"An object of persistent and heroic effort"

[Title from Edward Hein's “Niagara Frontier and the War of 1812”¹]

Sometime before 1806, Elizabeth Clarke Campbell arrived in Newark, a growing town on the western bank where the Niagara River empties into Lake Ontario. She was accompanying her new husband, Donald Campbell, who was fulfilling his appointment as fort-major at nearby Fort George. Elizabeth was the daughter of Irish immigrants who had settled in Halifax. Donald was a Loyalist from North Carolina who had been imprisoned at one point during the Revolution for “corresponding with the enemy.”⁵⁵ He later joined the Royal North Carolina Regiment and was captured at Yorktown when Cornwallis surrendered. Imprisoned, paroled, and then shipped out from Florida, he arrived in Nova Scotia in 1784. Although Campbell received 550 acres in Country Harbour, Nova Scotia, he was apparently more interested in pursuing his military career, serving as an officer in the Nova Scotia Regiment, the Royal Fusiliers, and the 5th Foot before his appointment to Fort George in Upper Canada.⁵⁶ During his time in the service in Nova Scotia, Campbell joined the social circle that included the Clarke family and married Elizabeth in 1805, shortly before they departed the maritime province for the western edge of British North America.

The Campbells’ relocation to Newark was part of the rapid settlement and military construction in the Niagara District that began in 1780. Between 1806 and 1812, Elizabeth gave birth to four children: Edward Clarke, John Angus, Sarah Eleanor, and an infant whose name has been lost. The family lived in “A neat frame house, well finished and painted consisting of six Rooms, with Stable & other outhouses.”⁵⁷ They kept cows and horses in a farmyard surrounded by a split-rail fence.⁵⁸ Their home was thirty-two by thirty-eight feet and had one and one-half stories, which was typical of more spacious houses in Newark. Heated by cast-iron stoves and comfortably furnished for daily life and entertaining, their home became known in the town as a “seat of hospitality and plenty.”⁵⁹ Brought to the district by the expansion of the military in Upper Canada, the Campbells built a life for themselves in the growing town and enhanced its social and economic growth. Yet when war between Britain and the United States of America was declared in 1812, the Campbells and everyone they knew faced violence, looting, destruction, and displacement that threatened to erase thirty years of toil and growth.⁶⁰

The story of the Campbell family that opens each of the modules in this study begins with common elements of early settlers in the new province: a first-generation Nova Scotian married a Loyalist refugee from North Carolina, moved to the frontier of Upper Canada, started a family, built an estate, helped establish a thriving community, suffered tremendous losses during a brutal war, and then rebuilt everything in the postwar era. While the family is not meant to represent every inhabitant, their journey helps mark out the path that many others also followed and provides a point of comparison for experiences that differed. Most importantly, the fact that the Campbell family and most early inhabitants like them settled in the Niagara District has defined the geographical focus of this study.

This module argues that the Niagara District provides the most suitable case study of how women coped with and responded to the War of 1812 in Upper Canada for three reasons. First, the Niagara District was at the center of the most intense action of the war and was a long-contested space in which different groups and nations have fought for control of the Niagara River and the resources to which it provides access. By the outbreak of the War of 1812, the district had become a valuable strategic goal that would allow the United States to control access to the Great Lakes and fur trade routes, cut off British support for western native allies, and establish a foothold in Upper Canada from which to force Britain out of North America. Because the Niagara District became the main focal point in the northern theater, its inhabitants experienced destruction and displacement more severely than residents in any other district. Between 1812 and 1815, they were subjected to three invasions, seven major battles, dozens of minor skirmishes, long periods of enemy occupation, substantial appropriations by the British military, plundering by friendly and enemy soldiers, and destructive moments in which whole villages and towns were burned to the ground. The long and brutal war in Niagara meant that more local men were wounded or died while serving in the militia, more women became heads of households when men died or were imprisoned, more inhabitants had private property taken or destroyed, and entire communities were displaced when their homes were burned. An analysis of the effect of the War of 1812 on women in Upper Canada and their responses to those experiences must focus on Niagara because the district with the greatest population was also a valuable target of conquest, creating a situation in which intense, brutal warfare affected thousands of inhabitants.

Second, the early settlement and rapid population growth in the Niagara District between 1780 and 1812 created a large, diverse population concentrated in a relatively small geographic region that created a significant source of evidence related to experiences and actions during the war. Records related to the settlement of Niagara date back to the first attempts at permanent British habitation of the western bank of the Niagara River in the 1780s. Although settlers spread westward into the rest of the province, no other region developed as quickly as Niagara, which quickly overtook more established settlements in the east like Kingston and Cornwall. By 1806, the district was the most populated British settlement in Upper Canada with over 11,000 inhabitants (24 percent of the provincial population).⁶¹ A higher population in general also meant a higher population of women. In an 1806 census of the Home District, female adults represented about 20 percent of the population.⁶² Assuming that ratio was similar in Niagara, approximately 2,200 adult women lived in the district in the decade before the war. While the Niagara District covered about 4,000 square kilometers (~1,500 sq. miles), most of the district’s inhabitants were concentrated in towns along the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, the banks of the Niagara and Chippewa Rivers, or in farming communities scattered across the region. With a large population living in both rural areas and town centers, the Niagara District provides diverse representations of life in Upper Canada in the early nineteenth century.

Finally, because Niagara was both highly populated and suffered the greatest losses during the war, its inhabitants’ lives have greater representation in official and public records than residents of other districts. Throughout the settlement of Lower and Upper Canada, Loyalists seeking refuge from persecution petitioned the British government for land to replace what they had lost in support of the Crown. Men and women submitted written petitions and supporting evidence to prove their identity, loyalty, and character, often “detailing services, losses and suffering during the American Revolutionary War.”⁶³ The flood of refugees and immigrants into the Niagara District resulted in thousands of documents related to their lives and the settlement of the district being preserved in the records of the Upper Canada Land Petitions. After thirty-two years of growth and stability, Niagara was suddenly disrupted by war and its inhabitants were subjected to injuries, losses, and displacements that were sometimes documented in military reports, correspondence, and ledgers that always accompany war operations. More significantly, relief organizations and official boards of investigation collected and preserved details about inhabitants’ suffering and losses. The Loyal and Patriotic Society solicited funds to distribute as relief for suffering inhabitants and provided information about over 800 people—nearly half from Niagara—who received support in a report published in 1817. Similarly, the records of the Board of Claims for Losses (BCL) include information about the lives of over 670 inhabitants of Niagara, which account for 33 percent of all claims made to the board. All these sources make the greater population of Niagara more visible in the historic record, allowing deeper inquiries about how the war affected inhabitants’ lives and how their responses to traumatic events shaped the district and province in the postwar era.

Mapping Women's Claims across Upper Canada

Read more about the data behind this map

This map shows the distribution of women who either submitted or inherited claims made to the BCL. Claims are represented by township across the province of Upper Canada. The townships with the highest proportion of women’s claims are Niagara and Stamford in the Niagara District, which experienced the most intense fighting in the province. Other townships in which the war caused significant losses include York in the Home District and Sandwich in the Western District. Claimants living along the River Thames often provided no further details about their residence, so those claims are represented by the path of the river itself. The interactive map on the project website includes the specific figures for each township along with links to more information about each female claimant.⁶⁴