heads and are returned; two civilians are killed. Four hundred and fifty soldiers invade the community and begin taking prisoners – so many, indeed, that they are finally released on the promise that they will “implore the pardon of His Excellency the Governor.”

His Excellency is a suave diplomat whose forte is conciliation. He has learned that delicate art as governor of St. Lucia and later of Dominica, French-speaking islands in the Caribbean wrested from the mother country by the British but soothed into passivity by a man who has none of the hauteur of a British colonial bureaucrat. Born of a Swiss father and perfectly at home in the French language, Prevost has the exact qualifications needed to win over a race who also consider themselves a conquered people.

Now, before some three hundred insurgents, the Great Conciliator appears and turns on his considerable charm.

“His Excellency expostulated with them as a Father and pointed out to them the danger of their situation in a style truly honourable to his own feelings, assuring them of his forgiveness on delivering up those who had been promoters of the insurrection … which they cheerfully agreed to do.…”

Thus with the crisis defused and the approving comment of the Montreal
Herald
putting the seal on his actions, the Governor General can turn to graver matters. He is resolved to fight a defensive war only; he does not have the resources to go on the attack, even if he wished to. But he does not wish to. His own natural caution has been sustained by specific instructions from Lord Liverpool, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, to do nothing rash.

Rashness is not Sir George’s style. He finds it difficult to countenance it in others. Surely the United States will do nothing rash! He is half convinced that the Americans do not actually mean to fight; that some accommodation can be made with them; that the war is not a real war; and that, in any event, it cannot possibly last for more than a few weeks. “Prudent” is a word that slips comfortably into his correspondence. He considers it “prudent and politic to avoid any measure which can in its effect have a tendency to unite the people in the American States,” for “whilst disunion prevails among them, their
attempts on these provinces will be feeble.” Therefore it is important not to anger the enemy. Brock, specifically, is enjoined from “committing any act which may even by construction tend to unite the Eastern and Southern states.”

Brock, with his reputation for dash and daring, worries Prevost. The impetuous, subordinate is more than a week away by express courier and a month away by post. His audacity is legendary. Prevost has certainly heard the stories. One goes all the way back to Brock’s early days, when his regiment, the 49th, was stationed at Bridgetown in Barbados. There was in that company a confirmed braggart and duellist whose practice was to insult fellow officers and finish them off at twelve paces. Brock, when accosted, accepted the challenge but refused to fire at the regulation distance. Instead, he produced a handkerchief and demanded that both men fire across it at point-blank range, thus equalling the odds and making the death of at least one of them a virtual certainty. His adversary panicked, refused to fire, and thus shamed was forced to leave the regiment.

There are other tales: Brock in the saddle, insisting on riding to the very pinnacle of Mount Hillaby, twelve hundred feet above the Caribbean – a feat most horsemen consider impossible; or, in 1803, personally leading an eight-hour chase in an open boat across Lake Ontario to apprehend six deserters, a venture that brought him a reprimand.

To a prudent commander, Brock’s presence can be disquieting, even alarming. He is known as a man who believes that “nothing should be impossible to a soldier; the word impossible should not be found in a soldier’s dictionary!” Will Brock attempt the impossible in Upper Canada? Prevost is determined that he shall not.

The contrast between the two commanders can be seen in their official portraits. At forty-four, Prevost is a handsome man, his lean face framed by dark sideburns; yet even in his painted likeness there is a furtiveness. The eyes swivel back as if to watch the artist; little furrows crease the brow. There is a slackness of mouth, a hesitancy of stance, none of the knife-edge sharpness that distinguishes the features of his subordinate who, in his portraits, looks off resolutely and serenely into the middle distance.