STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 083
Why Canada Did Not Immediately Fall
11. Why Canada Did Not Immediately Fall (2)
The boast sounds like mere “spread-eagle” bombast when subsequent events are considered: but there was more in it than might be conceded by those who are merely wise after the event. The President and his party had been making their preparations; they had, six months before the war began, passed a Bill for raising 25,000 additional regular troops, and the new regiments were already mustering. In April, Congress had authorized the President to call out 100,000 State Militia if war should be declared. In May—a month before the British Minister was sent away from Washington—an army had begun to move up to the farther end of Lake Erie to outflank the British line of defence in Upper Canada. It was ready to strike when the signal came, and meanwhile the Governor at Quebec, Sir George Prévost, was wholly unable to make up his mind whether hostilities were probable or not, and was continually receiving dispatches from London to inform him that all endeavours were being made to avert a breach with the United States by means of concessions, and that meanwhile no reinforcements were being got ready for his benefit. When one Government is secretly resolved to force on war, and the other doubts of the reality of the danger, and makes no adequate preparation to meet it, the party which knows its own mind has an immense advantage.
That Upper Canada was not overrun by the Americans immediately after the declaration of war on June 18, 1812, was due, humanly speaking, to three things. The first was that President Madison and his military advisers appear to have been wholly ignorant of the fact that large numbers of men collected at various distant points, unprovided with transport, and mostly untrained to arms, cannot be made into a field army at a moment’s notice by a dispatch from headquarters. The second was that the militia of Canada, whose very existence the Americans had ignored in their schemes of conquest, and whose construction and equipment were as sketchy as that of the levies opposed to them, turned out to be a formidable fighting force, despite of their very modest strength. The third, and to us the most interesting point of the three, was that Upper Canada was at this moment in charge of a soldier of true military genius, one of those unsuspected leaders of men whom an emergency sometimes calls to light—Major-General Isaac Brock.
That Brock was a capable man, and an officer who knew how to make himself loved by his troops, was known to every one who had come into contact with him. That he was a heaven-sent strategist, a true organizer of victory, was a fact that could only emerge on the crucial occasion when he was put to the test. His career down to 1812 had given him no chance of showing the heights to which he could rise in the moment of necessity. Born of an old Guernsey stock in 1769—in the same twelvemonth that saw both Napoleon and Wellington ushered into the world—he had joined the 8th Foot as an ensign in 1785, when he was but sixteen. But the chances of regimental service in that corps and in the 49th—into which he exchanged in 1791—had not permitted him to hear a shot fired in anger till 1799. He missed all the early years of the French Revolutionary War, and saw his first campaign in the Duke of York’s disastrous and ill-managed invasion of North Holland. He was, however, one of the few officers who emerged with an enhanced reputation from that miserable business, and when he came to command the 49th as Lieutenant-Colonel, it was said of him by the Commander-in-Chief that he had made one of the worst battalions in the service into one of the best.
After the Dutch campaign he only once again went on active service before 1812, his regiment having been told off to serve as marines on board Sir Hyde Parker’s fleet in the spring of 1801. Thus he was present on board the Ganges at Nelson’s bombardment of Copenhagen, in which engagement his men, scattered among various line-of-battle ships, lost eight killed and twenty wounded. But there was little opportunity for a colonel to distinguish himself in this contest of ships and batteries.
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