Tecumseh and Brock Read Free

influence would he have had? The diplomats who negotiated the peace treaty with the United States in Ghent were acting on the instructions of the government at Westminster. And the British cared above all about their broad imperial interests.
    Tecumseh’s confederacy was the final occasion in history when native forces played a crucial role in determining the outcome of a geostrategic struggle in North America. The inspired concept of a native state reached the peak of its influence in the years prior to the War of 1812 and during the first year of the conflict. With the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, the concept became a lost cause.
    The British were glad to put the War of 1812 behind them. They regarded it as a strategic annoyance imposed on them by the Americans. In their view, its outcome was satisfactory: no imperial territory was lost, and the British did not even have to concede to the United States on the issue of impressment. While British diplomats argued for a time in favour of a native state in North America, they quite easily shelved the concept when it became a barrier to achieving peace. On June 18, 1815, three years to the day after the American declaration of war, the British and their allies fought and won the decisive Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon was defeated and exiled to St. Helena, a small, windswept island in the South Atlantic. The year 1815 marked the dawn of Pax Britannica, the century in which Britain was the world’s leading imperial power, a period of dominance that ended only with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.
    Americans look back on the War of 1812 as a decisive trial through which the nation passed, emerging stronger and more united. American historians have depicted the conflict as the country’s second war of independence, or as the war that forged a nation. 1
    Were it not for the repeated American claim in books, songs, and films that the United States won the War of 1812, the assertion would seem self-evidently absurd. After all, the U.S. initiated the conflict and gained no territory as a result. There is no question, though, that the young republic held its own on the battlefield against the world’s greatest power and put an end to British intervention in American–Native affairs.
    The war also pushed the Americans to overcome the dangerous ideological division that had plagued the country since the 1780s. The split between Republicans and Federalists reflected the great ideological-philosophical conflicts of the age of the French Revolution and the succeeding Napoleonic era. During these volatile decades, Americans, like Europeans, positioned themselves along a spectrum that extended from those who identified with the French Revolution to those who feared the Revolution and sided with the British resistance to France. By the end of the war, Americans had left behind the preoccupations of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic age to embark on a more exclusively American journey.
    For the French Canadians, the war was the latest in a long history of invasions from the south. During the Patriot invasion of Quebec in 1775, Americans had managed to occupy Montreal for a time, but no major regions or towns in Lower Canada were taken and held by U.S. forces in the War of 1812. The most noteworthy episode of the war for French Canadians was the Battle of Chateauguay in 1813, when Lieutenant Colonel de Salaberry led a small, largely French-Canadian militia unit to rout a much larger American force. De Salaberry emerged as a French-Canadian folk hero. His statue can be seen today at the National Assembly in Quebec City, sword in hand, beckoning his men to follow him.
    The War of 1812 was Upper Canada’s War of Independence. Upper Canadians emerged from the conflict with a North American sensibility and a conservative political culture. Loyalty to the Crown became the highest expression of public virtue. Those who refused to proclaim