1812: The War Canada Won and the Americans and British Drew

As readers will know, the original Fort York was built by Governor John Graves Simcoe, who correctly foresaw the strategic importance of Toronto because of its natural harbour and greater distance from the United States than other Upper Canadian towns closer to the border such as Kingston and Niagara Falls. It was part of Simcoe's visionary plan for the new province of Upper Canada, founded in 1791 to accommodate the tens of thousands of Empire Loyalists who fled the American Revolution, and for whom living in the predominantly French-speaking and civil law-governed jurisdiction of Lower Canada (Quebec), was not appropriate. Simcoe also aggressively recruited and incentivized immigration from the United States, and with a pioneering military corps, named after his old regiment, the Queen's Rangers, he built an ambitious network of straight roads, on the Roman military model. (almost all named after contemporary British colonial officials: Yonge, Bathurst, Dundas, Danforth, etc.)

He correctly foresaw that war could arise again with the Americans, and was confident that once Americans were attracted to the rich farmland of what is now southern Ontario, their loyalty would be to their own status in the place they had settled and not to the country from which Simcoe had enticed them with generous grants of land. He was one of the first to see that the viability of an independent jurisdiction north of the United States would require a large English-speaking population and one that would grow in approximately equal proportion to the Americans. Simcoe was only the resident governor for four years, and had to depart for health reasons in 1796. He returned to the active military in 1798 and was elevated to the military command in India in 1806, a very senior position in the British army, but died before he could take up the post.

The British provoked the War of 1812, by their high-handed interception of American shipping on the high seas, searching and seizure of American cargoes, and arbitrary impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy as alleged British deserters, (often completely spuriously). Fortunately and unfortunately for Canada, the third and fourth American presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had demobilized the standing American army of 20,000 recruited, trained, and successfully commanded by George Washington and retained, (with renewed personnel of course), by his successor, John Adams. This was unfortunate in that Washington had advised his successors that the presence of such an army, capable of occupying Canada, would assure that the British did not exploit their naval superiority, and if Jefferson and Madison had followed his advice, Britain would not have caused the war of 1812, But once the War of 1812 was underway, Canada was fortunate that the Americans had no army to start with and blandly assumed that state militias, a rag-tag group of untrained roustabouts, would suffice to subdue Canada. It was, wrote Jefferson to general Duane, "a mere matter of marching." Not quite, and Jefferson and Madison had no one to do the marching anyway.

The Seven Years' War and the War of the American Revolution had established three routes for the United States and Canada to invade each other: up or down the territory adjacent to Lake Champlain south of Montreal, across the Niagara River between Lakes Ontario and Erie, and across the St. Clair River where Detroit and Windsor now stand. After a great deal of huffing and puffing, Madison was authorized by the Congress to call up 100,000 reservists for six months, and the British decided to relax their aggressive policy to American merchant shipping. But for the only time in its history, a British prime minister was assassinated (Spencer Percival), which caused a delay, in which the United Stets declared war on Great Britain (with a third of the senators and congressmen opposed, a dangerous division in American opinion). At the same time, in one of the most momentous acts in the history of Europe, Napoleon invaded Russia with his Grand Army of more than 500,000 men.

The Americans attacked with their under-trained forces along the three traditional avenues, and the opening season of the war was a complete fiasco, largely because of the courage and genius of General Sir Isaac Brock, who with the aid of the native commander Tecumseh, over-awed the American commander at Detroit, General William Hull. Hull surrendered his army and was court martialed and sentenced to be executed, which was only commuted because of his exemplary record in the Revolutionary war thirty years before. Brock saved the country during the Niagara thrust, holding the Americans at the Battle of Queenston Heights, at the cost of his own life, in the recent tradition of Wolfe, Montcalm, and Nelson. It was after this action that Laura Secord walked twenty miles through the night to warn the British and Canadians of American advances. The future King Edward VII, who was only born in 1840, learned of this in a trip to Canada in 1860 and awarded Laura Secord, then 85, a pension from his own resources. The attack up Lake Champlain failed because the state militia declared they had no obligation to fight outside their state,. i.e. in Canada.

The Americans did better in 1813, taking the original Fort York, but at great cost, as the retreating defenders blew up the magazine killing hundreds of Americans including Zebulon M. Pike, the western explorer after whom Pike's Peak is named. This action was led by one of America's great generals, Winfield Scott. But the Americans were pushed out and our native allies burned down Buffalo, New York, in return for the destruction of York. The American attack on Montreal was again routed easily. Future president (on the strength of the marginal victory over the "Indians" at Tippecanoe), William Henry Harrison did better at the Detroit crossing and advanced as far as Chatham before the winter closed in. American Captain Oliver Hazard Perry won the naval battle of Lake Erie. U.S. Colonel Richard Johnson claimed to have killed Tecumseh and more than twenty years later was elected vice president on the slogan : "Rumpsey, dumpsey, who killed Tecumseh?"

The war became a race between mobilizing and shaping up the American army and the transfer by the British of battle-hardened forces in strength from Europe as the Napoleonic threat receded after the Russian campaign and the Allied victory at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1814, with the northeastern states in near-insurrection because of the collapse of maritime trade, Madison took the unheard of step of naming the secretary of State, James Monroe, War minister also, with a mandate to end the war by a combination of force and diplomacy.

Scott was rebuffed near Niagara, the Anglo-Canadian advance down lake Champlain was defeated at Ticonderoga, (scene of Montcalm's greatest victory nearly sixty years before), but the British landed a shore party from the war in Spain and burned down much of Washington-the president fleeing on foot and his wife, Dolly Madison, hastily departing the White House with the official painting of George Washington under her arm. Peace was negotiated (at Ghent, now in Belgium), with no boundary changes, though before this was known, General and future president Andrew Jackson, defeated the British under the Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law Edward Pakenham, at New Orleans.

The Americans had done well holding their own with the British, but the Canadians had done better as successful co-defenders of their own country against the Americans. The recent American emigrants attracted by Simcoe did not betray their new country and English and French-speaking Canadians were much knitted together by the nasty little war. Fort York was rebuilt, enlarged and made more formidable, and has never had to be used to repulse an invader again, as the three approaches to Canada have been used only for commerce and tourism these two hundred years. For Canada, it was as good a war as a war can be, and Fort York, old and new, was at the centre of it.