For Honour's Sake (2 page)

I
n August 1814, eight men travelled to the ancient Flemish city of Ghent to negotiate the end of a war being fought on a faraway continent. They numbered three Britons and five Americans, for these were the two belligerent nations. The conflict had started on June 18, 1812, when President James Madison signed a war proclamation against Great Britain. Two years later, neither side could claim that the war went well.

The British had never wanted this war. Early summer of 1812 had been a period of great crisis for the nation, and war with America only worsened matters. Since 1805 Britain had been locked in a titanic struggle of empires for mastery of Europe. So far it had been unable to stop France's Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte from turning most of the continent into his personal fiefdom. For the past four years Viscount Wellington's army had been engaged in a bloody campaign to prevent France's conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula. In June of 1812, as the United States sent troops marching toward Canada, the British finally prevailed in Portugal. Pushing into the heart of Spain, they drove the French before them.

That, however, was about the only good news Lord Liverpool's government could savour, for France's setbacks could be attributed directly to Napoleon's failure to reinforce his Iberian army. While Wellington besieged one French bastion after another in Spain, Napoleon assembled the 530,000-strong Grande Armée, eyes turned east toward Russia. Once the French boot heel rested on Russia, the little Corsican would wheel about and send Wellington, a general he considered timidly cautious, reeling right off the continent. British spies had
reported the existence of Napoleon's massive juggernaut and its purpose. Odds that Tsar Alexander's antiquated army could stave off the French were considered poor. If Russia fell, Britain would face Napoleon alone.

The grinding war had reduced Britain's economy to a shambles. Loss of European trade and the war's ever-escalating costs had plunged the nation into a depression and imposed severe food shortages. Starvation had threatened during the past winter, and there was unrest in the streets. Ireland remained a festering sore—conditions there were worse than elsewhere in the British Isles. The cost of sustaining Wellington's Peninsular Army placed enormous strain on the government's coffers. At the same time, the Admiralty was demanding more resources to ensure the world's largest fleet continued to master the seas that not only were so essential to retaining the empire but also served as Britain's lifeline for food and other vital imports.

On May 11, an added crisis had arisen when Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated. On June 8, a reluctant Lord Liverpool, then secretary for war and the colonies, accepted the Prince Regent's pleas to lead the government. The Prince had become de facto sovereign on February 5, 1811, when his father, King George III, was declared unfit to rule because of insanity. Faced with a glut of foreign and domestic crises and frantically trying to ensure a stable government to effectively deal with them, Liverpool had focused for the rest of the month on forming a workable cabinet. Most pressing were matters foreign, and to address these Liverpool decided not only to retain Viscount Castlereagh as foreign secretary but also to make him leader of the House of Commons, a position that Perceval had previously held. Believing it imperative that this wartime government have the support of the country and not just of the House of Commons, Liverpool announced that he would dissolve Parliament at the end of September and hold a general election. With all these events swirling about Liverpool and his cabinet, Britain's government needed nothing less in the summer of 1812 than another war, on the other side of the Atlantic. But they had also been so distracted by matters domestic and European that attempts to head off such a war were halfhearted and badly bungled.

Britain had defended British North America during that summer and fall with sufficient zeal to thwart America's attempts at conquest. Somewhat to the surprise of British colonial officials there and to the consternation of the Americans, almost all Canadians remained loyal to the Crown. In both Upper and Lower Canada the militia stepped forward to strengthen the thin ranks of the British redcoats. Local knowledge of battlegrounds and the ability of these farmers, fur traders, small businessmen, and shopkeepers turned soldiers to wage irregular war gave the defenders of British North America a much-needed edge over the numerically superior American forces.

The Americans had assumed that the colonists would welcome the chance to throw off the British yoke—particularly the French-Canadian majority in Lower Canada, themselves conquered by Britain less than forty-five years previously. In Upper Canada they had thought the many recent immigrants from the United States would welcome the opportunity to raise the American flag over their new homeland. But neither French Canadians nor American immigrants had heeded their calls to rise against the British. That refusal ultimately doomed all the attempted invasions.

Not only Canadian loyalty to the Crown dashed the American dream of an easy conquest of British North America. Most Indian nations, too, cast their lot in with Britain. Led by the charismatic warrior chief Tecumseh, the leaders of the powerful Indian confederacy on the western frontiers believed the best way to preserve their nations, their lands, and their way of life from the avarice of American settlers determined to expand the boundaries of the United States ever westward was through military alliance with Britain.

By the summer of 1814, the darkest days of the North American war appeared to have passed for British North America. Although supremacy on the Great Lakes had been forfeited, Britain's armies in Canada had moved from defence to the offence—taking the war for the first time in strength onto American soil. Along the U.S. coastline, amphibious forces carried out major landings, and the naval blockade of the ports had crippled America's economy.

Heartening as this news was, it paled when compared to the great events unfolding in Europe. On April 11, Napoleon had abdicated and
accepted exile to Elba. This after Paris surrendered on March 31, following a string of decisive battles that crushed the French army and delivered a vast Allied army before the city's gates. With an armistice in Europe, the large British army serving there was freed for deployment to North America. By early summer, about ten thousand reinforcements—a flood compared with the paltry trickles of earlier years—had sailed from Europe to North America. It was the influx of these troops that made it possible for Britain to seize the initiative. But even as these reinforcements had disembarked in Halifax, Britain's government was loath to continue what clearly promised to be a long, harsh campaign to defeat the United States. Lord Liverpool and his cabinet were as weary of war as were His Majesty's lesser subjects. And although the European war was at an end, the pressing business of dividing the spoils amongst the victors remained. Empires and nations had to be reformed or created on the spot to fill power vacuums left by the French dismemberment of the old order; new boundaries needed to be drawn. Measures also had to be taken to permanently hobble France. This was the task that required the full attention of Liverpool and Castlereagh.

In Vienna, the European statesmen were gathering for the congress that would settle these matters and impose the terms of surrender on France. The continuing conflict in North America was but an unfortunate distraction, a pointless war fought over issues rendered moot by the developments in Europe—accepting, of course, that the causes America claimed had driven it to arms had ever been genuine and not mere pretexts to mask less honourable ambitions. Whatever might be the truth on that front, a negotiated peace that concluded the war quickly was desired. So long, that is, as the terms of the treaty guaranteed the security of Canada and the frontier Indians against future American aggression.

With this intent in mind, a long process of invitation and discussion finally resulted in three British commissioners proceeding across the English Channel to Ghent. They were His Lordship Vice-Admiral James Gambier, Undersecretary to the Secretary for War and the Colonies Henry Goulburn, and William Adams, a lawyer expert in maritime and naval law. In their diplomatic pouch they carried extensive instructions
as to the treaty terms to be proposed to their American counterparts that strictly limited their ability to make independent decisions.

For their part, the American commissioners had trickled into Ghent by ones and twos and by various circuitous routes of travel, for they came not only from the United States but also from Russia and other parts of Europe. They were U.S. Minister to Russia John Quincy Adams; Albert Gallatin, who until recently had been Madison's secretary of the treasury; Speaker of the House of Representatives and Kentucky Republican Henry Clay; Federalist senator from Delaware James Asheton Bayard; and Jonathan Russell, the former chargé d'affaires in London and newly appointed U.S. minister to Sweden. Although these men fancied themselves as tethered to a longer leash than their British counterparts and consequently able to negotiate more independently, their instructions were as extensive and precisely stated as the British briefs. The Americans were to arrange an amity that retained American honour and required no surrender of either land or the right to continued expansion without threat of interference from Great Britain. In effect, the American government sought a treaty that returned North America to the status quo that had existed before 1812 and would accept no penalty for its resort to arms.

Each side distrusted the other. The British suspected that the American government was insincere and would treat for peace only if it could win by diplomacy what it had failed to gain through war. Among the Americans there was lurking suspicion that Britain sought to impose terms that would unravel the Union and re-establish dominance of king and crown over North America. Both believed that they were the aggrieved party, the one forced into this war by the other.

A major problem that the commissioners had to resolve was the actual manner of negotiation. Little precedent existed in European diplomacy to end a war where neither combatant had vanquished the other or was on the verge of inevitably doing so. Nor were the belligerents prepared to declare an armistice until the negotiations either failed or culminated in an acceptable treaty. While the commissioners talked, blood would continue to flow in North America. This fact added urgency to matters, but also rendered the discussions more uncertain.
It was entirely possible that battles yet to be fought could decide the war before the commissioners reached acceptable terms.

Normally European treaties were negotiated—often with mediation provided by a neutral third-party nation—merely to determine the penalties an already defeated nation must accept to end hostilities. A province or two would be carved away as spoils to the victor, indemnities paid for the costs of prosecuting the war. Surrender of a colony might assuage the thirst of the winner for further gain, and the exile of a ruler sometimes made way for a more acceptable sovereign. Neither the British nor the American commissioners were coming to the other with cap in hand, so they would have to steer a course through largely uncharted diplomatic waters.