How Canada’s Fathers of Confederation Were Connected to the War of 1812

In my last two years of high school, I worked Saturdays and summers in West Vancouver’s best second-hand bookshop, the Bookstall in Ambleside, where my boss was a World War II veteran named David Angus Moon. He’d served in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, the RCN(R), and the Royal Navy, and in June 1944, in command or second-in-command of a landing craft in the Battle of Normandy.

Today, the last veterans of that war who are still around are getting pretty venerable, like 101-year-old Bryce Chase, who lives in Calgary’s Colonel Belcher retirement home, or Victor Osborne of Nanaimo, who is 106.

Despite the passage of time, we honour them still. People want to remember the great deeds of our forebears and those who died. On Remembrance Day, 35,000 turned out in Ottawa, according to the Royal Canadian Legion, and there were big crowds everywhere—testament that Canadians want to honour their veterans, including the 40,000 who completed tours in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014.

When Canada, already 200 years old, was re-founded as a federal Dominion in 1867, some of the Fathers of Confederation were veterans of the War of 1812 or had a close connection to veterans. The war had ended 50 years before the Charlottetown Conference and was part of fairly recent memory and family lore. A fair number of the Fathers were only one generation removed from the war.

Sir John A. Macdonald’s uncle, Lt.-Col. Donald MacPherson, saw action in U.S. Commodore Isaac Chauncey’s attack on Kingston Harbour during the War of 1812. One of MacPherson’s six daughters (thus Macdonald’s cousins) could remember shots penetrating “the wooden walls of the pretty white cottage that then did duty as the commandant’s residence.” (To imagine Upper Canada in those days, think rustic Jane Austen but with bullets).

Young Johnny Macdonald, devouring “his uncle’s library and the ‘slices of pudding’ set aside by Macpherson’s youngest daughter,” grew up in the shadow of the War of 1812. He was 14 when his uncle died in 1829, buried in Kingston with full military honours, “the minute guns from the city battery being answered by those from the fort,” fired by the 71st Highlanders. Later, everywhere Macdonald campaigned in 1860, biographer Donald Creighton relates, he met “lawyers, merchants, farmers, young men … and old men who had fought in a dozen political battles and bore the medals of the War of 1812 upon their chests.”

Sir George-Étienne Cartier, who brought Quebec and British Columbia into Confederation, was proud of his Militia connections. Both his father and grandfather served. Cartier and Macdonald’s right-hand man, Hector-Louis Langevin, later a cabinet minister, was married to Sophie-Scholastique LaForce, whose father, Major Pierre LaForce, was one of Salaberry’s Voltigeurs officers in the 1813 battle of Chateauguay, in which Canadian-born militia and native allies forced back the American invasion aimed at capturing Montreal.

One of Macdonald’s mentors in Upper Canada, Sir Allan Napier MacNab, born in Niagara in 1798, had volunteered at the age of 14 and served in the Militia at Sackets Harbor, Plattsburgh, Black Rock, and Fort Niagara. Sir Charles Tupper, who brought Nova Scotia into Confederation, got his start in politics in the 1850s under the influence of an 1812 veteran, James W. Johnson, the Conservative leader and pre-Confederation premier whose portrait hangs in the legislative chamber in Province House today.

Sir Oliver Mowat, a Confederation delegate in 1864, went on to become Ontario’s third premier and eighth lieutenant governor. His Scots father, John Mowat, was a Peninsular War veteran among the 6,000 troops sent by the Duke of Wellington to Canada to fight in the War of 1812, and served at Plattsburgh in 1814.