Historical maps, their meaning and their uses

Last night's round table on the War of 1812 attracted an audience of 35, not bad for a rainy Friday night opposite a hockey game.  We had faculty, students and people from town, and they were interested enough to stick around right up to 10 pm.

One of the most interesting discussions concerned the role of Natives in the war and diplomacy of the time, and whether that role has been ignored or misrepresented, and still is.  One point at  issue was the map above, which was being used to display basic geography.  The priority of the maker was clearly to emphasize American expansion.  Notice how solid  the American states and territories look, and the lack of provincial boundaries in British territory.  Even  more remarkable is the absence of any Native settlements or territories.  This led one participant to state that the map was "false."

Yes and no, say I.  What practical meaning did the boundaries of the Mississippi Territory have in  1812?  Weren't the Creek Indian settlements attacked by Andrew Jackson a lot realer?  On the other hand the state boundaries established in the 1810s are real and practical today.

This  returns me to a point I made to my Crusade and Jihad students in our first class meeting, when I was showing them various maps depicting Christian and Muslim expansion in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  The maps "lied" (= "were false"), I said.

It is more accurate to say that ANY map, historical or otherwise, is very much an oversimplification for analytical or propagandistic purposes.

Thus I say that the appropriate response of a historian to a historical map is not to draw a quick conclusion but to ask more questions.

Which is pretty much what we  were doing with this map last night.

The War of 1812: A Round Table at Nipissing University

1812 -- Turning Points

On the face of it a small frontier conflict, the War of  1812 had world-wide causes and consequences.  It  was not just  one  turning point  but several, for Canada, the United States, Native North America and the British Empire.    

  

In this bicentennial year, the Department of History of Nipissing University presents a Round Table, 1812: Turning Points, for the benefit of the University and the wider North Bay community. We hope to explore all aspects of the war, what it meant at the time and what it means today. Your participation will be welcome.

Friday, September 14, 2012 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM

The Nipissing University Theater, Nipissing University (North Bay campus)

Contact: Steven Muhlberger  -- Stevem@NipissingU.ca --705 – 4744 – 3461 ext 4458

A war to end war

Today in the Globe and Mail, "There was a war in 1812? Really?"
Earlier this month, Peter Jones in the Globe and Mail:

But the real legacy of the War of 1812, government claims aside, is simply that there was never a repeat. Tensions remained, small cross-border incursions took place, and fortifications continued to be built and maintained for another half-century, but the primary lesson both sides drew (and which was slowly reinforced) was not to bother again.

This may sound rather uninspiring – it is difficult to gather a group of colourfully dressed re-enactors to flail around in a field but not actually fight each other – but it probably explains much in terms of the incredible success North America’s two northern nations have enjoyed since.
For from the War of 1812, and its aftermath of avoiding another conflict, slowly emerged what might be called the North American regional consensus. It is now largely unspoken; most who live here probably couldn’t articulate it if they had to, but it has dominated the lives of both countries, and especially Canada, ever since.

Simply put, the North American regional consensus boils down to a realization that the cost of fighting for any possible treasure on the other side of the border is patently ridiculous when it is simply easier and cheaper to exchange these things by trade; that two quite different systems of government can coexist perfectly well; and (for Canadians) that maintaining stability and security in the northern half of the continent ourselves means that the United States will not feel compelled to do it for us
.
We may take all of this for granted, but we shouldn’t. It took those sophisticated Europeans another 150 years (and two of the bloodiest wars in history) to figure it out. Most regions of the world still haven’t.
Of course, the fact that the British had a growing concern for their own relations with the United States probably had something to do with the lack of fighting after 1814. We tend to forget that, after 1814, the British often sided with the U.S. in various arbitration exercises, when they probably should have acted differently if strictly Canadian interests were uppermost in their minds. The Alaska panhandle is a case in point.

Whatever the reasons, the North American regional consensus is now so deeply ingrained on both sides of the border that anyone who tried to promote the idea of fighting a war over anything would rightly be regarded in both countries as insane. Social scientists refer to such regions as “security communities” – places in the world where the idea of conflict is so remote that societies and individuals have developed, as Karl Deutsch put it many years ago, “dependable expectations of peaceful change.”
So there you have it. The real legacy of the War of 1812 is that it helped set the stage for a regional security community. Hardly stirring stuff, but, if you look around the world today, you will quickly realize just how rare a thing ours is. And it is a thing very much worth celebrating.

Old Ironsides!

OK, despite my critical view of the War of 1812, I remain a fan of the USS Constitution.  With luck, she  sails again tomorrow.

Upper Canada before 1812

Some more analysis by Alan Taylor of Upper Canada "before the war."

To suppress sedition,, the government sought to control the flow of public information. In a stark contrast with the republic, the British restricted Postal Service in Upper Canada to official dispatches and to the letters of favored merchants. An American settler described Upper Canada as the land of "no mail, no post-offices, [and] no post riders." ... A Local schools worried officials, who feared that a little knowledge was dangerous in common minds, particularly when their teachers came from the United States. ... Distrusting local, common schools, officials preferred to fund only a few elite schools, one per district ,to educate the sons of gentlemen. ... Britons defined Upper Canada as a set of absences: as free from the social and political pathologies attributed to the United States. They celebrated the colony for lacking the land jobbing, Indian warfare, African slavery, Republican electioneering, libelous newspapers, majoritarian intolerance, and mob violence that blighted the republic.In 1792 Patrick Campbell boasted that the settler in Upper Canada could get "get lands for nothing, be among his countrymen, and run no risk of being ever molested by Indians, tarred or feathered." The British promoted Upper Canada more for what it was not, than for what it was.

Results of that nasty little war

Of 1812, that is.

Nasty or not, it was important.

Before the war, the geographical and legal boundaries of the Anglophone world were ambiguous; lots of people were more concerned about the radical Democratic-Republican or conservative Tory or Federalist next door than they were about people who lived on the other side of the ill-defined border. Not to mention all those radical Irishmen who could be anywhere, as indeed could Irish conservatives.  How different were American farmers in New York State from "Late Loyalists" in Upper Canada (i.e. Americans who had moved north to buy cheap land)?  Not much, though some were more radical than others, or perceived as such.  Geography did not determine this.

But after the war, the border (the UC-USA border) meant a lot.  On  the other side, whichever side you  lived, were people who had burned your houses and wrecked your farms and maybe unleashed scary Indians on you.  They were now The Enemy in a way that they had not been before.  Migration was not welcome; the policy in Upper Canada became one of recruiting settlers direct from Britain.
 
I also get from Alan Taylor the  notion that Britain came very close to winning the war outright.  The treaty of Ghent of 1814 gave the USA very little of what it had fought for, and with Napoleon out of the way, Britain could have crushed the broke, divided States like so many bugs, even while observing the treaty.  Instead, the imperial government took a rather minimalist view of  its role in North America. In particular the traditional alliance with the Indians south of the lakes was abandoned.

Why?  The empire had been fighting a world war for a long time and was TIRED. And the Battle of New Orleans made the point that hegemony in America would probably not be cheap.

Alan Taylor on "Loyalist" Upper Canada

In Upper Canada most of the common people felt ambivalent about taking sides in the war. Drawn to the colony by low taxes and cheap land, the American-born majority had scant interest in politics and a great dread of war. Localist, pragmatic, and self-interested they balked at making sacrifices for any larger political cause, whether for an empire or a republic. The common folk were loyal enough to Britain so long as the colonial government left them alone, but they felt shocked by the sudden wartime demand for their services in the militia. British officials mistook their reticence for disloyalty, and the Americans misunderstood it as longing for a republic. . In fact most people just wanted to be left alone to tend their farms, so they hoped that one side or the other would win the war quickly.

What a nasty little war

As I read Taylor's the Civil War of 1812, the question in my mind becomes not was this an important war? But rather why would anyone want to be associated with either side in this war? It's a nasty war where most of those in arms are there for the loot while those who have some principles or goals have unadmirable ones. The Americans who are most interested in the conquest of upper Canada are former Canadians unhappy with the aristocratic domination of the provincial government and its general unfairness. Or they are unhappy about the situation in Ireland. Or both. American Federalists are more interested in discrediting the Republicans, and the Republicans are more interested in labeling the Federalists as traitors than either is in actually fighting the British. While Upper Canada conservatives are really keen to label anything like dissent as treason. Yuck.

The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor

I am reading Alan Taylor's recent book on the war of 1812, and it is excellent. It is a finely written narrative history that does an excellent job of describing people and situations, and also very good as an analytical treatment of the war. One of the characteristic features of this book is that it focuses on Upper Canada, much my surprise. It is in Upper Canada, today's Ontario, that Taylor sees many of conflicts of the early 19 century coming together in an interesting mixture. For instance, one conflict was between the concept of republic and its associated idea of citizen, and the concept of empire associated with the idea of the subject. Taylor: "We imagine that the revolution effected a clean break between Americans and Britons as distinct peoples. In fact, the republic and the empire competed for the allegiance of the peoples in North America – native, settler, and immigrant." Taylor is amazingly fair in showing the virtues and drawbacks of both systems of thought as they worked themselves out in North America.

How important was the War of 1812?

It is easy to be snarky about the War of 1812.  Someone on the radio today did precisely what I have done in the past -- compare the North American war to the invasion of Russia.  I always follow that quip up by referring "of course" to the fact that the war was a real turning point for Canada.

But today I have reason to wonder.  I was in a university library looking at the section where they keep books on 1812 written from the Canadian point of view and I noticed that there are more books on 1837 than on 1812.  A LOT more.

Hunh.

All you readers, US, Canadian, or Other can now look up 1837.

1812 -- controversial after all these years

In September, the Department of History at Nipissing University will be sponsoring a symposium on the War of 1812 in context.  I brought this up originally because I thought that professional historians based in Canada should create an opportunity to discuss a historical event of such obvious importance.

I was surprised when one of my colleagues said he wasn't sure that he wanted to be involved, because the bicentennial was being used by the current government to promote a militaristic view of Canada's past, in line with its militaristic view of Canada's present.

It seems, though, that my colleague's view is not an isolated one, and that officially sponsored celebration of the war is already generating pushback from people who identify with a long-established anti-war tradition.   And when I say "anti-war" I mean not just any war, but the War of 1812 in particular.  Today saw an article in the Globe and Mail about controversy over celebrations in Stouffville in York Region just north of Toronto:

North of Toronto, in Stouffville, a group of people who belong to pacifist churches are asking their MP to tone down a June event tied to the bicentennial. They say it doesn’t accurately reflect the history of the town, which was founded by Mennonites who conscientiously objected to war.It’s an affront to a truthful telling of that history,” said Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, a Mennonite ordained minister and associate academic dean at Tyndale Seminary.

The pushback in Stouffville is part of a movement to tell another side of the war’s story: those who didn’t fight and were proud of it.
Mr. Neufeldt-Fast represented people from Stouffville’s Mennonite, Quaker and Brethren in Christ churches when he spoke out against the bicentennial event at a council meeting earlier this week.
The town council voted 4-2 to approve Conservative MP Paul Calandra’s plan for a traditional Freedom of the City military march to the town hall. His plan also includes a parade and a request for CF-18 fly-by.
Mr. Neufeldt-Fast said he’s not opposed to commemorating the bicentennial of the war, which affected all of Upper Canada. What he’s opposed to, he said, is the suggestion that the town’s past is rooted in the military rather than pacifism. “It shows, actually, a degree of ignorance of our historical origins,” he said.

... 

Part of what swayed pacifists to move from the U.S. to Upper Canada was the Militia Act, which allowed people who could prove they belonged to peace churches to be exempt from war if they paid a tax, according to Laureen Harder-Gissing, the archivist for the Mennonite Archives of Ontario.
...
Clyde Smith, one of the two Stouffville councillors to vote against the bicentennial plan, said it was troubling to have to side either with his MP or the descendants of those who founded the community. Ideally, there would have been more time to find a compromise, he said, but that wasn’t an option.
“We were forced to make a choice,” he said. “I couldn’t support an event that was going to be divisive and offend a large number of people in our community.”

I have studied the fascinating history of Pennsylvania peace-churches that resisted involvement in the American Revolution on precisely the issues of pacifism, religious liberty and constitutional government, and I knew there was and is a strong connection between Pennsylvania and Ontario peace-churches, but this controversy about the history of Upper Canada has caught me completely by surprise.  Who would have thought that this old conflict would resurrect from local roots?

Image:  the Temple in Sharon, Ont.  Not Stouffville but part of the unique ecclesiastical history of York Region.