"Where Did the Time Go?" Four Decades of Canadian Scholarship and Research on the War of 1812
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The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014 "WHERE DID THE TIME GO?" FOUR DECADES OF CANADIAN SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH ON THE WAR OF 1812 By Donald E. Graves The following article originally saw life as a keynote speech at the Living History Symposium held at the University of Guelph on 25 March 2012. It has been modified for inclusion in this edition of the War of 1812 Magazine. The Bicentennial is descending on us like a wolf on the fold and as most of my professional life, 39 years to be exact, has been devoted to the study of the War of 1812. It used to be a very small field. In the early 1980s there were only about half a dozen of us working in it -- and we all knew and hated each other. Things have changed. Each week sees more new books released on the heads of an unsuspecting public and more and more glamorous Bicentennial events being announced. In the past six months I have been averaging four to five requests per week to give talks, papers, speeches, interviews or participate in events relating to the Bicentennial, most of which I turn down. My purpose is to review the Canadian historical work on the War of 1812 that has appeared in the last four decades since I have been a student of the war. Frankly, it is a vast subject and I am stupid to have taken it on, but there you go. This talk is properly about historiography or the study of the writing of history. I can really only skim over the surface and I will not be covering some aspects of the war -- notably the social and economic, or aboriginal, in any great detail. Like most historians I tend to be a long-winded gas bag so, before I examine the immediate past I want to start at the beginning and survey what went before. As best as I can ascertain, the first Canadian history of the War of 1812 was written by one David Thompson and published in Niagara on the Lake in 1832. This early effort was followed by other British and Canadian authors such as Gilbert Auchinleck, Robert Christie, William Coffin, James Hannay, William James, William Kingsford, Egerton Ryerson and others. These early authors made no attempt to be impartial. As James Hannay put it: No doubt it will be said by some critics that in this book I have been too severe on The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014 the Americans, who invaded our country, burnt our towns, ravaged our fields, slaughtered our people and tried to place us under a foreign flag … I see no reason why any American of the present day should feel offended by an absolutely truthful narrative. What these authors were about, intentionally or not, was the creation of a national myth of the War of 1812 -- a mythical epic that a small but brave people withstood repeated attacks by superior numbers and preserved their freedom. It was Leonidas and the immortal 300 holding the pass at Thermopylae against the frantic, chattering, disorganized hosts of republican Persians. Egerton Ryerson was quite clear about that when he wrote how the Spartan band of Canadian Loyalist volunteers aided by a few hundred English soldiers ... repelled the Persian thousands of democratic American invaders, and maintained the virgin soil of Upper Canada unpolluted by the plundering foot of the invader. An essential part of this legend was the militia myth, a myth that related how the Canadian militia dropped their ploughs, grabbed their muskets and marched to the frontiers, where they defeated the invaders (with just a little help from the regular British army). It was a myth that would bedevil the historiography of the War of 1812 until the mid 20th century. In the mid 1890s, a periodical was established with the title The Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada, which would later be renamed the Canadian Historical Review. In an issue published in 1896, an anonymous reviewer took to task the most recent volume of William Kingsford's History of Canada, which dealt with the War of 1812. The reviewer castigated Kingsford for sloppy research, careless writing and for making dozens of factual errors, many of which he listed in the review. The critic was a man named Ernest Albert Cruikshank and this was the first appearance on the national stage of an author who would dominate Canadian writing on the War of 1812 for the next half century and who, to a certain extent, still weilds great influence. Yet, though all students of the war are familiar with Cruikshank's copious work on the conflict, few know much about the man himself or his influence. I am therefore going to spend some time discussing him. Ernest Albert Cruikshank was born near Fort Erie, Ontario, in 1853, and was educated at Upper Canada College in Toronto. Although the details are not clear, he commenced a study of languages and spent a little time in the United States working as an interpreter and journalist. He then returned to the Niagara area and began a career in local politics that lasted until 1908 serving as a township and village reeve, a county warden and police magistrate. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the militia at the age of 24 in 1877 and rose steadily through the ranks, becoming a lieutenant-colonel and commanding officer of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment by 1899. Ernest Cruikshank had three attributes that influenced his life and work. First, he seems to have The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014 enjoyed moderate independent wealth. Second, although he never saw action, he was fascinated by the military and military history. Third, he had an obsessive-compulsive personality. Unfortunately, it was a deadly combination as the result was that Cruikshank is one of the most prolific -- if not the most prolific -- historian Canada has ever produced. While preparing this paper I checked his publication record on the Amicus web and it displayed 500 titles before warning me that there were more but that my request exceeded the search limit. Most of these 500 titles were books and monographs and there were only a few of the hundreds of articles Cruikshank is known to have written. As a matter of fact there does not exist a complete bibliography of his work because Cruikshank would often publish an article in one periodical and then re-publish it in another periodical with a different title. Cruikshank was able to produce so much because he was -- although whether he knew it or not is debatable -- a follower of the German historian, Leopold von Ranke. Ranke believed that history can be studied like a science and the historian must concentrate on analyzing primary sources -- documents -- above all else. Cruikshank based his work almost completely on historic documents. To Ernest Albert, history was documents and what the historian's job was to find the documents, transcribe them, arrange them chronologically and publish them. Forget about context, analysis, comparison or even reliability, historical work according to Ernest was a fairly straightforward and mechanical business. This being the case, it was easy for him to turn out masses of published work with little effort. On the War of 1812 alone he published The Documentary History of the Campaigns on the Niagara in 9 volumes The Documentary History of the Invasion of Canada and the Surrender of Detroit in 1812 Documents Relating to the Invasion of the Niagara Peninsula by the United States Army commanded by Major-General Jacob Brown, 1814 Records of Niagara. A Collection of Contemporary Documents and Letters, 1812 He also wrote complete monographs on the battles of Queenston Heights, Fort George, Fort Erie, Beaver Dams, Stoney Creek, Lundy's Lane, the blockade of Fort George and other actions. Finally, he contributed many articles on War of 1812 topics including a 13-part series, "Record of the Services of Canadian Regiments in the War of 1812." Even Cruikshank's monographs and articles, however, are basically a pastiche of quotes from documents or, if not quotes, a paraphrase of them. And only rarely, at least in the first two decades of his writing career, did he favour the reader with a source note and even then, it was usually some The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014 cryptic abbreviation that is hard to find. Cruikshank was truly "The King of Scissors and Paste History." But how reliable is the man's work? By and large, I think the documentary collections remain useful but I usually advise those working in the field that if they are relying heavily on some items in his documentary collections, to check the original at some point. This is because Cruikshank was also not above altering text if he thought a mistake was being made. When he quotes the memoir of American Major T.S. Jesup at the battle of Lundy's Lane, he transcribes a statement by Jesup as being "By now my casualties were so heavy that I was forced to form my regiment in a single rank and put my files closer in line." What Jesup actually wrote was that he put his "file closers," the rank of NCOs and junior officers stationed behind the rear rank, into line. Cruikshank did not know the difference and as "files closer" made more sense to him, he changed the wording without bothering to tell the reader. More troubling is Cruikshank's suppression of any material that could be construed as criticism of Britain or the British army.