A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown.

Cornwallis was now in hopeless case, unless Clinton could relieve him. Expectation of relief was given, the 5th of October being named as the day on which the relieving force would probably leave New York. On the night of the 5th the Americans began their trenches, on the 9th the guns opened fire: after a week’s fighting, on the 17th, Cornwallis treated for surrender; and on the 19th, the day on which Clinton actually sailed from New York to bring the promised aid, the British army laid down their arms, sickness having reduced the number of fighting men from 7,000 to barely 4,000.

Consequences of the surrender.

Four years had passed almost to the day since the similar disaster at Saratoga. The second surrender practically finished the war, though there was still some small fighting in the south, the English being driven back to Charleston and Savannah. Savannah was eventually evacuated in July, 1782, and Charleston in the following December, by which date terms of peace between Great Britain and the United States had already been signed. Meanwhile in England Carleton had been Carleton succeeds Clinton. nominated to take the place of Clinton as Commander-in-Chief in America, Germain resigned, and in March, 1782, Lord North’s ministry came to an end. The Whigs came in pledged to make peace, Rockingham being Prime Minister and Shelburne and Fox Secretaries of State. Within four months Lord Rockingham died, and Shelburne Negotiations for peace. became Prime Minister, Fox leaving the Government, and the younger Pitt joining it as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Already negotiations for peace were proceeding at Paris, where Richard Oswald, a nominee of Shelburne’s, had been treating with Franklin, complaisantly entertaining every American demand. Rodney’s great victory over de Grasse in the battle of the Saints, on the 12th of April, 1782, enabled England to speak with a firmer voice. The failure in September of the combined efforts of France and Spain to take Gibraltar again added strength: and Shelburne’s ministry was enabled to conclude a peace, which, if it contrasted sadly with the triumphant Treaty of 1763, was at least far from being the capitulation of a ruined Power. On the 30th of November, 1782, articles were signed between Peace concluded and the Independence of the United States recognized. Oswald, on behalf of Great Britain, and the Commissioners of the United States, ‘to be inserted in and to constitute the treaty of Peace’ which was to be concluded when Great Britain and France had come to terms. On the 20th of January, 1783, Preliminary Articles of Peace were signed between Great Britain and France on the one hand and between Great Britain and Spain on the other; and on the following 3rd of September the Peace of Versailles was finally concluded, treaties being made by Great Britain with France, Spain, and the United States, a treaty with the Netherlands having been signed on the previous day. Under the first article of the treaty with the United States the King of England acknowledged the thirteen colonies then forming the United States to be ‘free sovereign and Independent States’.

Comparison of the American War of Independence with the late war in South Africa.

At the time of the late war in South Africa an analogy was sometimes drawn between that war and the War of American Independence. In some respects there was similarity. In either case a group of British colonies was primarily concerned, and in either case the British Government was faced with the difficulty of transporting large bodies of troops across the sea to a distant scene of war, America in the eighteenth century before the days of steam being for all practical purposes more remote than South Africa in our own time. There were two distinct spheres of operations in America in the earlier years of the war, Canada and the Atlantic states, just as in South Africa the war was divided between Natal and the Cape Colony; and the Boer invasion of Natal and investment of Ladysmith to some extent recalls the overrunning of Canada by Montgomery’s troops and the hemming up of Carleton inside Quebec. In both cases there was the same kind of half knowledge of the country and its conditions in the public mind in Great Britain, and, curiously enough, in either case the estimate seems to have been most at fault where fighting had been most recent; in Natal, where less than twenty years had elapsed since the previous Boer war, and on the line of Lake Champlain and the Hudson, presumed to be well known to many who had served at a somewhat shorter interval of time under Abercromby and Amherst, and who encouraged Germain to give his confident instructions to Burgoyne for a march to Albany. Distance, transport, supplies, communications, rather than hard fighting, were the main elements of either war; and the description of the American war given in the Annual Register for 1777, which has been already quoted,[161] that it was ‘a war of posts, surprises, and skirmishes instead of a war of battles’, would apply equally to the South African war. But here the likeness ceases, and no real parallel can be drawn between the two contests. The American war was a civil war, Englishmen were fighting Englishmen. The war in South Africa was a war between two rival races. In the earlier war the great forces which have been embodied in British colonization, mental and physical vigour, forwardness and tenacity, the forces of youth, which have the keeping of the future, were in the main ranged against the mother country: in the later war they contributed, as never before, to the sum of national patriotism. In the earlier war foreign nations intervened, with fatal effect, and the sea power of England was crippled. In the later, the struggle was kept within its original limits and British ships went unmolested to and from South Africa. Not least of all, while on the former occasion ministers at home tried to do the work of the generals on the spot, Carleton’s bitter comments on the disastrous result, which have been quoted above[162], could in no sense be applied to the later crisis. As bearing on this last point, Effect on war of submarine cables. it is interesting to speculate what would have happened had submarine cables existed in the days of King George the Third. The telegraph invites and facilitates interference from home. It tends to minimize the responsibility, and to check the initiative, of the men on the spot: and if the cables which now connect England and America, had been in existence in the years 1776 and 1777, it might be supposed that the commanders in America would have been even more hampered than they were by the meddling of the King, and his ministers. But the evil was that, in the absence of the telegraph, interference could not be corrected, and co-operation could not be ensured. Germain laid down a rigid plan: a second-rate man received precise instructions which he felt bound to follow against his own judgement; and for want of sure and speedy communication the cause was lost. It is impossible to suppose that even the King and Germain would have refused to modify their plans, had they known what was passing from day to day or from week to week: in other words, the invention which more than any other has opened a door to undue interference, would probably in the case in point have done most to remedy the ignorant meddling which was the prime cause of the disaster at Saratoga.

The War of American Independence was ‘by far the most dangerous in which the British nation was ever involved’.[163] It was seen at the time that its issues would colour all future history and modify for ever political and commercial systems, but no prophet seemed to contemplate a colonial future for Great Britain, and Benjamin Franklin said ‘he would furnish Mr. Gibbon with materials for writing the history of the Decline of the British Empire’.[164] Yet the present broad-based Imperial system of Great Britain was for two reasons the direct outcome of that war. While the United States were still colonial possessions of Great Britain, they Effects of the American War of Independence on the British Empire as a whole. overshadowed all others; and, had they remained British possessions, their preponderance would in all probability have steadily increased. It is quite possible that the centre of the Empire might have been shifted to the other side of the Atlantic; it is almost certain that the colonial expansion of Great Britain would have been mainly confined to North America. Nothing has been more marked and nothing sounder in our recent colonial history than the comparative uniformity of development in the British Empire. In those parts of the world which have been settled and not merely conquered by Europeans, and which are still British possessions, in British North America, Australasia, and South Africa, there has been on the whole parity of progress. No one of the three groups of colonies has in wealth and population wholly out-distanced the others. This fact has unquestionably made for strength and permanence in the British Empire, and it is equally beyond question that the spread of colonization within the Empire would have been wanting, had Great Britain retained her old North American colonies. Unequalled in history was the loss of such colonies, and yet by that loss, it may fairly be said, Great Britain has achieved a more stable and a more world-wide colonial dominion.

But this result would not have been attained had not the lesson taught by the American war sunk deep into the minds of Englishmen. It is true that for a while the moral drawn from this calamitous war was that self-governing institutions should not be given to colonies lest they should rebel, as did the Americans, and win their independence: but, as the smart of defeat passed away and men saw events and their causes in true perspective, as Englishmen again multiplied out of England but in lands which belonged to England, and as the old questions again pressed for solution, the answer given in a wiser and a broader age was dictated by remembrance of the American war, and Lord Durham’s report embodied the principles, on which has been based the present colonial system of Great Britain. It was seen—but it might not have been seen had the United States not won their independence—that English colonists, like the Greek colonists of old, go out on terms of being equal not subordinate to those who are left behind, that when they have effectively planted another and a distant land, they must within the widest limits be left to rule themselves; that, whether they are right or whether they are wrong, more perhaps when they are wrong than when they are right, they cannot be made amenable by force; that mutual good feeling, community of interest, and abstention from pressing rightful claims to their logical conclusion, can alone hold together a true colonial empire.

Its effects on Canada.

Though the United States, in the war and in the treaty which followed it, attained in the fullest possible measure the objects for which they had contended, it is a question whether, of all the countries concerned in the war, Canada did not really gain most, notwithstanding the hardship which she suffered in respect of the boundary line between the Dominion and the United States. For Canada to have a future as a nation, it was necessary, in the first place, that she should be cut adrift from the French colonial system as it existed in the eighteenth century. This was secured as the result of the Seven Years’ War. In the second place, it was necessary that she should not be absorbed by and among the British colonies in North America. This end was attained, and could only be attained by what actually happened, viz., by the British colonies in North America ceasing to belong to Great Britain, while Canada was kept within the circle of the British Empire. Had the United States remained British possessions, Canada must eventually have come into line with them, and been more or less lost among the stronger and more populous provinces. The same result would have followed, had the British Government entertained, as their emissary Oswald did, Franklin’s proposal that Canada should be ceded to the United States. It would have followed too, in all probability, if Canada had been left at the time independent both of Great Britain and of the United States, for she would have been too weak to stand alone. The result of the war was to give prominence and individuality to Canada as a component part of the British Empire; to bring in a strong body of British colonists not displacing but supplementing the French Canadians and antagonistic to the United States from which they were refugees; to revive the instinct of self-preservation which in old days had kept Canada alive, and which is the mainspring of national sentiment, by again directly confronting her with a foreign Power; and at the same time to give her the advantage of protection by and political connexion with what was still to be the greatest sea-going and colonizing nation of the world. The result of the War of American Independence was to make the United States a great nation; but it was a result which, whether with England or without, they must in any case have achieved. The war had also the effect, and no other cause could have had a like effect, of making possible a national existence for Canada, which possibility was to be converted into a living and a potent fact by the second American war, the war of 1812.