And, as Taylor notes, Americans, whether refugee Loyalists or newly-minted republicans, were in the majority on both sides of the border. But their ideological division “within a cultural and demographic overlap made for a dangerously unstable compound’’ and led inexorably to civil war.
If there is a conventional view of the War of 1812, triggered by the impressment of American seamen into the British navy, and anchored on stirring accounts of the exploits of the frigate Constitution, this is not it.
Taylor’s 1812 is a land war, and his account, taking the reader into the borderlands of upstate New York and Upper Canada (which generally comprised present-day southern Ontario), will go a long way in upending that conventional view.
As Taylor, a historian at the University of California Davis, defines the war, it had these “four overlapping dimensions’’:
Loyalists who had fled to Canada after the Revolution battled republican Americans for control of Upper Canada; Federalists often spied for the British and in New England “flirted with secession’’; Irish who were recruited into the British Army [renewed] “in Canada their rebellion’’; and many Indian tribes “allied with the British to roll back American expansion.’’
A vantage point is the Niagara Frontier. On opposite sides of the Niagara River as it flowed out of Lake Erie, within cannon range of each other, were the American Fort Niagara and the British Fort George.
In December 1813, American forces, unable to hold previously captured Fort George, retreated, burning the town of Newark as they fled. The British took revenge by burning the town of Lewiston after capturing Fort Niagara. At month’s end the British sent their Indian allies burning and pillaging into Black Rock, just north of Buffalo, meanwhile burning four American schooners trapped in the ice.
And there was political fallout, writes Taylor, as “the disasters on the Niagara front became a key issue’’ in the New York legislative elections in the following spring. “In a landslide, the voters endorsed the Republican promise of revenge,’’ with a new military campaign for that summer.
