Canadians had a critical role in stopping the American invasion of British North America
In October 1813, American Gen. Wade Hampton marched his 2,000 soldiers along the banks of the Châteauguay River, part of a two-pronged American push towards Montreal. There, he was met by an all-Canadian force under the command of Lt.-Col. Charles-Michel de Salaberry.
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It was a very Canadian battle: Voltigeurs, professional French Canadian soldiers, Canadian Fencibles, militiamen and several Kahnawake warriors, fighting for the first time in the War of 1812 without any British support. Two Canadians were killed and four went missing. Twenty-three Americans died, and a further 29 vanished.
From behind well-built barricades, the Canadians took shots at the Americans, who were armed with infamously inaccurate ammunition, and mainly ended up shooting the nearby trees. Hampton gave up, and retreated. That, and the Battle of Crysler’s farm, fought about a month later, ended the American attempts to get at Montreal.
“You have this rag-tag group of Canadian guys who (de Salaberry) whips into this formidable fighting force who can repel a much stronger group of American invaders because of their grit and their skill as warriors, and critically, they’re being seconded by Indigenous allies,” said Tim Foran, curator of British North America at the Canadian Museum of History.
The list of countries that have defeated the United States on the battlefield is a short one.
There have been a handful of failed military adventures — the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961, for example — but when it comes to nation-to-nation, army-to-army, the defeats are few and far between.
In 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, the Americans were defeated after years of war. The Taliban, having been driven from power in Afghanistan following the 2001 American invasion, retook their country in 2021.
Canada, however, has the distinction not just of having fended off an American invasion, but also of marching on Washington and putting the U.S. capital to the torch in 1814.
At least, that’s the story we tell ourselves.
Strictly speaking, Canada in its post-1867 form, has never fought a war against the United States. At the time of the War of 1812, Canada was a British colony, and the defence was a joint effort between colonial militiamen, Indigenous allies and British troops. Many of the officers were British, and the bulk of the Redcoats that put Washington to the torch had likely never set foot in Upper or Lower Canada before shooting up the American capital.
“It really is a polyglot group of folks who throw their lot in with the British Crown, and they succeed in that their territory does not become American,” said Foran.
What’s absolutely undeniable is that the War of 1812 built a sense of national pride in Canada, as it did in the United States. Both sides, more than 200 years later, largely insist they won the war. (If there were losers of the war, it was Indigenous Peoples, whose coalition resisting American expansion crumbled and whose political power would soon dissipate in Canada.)
Still, it was a Canadian victory in one obvious sense: by the time the fighting came to an end, the United States hadn’t expanded its territory and Canadian territory remained firmly in British hands.
Fifteen thousand Americans had died, compared to fewer than 9,000 Brits and Canadians and, although the Americans had burned York, present-day Toronto, it wasn’t an especially important military objective, and the British turned around and set Washington on fire while James Madison, the president at the time, fled. His wife, for the record, stayed behind to try and salvage the White House art.
They’re responding very consciously to the Americans burning York… You burn British parliamentary buildings, we will burn your American Republican buildings
The British put the Capitol, which at the time included the Supreme Court and Library of Congress, as well as the Washington Navy Yard and the White House to the torch. One possibly apocryphal story says that Madison was so confident of victory, he had a feast laid out in the White House, which was then eaten by a group of Royal Engineers before they set the fires.
That fight looms large in Canadians’ memory. While it was, so far as the historical record shows, fought mostly by the British, this, and other British battles, were explicitly fought in defence of Canada.
“Many of these guys are veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, but they’re responding very consciously to the Americans burning York, burning Toronto, and this isn’t lost on them: You burn British parliamentary buildings, we will burn your American Republican buildings, so they’re clearly responding to that atrocity,” said Foran.
The famous figures in the war are well-known to Canadian schoolchildren: Tecumseh, the Indigenous warrior who had been fighting the Americans for years by the time he sided with the British. Isaac Brock, the British general who once faced down a man in a duel by insisting they shoot from mere inches apart.
In several other battles, Canadians played critical roles. Take the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, the bloodiest fight of the war, which is commemorated in The Maple Leaf Forever as a battle where “our brave fathers, side by side, for freedom, homes, and loved ones dear, firmly stood and nobly died.” In that fight, held on the hottest night of the year, in the smoky dark, hundreds of Canadians fought alongside their British and First Nations counterparts.
“You couldn’t tell friends from foes but it’s this brutal, visceral, awful and intimate knife fight,” said Foran.
The War of 1812 grew out of a much larger war: Napoleon, who had seized power in France and later declared himself emperor, was rampaging across continental Europe. In response, Britain had heavily restricted trade with France. The United States, though officially neutral, responded with its own trade restrictions on British imports. The U.S. government, under president James Madison, was particularly angry about the impressment of some 15,000 Americans into the Royal Navy.
“(They) have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation and exposed, under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren,” thundered Madison on a June 1, 1812 speech to Congress.
A little over two weeks later, Congress declared war — the first time it had ever done so.
There has been much scholarly debate over the centuries as to what the Americans’ objectives were in invading Canada. Several historians have argued that the Americans wanted to annex Canada. Certainly, there is some historical evidence for this interpretation, such as the declaration of Thomas Jefferson, the second U.S. president, who said in 1812 that the “acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching,” with the final goal of “expulsion of England from the American continent.”
Others insist that to seize parts of Canada would give the United States the upper hand in its negotiations with Britain over maritime rights. Whatever the reason, the United States failed spectacularly on any territorial ambitions or in the attempt to evict the British from North America. When the war kicked off, the Americans were hampered by poor planning. General William Hull, who was leading an army at Fort Detroit, had a ship full of military invalids — and his invasion plans — sent ahead to Detroit. He had no idea war had been officially declared. The British commander of Fort Amherstberg, however, was aware war had been declared, and seized the ship, along with Hull’s plans.
Preparatory problems aside, Hull’s declaration that he had arrived to liberate Canadians from British tyranny availed him little and he is infamously responsible for the surrender of Detroit to Brock, having been tricked about the strength of Brock’s forces and fearful, he later wrote, of “the horrors of an Indian massacre.” (For his cowardice, Hull was court-martialed and sentenced to death, although this sentence was later commuted.)
By the time the war ended, with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on Christmas Eve in 1814, Canada had forged for itself its own mythology, its own identity, centred on the idea that a coalition that ran across race, religion and nationality had staunchly defended its territory from the Americans.
“After the war, there’s this — from a Canadian perspective — this growth of a mythology about how the civilian soldier really was responsible for keeping Canada British, which is highly problematic, but a really interesting arc in how people thought about the war,” said Foran.
There are any number of battles in the War of 1812 that were fought by distinctly Canadian Fencibles and Voltigeurs. Indeed, a corps of Black Canadians, raised by Richard Pierpoint, a former American slave who was at that point in his late 60s, fought alongside white and Indigenous troops throughout the War of 1812 (although they were treated shabbily following the war).
Still, you can see some of the early lines of Canadian identity being drawn here, with its now-multicultural composition and an expression of Canadian values. In 1858, Thomas D’Arcy McGee wrote a poem entitled Along the Line, the line referring to the border:
“We have never bought or sold
Afric’s sons with Mexic’s gold,
Conscience arms the free and bold,
Along the line! along the line!”
“McGee, for me, is a really interesting entry point into that tradition of romanticizing the War of 1812 as Canadians being valiant, morally superior to the Americans and doing whatever they can to defend their homes,” said Foran.
“There is some historical truth in it, but it’s more important as a rhetorical device, as a way of binding us together and reminding people, well we do have these collective values, and they’re sure not American.”
Editors’ note:An earlier version of this story had the incorrect publication date for Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s poem. National Post regrets the error.
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