Epilogue

These are the things that test and try men’s souls,
And show what leading principle controls;
And not the men alone thus did and dared,
But women fair and young, and old and silvery-haired.323

- Janet Carnochan, “Has Canada a History?”

Elizabeth Campbell’s incredible and harrowing experiences during the War of 1812 were the inspiration for this dissertation. Between 1812 and 1825—the last thirteen years of her life—Campbell lost her husband, her home, her youngest child, and was forever separated from the community in which she lived. Her story raised questions about how a family could survive so much trauma and loss, travel such vast distances, and then become so respected and remembered in a town that had been reduced to ashes. The search for an answer began in the archives of the Niagara Historical Society & Museum with a few remaining documents and artifacts from the Campbell family, including the only surviving letter written by Elizabeth herself. These fragmentary pieces of evidence were preserved because Edward Clarke Campbell attained prominence and made substantial contributions to the growth of the town, district, and province. Yet even such scant records provided just enough information to illuminate how Campbell overcame these challenges with what one acquaintance called “fortitude and resolution.” Throughout the trials she faced, Campbell demonstrated some of the possible actions that women could take to preserve their families and support their success. During the occupation of Newark, she joined households with Charlotte Dickson, preserving and sharing resources and support. When her youngest child was dying, she risked her own life to have the infant baptized. While seeking refuge after losing her home, she appealed to the Loyal and Patriotic Society for aid. When she heard that the government might provide compensation for war losses, she used personal connections to raise support for her claim in 1815 and again in 1823. Having found safety and security in Nova Scotia, she did not forget her community in Newark but relied on former acquaintances to provide an opportunity for her son to start a career and used money from her war loss compensation to fund his apprenticeship. And though she did not live to see Edward’s success and rise to prominence, her work was rewarded by his influence in the regrowth of the Niagara District and recorded in the archives of Newark.

Almost too remarkable to be true, Campbell’s story suggested that other women in Upper Canada with shared experiences might also have gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve their families during and after the war. The copy of Campbell’s list of war losses preserved in the local museum led to the Board of Claims for Losses records, which contain a remarkable trove of documents that provide unique insight into the lives of women who suffered during the war. Similarly, her name appeared in the Report of the Loyal and Patriotic Society alongside many other women whose shared experiences of loss and suffering were recorded and described in what may have been the only time that their names appeared in a print publication. The report and claims both indicate that the Niagara District suffered more severe looting and burning than any other district and that women were dispossessed or displaced at a higher rate in Niagara.

The records that emerged as a result of the war include descriptions of loss and suffering but also contain details about experiences that can be layered to better understand how women coped with the war and helped shape the recovery of the district. When faced with death, looting, destruction, and burning, women took on additional work, joined forces with others, made appeals for aid, and sought compensation for their losses. Their communities were physically attacked and disrupted but in response drew closer together for mutual aid and survival. Following the war, women relied on their social connections to provide support for their war loss claims, to find suitable marriages for their children, and to arrange career opportunities. They used their loss compensation payments to rebuild their homes, support commercial activities, engage in land speculation, and create financial stability for their families’ futures. As the inhabitants of the Niagara District began to pick up the pieces of their burned and broken communities, women contributed to economic and social recovery through practices and roles that were not unknown in the prewar era but took on greater significance when they became solely responsible for maintaining families, homes, farms, and businesses.

While some depictions of the postwar recovery of the Niagara District and Upper Canada tend to focus on forces and processes in which individuals are eerily absent, our understanding of how the district and province returned from the brink of disaster must include the people who made it happen. In his economic history, McCalla wrote that in the postwar period, “the provincial economy would develop along the lines already established, at rates of population growth and land clearing already indicated, and with economic fluctuations that reflected the province’s links with a wider world.”324 This high-level view of Upper Canada’s economic history is certainly necessary but also leaves one wondering who was involved in land clearing, population growth, and economic fluctuations. The answer is that both men and women participated in those activities to some degree but are nearly invisible at that level. For these two perspectives differ not in accuracy but in scale. For instance, a time-lapse video of building construction shows all the activity across the job site and helps demonstrate the growth at a macro level, but individual workers are invisible or seem inconsequential in the larger process. Yet without those workers the construction process would halt and the building would never be completed. Although historians must simultaneously consider individual lives and broader contexts, the tendency to take a broad, all encompassing view can easily become too disconnected from the people who contributed to the larger process even without knowing it.

Yet even histories that incorporate more individual detail and agency often misrepresent the people present in a historical moment. When the men and women who had lived in Newark returned to the ruins of the town, they immediately set to work rebuilding homes, barns, stables, shops, warehouses, and churches. In his 1896 history of Niagara, William Kirby wrote that the residents of Newark, “bore their losses like brave men, and courageously set to work to rebuild and restore the town.”325 Like many authors of history in the nineteenth century, Kirby ignored women’s contributions and separated men and women’s work entirely: “The men worked diligently in the fields and forests. The women made the house bright and happy with good housewifery, and ever a clean table cloth, and a bright fire in winter.”326 These characterizations of women were not true representations of life in Upper Canada in any era, but are especially inadequate for understanding how women experienced the war, responded to traumatic events, and contributed to the recovery of the province.

Women who lived through war during the early nineteenth century in Upper Canada occupied a position at the center of two different fields of historical research that to date have not been in dialogue with one another. First, traditional military histories of the War of 1812 have focused primarily on battles, strategies, military men, ships, supplies, morale, technology, and other elements of warfare. Large-scale overviews and even deep investigations of single campaigns often overlook the lives of people who were affected by and coped with the violence and loss created by war. When individual civilians are mentioned, they often stand in as representative victims of war’s brutality, especially if they are women or children. Histories that situation wars within political, economic, or social context without mention of inhabitants living in war zones and occupied territories can strip away the humanity that makes all war intimately personal for those involved. While other conflicts have been studied with more attention to their effects on civilians and women and how they responded to moments of crisis, the War of 1812 has not received similar scholarly treatment.

Conversely, social historians studying Upper Canada have paid much more attention to women’s participation in the settlement and growth of the province during the nineteenth century but have not considered whether the War of 1812 disrupted or redefined women’s roles. Françoise Noël’s study of family life in early nineteenth century Canada provides remarkable details about courtship, marriage, parenting, childhood, and community but makes no mention of the war at all.327 Elizabeth Jane Errington’s study of women’s work in Upper Canada convincingly demonstrates that “work performed by women, as wives, sisters, mothers, farmers, craftswomen, mistresses, and maids was essential to the development of the colony as a whole.”328 However, missing from Errington’s work is any consideration of how women’s experiences during the war helped redefine their participation in the growing province. The evidence discussed in the previous modules suggests that Errington’s framing of women’s work is even more fitting when considering women’s wartime activities in saving and sustaining their families through traumatic events. While both of these studies are valuable contributions to the history of Upper Canada, particularly women’s position and participation in the early years of the province, they fail to ask what happens to women and families when faced with death, plundering, and burning.

This dissertation provides a first attempt to bridge the divide between military histories of the War of 1812 and the social and gender histories of Upper Canada in the nineteenth century. I have drawn on the work of scholars in both fields as a framework for examining what happened when the women of Niagara were subjected to violence and terror during a war that was characterized by a senior British officer as a conflict between two “enlightened and civilized nations.”329 When the war brought looting and burning, women worked to preserve their way of life as best they could but also took on new roles to ensure that their families and communities would survive the war and regrow afterward. Some lives disrupted by the war returned to normal when the fighting ceased, but death and loss meant that other lives were altered forever. Women had always played an important role in Upper Canada’s socio-economic growth and stability but the war created circumstances requiring women to take extraordinary measures that provided for their families, preserved their communities, and shaped the recovery of the Niagara District.

Further research is needed to trace more thoroughly the long-lasting effects of women’s wartime experiences and activities in the recovery and growth of the Niagara District and Upper Canada. The evidence related to postwar activity found in the records of the Board of Claims for Losses provides a starting point but lacks the scope and detail needed to fully understand the depth and breadth of women’s contributions. Additional research areas might include examinations of public memory of the war, how public policies changed as a result of the war, how women remembered and portrayed their own participation in the events of the war, how long the effects of the war lingered in communities, and whether women who took on additional roles during the war returned to former positions, continued in their newly defined positions, or inspired other by their example. The exponential population growth and rapid industrialization of Upper Canada as it transformed into the modern province of Ontario overshadowed the experiences of the inhabitants who lived through the war. Although the War of 1812 has been called a “forgotten war,” there are hundreds of books and thousands of articles about the war and the province. What has long been missing are the stories of women who survived, saved their families, strengthened their communities, and rebuilt their lives on the ashes.


  1. Janet Carnochan, “Has Canada a History?,” in History of Niagara (Toronto: William Briggs, 1914), 301.↩︎

  2. Douglas McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 42.↩︎

  3. William Kirby, Annals of Niagara (Welland: Tribune, 1896), 215.↩︎

  4. Kirby, Annals of Niagara, 83.↩︎

  5. Françoise Noël, Family Life and Sociability in Upper and Lower Canada, 1780-1870: A View from Diaries and Family Correspondence (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).↩︎

  6. Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 24.↩︎

  7. Sir George Prevost, “Proclamation,” in Cruikshank, DHCNF 5:115.↩︎