The Invasion of Canada Read Online Free PDF Page A

began. She cannot man her ships with volunteers. Worse, thousands of British sailors are deserting to American merchantmen, lured by better conditions and better pay-four times as much. Who can blame the British for recapturing bona fide deserters in time of war? Certainly not the British public; they applaud it.
    But who is a bona fide deserter? Americans and British speak the same language, look alike, dress alike. British boarding parties, hungry for men, do not always bother with the niceties. They grab whom they can. No one knows how many American seamen have been pressed into British service (the figures run between three and seven thousand), but it takes only a few publicized cases to enrage the American public. Even when a case of mistaken identity is proved and admitted, months elapse before the seaman is returned. Service in the British Navy is like a prison sentence or worse, for as Samuel Johnson once remarked, “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Some American seamen have been known to cut off their hands to avoid impressment; some who refuse to serve are flogged unmercifully by the British; and a few, including the three escapees from
Melampus
, are prepared to risk death to get away.
    Their recapture from
Chesapeake
touches off an international incident. Riots break out in New York, where a mob does its best to dismantle a British ship. The British consul is forced to seek police protection while an English diplomat on a tour of the Union finds it prudent to assume an incognito. Public meetings throughout the land denounce the perfidious British. In Quebec, Lieutenant-Colonel IsaacBrock notes that “every American newspaper teems with violent and hostile resolutions against England, and associations are forming in every town for the ostensible purpose of attacking these Provinces.”
    The future general is right: the country is emotionally ready for war, more so, in fact, than it will be in 1812. But its leaders are not ready. The President, Thomas Jefferson, threatens war but does not mean it-a dangerous posture. “If the English do not give us the satisfaction we demand, we will take Canada which wants to enter the Union,” he tells the French minister to Washington. The Frenchman takes these bellicose remarks languidly and reports to Paris that he does not believe that either Jefferson or his foreign secretary, James Madison, wants war. Jefferson bans British warships from American waters, enforces an embargo preventing all ships from sailing out of U.S. ports for foreign destinations, and hopes that these threats will force the British to abandon impressment. But the British do not yield and the embargo is a failure. The public’s ardour for war cools quickly. The crisis passes.
    But there is one group of Americans whose ardour does not cool. In the oak and hickory forests of Ohio, in the cornfields along the Maumee and the Wabash, on the banks of the Au Glaize and on the Tippecanoe in Indiana Territory, there is a quickening of the blood, a stirring of old and painful memories of the defeat at Fallen Timbers and the surrender of hunting grounds at Greenville. The war fever, filtering through to the tribes of the Old Northwest, revives the dying hopes of the native Americans for a new conflict in which they will fight side by side with the British against the Long Knives. The Northwest has been at peace since General Anthony Wayne’s decisive victory in 1794. But the
Chesapeake
incident acts as a catalyst to animate the tribes and shatter the calm that has prevailed north of the Ohio for more than a decade.
    Among the British, the incident produces two oddly contrary reactions. On the one hand it convinces them that America will continue to bluff rather than fight, a conclusion that will lead to calamitous results in 1812. On the other hand they are encouraged to strengthen their