Historiography of the salon

Transcription

Steve Paikin: Okay. First of all, can you believe this? This is fabulous how many people have come out tonight... Alan Taylor: It's wonderful. SP: To discuss a war that started actually 200 years ago... Boy, we're really close, about five days away from the actual declaration of war. AT: The suspense is building. SP: Yes it is. First question is obvious from the... And it's right from the title of the book, "I think we have not traditionally thought of this war as a civil war; we have thought of it as us against them." Where did the notion that this was actually a civil war, how did that come to you? AT: Well, it came to me when I started investigating who lived in Upper Canada, the Ontario of the past, and I found out that something on the order of two-thirds of the people who lived here in 1812 were migrants from the United States. And they weren't the true loyalists, that two-thirds, there certainly were true loyalists here, who had come during the 1780s, but they were mostly a later group of migrants known as the late loyalists. And so their experience when American forces invade upper Canada, is that of a civil war, and that they are being invaded by people who used to be their neighbours and in some cases used to be their friends. SP: I think it was back on the 5th that the House of Representatives passed the declaration of war, it then went to the Senate and they passed it, and then on the 18th, I think is the 200th anniversary of President Madison's actually signing it. That sounds like there was a lot of support for this war in the United States, particularly in high government circles. Is that the case? AT: Well, there wasn't high government circles because there was one party that controlled the government of the United States. It was the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Not quite the same thing as today's Republican Party. But that Republican Party was... About 81% of the members of that party in Congress voted for the declaration of war, but the opposition party voted unanimously against it. So, it was not a bipartisan war and the opposing party were the Federalist. And they thought that was a war that was meant as much to discredit the Federalist Party and destroy it in the United States as it was to conquer Canada. SP: All politics is local. AT: Or it's across the border as well. SP: Across the border as well. Let's go through some of the reasons why this thing started in the first place. So we're gonna to go through a bunch of statements here. How accurate is this statement here? "The war began because the Americans simply wanted to take over as much of the North American continent as they could." AT: That's probably about 10% true. SP: That's the conventional wisdom, though. AT: Well, it's probably the conventional wisdom in Canada. It's [laughter].. And you have reason for it. You did get invaded after all. But the reason why the United States wanted to invade Canada was they were... The leaders of the United States were very upset about British military aide to Indian peoples living within the United States. Now, the British did that because they feared there would be a future war with the United States and they knew they would need those First Nation peoples as their allies. And so those weapons given to native peoples, enabled them to defend their homelands against American expansion westward. So, what the British intended as a defencive measure, to help them protect Canada, was interpreted in the United States as an act of aggression against the United States. And it became one of the reasons why Americans wanted to invade Canada, was to break up this alliance with native peoples. SP: Had the native peoples not been on the side of the Brits at this time, for this war, what might have happened to the British side? AT: Well, those native peoples were absolutely essential to the success of the British in defending Canada. Particularly in that first year of the war, which was the most difficult one for the defense of Upper Canada because at that time, in 1812, most of the British troops were tied down in Europe fighting against Napoleon and they could not send reinforcements to Upper Canada until 1813, and then they sent more in 1814. But during that first year, you had less than 2000 British troops for this vast province of Upper Canada, extending from Windsor on the west all the way over to Cornwall. And 2000 troops, that's spreading them pretty thin. Now, of course you had the militia, but the population of Upper Canada was at most 75,000 people. So, you're talking about a militia of maybe 10,000 to 12,000 people, also spread thin. So what is it that evens it for the defenders of Upper Canada? It's the fact that they could get these native peoples to ally with them because these were the most masterful guerilla fighters in North America. SP: Let's talk about some domestic American political considerations in all of this. How much concern was there? We have to remember that a few decades from this time, America will have a civil war. And the South, I gather, is already looking at the North with suspicious eyes. How much concern was there among the Americans in the South, that if the North were to annexed Canada... AT: Right. SP: The balance would be somehow at askew? AT: That's a good point. It's one of the reasons why... The United States was, and I'm sorry to break this news, [laughter] they were ambivalent about conquering Canada. [laughter] There were some people who were quite keen for it, but there were a lot of people, for domestic political reasons within the United States, who thought this would be a mistake. You can read Thomas Jefferson's writings and you would be persuaded that people in Canada lived on ice floes, year round. He wasn't really persuaded that Canada was worth conquering. Then the other fear was the United States was a very tenuous coalition of regions, at that time. Southerners did not trust Northerners, Westerners didn't trust Easterners. AT: So, if you're suddenly going to add several potential states to the Northern side of the ledger, that gave great pause to the Southern politicians. So their position was, we're going to war for maritime reasons because the British Navy is interfering with American ships and American sailors, and we're going to grab Canada as a bargaining chip that we will give back to the British in order to get them to make concessions in a peace treaty to end the war. Now, that's not a very appealing message to the people being invaded. "We're coming here and we want you to help us, and by the way, if you do help us you'll become traitors, and we're going to give you back to the people who will consider you traitors." When Canadians thought about that for a little while, they thought why should we help you? SP: Let's follow up on the maritime angle. The British did seize American merchant ships, they stopped other American boats to search for deserters from the Royal Navy and then there was something called impressment. What was impressment? AT: Well, the Press gang worked throughout the British Empire, that it was a very crude form of conscription. You would go into a tavern or you would go onto a ship and you would see a likely-looking sailor, and you would say, "It's your unlucky day, you are now in the Royal Navy." They would haul this guy off, kicking and screaming, and they would put him in the Royal Navy where conditions were pretty grim, working conditions, and you're also in danger of being blasted by the Spanish or the French. And pay was low and the food in the British Navy was exactly as you would imagine it. [laughter] AT: Then for excitement, you would be flogged regularly. So sailors decided by the thousands that maybe leaving the British Isles and going to the United States and finding higher paying jobs in the American Merchant Marine was a safer and higher paying occupation. Well, if you're an Empire and you're engaged in a world war against the might of Napoleon's empire, you have to have the world's largest navy to protect this island kingdom. You can't afford to be losing thousands of these sailors, going off to another country, which is getting rich off this war as a neutral carrier of the trade that's no longer safe for the British or the French to carry. So, from a British perspective, the Americans are making out like bandits; they're helping Napoleon and they are stealing all these sailors from the British Empire. AT: The British felt fully within their rights to stop these American merchant ships, inspect their crews, take anybody who looked or sounded British and put them in the Royal Navy. Now, a lot of these people considered themselves naturalized American citizens, and in some cases they were people who had been born in the United States, but if you are the captain of a Royal Navy warship and you're short handed, you're going to take any able-bodied sailor that you can, and you're not going to take seriously the protest of the United States, which has a navy, which is about 20 warships compared to the 1,000 warships of the Royal Navy. SP: Okay. So lets go through our checklist here. We've got 10%, you say, had designs on Canadian territory. We've got the issue of impressment and the maritime issues. We've got the Indian confederacy issues, but let me flip it around, because I don't want to make it sound like, as I learnt from your book, that Canada had no designs the other way as well. AT: Right. SP: John Graves Simcoe, our first Lieutenant Governor here in the Province of Ontario, wanted to crush the republic and reunite the empire. Now how much of that attitude was widespread and may have contributed to the British sides wanting to go to war? AT: Well it's a widespread sentiment, but I wouldn't say that it's the sentiment of the top leaders, people in London. People in London, their top priority was to wage war against Napoleon because the survival of the empire was at stake. And Napoleon was a despot who was dominating Europe at that time, plus he was French. [laughter] And so from the British perspective, that made him target number one. Now the Americans... The British leaders didn't much like the Americans, they had made a lot of trouble in the American Revolution. They seemed like a bunch of ingrates and they were making a lot of money out of trading with Napoleon's France. So British officers would, in their private letters, often express sentiments to the effect of, "This will be a good chance for some payback and teach the Americans some lessons." AT: And they fantasized about the possibility of breaking up the American Union and perhaps part of that union would choose to rejoin the empire. So that was never the official policy of the government, but for the people who were involved in the war, here in North America, a lot of them were hoping that their efforts would lead to the discrediting of the Republican form of government and to the dissolution of the American Union. SP: Okay, let me continue with this notion of civil war and you can't tell the players without a program. There are loyalists on both sides of the border, there are Americans on both sides of the border, there are Indian nations on both sides of the border all fighting against each other. There are Irish on both sides of the border. Irish in the United States who hated Britain, did that embolden them to want to go to war with Canada? AT: Absolutely, probably the most enthusiastic people for war in the United States [laughter] were Irish Americans because Ireland was under the domination of the British. There had been a very bloody failed rebellion in Ireland in 1798. It had generated thousands of refugees and the primary place they went was to the United States. Their political world view was that of Republicans and the United States they thought of as the finest country in the world. And once they came to the United States, they settled usually in the seaport cities or near them, especially Philadelphia, and they became very politically active. They were often the editors of Republican newspapers and they helped to gin up feeling in the United States in favour of war. And they had this concept that if you could start to unravel the British empire anywhere, it would have a ripple effect that would be felt in Ireland. So that if they could overthrow British rule in Canada, that this would inspire a new rebellion that would liberate Ireland was their thinking. AT: Now it becomes very much of a civil war experience when these troops do invade upper Canada and there was a disproportionate number of those soldiers, not a majority, but a higher percentage of those soldiers were Irish American than was their proportion of the American population, because they were highly enthusiastic about this whereas a lot of other Americans weren't. They crossed the border and they are engaged in combat... It turns out the regiments they were fighting against in 1812, almost all of them had been recruited in Ireland. Ireland was a very poor place. There were a lot of desperate young men and the one way in which they could get some money and they could get out of Ireland was to enlist in a British army regiment. The regiments that were posted here in Canada were almost all recruited in Ireland and most of their troops were Irish. So you had Irish people fighting on both sides in the battles in Canada. SP: Brother against brother, it really was? AT: Literally, yes. SP: There is one other group we haven't mentioned yet and that is the French Catholic les habitants, the French Canadians. Now did they prefer to be a minority under British rule in present day Canada or were they looking to get liberated by the Americans? AT: If they made a list of liberators they would not put the Americans on it. [laughter] There had been an attempt to liberate them by the Americans during the American revolution which had not gone well, and they didn't have fond experiences with Americans who they mostly knew as peddlers and horse thieves who would come across the border. So it was not a good representation of the American character that they were familiar with. Plus, they had mostly made their peace with British rule at that time. They didn't have any fondness for British rule, but they hated Napoleon more because Napoleon had done things against the Catholic church and against the Pope. And the British government of Canada had mostly protected the interests of the Catholic church at that time. AT: So, the Catholic hierarchy in Canada was quite clear that preserving British rule was preferable to an American conquest. And so the French Canadians were not much involved in the war, I'm not saying they had no role, but the primary American invasion was into upper Canada which was mostly an Anglophone colony. But occasionally American forces would go into lower Canada, what's now Quebec, and on those occasions the French Canadians did turn out and they were very effective against fighting the invaders. SP: There are deserters obviously in every war, but particularly I guess, given the way you've set this story up as a civil war, it seemed like desertion was an epidemic in this war. There's tons of it. AT: Yes. SP: How come so much? AT: Well, this is a war in which people speak the same languages on both sides, most of the people are speaking English. And I think it is worth dwelling upon that because it means that you can persuade people of the other side pretty readily because you're speaking their language and people can imagine themselves on the other side. Now desertion worked a little differently on the two sides. When Americans would run away. Sometimes they would go into upper Canada, often because they had relatives living here because there were so many upper Canadians were Americans by birth. More often, Americans were running away to go back home within the United States. When the British soldiers desert, they don't feel it's safe to hide out within upper Canada. So they will almost always go over to the American forces. And we have to bear in mind that most of these soldiers were Irish, and there was a phenomena what's called an "immigration enlistment." It seems clear that some of these people enlisted in these British regiments to get a free ride across the Atlantic and their geography was good enough that they knew the United States was next to Canada. [chuckle] AT: And they're just looking for an opportunity to throw the gun down and go across. Now I want to be clear, I'm not talking about most of those troops. Most of those troops did their duty and stuck it out with the British, but the British officers complained early and often that the ethnicity of most of their deserters was Irish. SP: I'm just looking for this guy's name in the back of the book because maybe somebody in this room will know. Was he a General Willcocks? He started with the Canadians, he defected at the other side... AT: This is where you're all supposed to hiss [laughter] because he was a traitor to Canada. SP: He was a traitor and there's a street right, running through the University of Toronto, oh, Joseph Willcocks, called, "Willcocks Street." Is that named after that traitor son of a gun, do you know? AT: No, no. No. No, do not go out and tear down those signs. [laughter] AT: It's named for a relative of his... SP: Okay, good. [laughter] AT: Who died before the war and would have been loyal, even if he had lived. [laughter] SP: Okay. AT: Right. But Joseph Willcocks was a traitor to Canada. He, of course, didn't see it that way. He initially was fighting on behalf of defending the Province. He had been recruited by Isaac Brock who was politically very shrewd. He was the Commanding General and the acting Lieutenant Governor when the war began, Brock. And he was trying to unite all of the factions within Upper Canada, and so he reached out to Willcocks who had been leading the opposition and brought him into the fold. Willcocks stopped his opposition activity, shut down his newspapers, sold off his brass, got a commission, fought at the Battle of Queenston Heights, helped to recruit First Nations people for the war effort. AT: But then in 1813, he suddenly switched and he ran away to the Americans. Well, what happened? Brock got killed. His successor was politically weak, continued to try to include the opposition. But after York fell to the Americans in April of 1813, that man, Sir Roger Hale Sheaffe was discredited and sacked. A more hard-line regime came into power, politically, in Upper Canada and started to arrest people who were perceived to be dissidents. Willcocks didn't wanna be arrested, so he ran away to the Americans and he organized a unit of other Upper Canadians who where dedicated to overthrowing British rule. So there were some Upper Canadians led by Willcocks who were actively fighting against other Upper Canadians, a much larger number who were defending British rule in Upper Canada. SP: Let me ask you about military strategy by the Americans because you've already told us that maritime problems between America and Britain were significant in the reasons behind this war. And yet, the Americans really fought this mostly as a land war within our boundaries as opposed to out in the Atlantic. How come? AT: Well, they can count and they know that they've got 21 warships and the British have a 1,000. Now, that's not to say that those 21 didn't perform some incredible feats, but they cannot wage a war to wrest domination of the North Atlantic away from the British because they just don't have the ships to do that. So they waged a commerce raiding war, in which those 21 warships are trying to slip out through a British blockade, disperse around the seas of the world, and attack British merchants ships. If they have the opportunity to find a stray, single British warship they will attack it. They can inflict some pain and certainly, it's bad for public relations for the Royal Navy to ever lose to anybody. They were used to always beating the French and the Spanish. As for these Americans to win an occasional naval victory was very disheartening to the British, so they issued a rule: No more one ship against one ship battles with the Americans. If you have two ships, you can attack the Americans, but if you've got one you avoid it. SP: Follow up. There were militarily important locations that the Americans never attacked. There were less significant locations where they spent a great deal of time with ground troops trying to attack. And it so happened that there were fairly wealthy American landowners who owned land in the sensitive areas, but never saw any action. You want to say there's a connection here or not? AT: That's incredible. SP: Isn't that an amazing connection? AT: Right. [laughter] SP: Who had schlep and why, I guess, is the question. AT: Well, that's a very important question. So the obvious place, if you're an American war planner and you want to conquer Canada, what do you go after that's the most important place to capture? What are the two most important places? Montreal and Quebec City, because they will control everything that's upstream. There were no decent roads, so all of the supplies, all the reinforcements that are ever gonna get to Upper Canada will be cut-off if you control Montreal and Quebec City. And that's why the major British force in North America was in Quebec City. The most impressive fortifications in North America were in Quebec City. The British plan was, that if they lost everything else in Canada, they would hold up in Quebec City behind the city walls and wait for reinforcements to come from Europe. AT: Now, the Americans don't do the obvious thing which is to go against Montreal and then move on to Quebec City. Instead, they attack Upper Canada, Niagara Peninsula in Western Upper Canada in particular, which is militarily stupid. So why? Well, part of it is the American Army wasn't big enough, wasn't professional enough for the job of taking on Quebec City. And political support in the United States for the war was so shaky that the political calculus was, "Let's go to the place where we can win quick and easy victories because then the war will become more popular in the United States, our troops will get experience, we'll recruit more soldiers, and we'll be strong enough in year two to move on against Montreal and Quebec." So that's one calculation. The other is the United States needs to borrow money because they don't wanna tax the American people. It's something you never wanna do if you wanna be in political power in the US. [laughter] AT: The governing party wants to run a war, it turns out wars are expensive and... But they don't wanna tax the American people, so we do what Americans do. We borrow money. The problem is most of the people with money in the United States were Federalists who are opposed to the war and refused to loan their money to the US government. There are a handful of very rich men who are willing to loan money for this war effort, that gave them enormous clout over the US government. One of them owned thousands of acres of land in Northern New York right along the Saint Lawrence Valley, which could have been this invasion corridor to go to Montreal. He made very clear to the leadership of the United States, "I'm loaning you a lot of money, I do not want your troops going across my... "