Celebrating the War of 1812

In 2012, when Stephen Harper wanted us to celebrate our ‘victory’ in the War of 1812, I was shocked to realize that two hundred years after that disaster our prime minister did not know our history. This article, written originally in 2012, is pertinent now as the American president again threatens to absorb Canada.

On October 5, 1813, the British army formed lines to defend itself from an American advance into Upper Canada. Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, was holding the right flank, but the British were nervous and broke at the first signs of American aggression. They fled, leaving 500 Indians to face the 3000 American troops advancing at the battle of Moraviantown. Tecumseh was killed, and along with him died the hopes of the Indigenous Nations.

From Tecumseh’s point of view, the War of 1812 was only a continuation of the American War of Independence, and it had followed quickly on the British victory over the French. The elders living in1812 well remembered how much easier it was to deal with the Europeans when the French and English were both vying for their cooperation and products. Once the French were gone, they faced a monopoly. They were composed of interdependent nations with a much different culture. Traditionally, they had maintained relationships with both the French and the English. The Mohawk, the easternmost of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, had named Sir William Johnson as their British ambassador and the British had accommodated by naming him Superintendent of Indian Affairs, answering directly to London. For the British, Johnson could maintain these independent nations as allies against the French, but for the Mohawk, Johnson could mitigate their problems with the Thirteen Colonies. After the French departed, the Mohawk and Oneida appealed to Johnson to formalize the limits of both White and Indigenous territories. Through the Royal Proclamation of 1763, Johnson participated in securing them a clear border between the British colonies and their lands, guaranteeing them most of their historical territories south of the Great Lakes and west of the Alleghenies, but he had trouble getting the colonists to respect it. He tried again with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, but the colonists perceived Johnson as an impediment to White expansion and had no appreciation of or care for the Indians. The Indigenous lands became another justification for them to separate from the British Empire and to no longer have to respect these treaties.

Sir William Johnson’s partner was Molly Brant, the head of the Society of Matrons of the Six Nations. From the Indigenous point of view, their bond was a marriage, but from the colonists’ perspective, it wasn’t proper to co-habit with an Indian. A trader and importer, Johnson was highly respected in the Mohawk Nation, but he was feared and hated in the White communities, mostly because he treated the Indians as fairly as he treated the Whites. As the rebellious colonies rose against Britian, Johnson could no longer mediate. Johnson cared about the Indians. He could attend their conferences as one of them and his home was their home. Molly’s younger brother, Joseph Brant, had become his protégé and received an education in both worlds. When there were problems with the colonists, Johnson had always found a way to solve them. He had called upon the Six Nations to be his allies against the French. He travelled with them and understood their society, but he was old and his health was failing. He could no longer force respect of the treaties. A floodgate had opened and would not be closed. Colonists murdered Indians as though for sport and manipulated real estate transactions that would not stand up to Indigenous or British law. On July 7, 1774, a delegation of 600 Six Nation chiefs gathered at Johnson’s home for a council and slowly, following their customs, the talks began. Respecting protocol, it would not be until July 11 that Johnson could address their concerns. He talked for hours in the hot sun, using all the demonstrative body language custom required. By the end, he was seized with spasms and was taken to his room. From his bed he told Joseph Brant, “Joseph, control thy people. I am going away.” Two hours later, Molly raised her voice in the death wail of her tradition and the knowledge of his passing was communicated to the delegation. His dramatic death marked the beginning of a period of terror and desperate attempts to organize a resistance.

Joseph Brant and his sister dedicated themselves to uniting all the Indigenous nations against the rising tide of White rebellion. They encouraged Indigenous Nations to ally with the British. Of the Six Nations only the Oneida did not become allies of the British. Eastern Mohawk territory had already been overrun and the Oneida, who were next in the path of colonial expansion, desperately negotiated, hoping to hold onto their homes. The British saw the remaining members of the Six Nations as allies when it suited them but often didn’t see them at all.

The most westerly of the Six Nations, the large Seneca Nation, represented half of their total population. They had less experience with the American rebels. Their tactics of guerrilla warfare were effective but left their villages unprotected. The Americans, instructed by Washington, burned their villages along with their winter food supplies. The American rebels, largely an underclass that the war managed to keep angry and hungry, saw the rich, cultivated fields of the Seneca and would not forget them.

When the British finally sat and negotiated with the new United States of America, they did so in Europe, neglecting to invite their Indigenous allies to the table. Joseph Brant and the other Indian leaders heard of the end of the war as though they were mere bystanders. The British had forgotten about them. Indian villages were destroyed, leaders were dead, and the food supply was gone, and even though British forces on the ground in America could see that a much better outcome could have been obtained, the British conceded Indigenous land as though they owned it. In this state, refugees in their war-washed land, the Six Nations faced the advancing hordes of the new Americans, mostly discharged soldiers and militiamen looking for their main chance in a land whose title was no longer protected by treaty.

During the following three decades, the Indigenous Nations of the Ohio region and the Six Nations worked to establish a confederacy to negotiate with the Americans, but a single Indian voice did not suit the Americans, who sabotaged their efforts even while their own frontier justice system held any Indian they captured responsible for all Indian actions. The great Chief Cornstalk, recognized as the leader of a large Shawnee group that refused to take sides with either the Americans or the British during the American War of Independence, was present at treaty discussions in 1775 and 1776, each time demonstrating that a settlement could be found peacefully. In 1777, when he arrived at Fort Randolph on the Virginia frontier, the American captain in charge of the fort threw him in prison in an attempt to hold him hostage. His own militia soldiers broke into the prison and killed the Shawnee party, including Cornstalk and his son. The murderers went unpunished because no American would testify against them.

At the same time, the British and French were at war in Europe. Desperate for crew, the British did not hesitate to snatch and empress – effectively enslave – able-bodied men who were unlucky enough to be found in a maritime environment in England or elsewhere, forcing them to work as crew. Some of these men were Americans, and in 1807 sailors from a British man-o-war forcibly boarded an American ship to retrieve four deserters, three of whom were Americans who had been empressed. The action led Great Britain and the United States into the War of 1812 and brought back the British policy of supporting the Indians. In the words of Sir James Henry Craig, Governor in Chief of British North America, “…if we do not employ [the Indians] there cannot exist a moment’s doubt that they will be employed against us… ” The Indians were neither romantic nor autonomous by this point but were refugees of great nations that had been destroyed by successive plagues of European disease and wars of aggression against them.

When the War of 1812 began, the British were at war with Napoleon Bonaparte and, taken together with the earlier Seven Years’ War (1758 to 1763), these two huge European conflicts were as much about hegemony in Europe as were World Wars I and II. The newly-created United States took the side of the French. During the period from1812 to 1814 there were over two dozen different and significant conflicts in Europe in which the United States did not figure. Its issues with the British were empressment and the desire to establish its own hegemony in North America, especially over the Ohio Valley, home to the next group of Indigenous Nations. The War of 1812, a small sideshow in the great war against Napoleon, succeeded in establishing American dominance over North America and was a major loss to the British Empire, but the real victims of the wars were the Indigenous Nations. The great Shawnee chief Tecumseh had risen to lead a new confederacy that allied itself with the British. A remarkable and able leader, he was the only hope left that the Indians might salvage some territory they could call their own. The British knew this but even so, in October 1813, General Henry Procter and his troops broke ranks and fled in the face of an American advance through Moraviantown, leaving Tecumseh and his vastly outnumbered warriors to face annihilation.

After the war, the Indians had only one power to deal with, the Americans, who practiced a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing over the next decades, culminating in their policy of Manifest Destiny that forced the remaining Indians into reservations, mostly in Oklahoma.

Stephen Harper’s Canadian government claimed this history as a military victory for our young nation and Mr. Harper’s official letters carried a notation on the bottom of the page saying “War of 1812–14”, casting us in the role of a warrior nation, modelling us upon romanticized ‘heroes’ like Daniel Boone. The truth, a long-ago victim of war, didn’t matter.