The 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 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. In one of his documentary collections, he quotes a letter from a Royal Artillery officer which describes the performance of British gunners at the battle of Chippawa. Some passages in the printed version appear to have been omitted and replaced with a line of asterisks. Getting suspicious I checked the original to find that Cruikshank had omitted several paragraphs in which the artillery officer criticized Major-General Phineas Riall for interfering with the deployment of his guns during the action and was generally mean to his RA officers.

Then there is his pamphlet on the battle of Lundy's Lane that went through at least three revisions in the 1890s. Although Cruikshank was in possession of all the primary sources that proved beyond any doubt that British troops did not re-capture their artillery by the end of the battle, he states that they did so, relying on an obscure and dubious secondary source to end the battle in the way he wants it to end. In sum, Cruikshank's works are still useful but use caution and, personally, I regard them as a first, but certainly not a last step.

As of result of his impressive, but mindless, industry Cruikshank churned out an incredible list of titles and became a national figure. In fact, he was such an overpowering figure in the field of Canadian historiography that, up until his death in 1939, very few ventured to write on the subject and most of these were local historians who published on fairly narrow topics. An exception is William Wood's Select British Documents of the American War of 1812, three useful volumes of accurate transcriptions of important documents from the conflict with some attempt to provide a contextual background, something Cruikshank could never be accused of doing.

Shortly after Cruikshank died in June 1939, the Second World War broke out and this new conflict indirectly led to the creation of a new and more professional generation of historians who contributed to the field of 1812 studies. They were all members of the wartime Canadian Army Historical Section which had been assembled by Dr. Charles P. Stacey. Stacey chose his staff wisely and it included such men as D.J. Goodspeed, J.M. Hitsman, G.W. Nicholson and George Stanley who researched and wrote a very competent 3-volume history of the Second World War

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

army in seasonable time.

Members of the Directorate of History, as the Army Historical Section became after the unification of the armed forces in 1968, have also contributed to our knowledge of the war. Stacey himself contributed a very seminal article that once and for all debunked the militia myth. S.F. Wise wrote extensively on the aboriginal peoples and the intellectual side of the war. Alec Douglas, a former naval officer, contributed papers and monographs on the maritime side of the conflict while Brereton Greenhous worked on the logistical aspects.

In the 1950s and 1960s, these historians dominated not only the field of the War of 1812 but also military history in Canada in general. As a group, these authors, all of whom had a service background, tended to favour political and military/naval subjects at the strategic and operational level, above other topics. Their approach was fairly conservative, and they were most certainly not students of the so-called "new military history" which originated in the 1950s and which focused on almost every aspect of war except the actual fighting.

Now at long last, I come to the beginning of my survey, which starts in the early 1970s. Ah yes, the 70s -- disco, long hair on both sexes, wide lapels and ties on men, Richard Nixon in the White House, Pierre Trudeau in the Prime Minister's Office and his wife Maggie all over television and at least one of the Rolling Stones. The best thing about the decade was Monty Python's Flying Circus but otherwise it was mainly forgettable.

When I began formal study of the War of 1812 in 1973, the standard Canadian history of the war was Mac Hitsman's Incredible War of 1812, a book I much admired. Most of what else was available were a seemingly endless list of Cruikshank titles, Wood's Select British Documents and such American authors as Adams, Mahan (a much underrated book in my opinion), and some very general works. Two important campaign studies appeared during that decade, Alan Everest's The War in the Champlain Valley and Robin Reilly's The British at the Gates, about New Orleans in 1814-1815, which were notable for extensive research among both opponents and a lack of national bias. As an undergraduate I never studied Canadian history but completed the requirements for two Honours Degrees, one in modern European history and one in 18th century European history with oriental and classical history as minors in both. However, when time came for me to go graduate school, I somewhat reluctantly decided to pursue a Canadian thesis topic, particularly a War of 1812 topic so I chose to write about Joseph Willcocks and the .

I did my graduate work at Carleton University in Ottawa, which permitted me to spend long hours, in fact most of my time in the national archives which, in those days, were open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For those of you who are not familiar with him, Joseph Willcocks was the worst traitor in Canadian history and his unit consisted of renegades fighting against their own countryman. Unfortunately, the only documents on the man and his followers were in the US National Archives, specifically in Record Group 107, the correspondence of the American Secretary of War which is not at all well indexed. This meant that I had to read through the entire correspondence, outgoing

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

and incoming, of the secretary of war from 1811 to 1816, about 66 reels of microfilm, as I recall, and it took me about six months. I made copious notes, however, and they have stood me in good stead ever since.

In any case, after I arrived in Ottawa I became friends with René Chartrand, at that time Chief Military Curator for Parks Canada or some similar title. Through Rene and my own research I discovered the considerable body of work done by the Parks historians. I earlier mentioned the defence department historians and their work. When their historical production began to ebb in the late 1960s as they retired or accepted academic appointments, much of the War of 1812 research in this country almost to 1990 was produced by Parks Canada historians. Much of it was devoted to material history or archaeology but Parks also produced some very good original works of well- researched narrative history. Examples would be Vic Suthren and Carol Whitfield's studies of Chateauguay and Queenston Heights respectively., Robbie Allen's groundbreaking account of the Indian Department which was later published as His Majesty's Indian Allies, Michelle Guitard's study of the francophone soldiers who fought at Chateauguay, a fine example of social and cultural analysis, Margaret Coleman's narrative of the US occupation of Fort George and there are many others.

In conjunction with this historical work and connected with it -- as his wife happens to have been an historian with Parks Canada -- René Chartrand was doing splendid work in the field of military material history. What Rene did was apply scholarly standards to uniform and weapons research and make it available in the form of numerous articles and a splendid collection of paintings by prominent artists which are not just pretty pictures but a visual record of the uniforms of the War of 1812 for both combatants. He later continued this work with the Department of National Defence and private individuals and organizations. One of the most prominent results are his two recent books on the uniforms, colours and weaponry of the two opponents of the War of 1812, A Most Warlike Appearance and A Scarlet Coat, which I think will bear the "definitive" label for a long time to come.

In 1979 I joined the Parks Canada group as a contract historian and later a military consultant. I contributed a lengthy report on officer's life styles at Fort George and the practice of military medicine in the early 19th century, which has also stood me in good stead. I spent much time in the Niagara peninsula and got very familiar with the historic ground on both sides of the river. In 1983 I began work as a military archivist at the National Archives of Canada, another useful learning experience, before joining the staff of the Directorate of History in 1986 as -- of all things -- a naval historian. One has to make a living somehow.

During the 80s, a number of important titles on the war appeared. The first was George Stanley's The War of 1812: Land Operations brought out by the Canadian War Museum. Stanley was a graduate of the defence department historical section who later went to an academic career. His book is notable because it goes into some detail on operations outside the Great Lakes but suffers because it is not properly documented -- that is to say that Stanley provided his sources but a

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

decision was made not to publish them. A companion volume on naval operations was planned and completed by Fred Drake but never published.

Students of the naval war of 1812, however, have been very well served by the appearance in 1985 of the first of four planned volumes of The Documentary History of the Naval War of 1812 which is an excellent and scholarly publication brought out by the US Navy historical section. The document transcriptions are accurate, they are properly analyzed and placed in context, there is as much British as American material, and there is remarkably little bias in the choice of it or the comments made on it. Three of four volumes have appeared so far and are without a doubt one of the most valuable publications on the war to appear in recent times.

And now we come to the 1990s, a time when there was a distinct revival of interest in the War of 1812 and a resultant surge of publications concerning it, a flood tide that has increased to this day. I am therefore going to cover the next two decades not separately but as a single entity.

I will begin with myself as, for better or worse, I have somehow seem to have gotten connected with many of the major books about the War of 1812 that have appeared in Canada in the last 20 years. Let us start in 1993 when I published a book about the 1814 battle of Lundy's Lane. I began working on this book as an antidote to the déformation profesionelle caused by my work on the official history of the Canadian navy in the Second World War, most of which concerned reading minutes of endless committee meetings, memos about those minutes and counter minutes to those memos. I became concerned that I would end up not as a military historian, nor even a naval historian, but as some sort of medieval monk chronicler of bureaucracy.

At that time in the late 1980s I was leading battlefield tours in Europe for our military units then stationed in Germany and starting to get a real feel for, and eye for, terrain. I had also been heavily influenced by a 1976 book by John Keegan called The Face of Battle in which Keegan analyzed the weaknesses of many English-language battle studies, stressed the importance of such studies and provided examples of how to analyze a battle. Finally, two other publications, one a study of the 1862 battle of Antietam by Stephen Sears called A Landscape Turned Red and the other a study of men in battle by Richard Holmes called Acts of War had incited my interest in writing a book about a Napoleonic military action based on as many primary sources as I could find. In sum, I wanted to select a narrow topic and go as deeply into it as I could.

It took more than six years but the thing was finally done. The manuscript was turned down every publisher in Canada and, at one time I had a stack of rejection letters nearly an inch thick. It finally found its way to an American publisher and saw print in 1993 as The Battle of Lundy's Lane. On the Niagara in 1814 which was not at all my choice of title. When writing this book I had tried very hard to be equal in my treatment of the two opponents and I must have done something right because Americans often accuse me of being pro-British while Canadians accuse me of being pro- American.

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

From the research for that book arose two others. I discovered the memoir of a young British officer, John Le Couteur, who had fought throughout the war. I edited it for publication and it saw print in 1994 at Merry Hearts Make Light Days. In a similar fashion, the eyewitness memoirs of three American soldiers who fought at the battle of Lundy's Lane appeared in 1996 as Soldiers of 1814.

In the Niagara area, interest in the War of 1812 was incited by the discovery in 1987 of an American military cemetery from the conflict. The remains of more than a dozen US service men, were exhumed, studied by pathologists and then reburied with full military honours on US soil. I visited the site of the exhumation as part of my DND duties and I have to say that its gives you a very strange feeling to gaze on the remains of men that you have been writing about for much of your adult life. Two interesting books, Death at Snake Hill and a forensic medical study resulted from this discovery.

Shortly afterward, passions were ignited in the Niagara when a local developer acquired the land on which the battle of Chippawa had been fought in 1814 and applied for permission to subdivide it to build a suburb. At the bequest of the opposing parties, I wrote a research report which established the physical parameters of the battlefield. When the controversy ended after the developer offered the land to the Niagara Parks Commission, I took much of the information from this report and incorporated into a book called Redcoats and Greyjackets, written as a fundraising project for the friends of the battlefield. I have never been happy about this book as it was intended to be a coffee table picture book but the publisher instead brought it out with cheap production values about one step above photocopying.

For me the 1990s were a very busy decade particularly after I left government service in 1996. In 1997 I met Robin Brass, the owner of a small publishing firm that specialized in military and local history. Robin acquired my Lundy's Lane book, let me revise it, re-designed it and released it in 1998 as Where Right and Glory Lead. I enjoyed working with Robin so much that I decided to write another 1812 battle book, this time on the twin victories of Chateauguay and Crysler's Farm and thus Field of Glory was released in 1999. It was modelled on my Lundy's Lane book and is the second volume in what will eventually be a trilogy of studies on the major battles of the northern theatre of the war.

Robin Brass kept urging me to write a general history of the War of 1812 but I put him off because I think it would be an easier thing to write a history of the Second World War than a history of the War of 1812. Finally, I suggested that, instead of bringing out a new history, we revise an old classic, Mac Hitsman's Incredible War of 1812, first published in 1965 and long out of print. I got the bright idea of trying to retro-fit the sources to this book, which had been removed from it by the original publisher, the University of Toronto. To do so I enlisted the aid of three other historians of the War -- Carl Benn, Bob Malcolmson and Stuart Sutherland -- and, amazingly enough, we were able to identify all but I think ten of nearly 900 source documents used by Hitsman. And what is more amazing is that it only took us three months to do it. The revised edition of Incredible War

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

was published in 1999 and has become Robin Brass's bestselling title -- it is now in its seventh printing and it is going back on the press this year.

Mention of Bob Malcomson brings up a man who really should be here to celebrate the Bicentennial but who unfortunately passed away in 2009 at a tragically young age. A native of St. Catharines, Bob was a lifelong student of the sailing navy and the author of dozens of articles on maritime warfare in the age of Nelson. In 1991, with his brother Thomas, he co-authored a book titled HMS Detroit, a study of the pivotal 1812 battle of Lake Erie. Bob sought my advice about a ms. he had in hand about the naval War of 1812 on Lake Ontario. I thought it a very sound piece of work and recommended to Robin Brass and it appeared in 1997 as the award-winning Lords of the Lake. Bob quickly followed that with three other books on North American naval matters and then changed his pace and began working on a study of the battle of Queenston Heights. He was the first Canadian historian to actually examine the sources on this engagement located in the New York State Archives in Albany and his conclusion was that Van Rennselaer's objective was not to invade and conquer the Niagara peninsula but simply to secure winter quarters for his troops, a much more limited objective. Bob followed up this excellent book by compiling an encyclopaedia of the War of 1812, which appeared in 2006, and then wrote an extremely well-researched study of the 1813 attack on York. In the space of a single decade Bob Malcomson established himself as one of the top Canadian historians of the War of 1812.

Another historian who assisted me with the revision of Hitsman was Stuart Sutherland. Stuart spent two decades researching a group biography of the British officers who fought in North America during the war. It was published in 2001 as His Majesty's Gentlemen and, although obtaining a copy is very difficult, it is a superb source for details on the careers of nearly a thousand men. Two similar works are Bill Gray's 1995 effort, Soldiers of the King, which is an excellent biographical and organizational study of the Upper Canada militia and Luc Lepine's Lower Canada's Militia Officers 1812-1815, which does the same for Lower Canada.

I am an historian therefore I deal in hard, cold facts, not fancy, so I am going to ignore fiction titles except perhaps Pierre Berton's two-volumes published in the late 1970s. Besides I think the last good historical novelist was C.S. Forester and he's been gone since 1963. Seriously, people often ask me what I think about Berton's books and my stock reply is that they have a very good bibliography and it is a shame the author never used it. However, its all grist for the mill and if reading Berton gets someone interested in the War of 1812, my hope is that they may eventually turn to more solid works.

In a similar fashion, I am not going to spend much time talking about film documentaries of the war. I have been involved in six and frankly I find film people to be all wind and no rain, feckless and unprofessional.

I want to talk briefly about leadership and command in the war. It was Mac Hitsman who wrote a very important article in 1964 questioning whether the traditional treatment of Lieutenant-General

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

Sir George Prevost by almost every historian who had written about the war might possibly be in error. In his 1999 book, British Generals in the War of 1812: High Command in the Canadas, Wesley Turner began that re-examination and this book also contains some very useful biographical information on other senior commanders. I think that when John Grodzinski's biography of Prevost is published later this year, I think that, for the first time in two centuries this much-maligned officer is going to get a fair hearing in the historical court.

In the same vein, Sandor Antal's semi-biography of Major General Henry Procter, A Wampum Denied, is a useful contribution although I do not agree with everything the author says. And, of course, we have Jonathon Riley's recent biography of Brock, A Matter of Honour, which I find fascinating because it is a critical assessment of a general by a fellow general -- a professional evaluation if you will -- and, ironically, the assessor has seen more combat than the subject. Brock is an endless object of attraction, it seems. Wesley Turner has recently contributed another biography of the man and I know of at least one other biography in the works. I sometimes think that other senior commanders should get some attention or the crop of young field grade officers in their 30s -- men such as Bisshopp, Harvey, Morrison and MacDonell, who did much of the operational work of defending this country. I made one contribution toward that end when I published my biography of Thomas Pearson, that warhorse of the British Army in North America, Fix Bayonets! in 2006.

Now I am running out of space so I am going to have skip over a number of very worthwhile titles including my wife's book, In the Midst of Alarms: Women in the War of 1812. The story of how that book came to be, and how it and my wife made me even crazier than I am, will have to wait for another opportunity.

However, before I conclude, I want to mention two War of 1812 books that I particularly like. You know, anyone can call themselves an historian. You might have the academic training and professional training that I am lucky enough to possess, or you may not. But in history, the fact is that talking the game is not enough, to be respected as an historian you have to be able to write the game and -- believe me because I know -- writing is not a very enjoyable experience. This is why I am delighted when I come across books written by so-called "amateurs" which are readable, educational and above all, useful, as a professional student of the war. In this category, which is not a large one, I want to notice Glenn Stott's Greater Evils: The War of 1812 in Southwestern Ontario and Stuart Rammages's The Militia Stood Alone. Malcom's Mills. Both books deal with western Upper Canada, an area that is only too often overlooked by historians.

I will conclude by saying that when I make public appearances I am often approached by people who want to know they can get into the historical writing field. Generally, I tell them that they would be better off going into the ministry because, although the money is not great, it's out of the rain, there's no heavy lifting and it's all pensionable time.

However, if that doesn't put you off and you want to persist in this madness than I suggest you

The War of 1812 Magazine Issue 21, January 2014

contact John Grodzinski, the editor of the "War of 1812 Online Magazine." This publication, which is in its sixth year of existence, is an excellent venue for the neophyte historian or for those interested in providing information about their historic event, historic site or re-enactment unit.

To conclude, I will rip off Robert Crumb and urge you that, when you writing about the War of 1812, re-enacting it, celebrating it or just hanging out around it, always remember to keep

KEEP A SMILE ON YOUR LIPS AND A SONG IN YOUR HEART