Distress and Misery

The flames that consumed homes throughout Niagara were the consequence of multiple interacting factors that combined to bear down heavily on civilians living in contested or occupied territories. The initial plan by the Americans was a three-pronged attack on Upper Canada that quickly failed, putting much more pressure on the Niagara campaign as the only possible source of victory. Combined with internal conflict stemming from personal and political differences, that pressure caused American officers to make costly mistakes that sowed frustration throughout their force. Expectations of being received as liberators were dashed when American soldiers looted homes and farms to augment their meager rations and overdue pay, turning potential allies into resentful resistors who suffered doubly from appropriations and looting by the British army. As the two armies advanced and retreated, they both scoured the land for resources, devastating the lives of civilians caught in the middle. In 1818, an address from the inhabitants of Upper Canada to the Prince Regent, George IV, presented a stark depiction of the circumstances of the war: “Wives and children had fled from their homes, the face of the country was laid to waste, and the fire of revenge was sent forth to consummate distress and misery.”¹⁹⁷ The goal of the address was royal intervention in the politics of Upper Canada to ensure compensation for the losses incurred during the war, which were substantial. In total, claimants estimated their losses at over £400,000 across the province, of which the inhabitants of Niagara accounted for more than half.

But the toll on the people of Upper Canada cannot be understood purely in quantitative data about their losses. While each item lost was assigned a discrete value, the articles stolen, killed, or burned also represented a part of someone’s life, whether a tool for daily activities, a family heirloom, a means of production, a source of food, a mark of class, or even just a small piece of comfort in frontier life. For many women of the district, deprivation of possessions and shelter was accompanied by temporary or permanent losses of family members, displacement from the communities in which they lived, and physical harm. A close examination of their experiences, however, reveals that women who suffered dramatic losses during the war did whatever necessary to survive, to preserve their families and communities, and to rebuild their lives out of the ashes that remained when their worlds burned down.

Go to Module 3: Coping with War