JacketFlap connects you to the work of more than 200,000 authors, illustrators, publishers and other creators of books for Children and Young Adults. The site is updated daily with information about every book, author, illustrator, and publisher in the children's / young adult book industry. Members include published authors and illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers, publishers and fans. Join now (it's free).
Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Blog Posts by Tag
In the past 7 days
Blog Posts by Date
Click days in this calendar to see posts by day or month
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: war of 1812, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 6 of 6
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: war of 1812 in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
In April 1822, sailors from the British warships HMS Iphigenia and HMS Myrmidon, after a brief but fierce fight, captured two Spanish and three French slave ships off the coast of what is now Nigeria. Prize crews sailed the ships to Freetown in Sierra Leone, where the international mixed commission which was competent to hear cases regarding the slave trade decided to liberate the slaves found on the Spanish schooners, as well as those slaves found on a Portuguese ship which the British naval vessels had taken earlier.
Two hundred years ago American and British delegates signed a treaty in the Flemish town of Ghent to end a two-and-a-half-year conflict between the former colonies and mother country. Overshadowed by the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars in the two nations’ historical memories, the War of 1812 has been somewhat rehabilitated during its bicentennial. Yet arguing for the importance of a status quo antebellum treaty that concluded a war in which neither belligerent achieved its war aims, no territory was exchanged, and no victor formally declared can be a tough sell. Compared to the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, fought a just a few months later and forty odd miles down the road from Ghent, the end of the War of 1812 admittedly lacked cinema-worthy drama.
But the Treaty of Ghent mattered enormously (and not just to historians interested in the War of 1812). The war it ended saw relatively light casualties, measured in the thousands compared to the millions who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that raged across the rest of the globe. Nevertheless, for the indigenous and colonizing peoples that inhabited the borderlands surrounding the United States, the conflict had proved devastating. Because the American and British economies were intertwined, the war had also wreaked havoc on American agriculture and British manufacturing, and wrecked each other’s merchant navies. Moreover, public support for the war in the British Empire and the United States had been lukewarm with plenty of outspoken opposition who had worked tirelessly to prevent and then quickly end the war.
William Charles, “The Hartford Convention or Leap No Leap,” (Philadelphia, c. 1814). Library of Congress. The print depicts New England Federalist contemplating secession, which Charles equates to a return to the fold of the British Empire—represented as the open-armed King George III. In the center is Timothy Pickering, the former Secretary of State and outspoken opponent of the war in Congress, who is praying fervently (an attack on those New England clergy who publicly opposed the war) for secession and for the personal rewards of wealth and aristocratic title it would bring him.
Not surprisingly, peace resulted in widespread celebration across the Atlantic. The Leeds Mercury, many of whose readers were connected to the manufacturing industries that had relied on American markets, even compared the news with that of the Biblical account of the angelic chorus’s announcement of the birth of Jesus: “This Country, thanks to the good Providence of God, is now at Peace with Europe, with America, and with the World. . . . There is at length ‘Peace on Earth,’ and we trust the revival of ‘Good-will among men’ will quickly follow the close of national hostilities.” When the treaty reached Washington for ratification, President James Madison and Congress fell over themselves in a rush to sign it.
Far more interesting than what the relatively brief Treaty of Ghent includes is what was left out. When the British delegation arrived at Ghent in August 2014, they had every possible advantage. Britain had won the naval war, the United States was on brink of bankruptcy, and the end of Britain’s war with France meant that hardened veterans were being deployed for an imminent invasion of the United States. Later that month British troops would humiliatingly burn Washington. Even Ghent itself was a home field advantage, as it was occupied by British troops and within a couple of days of communication with ministers in London.
In consequence, Britain’s initial demands were severe. If the United States wanted peace, it had to cede 250,000 square miles of its northwestern lands (amounting to more than 15% of US territory, including all or parts of the modern states of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). These lands would be used to create an independent American Indian state—promises of which the British had used to recruit wary Indian allies. Britain also demanded a new border for Canada, which included the southern shores of the Great Lakes and a chunk of British-occupied Maine—changes that would have given Canada considerable natural defenses. The Americans, claimed the British, were “aggrandizers”, and these measures would ensure that such ambitions would be forever thwarted.
The significance of the terms is difficult to underestimate. Western expansion would have ground to a halt in the face of a powerful British-led alliance with the Spanish Empire and new American Indian state. The humiliation would likely have resulted in the collapse of the United States. The long-marginalized New England Federalists had been outspoken in their opposition to the war and President James Madison’s Southern-dominated Republican Party, with some of their leaders openly threatening secession. The Island of Nantucket had already signed a separate peace with Britain, and many inhabitants of British-occupied Maine had signed oaths of allegiance to Britain. The Governor of Massachusetts had even sent an agent to Canada to discuss terms of British support for his state’s secession, which included a request for British troops. The counterfactuals of a New England secession are too great to explore here, but the implications are epic—not least because, unlike in 1861, the US government in 1814 was in no position to stop one. In the end, a combination of the American delegates’ obstinacy and a rapidly fading British desire to keep the nation on an expensive war footing solely to fight the Americans led the British to abandon their harsh terms.
In consequence, the Treaty of Ghent cemented the United States rather than destroyed it. Historians have long debated who truly won the war. However, what mattered most was that neither side managed a decisive victory. The Americans lacked the organization and national unity to win; the British lacked the will to wage an expensive, offensive war in North America. American inadequacy ensured that all of Canada would prosper as part of the British Empire, even though Upper Canada (now Ontario) had arguably closer links to the United States and was populated largely by economic migrants from the United States. British desire to avoid further confrontation enabled the Americans to focus its attentions on eliminating the other, and considerably weaker, obstacles to continental supremacy: the American Indians and the remnants of the Spanish Empire, who proved to be the real losers of the War of 1812 and the Treaty of Ghent.
Featured image: The Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814, Amédée Forestier (1814). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Canada Day (Fête du Canada) is the holiday that suggests summer in all its glory for most Canadians — fireworks, parades, free outdoor concerts, camping, cottage getaways, beer, barbeques, and a few speeches by majors or prime ministers. For children, it is the end of a school year and the beginning of two months of summer vacation. For adults, it is a day off work, often a long week-end to catch up on gardening, getting together with family and friends, and relaxing. We wave flags, dress in red and white, and say happy birthday to Canada. After six months of complaining about the snow and the cold, we complain about the heat and mosquitoes.
Historically however, 1 July 1867 marked a more regional rather than national event. The occasion commemorates the joining of the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada (later to become Ontario and Quebec). Canada became a dominion of the British empire, and remained linked to Britain until 1982 when Canada became an independent nation, and when the holiday was renamed (from Dominion Day).
Unlike our US counterparts who find many occasions to show their patriotism, Canadians are more restrained in their expression of their love for their country. We become fiercely “Canadian” during the Olympics, when our writers (usually named Alice or Margaret) win Literary prizes, and when our hockey teams win the Stanley Cup. Our national holidays are still based mainly on the Christian calendar (Good Friday, Easter, Christmas), or else reveal the vestiges of our British heritage (Victoria Day). Canada Day is one of the few days we allow ourselves to indulge in national and civic pride.
However, Canada Day evokes different feelings for different people. Feminist activist Judy Rebick, who supported the “Idle No More” movement last year, reminds us that the British North America Act signed on 1 July was “based on the annihilation of most and marginalization of the rest of First Nations.” She says that she does not celebrate Canada Day and never has. Similarly, in a witty and ironic piece that satirizes the inadequacy of the reparations that have been made to First Nations and aboriginal people, playwright and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor writes a list of apologies (following the style of Stephen Harper who apologized to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis for the imposition and effects of the residential school system). Hayden Taylor’s tongue-in-cheek apologies include occupying land that “one day, your people would want” and for not staying in “India, where we were originally thought to have come from.” For Chinese Canadians, 1 July is remembered as “Humiliation Day” because in it was on this day in 1923 that the Chinese Immigration Act was enacted. This act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, banned Chinese immigration to Canada until it was repealed in 1947.
The point is that what we celebrate as a nation– the history, the symbols, the rituals, and the food—is selective. When we talk about the past, it is not necessarily about what happened, but the bits and pieces that we choose to remember, highlight, and to commemorate. It is significant that in 2012 Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose to highlight the War of 1812 as a “seminal event in the making of our great country” which he conveniently reconfigures as a “war that saw Aboriginal peoples, local and volunteer militias, and English and French-speaking regiments fight together to save Canada from American invasion.” Harper chooses not to talk about the dispossession of First Nations people from their lands, British administrators’ view of them as dependents and impediments to expansion at that time, but instead, embraces them in his inclusive, revisionary history.
Recent interest in memory, preservation, and heritage have made us become more aware of how history has been presented to us, to the ways our relationship with the past have been mediated by literature, films, images, and national commemorations. The “idea” of Canada can be seen as a consciously constructed culture of memory since its foundations. For example, Kimberly Mair looks at the way the ordering and spatial distribution of objects in a museum neutralizes the colonial and genocidal aspects of aboriginal history for visitors, while Shelley Hulan searches for references to First Nations in the stories of Alice Munro. Doris Wolf and Robyn Green look at works that challenge old ideas of Canada as a settler nation by focusing on the experiences of aboriginal peoples in residential schools.
Other fascinating aspects of memory are trauma and forgetting. Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that although history is important, the ability to forget is a necessary part of happiness: “He would cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory, without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is – worse, he will never do anything to make others happy.” Recently, Canadian diasporic authors such as Madeleine Thien, David Chariandy, Dionne Brand, and Esi Edugyan reveal what it means to be haunted by their past in a globalized age. By paying attention to how we remember, the roles played by literary and cultural representations in constructing our memories, we see how the present is not only influenced by the past, but how the present continues to rework and reshape our understanding of the past.
Eleanor Ty (鄭 綺 寧) is Professor of English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. She has published on Asian North American and on 18th Century literature. Author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U Toronto P 2004), she has co-edited with Russell J.A. Kilbourn, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2013), with Christl Verduyn a collection of essays, Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2008). With Cynthia Sugars, she has co-edited Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Crossing the Panther’s Path was written by Elizabeth Alder and published in 2002. It is the fictionalized story of a fifteen-year-old boy named Billy Calder and his involvement with the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh during the War of 1812.
The character of Billy Calder, according to the author, is based upon the life of Billy Caldwell, who eventually became named a Pottawattamie Chief. If you research Billy Caldwell on the internet he will be listed as having a Mohawk mother, a Pottawattamie mother and even a Shawnee mother but Alder calls his mother Windswept Water, of the Mohawk tribe. His father was an Irish man and a captain in the British army and in the novel his father is loving and kind. According to most information I found, his father abandoned him as a young child and Billy grew up with his mother’s tribe. His father took Billy in later in his childhood and had him educated. His father eventually disinherited Billy and it appears to have been due to conflicts over their both desiring to be Commandants of the Canadian fort in Amherstberg, across from Detroit, Michigan.
The novel is also inaccurate in its recounting of Billy’s wives and so it makes sense that the character’s name was changed, though most other historical figures retain their real life names.
Billy wants to join Tecumseh in his fight against the Americans and their theft of Native lands, against his mother’s wishes. Billy is aptozi meaning half-breed. In the end, he marries Jane, another person of mixed-blood. I enjoyed this aspect of the novel. My great-great-grandfather Millen Ralston was half Scotch Irish and half, well, we’re not totally sure. Possibly Cherokee, most likely Shawnee. Millen married Eliza Sinkey who was of mixed blood also, Shawnee, maybe? Some cousins say her ancestors - the Greens, the Hustons, the Sinkeys - were associated with Blue Jacket’s tribe. Some cousins say some cousins today still know some Shawnee language, passed down through the generations. And we have all spent countless hours trying to document or prove our ancestry. Some cousins have done DNA testing to prove their Native American ancestry. I think it is going to remain an educated guess.
I also think we need to talk about the American experience of being mixed blood more often. The story of my ancestors is the story of America also. Survival through assimilation. When Jane doesn’t want Billy to fight anymore, I think my great-great-grandmother may have spoken those words.
Tecumseh is a powerful, intelligent, heroic character in this novel. Tecumseh says it is time for war when a great sign in the sky is followed by the ground shaking. A greenish light then streaks across the sky as when he was born and named Panther Passing Across. Tecumseh shortly after stomps his foot and creates an earthquake felt even by President Madison. Tecumseh is articulate and charismatic.
The fight the Indians waged in an attempt to stop the Americans is presented realistically. Nothing is left out to present a different picture. The massacre at Fort Dearborn by the Native Americans is relayed in its horrifying detail as is the ruthlessness of William Henry Harrison in his pursuit of extermination of the American Indian. As is the deception the Americans pulled at Fort Dearborn, promising whiskey and ammunition they’d already dumped in the Detroit River, for safe passage out of defeated Fort Dearborn. And it is for these reasons, that I recommend this book for middle grade and above students of American history.
I do have some issues with Alder’s novel. Tenskwatawa is portrayed as an imbecilic alcoholic, at constant odds with his brother Tecumseh. Tecumseh does not even really believe that Tenskwatawa really had a vision from Grandmother Kokomothena, telling him that he is the spiritual leader she raises up in difficult times to lead others on the right path. Tenskwatawa is only interested in drinking and he cruelly harasses young children, scaring them with his knife into Billy’s arms. Tecumseh almost kills his brother when he returns and discovers that Tenskwatawa had battled with Harrison, resulting in the destruction of Tippecanoe. I cannot quote my sources but after much reading I had come to believe that Tenskwatawa had given up alcohol and this portrayal bothered me. It felt like a huge liberty to use Tenkswatawa’s real name and identity when Billy Calder’s had been changed. Tecumseh and his brother were very close, they built towns together.
Alder also claims in the novel that Tecumseh traveled to the Blackfoot and possibly the Sioux in his quest to build a coalition. That horse and rider swam across the Detroit River from Fort Malden to Amherstberg yet the current of the river was so swift it hardly ever froze over. That Tecumseh’s son, Cat Pouncing, and Billy are able to bury Tecumseh according to Shawnee custom, his face painted and his head to the West. That a genuine warmth was rarely accorded to outsiders by the Shawnee.
My reading on Shawnee history is not what it should be, but my impression is that the Shawnee often took in outsiders. That what made you Shawnee was the following of their customs and traditions and way of life rather than the color of your skin. That they adopted people willingly and warmly into their tribe.
I cannot imagine swimming across the Detroit River, it is ½ mile wide. The current runs fast, even on a horse. I could not find this information, as to whether or not they travelled across this way. Maybe the river has changed over time.
I have read that Tecumseh’s body was not ever identified, that no one knows where he was buried. That he was probably so badly mutilated no one could identify him. I rather think this is probably the case as he caused the Americans untold grief.
I have located a source that says Tecumseh met with the Sioux, but have not found one to say he traveled to Montana. If you can clear this up for me with a source, I would appreciate it.
Despite some of the dialogue being forced and irritating at times, the story is well-paced and holds the reader’s interest. I will have my daughter read Crossing the Panther’s Path when we study the War of 1812. We will discuss whether or not it is fair to portray Tenskwatawa as a drunk, when he had reformed himself. And by the way, my Ralston ancestors fought in the War of 1812 and for the Americans.
1 Comments on Crossing the Panther’s Path by Elizabeth Alder, last added: 1/4/2009
Please relay to Elizabeth. If she desires to have
the Cousin’s Y-dna (Male) checked for
relationship to Chief Bluejacket, Please e-mail
me.
Thank you
Gene Park
SHawnee
Colors of War by Pat Beckman is an MG historical fiction novel about the War of 1812 with a focus on the Shawnees involvement and the death of Tecumseh. It centers on a pre-teen boy Michael, an orphan being raised by an older brother and an abusive nasty uncle, who runs away from home and is adopted by Tecumseh’s older sister Star Watcher and Tecumseh. The story takes place around Detroit, Michigan, Lake Erie, and the Shawnee encampment on Bois Blanc Island in the Detroit River.
Tecumseh was an intelligent and visionary war chief of the Shawnee Indians who gave his life in an attempt to pull the Indian nations together and stop the European Americans from continuously stealing their lands.
If you haven’t figured this out yet, Tecumseh is one of my heroes. My Shawnee ancestors did not go to the reservations and lived in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio, our family records indicate they also spent time in West Virginia. They inter-married with Scots-Irish and assimilated into white society.
My great-grandfather was the son of two mixed-race people, both of whom had an Indian mother and a white father. But my grandfather, who could have told me all about this, died in 1939. He married my 100% Irish grandmother and she did her best to remember what she could. Which was mostly about being Irish and how much I reminded her of her own mother– the one who left Ireland on her own at the age of 18 with two brass candlesticks and a lot of courage.
So, we have been on a quest to read children’s books about the Shawnees, told from their perspective. Colors of War does not meet that criteria. There are spots that made me wince. Michael describes the War Dance as an “awful noise”, “whooping and bellowing”, “high-pitched shrieks on the Stomp Ground”. Tecumseh picks Michael of all the young men to go with him and talk to the British about their plans of war against the Americans. Michael thinks of himself as more capable and smarter than the other Indians. He has magic, since he can draw pictures with charcoal on bark. I am not certain that this newness of seeing someone draw would be accurate, that no Shawnee ever before 1812 figured out how to draw pictures. Ernest Spybuck was a renowned Shawnee artist, painting scenes of Indian life not many decades later.
Michael even takes charge of the Shawnee scouts at old Fort Miamis during the battle, telling them what to do. That they need to tell Tecumseh about the Americans movements as if the grown scouts couldn’t have thought of this themselves.
Michael’s older brother Davey fights with the Americans and the two brothers are re-united in the end. Tecumseh leaves Michael an “I love you like a son” letter at the abandonned Bois Blanc camp and we are left to think of Tecumseh’s spirit as a sparkling glittering star that shoots across the heavens. Tecumseh means “panther passing across” as Tecumseh’s father saw a comet when his son was born.
There is a glossary of Shawnee words and their meanings in English as they are used throughout the book and an interesting description of Michael having his ears cut to create loops of skin to hang pendants from, in the tradition of the Shawnee. And an interesting use of the terminology for all of the moon cycles: Moon of the White Snows, Moon of the Sugar Weather, Moon of the Flowers, Moon of the Berry, Moon of Green Corn, Moon of Fallen Leaves.
0 Comments on Colors of War by Pat Beckman as of 11/26/2008 2:01:00 PM
It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), That each by observation Might satisfy his mind.
The First approach'd the Elephant, And happening to fall Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to bawl: "God bless me! but the Elephant Is very like a wall!"
The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, -"Ho! what have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!"
The Third approached the animal, And happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake: "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a snake!"
The Fourth reached out his eager hand, And felt about the knee. "What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain," quoth he, "'Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a tree!"
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said: "E'en the blindest man Can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can, This marvel of an Elephant Is very like a fan!"
The Sixth no sooner had begun About the beast to grope, Then, seizing on the swinging tail That fell within his scope, "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a rope!"
And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong!
MORAL.
So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!
Please relay to Elizabeth. If she desires to have
the Cousin’s Y-dna (Male) checked for
relationship to Chief Bluejacket, Please e-mail
me.
Thank you
Gene Park
SHawnee