Fire Along the Frontier: Great Battles of the War of 1812

By Alastair Sweeny

A view of the War of 1812 from a social perspective.

This book provides a fresh new view of the battles of the war and goes behind the scenes to explore wartime trading activity, particularly American dealings with Napoleon and cross-border commerce, as well as the activities of John Jacob Astor, America’s richest man and war financier, and his fur-trading partners in Montreal.

There was a wealth of military screw-ups. What did the generals do before each battle to lose it, and what could they have done to win? And did the incompetence and mixed loyalties of Military Governor Sir George Prevost, grandson of a financier of the American Revolution and nephew by marriage of Vice President Aaron Burr, nearly lose Canada for the British?

The book also provides glimpses of some of the fascinating behind-the-scenes players, such as legendary but flawed President Thomas Jefferson, and President Madison’s wife, Dolley, who could have won the war single-handedly had she been able to get all the generals together in the same drawing room.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jul 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781459704350

Alastair Sweeny

Alastair Sweeny is the author of several books on Canadian history and technology, including George-Étienne Cartier: A Biography, BlackBerry Planet, and Fire Along the Frontier: Great Battles of the War of 1812. He is the founding director of canadachannel.ca, a series of Canadian educational portals created by well-known authors in the fields of education and Canadian history. 

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Vernon.

One

Mister Jefferson’s War

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

−Thomas Jefferson

At first glance, the War of 1812 seems nothing more than a ridiculous spat that accomplished nothing, with a peace treaty that simply restored the status quo. But this thousand-day conflict did have major consequences, both on its own and as part of a wider world war.

The goals, the timing and the results of this war show that, behind a smokescreen of bombast and propaganda, 1812 was a special project of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his American allies, U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. To look closely at their motivations is to truly understand why America went to war.

Unfinished Business, 1783−1799

On September 3, 1783, Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the American War of Independence.

The British delegates were so furious, they refused to pose for Benjamin West’s commemorative painting, and it was never completed

Most British leaders felt cheated by the peace. They saw the victory of the American patriots as a theft of a major part of the British Empire by France. They had a point. While General Cornwallis had foolishly concentrated his forces in an area where he could be trapped, it was French naval vessels that closed the trap. French regiments made sure of the defeat. In fact, there were more French soldiers at Yorktown than there were Americans.

This image shows The American Commissioners. Front: John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Laurens.

Under the new treaty, the United States now owned the territory north and southwest of the Ohio River, but Montreal fur traders and their agents kept selling pots and axes and guns to the Indians. This seriously rankled the Americans.

For their part, the British were annoyed as well. Under the treaty, the Americans had agreed to indemnify the Loyalists for losses suffered during the Revolutionary War, but the money was proving devilishly hard to get, since many American and British merchants who had suffered losses were also clamouring to be reimbursed.

For the purpose of our story, we should note that one major debtor to British moneylenders was a forty-year-old Virginia squire named Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was born in 1743, the son of wealthy slave owner, planter, and surveyor Peter Jefferson, and Jane Randolph, daughter of a prominent Virginia family. Peter Jefferson was a member of the Loyal Company and surveyed and promoted land sales in Virginia and west of the Allegheny Mountains.

After his father’s early death, young Thomas boarded with a Scotch tutor, the Reverend James Maury. He kept a literary book filled with Greek, Latin, and English literature. He then went to the College of William and Mary to study mathematics, philosophy and French, then turned to the study of law.

Jefferson was not always encumbered by debt. In his twenties, he came of age, inheriting 2,750 acres from his father’s estate. He passed his bar examination and started building a new house, Monticello, at the top of a little mountain on his estate.

Jefferson’s finances first suffered in the 1760s, when the Virginia courts shut down during the Stamp Act Crisis, as the American colonists started pushing for more independence from Britain. Turning from law to politics, he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses at age twenty-six, and soon got swept away by revolutionary fervor.

Another financial crisis hit in 1770, when his family estate at Shadwell burned to the ground, destroying most of his personal and family papers and books.

He earned some relief in January, 1772, when he married a twenty-three-year-old widow, Martha Skelton. Her dowry almost doubled his land and slaves. But these 11,000 acres and 135 additional slaves were heavily encumbered by £4,000 in sterling loans from British creditors. When his father-in-law died a year later, Jefferson inherited a debt that he never really escaped.

In 1774, he sold some of his land to settlers and planters who paid in installments, but when the American Revolution broke out, the state of Virginia let buyers pay with inflated paper money, which Jefferson was obliged to accept, even though, as he complained, the money was worth less than oak leaves.

Jefferson’s expensive tastes made matters worse. He always lived beyond his means and never denied himself anything. He adored French wines, fine furnishings and clothing, works of art, and especially expensive leather-bound books — I cannot live without my books‚ he commented to frugal John Adams. During his diplomatic years in Paris alone, he bought two thousand books. The result was a personal debt that now reached almost £7,000.

Liquidating personal debts never seemed a priority to Jefferson the gentleman farmer. He waved off his obligations, always expecting that his rising government salary would cover them. A bit of an aristocratic snob, he regarded money-making as beneath his contempt. Jefferson professed to be appalled by the crass commerce of the New England states and New York. As commercial avarice and corruption advance on us from the north and east, he wrote his friend Henry Middleton, the principles of free government are to retire to the agricultural States of the south and west, as their government for her portion, agriculture may abandon contentedly to others the fruits of commerce and corruption.

And yet the man could put pen to paper and come up with arguments that appeared reasonable, if a touch radical. In July of 1774, he drafted instructions for the Virginia delegates to the first Continental Congress. In A Summary View of the Rights of British America he argued forcefully that the British Parliament had no governing rights over the colonies and asserted that the colonies had been independent since their founding.

A year later, at age thirty-two, he arrived in Philadelphia as the youngest Virginia delegate to the second Continental Congress, and was tasked to help Benjamin Franklin and John Adams craft a manifesto titled The Declaration of Independence. John Adams’s resolution charging the states to write constitutions and create new, independent state governments, was Congress’s real substantive declaration of independence, but the Declaration became the real holy writ of the American republic.

This document, so identified with Thomas Jefferson the Legend, was in fact the work of a committee that included Adams, Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. After discussion, the committee asked Jefferson, the junior delegate, to prepare a rough draft. Leaning heavily on the English Bill of Rights of 1689, Jefferson wrote it up in two or three days and submitted it to Adams and then to Franklin, Livingston, and Sherman, who together made a total of forty-seven changes to the draft, including moderating several of Jefferson’s more radical ideas, except perhaps the pursuit of happiness. Adams in particular changed "we hold these truths to be God-given to self evident."

The Declaration was laid before Congress, and 39 further changes were made, including the deletion of Jefferson’s arguments holding King George III responsible for continuing the slave trade in the colonies.[1]

On July 4, copies of the Declaration were printed, and on July 9, General George Washington read it to his troops in New York. On September 9, Congress designated United States as the new nation’s official name.

That October, Jefferson declined an offer to represent the U.S. abroad with Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane. He returned to Virginia to attend to his finances and serve in the House of Delegates. He and a talented young Virginia lawyer, James Madison, eight years younger, become fast friends and lifelong political partners.

On June 1, 1779, Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia and was reflected in 1780. In September of that year, he showed his warlike mettle by planning an expedition of Virginia militia, led by George Rogers Clark, against the British and their Indian allies at Detroit.

The war reached deep into Virginia in January of 1781, as General Benedict Arnold, now defected to the British, burned the capital at Richmond, forcing Jefferson and his officials to flee. British General Lord Cornwallis also attacked Charlottesville and nearby Monticello. Jefferson and his family barely escaped