The last year of the war was also a year of varying fortunes.In the far West a small body of Canadians and Indians captured Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi, while Michilimackinac, which a force chiefly composed of French-Canadian voyageurs and Indians had captured in the first months of war, defied a strong assault.In Upper Canada the Americans raided the western peninsula from Detroit but made their chief attack on the Niagara frontier.Though they scored no permanent success, they fought well and with a fair measure of fortune.The generals with whom they had been encumbered at the outset of the war, Revolutionary relics or political favorites, had now nearly all been replaced by abler men--Scott, Brown, Exert--and their troops were better trained and better equipped.In July the British forces on the Niagara were decisively beaten at Chippawa.Three weeks later was fought the bloodiest battle on Canadian soil, at Lundy's Lane, either side's victory at the moment but soon followed by the retirement of the invading force.The British had now outbuilt their opponents on Lake Ontario; and, though American ships controlled Lake Erie to the end, the Ontario flotilla aided Drummond, Brock's able successor, in forcing the withdrawal of Exert forces from the whole peninsula in November.Farther east a third attempt to capture Montreal had been defeated in the spring, after Wilkinson with four thousand men had failed to drive five hundred regulars and militia from the stone walls of Lacolle's Mill.
Until this closing year Britain had been unable, in face of the more vital danger from Napoleon, to send any but trifling reenforcements to what she considered a minor theater of the war.
Now, with Napoleon in Elba, she was free to take more vigorous action.Her navy had already swept the daring little fleet of American frigates and American merchant marine from the seas.Now it maintained a close blockade of all the coast and, with troops from Halifax, captured and held the Maine coast north of the Penobscot.Large forces of Wellington's hardy veterans crossed the ocean, sixteen thousand to Canada, four thousand to aid in harrying the Atlantic coast, and later nine thousand to seize the mouth of the Mississippi.Yet, strangely, these hosts fared worse, because of hard fortune and poor leadership, than the handful of militia and regulars who had borne the brunt of the war in the first two years.Under Ross they captured Washington and burned the official buildings; but under Prevost they failed at Plattsburg; and under Pakenham, in January, 1815, they failed against Andrew Jackson's sharpshooters at New Orleans.
Before the last-named fight occurred, peace had been made.Both sides were weary of the war, which had now, by the seeming end of the struggle between England and Napoleon in which it was an incident, lost whatever it formerly had of reason.Though Napoleon was still in Elba, Europe was far from being at rest, and the British Ministers, backed by Wellington's advice, were keen to end the war.They showed their contempt for the issues at stake by sending to the peace conference at Ghent three commissioners as incompetent as ever represented a great power, Gambier, Goulburn, and Adams.To face these the United States had sent John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, James Bayard, and Jonathan Russell, as able and astute a group of players for great stakes as ever gathered round a table.In these circumstances the British representatives were lucky to secure peace on the basis of the status quo ante.Canada had hoped that sufficient of the unsettled Maine wilderness would be retained to link up New Brunswick with the inland colony of Quebec, but this proposal was soon abandoned.In the treaty not one of the ostensible causes of the war was even mentioned.
The war had the effect of unifying Canadian feeling.Once more it had been determined that Canada was not to lose her identity in the nation to the south.In Upper Canada, especially in the west, there were many recent American settlers who sympathized openly with their kinsmen, but of these some departed, some were jailed, and others had a change of heart.Lower Canada was a unit against the invader, arid French-Canadian troops on every occasion covered themselves with glory.To the Canadians, as the smaller people, and as the people whose country had been the chief battle ground, the war in later years naturally bulked larger than to their neighbors.It left behind it unfortunate legacies of hostility to the United States and, among the governing classes, of deep-rooted opposition to its democratic institutions.But it left also memories precious for a young people--the memory of Brock and Macdonell and De Salaberry, of Laura Secord and her daring tramp through the woods to warn of American attacks, of Stony Creek and Lundy's Lane, Chrystler's Farm and Chateauguay, the memory of sacrifice, of endurance, and of courage that did not count the odds.
Nor were the evil legacies to last for all time.Three years after peace had been made the statesmen of the United States and of Great Britain had the uncommon sense to take a great step toward banishing war between the neighbor peoples.The Rush-Bagot Convention, limiting the naval armament on the Great Lakes to three vessels not exceeding one hundred tons each, and armed only with one eighteen-pounder, though not always observed in the letter, proved the beginning of a sane relationship which has lasted for a century.Had not this agreement nipped naval rivalry in the bud, fleets and forts might have lined the shores and increased the strain of policy and the likelihood of conflict.
The New World was already preparing to sound its message to the Old.
