Status Updates From The Invasion of Canada, 181...

“It is an irony of war that had he refused to surrender, had he gone down to defeat, his fort and town shattered by cannon fire, his friends and neighbours ravaged by the misfortunes of battle, his soldiers dead to the last man, the civilians burned out, bombed out, and inevitably scalped, the tired old general would have swept into the history books as a gallant martyr (cont’d in comments)

“Precipitate action does not fit the Upper Canadian mood. This is a pioneer society, not a frontier society. No Daniel Boones stalk the Canadian forests, ready to knock off an Injun with a Kentucky rifle or do battle over an imagined slight. The Methodist circuit riders keep the people law abiding and temperate; prosperity keeps them content.”

“[The War Hawks are] lawyers all, with an eloquence exceeded only by verbosity. They have been raised on tales of the Revolution told by elders who have forgotten much of the horror but remember all of the glory. They are … the kind of men who believe in the need to avenge any insult, imagined or real, who know what it means to fight for the land, and who are convinced that the only good Indian is a dead one.”

“Thus the war … ensured that Canada would never become a part of the Union to the south. Because of it, an alternative form of democracy grew up[.] The Canadian “way”—so difficult to define except in terms of negatives—had its roots in the invasion of 1812-1814, the last American invasion of Canada. There can never be another.”

Fascinating read in the context of today’s political climate.