For Honour's Sake (62 page)

Goulburn's early mentor, the Earl of Bathurst, continued as secretary for war and the colonies until 1827, when Lord Liverpool resigned. He then served as lord president of the council in the Duke of Wellington's government to 1830. Four years later he died at seventy-two years old.

The mercurial Viscount Castlereagh was both celebrated and impugned by his countrymen after 1815. His brilliant diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna and later conferences checked Russian ambitions in Europe while strengthening the then weak central powers of Germany and Italy. For this and other achievements in international affairs he was hailed. But as leader of the House of Commons he could not escape being tarnished as chief architect behind repressive policies introduced at home between 1815 and 1819 to which he was largely opposed. After a failed plot to assassinate the cabinet, Castlereagh carried a pistol at all times and claimed that his life was in jeopardy. Excessive suspicion gave way to open paranoia that manifested itself in unsupported belief that he faced blackmail from unidentified conspirators holding fraudulent evidence that he was homosexual. Just before Castlereagh was to have departed for a major conference in Verona, his doctors confined him to his country home. His razor confiscated, the fifty-three-year-old Castlereagh slit his throat with a penknife on August 12, 1822. Castlereagh was entombed in Westminster Abbey, but he was also scorned in verse by Romantic poets Shelley and Byron.

Expected to preside over merely a caretaker government, Lord Liverpool served continuously as Britain's prime minister for almost fifteen years. Had not a paralytic stroke forced his retirement on February 17, 1827, at age fifty-six, Liverpool might have continued in office until he deigned to leave it. In part, his long tenure was due to a lack of charisma that rendered him dogged administrator rather than dynamic leader. Less than two years after the stroke, Liverpool died in London on December 4, 1828.

President James Madison was constitutionally limited to two terms in office and so took his leave on April 6, 1817. He retired to his Virginia estate,
Montpelier, closing a political career that spanned forty-one years and dated back to the birth of America. He died at age eighty-five on June 28, 1836. His loyal secretary of state, James Monroe, succeeded him as the nation's fifth president—fulfilling by fact rather than design the Federalist gibe that Virginia had imposed on America a dynasty of three Jameses.

When Monroe's presidency ended in 1824, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson threw their hats into the ring. William Crawford, the American minister to France during the war, also ran, with Albert Gallatin his vice-presidential running mate. In a close contest, Jackson carried the popular vote but failed to win a majority. Adams was next in line, with Clay trailing at the tail end. It fell to Congress to decide the winner. While Clay still carried a grudge against Adams, he despised Jackson. His weight in Congress carried sufficient sway to tip the decision in Adams's favour, and Clay was rewarded with the secretary of state post.

Adams survived only one term, being swept from office by Jackson in 1828 after a particularly bitter campaign marked by personal slanders. Returning to Congress in 1831, Adams played the role of the nation's conscience by recalling its puritanical roots but was equally renowned for his inability to control his temper. After sixteen consecutive years in the House, Adams died at age eighty on February 23, 1848, just two days after a stroke left him slumped over his desk on the congressional floor.

Clay's naked presidential ambitions were to go unrealized. Upon returning from Ghent he had been re-elected House Speaker and confidently expected that he was bound for a rebuilt White House. Three times he announced his candidacy and as often stood back waiting for an expected call from supporters, who kept their silence. Moving up to the Senate in 1831 to better oppose Jackson, Clay became the leader of the Whig Party. He was still aspiring to the presidency when carried off by death at seventy-five in 1852.

Of the Americans at Ghent, James Bayard had been liked and respected by all the others. Upon leaving the city he had gone to Paris to await passage to America. But he was ill, suffering severe chest congestion that left him incapacitated for weeks at a time, and his stay there was a trial of endurance. He longed for home, feared he would die before reaching it.
Neptune
sailed with Bayard and William Crawford aboard on June 18,
1815, and entered Delaware harbour on August 1 after forty-three days at sea. Bayard, bedridden the entire voyage, was taken ashore on a stretcher carried by twelve sailors. They refused to surrender him to the crowd of well-wishers who had gathered at news of his illness, insisting on bearing him home. Bayard told his family he would not survive. Five days later the forty-eight-year-old Federalist was dead.

If Bayard was the most respected among the Ghent commissioners, Jonathan Russell was the least so. Having assumed his post as minister to Sweden, he remained there until 1818. In 1821, he was elected to Congress as a Massachusetts representative for what proved his only term. Russell's mediocrity would have earned him a moderate, not unfavourable niche in American history for his various roles in diplomacy. But, longing for more influence, Russell embarked on a vile and largely fraudulent campaign against his fellow negotiators Adams and Gallatin. Casting Adams as the chief villain and Gallatin as an appeaser seeking peace, Russell authored a phoney version of a lost correspondence he had sent to James Monroe that portrayed himself as both defender of New England and champion of the west. Monroe finally found the original letter, which unmasked the lies of Russell's product. Undeterred, Russell produced another version that differed significantly from the previous two. Shunned by Clay, whom he kept trying to draw into his web of deceit, Russell became increasingly unhinged. Finally Adams lashed back with typical erudition and prodigious output by documenting the entire controversy, analyzing in detail Russell's three letter versions, and publishing the entire thing in September 1822. Disgraced, Russell next tried to smear Clay, but with no success. Soon, when a man's reputation was ruined by public disclosure, Americans declared that he had been “jonathanrusselled.” When he died at sixty in 1832, Adams wrote: “He is gone to his account and is sufficiently punished in this world for his perfidy.”
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Albert Gallatin had refused to be drawn by Russell's attacks. After Ghent, Madison had offered Gallatin either secretary of the treasury or the post of minister to France. In 1816 he chose the latter and served in that capacity for seven years, returned home for three years (where he ran unsuccessfully for vice-president alongside Crawford), and then returned to Europe for a year as minister to Britain. Gallatin entered private life and
died at eighty-eight on August 12, 1849, preceded three months earlier by his wife. In his later years, Gallatin studied North America's Indian tribes and in 1842 founded the American Ethnological Society of New York, leading to his being called the father of American ethnology. On his deathbed, he had embarked on a rigorous self-examination, “to see whether I am in charity with all mankind. On this retrospect I cannot remember any adversary whom I have not forgiven, or to whom I have failed to make known my forgiveness.”
⁵
Fitting last words for the man who had nudged the Ghent negotiations one small step at a time toward a satisfactory peace where the honour of both sides was preserved.

It is interesting to note that although its future rode on the outcome of the negotiations, no representatives from British North America were invited to join the British delegation at Ghent or to propose terms for the peace. Goulburn was the only commissioner possessing even a scant knowledge of the colony's geography or the circumstances of its people. Perhaps tellingly, he considered the treaty a poor one for Canada, for the Indians, and for Britain. In the event, his concerns that Canadians and Indians were sacrificed for a speedy peace proved true only for the latter. Except for the Fenian raids of 1866, the borders stood inviolable thereafter from American military invasion. Had the commissioners in Ghent failed to reach agreement it is likely that the war would have ground on for years to come. Weary from decades of conflict, Britain might have given up on defending its holdings in North America, which perpetually cost more than they returned in the way of resources and wealth. Ultimately, although most Canadians failed to recognize it at the time, the Treaty of Ghent preserved the future of British North America by establishing a foundation of security from American incursions that ensured its survival. Combined with the new sense of selfhood that was fostered by the performance of the Canadian militia during the war, the conditions of the peace set British North America on the path that would in less than fifty years see the emergence of Canada as a distinct nation.

Hull, depicted much younger-looking than he actually was, surrenders his sword and Detroit to Brock. (Library and Archives Canada C-16404)

Brock is pictured here urging on the main counterattack that turned the flank and gave the British a victory at Queenston Heights but he actually died much earlier during an ill-fated charge against the American line. (Library and Archives Canada C-00273)

British boarders from
Shannon
fight hand-to-hand with the American crew of
Chesapeake
on June 1, 1813. (Library and Archives Canada C-974)

Laura Secord delivers her warning that the Americans are advancing on Beaver Dams to Lieutenant James FitzGibbon. (Library and Archives Canada C-11053)