This Day in Military History (British Attack Fort Niagara)

December 18, 1813—Retaliating for American forces’ burning of Newark, Canada, approximately 500 British regulars, accompanied by 500 militia and Indians, crossed the Niagara River after midnight. The operation, planned by the new commander in Upper Canada, Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond, was carried out with maximum discipline and secrecy, resulting in the seizure of Fort Niagara by sunrise—and leaving America’s northern frontier suddenly, shockingly vulnerable.

The War of 1812 is perhaps rivaled only by the Korean War as “America’s Forgotten War.” The average American (even, I’d bet, the average American historian), if he or she is lucky, won’t have too hard a time recalling America’s naval victories in the conflict.

But, after getting past Francis Scott Key witnessing the “banner yet wave” at Fort McHenry and Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, an American is likely to experience a fog descending on the brain when it comes to land operations. Believe it or not, there’s a reason for this: land battles were, by and large—and especially along the northern border—ignominious affairs for the United States.

Egged on by Henry Clay and other “War Hawks” in Congress, President James Madison entered a war with crucial American deficits in leadership.

Secretary of War John Armstrong was an incompetent rightly distrusted by the President, and owed his post to marital connections (he was the brother-in-law of Robert Livingston).

The leaders of unsuccessful assaults on Kingston and Montreal, Henry Dearborn and James Wilkinson, were also spectacularly unsuited to their positions: Dearborn by virtue of incapacity (the 250-pounder needed to be carried around in a two-wheeled device subsequently named after him), Wilkinson by virtue of treason (though some suspected as such, nobody knew for certain, until the documentary evidence turned up in archives years after his death, that Wilkinson had taken an oath of loyalty to the Spanish crown).

In this light, the actions of Brigadier-General George McClure were hardly unusual. Holding Fort George, the only American foothold on the peninsula formed by Lakes Ontario and Erie and the Chippewa River, he took fright first at an exaggerated estimate of enemy forces by a Canadian deserter, then became even further alarmed as his own army became rapidly depleted when many militia chose to go home to their farms rather than re-enlist when their terms of service were up.

Rather than let Fort George fall into British hands, McClure decided to deny them shelter in nearby Newark by putting the town to the torch.

Fourteen years ago, on vacation in Canada, I traveled from Toronto for a day of fine theater performances at the Shaw Festival. Monuments and plaques in the area in honor of Laura Secord and Sir Isaac Brock gave me my first real hint of how American’s neighbors to the north viewed the War of 1812—as a threat to their sovereignty. But only in writing this piece did I learn that the town I was visiting, now known as Niagara-on-the-Lake, was once called Newark, and that during the War of 1812 it fell victim to an American commander’s idiocy and cruelty.

McClure’s order, carried out by a group known as the Canadian Volunteers under the command of Joseph Willocks (who had once led the town in the Canadian legislature), was a huge mistake: inhumane (it left 400 residents homeless), militarily useless (though Newark itself was torched, Fort George was left with around 1,500 tents), and provocative (in Flames Across the Border: 1813-1814, historian Pierre Berton argues that it was this act, even more than the Americans’ accidental burning of the legislature at York, or present-day Toronto, that led to the retaliatory burning of Washington, D.C.).

General Drummond was generally regarded as a distinct improvement over his predecessor, Francis de Rottenburg. A native Canadian, Drummond had been heading a military district in northern Ireland when the war broke out. Taking command of the British forces in Fort George on December 16, he immediately planned to strike back.

Reading the account of the subsequent attack on Fort Niagara sounds like the Battle of Trenton in the American Revolution, but in reverse—another December crossing and assault on an unwary enemy, carried out in the wee small hours of the morning. Drummond made sure that the oars were muffled. Sentries were overpowered and killed without warnings being sounded.

Though McClure, clued in by an informer that a British assault was in the offing, had warned the fort’s commander, Nathaniel Leonard, to be prepared, the latter was miles away with family in Lewiston, likely suffering the aftereffects of too many spirits the night before. The garrison’s soldiers, after two days of nothing happening, had decided to do what seemed sensible but turned out to be anything but—get indoors to get out of the freezing cold.

Drummond’s order to use bayonets rather than guns meant that the Americans were utterly surprised. At the end of the brief battle, 65 Americans lay dead versus only six British.

More important, the American northern frontier now lay exposed. Within short order, the British had taken and destroyed Lewiston, then done the same to Buffalo and Black Rock.

The fate of the two opposing commanders in this campaign could not have been more different. Even before he had gone ahead with the burning of Newark, McClure had been stoutly opposed by at least some Americans who knew what he planned to do. But the ferocious British-Canadian counter-assault incited Americans to an outright fury against him. While marching down the main street of Buffalo, he was taunted and fired upon. With the militia pointedly refusing even to serve under him anymore, he yielded his post to a major general and slunk away.

Drummond had his share of failures as well as successes throughout the next year’s worth of fighting. But, like Andrew Jackson would do at New Orleans, he would impose martial law on his district (farmers wouldn’t sell food to the army) and successfully rally his countrymen against invaders. When he died in London in 1854, he was the senior general in the British army.

NOTE: A friend of mine knows of a portrait of Drummond by the painter Robert McInnes. He is interested in finding out more about the provenance of this painting, which is now in northern New Jersey. If anyone reading this post has any details on this, please contact me through this blog. Thank you.

This Day in Diplomatic History (Alaska Border Dispute Settled, to TR’s Satisfaction)

October 20, 1903—Undoubtedly crying “Bully!” when he received the news, President Theodore Roosevelt saw his “big stick” diplomacy rewarded when the Alaska Boundary Tribunal ruled in favor of the U.S. on virtually all counts.

For years, the Alaska border between the U.S. and Canada was unsettled, but nobody paid it too much mind. The territory, after all, was known as “Seward’s Icebox” when the American Secretary of State negotiated its purchase from Russia to generally widespread derision.

Then practically overnight, the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896 made this deal the most lopsided transaction until the California Angels swiped fireballer (and future Hall of Famer) Nolan Ryan from the Mets in exchange for on-the-way-out shortstop Jim Fregosi. Nobody cared that much about fisheries or lumber, but serious money—well, this was something different.

In short order, a joint high commission was formed to deal with the issue, but the matter dragged on without resolution. Pushing for one was not exactly high on the agenda of President William McKinley.

When it came to being filled with the milk of human kindness, the Republican President would probably rank among the top five who ever filled this position. Along with his warm disposition, McKinley thought he could be excused for having a lot of other things on his mind:

* His wife Ida, to whom he was utterly devoted, was an invalid who suffered from epilepsy and needed to be kept near his side at state dinners, where he managed to discreetly cover her face whenever he sensed an impending seizure.
* He had the Spanish-American War to fight.
* The treaty concluding that war put in America’s hands a number of former colonies whose fate needed to be decided.
* McKinley’s eventual decision on this—to embark on a policy of imperialism—excited criticism from, among others, Mark Twain, William James, Andrew Carnegie, and the once-and-future Democratic nominee for President, William Jennings Bryan.
* That decision also led to another conflict, an insurgent war in the Philippines led by Emilio Aguinaldo, featuring atrocities by the military that McKinley had to beg the American press not to expose.

In other words, McKinley’s attitude was: One war at a time, fellas. Let’s keep our friends on our side—you never know when we’ll need them. All things considered, not a bad governing philosophy.

After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, everything changed under his successor, T.R.—and in few areas more than in the President’s relationship with the Secretary of State, John Hay.

One of two secretaries for Abraham Lincoln, Hay had been a Washington player for four decades. I’m afraid that John Huston’s performance as him in The Wind and the Lion gives, in some respects, a false impression of the man. I’m not talking here solely about their difference in height (like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, the great director was considerably taller than his subject). More crucial was the distinction between their voices. Huston’s, of course, was whiskey-soaked and nicotine-tarred, while Hay’s vocal instrument, according to Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris in Theodore Rex, was “like a well-resined viola.”

The change in bosses meant that Hay was jumping to the tune of a man two decades his junior in body—and, if we are to believe the word of British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, six decades younger in temperament. “You must always remember,” the future British Ambassador to the United States once said, “that the President is about six.” (And he would know—he’d served as best man at the London wedding of Roosevelt to wife Edith.) Indeed, had he been born in a later time, T.R.’s youthful interest might have turned not to taxidermy but acting, so he might have appeared in those commercials that those of us of a certain age remember: “I want my Maypo!”

This totally hyperactive, hyperbolic man was setting a sharply different tone in U.S. diplomacy. He had tired of what he regarded as the Canadian-British delaying game, just as, at the same time, he was growing impatient with Colombia’s dickering over building a canal. T.R. didn’t mind stirring things up on two fronts.

Let’s stop here for a second for a different perspective on T.R. As a young New York state assemblyman and again as Police Commissioner of New York, Roosevelt had tangled with Irish-American politicians and cops over corruption. As he contemplated the Alaska boundary dispute, however, he might have been forgiven for thinking that the Irish might not have been entirely mistaken for several centuries in describing their colonial tormenters as “perfidious Albion.”

Come to think of it, the Irish members of New York’s finest might be onto something with their use of the good cop, bad cop routine. With his cultivated tastes, fashionable prejudices (anti-Semitism, along with anti-labor sentiments he vent in an anonymous novel, The Bread-Winners), and “sherry-now-or-after-the-Wordsworth-reading?” manner, Hay was practically central casting as the good cop. Roosevelt—arms flailing, voice rising, with all those teeth—was born to play the bad cop.

So T.R. made his move. He not only sent troops to the Alaskan border but slipped to Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. a note that could be “secretly” shared with members of His Majesty’s government. It bristled at the objections of Canadians that the three men he had appointed to the tribunal—Secretary of War Elihu Root, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and former senator George Turner—might not be impartial.

Moreover, Roosevelt threatened that if there continued to be a disagreement, the next time he sent a message to Congress, “I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter; a position … which will render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the attitude of England and Canada.”

It worked. The two Canadian representatives on the tribunal, Sir A.L. Jette and A.B. Aylesworth, continued to object, but the British representative, Richard Webster, 1st Viscount Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, sided with the Americans. The commission acceded to the U.S. claim for a boundary behind the heads of inlets, while equally distributing four islands at the mouth of the Portland Canal. The Canadian commissioners, sore at the outcome, refused to sign and went home, and the blow-up led the Canadian government to create its own Department of External Affairs to look after its own interests better.

But the settlement turned out to be a marker in the transition from tension between Britain and America (including a near set-to in the Civil War over use of British ports in building Confederate ships) to the celebrated “special relationship” of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (whose mom, be it noted, was the New York beauty Jennie Jerome).

This Day in Canadian History (Pierre Trudeau Becomes Prime Minister)

April 20, 1968—"Canada's JFK," Pierre Elliott Trudeau, became Prime Minister, beginning 16 years (except for a nine-month interval) in which he would leave an imprint far more on his country's institutions than his American predecessor had the opportunity to do in his "Thousand Days." In the process, he took a country that had been somewhat more conservative than the U.S. and transformed it into one a good deal more liberal.

If you're an American of a certain age, you're likely to remember Trudeau as a kind of character from a Moliere comedy, a middle-aged husband utterly unable to control a pretty wife only half his age. This, it turns out, is deceptive, for reasons going beyond the fact that a tragedy was being played out, unbeknownst to either the country or the principals themselves, offstage. (Margaret Trudeau’s misdiagnosed bipolar disorder was revealed a few years ago.)

That Trudeau should be known for far more than his difficult private life was borne home to me when I was visiting his country more in late September 2000, when news of his death from prostate cancer sparked an outpouring of retrospectives. I realized then what a major impact he had on his country.

Differing Views of Trudeau’s Legacy
If you're an American liberal from the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party, Trudeau-influenced Canada is likely to seem everything America should be but isn't, a paradise of access to inexpensive medical care and liberated attitudes toward sexuality. If you're a conservative, the nation will appear more like either a piece of Scandinavian governmental flotsam found on North American shores or, more likely, Massachusetts moved north, enlarged and taken to its natural extreme.

Whatever your ideological inclinations, 40 years later, it is impossible to imagine either Canada’s current institutions or atmosphere without gauging his record as prime minister or, earlier, minister of justice under predecessor Lester Pearson. Canadians were correct in naming Trudeau, in a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. poll, one of the “10 greatest Canadians.” (One of the few things liberals and conservatives can probably agree on is that a subject of one of my earlier posts, Wayne Gretzsky, deserves his inclusion on the same list.)

As the comparison to JFK indicates, the 1960s were a big decade for political charisma. Everybody wanted it.

In the U.S., the Democrats spent the rest of the decade pining for the second coming of Kennedy, including enduring tragedies involving both his surviving brothers. Conservative Republicans looked to former movie B-lister Ronald Reagan as a new hope emerging from the West Coast who could bring them back from the Goldwater disaster. Even at the municipal level, the search for this quicksilver quality continued. Bostonians thought they’d found it in Kevin White, New Yorkers in John V. Lindsay. It was columnist Murray Kempton’s apt description of Lindsay that captured the special appeal of these men (and, for that matter, Barack Obama today): “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”

Trudeaumania
“Trudeaumania” was yet another manifestation of this phenomenon, even before he assumed power. Teenage girls squealed at the sight of him. Autograph hounds even chased him across Parliament Hill grounds! The general election called after he won control of the Liberal Party leadership not only secured a solid majority but cemented his image as the ascot- and cape-wearing, celebrity-dating style maven, as he conducted a legendary “kissing campaign.” (This latter tactic is the one element of the Trudeau style that American politicians of all stripes wouldn’t mind importing—which might be one reason why politics has in recent years been defined as “show business for ugly people.”)

The new Prime Minister was brilliant, and like other such people his tendency to demonstrate it all the time struck many as arrogant. In a photo from February 1968, showing him listening at a conference to an aggrieved speaker advocating independence for Quebec, Trudeau didn’t even attempt to hide his amused contempt.

At other times, this arrogance could be self-destructive and stupid. “Why should I sell your wheat?” he asked farmers from the West—a remark they would recall in delivering one drabbing after another to the Liberals in that region. His inability to hide his annoyance with American leaders needlessly strained relations. And he executed a pirouette once behind Queen Elizabeth II—something that even I, a committed anti-monarchist, regard as singularly immature, insulting and superfluous, since the British royals are essentially toothless.

Trudeau’s Two Greatest Legacies
Two achievements toward the beginning and end of his time in office--keeping his country united and providing it with a written constitution –might constitute Trudeau’s greatest legacies.
A bilingual President, he served as a symbol for French speakers who wondered if Quebec really had a place in an Anglo-dominated country. His ethnicity might have also given him credibility in that province as he reacted to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte (a terrorist organization dedicated to Quebec independence) by invoking the War Measures Act in October 1970.

The act, which provided the government with emergency powers in the event of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended,” strikes this American observer as reminiscent in intent to America’s Patriot Act. Its invocation was especially unusual in view of the fact that Trudeau’s ardent civil libertarianism as minister of justice.

While most of the public heartily endorsed Trudeau’s use of the measure at this time, it is possible in retrospect to ask if he had resorted to it too readily. Under its provisions, more than 450 people were arrested without charge, with most subsequently released with no charges pressed. Civil libertarians asked at the time if Trudeau had overreacted. I believe they have a legitimate point.

Those looking to Canada as a bastion of rights need to rethink how justified that really is in the light of Trudeau’s actions. Only two government officials were threatened (Cross was eventually released, Laporte murdered) in the October crisis. In contrast, the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. resulted in the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. The threat was far more apparent and wide-ranging.

Unlike George W. Bush, Trudeau escaped large-scale condemnation over time for his actions for several reasons, I think: his Justice Ministry record, his eloquence in pushing for “the Just Society,” and the ratcheting up of tensions by the Quebec separatist movement, which created a large pool of support for any actions he took to quell disturbances. But like Bush, his actions—and occasional overstepping—during a crisis left a precedent that future leaders could invoke under far less justifiable circumstances.

In 1980, Trudeau decisively faced down the threat of Quebec separatism again, winning a referendum on the issue. As part of his campaign, he vowed to provide province and country with a new constitutional order, one that would not depend on amending it in Britain. Two years later, Queen Elizabeth II assented to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, entrenching a Bill of Rights into the Constitution of Canada, severing Canadian dependence on the British Parliament, and codifying federal-provincial relations.

Over the course of more than a decade, the record of any leader is bound to be mixed. Such was the case with Trudeau. In his stress on broad geopolitics and attention to lifestyle issues (the state, he famously said, “has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”) and sometimes merely fitful attention to bread-and-butter economic issues, he sounded at times like an American blue-state politico. And, as I’ve just noted, his handling of the October Crisis is not beyond criticism.

But he kept his nation whole and gave it a written body of laws and greater autonomy than it had known before. When he is written up in the history books—as surely he will—those are the achievements that will be recalled and honored.

This Day in Medical History

Jan. 11, 1922 – A Toronto resident, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, becomes the first patient to receive injections of insulin, a new medication for treating the dreaded “sugar disease.” Diabetic for the last two and a half years, Thompson had already beaten the automatic death sentence given to most Type 1 diabetes patients of the time. But his situation had become dire, as he had fallen to 65 pounds and was about to slip into a coma.

Fortunately, Thompson was about to benefit from months of work on one of the great medical discoveries of the 20th century. It all began with an overly anxious medical instructor, Dr. Frederick Banting, who, thinking his lecture for his first-year students the next day wasn’t good enough, took his medical journal to bed. Waking in the middle of the night, he wrote down his inspiration – the idea that would lead to insulin.

After laboring through sweltering summer of 1921 in a University of Toronto laboratory, Banting and his assistant, Charles Best, successfully tested a pancreatic extract on a diabetic dog. Banting’s paper on his discovery, delivered six months later at Yale University, received a tepid reception. But after some initial skepticism, he had won the approval of Dr. John J.R. MacLeod of the university’s physiology department, who put at Banting’s disposal as many resources – notably lab space and a team of assistants – to continue his explorations.

Thompson’s first injections of pancreatic extract, prepared by Banting and Best, were followed two weeks later by a purified extract from chemist James Bertram Collip. By the end of February, with Thompson’s blood sugar returning to normal and his strength returning, the procedure is considered a success.

In May 1922, Eli Lilly and Co. and the University of Toronto signed a deal for the mass production of insulin in North America. In 1923, Banting and MacLeod were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine/physiology (a much-needed boon to the soft-spoken, modest Banting, who had been so broke during his summer in the hot laboratory that his father and brother funded his work). The two Nobel Prize laureates shared their awards with their closest colleagues – Banting with Best, MacLeod with Collip. Twelve years after the successful injection of Thompson, Banting was knighted for his pioneering medical research.

Though he eventually died of diabetes complications, Thompson had managed to live 15 years after the first injection – an astounding advance for the time. Today, it is estimated that more than 15 million diabetics are alive today because of the drug.

As great a success story as this is, the full benefits of insulin have still not reached all corners of the world, even eighty-six years later. An estimated 19,000 Type 1 diabetes patients exist in 41 countries defined by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as “Highly Indebted Poor Countries.” That economic deprivation has resulted in life expectancies of as little as one year for children with newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetes in much of sub-Saharan Africa.