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The meeting of Tecumseh and Isaac Brock at Fort Malden on Aug. 13, 1812. They are are indelibly numbered among the founders of today’s Canada, says James Laxer.
Canada became a principal battleground in the war the United States declared against Great Britain on June 18, 1812.
Americans had developed grievances against the British over a period of years. They deeply resented the Royal Navy’s interference with U.S. commerce on the high seas during Britain’s life and death struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire in Europe. The Americans were especially furious with the British practice of “impressment,” seizing sailors on American ships and claiming they were deserters from the Royal Navy. The Americans who were pushing westward and occupying the land of native peoples on the western frontier — at the time, around the Great Lakes and in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and territories further south — reacted bitterly against sporadic British support for the native peoples and the supplying of their warriors with weapons.
If several major irritants drove the administration of president James Madison to declare war against Britain, the Americans had only one strategy to achieve military success — the invasion of Canada. American political leaders were confident of victory. Former president Thomas Jefferson wrote that the conquest of Canada as far as Quebec City would involve a “mere matter of marching.”
Nearly a month after the declaration of war, Gen. William Hull led a force of American troops across the Detroit River onto the soil of Upper Canada, near the present day city of Windsor. There friendly residents, many of them former residents of the U.S. who had migrated north to obtain land, greeted the invaders. Hull issued a proclamation declaring that “the standard of union now waves over the territory of Canada.
“I tender you the invaluable blessings of civil, political and religious liberty,” the general stated. But Hull’s honeyed words were followed by the stark warning that in the event that Canadians should choose to resist “this will be a war of extermination . . . No white man found fighting by the side of an Indian will be taken prisoner; instant destruction will be his lot . . . the United States offer you peace, liberty and security — your choice lies between these and war, slavery and destruction.”
What stopped Hull’s invasion in its tracks was the remarkable fusing of the talents of two warriors, Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, and Maj.-Gen. Isaac Brock, who commanded British forces in Upper Canada and led the province’s civil administration. In mid-August 1812, the two met at Fort Malden on the north shore of Lake Erie, a short distance from Fort Detroit on the other side of the border. Tecumseh, the pre-eminent native leader of his day, led a vast Confederacy of native peoples who came together to resist the American seizure of their lands. Brock, the most offensive-minded of the British military leaders in Canada, understood that effective coordination with Tecumseh and the native peoples was essential if the British were to prevail.
Drawing strength from each other’s determination, Tecumseh and Brock decided to undertake an immediate assault on the U.S. fortress, over the objections of Brock’s leading officers. They deployed British army regulars, native warriors and Canadian militia, despite the fact the Americans easily outnumbered these combined forces. Three days later, Hull, who was especially fearful of native warriors, surrendered Fort Detroit.
The stunning victory threw the Americans back on their heels and convinced much of the settler population of Upper Canada that a U.S. conquest of the province was far from inevitable.
Tecumseh and Brock merged two wars into one. The first was what we can call the Endless War, the struggle of native peoples to preserve their lands in the face of ceaseless pressure by setters and their regimes. The Endless War began many decades before the birth of Tecumseh and continued long after his death. The second conflict was the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.
As a consequence of the roles they played in the conflict, Tecumseh and Brock are indelibly numbered among the founders of today’s Canada. Ironically, neither was, or aspired to be, Canadian. Tecumseh fought for the rights and sovereignty of native peoples. Brock fought for the British Empire and would have preferred involvement in the “big show” in Europe against Napoleon. Both Brock and Tecumseh died fighting on Canadian soil, Brock at Queenston two months after the capture of Detroit and Tecumseh a year later in the battle of Moraviantown, not far from London, Ont.
The war dragged on with battles won and lost by both sides, rarely noteworthy for military brilliance. Before it ended with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (in present-day Belgium) in December 1814, the public buildings of York (Toronto) and Washington, D.C., were put to the torch.
The native peoples lost the chapter of the Endless War in which Tecumseh fought. At the peace talks, the British dropped the demand for the creation of a native state to be located between the Ohio River and Canada. But the Americans failed to conquer Canada, which meant that there would be two transcontinental states north of the Rio Grande, not one.
While the French Canadians were a people long before the War of 1812, the conflict was Upper Canada’s War of Independence, fought paradoxically under an imperial banner and with British regulars and native warriors doing the lion’s share of the fighting alongside Canadian militia.
Of course, Canadians should commemorate this essential chapter in our history. Those who have opposed such public commemoration financed by Ottawa ought to ask themselves whether they think that Americans of all political shades will stop feting their War of Independence or that the French will cease their annual marking of the storming of the Bastille.
James Laxer, professor of political science in the department of equity studies at York University, is the author of Tecumseh and Brock: The War of 1812. He will be speaking about the War of 1812 at 2 p.m. on Sunday at the Bloor/Gladstone Library, 1101 Bloor St. W.
