War Loss Claims and Gender

In addition to the restrictive procedures and evidentiary requirements of the board, other factors contributed to limit women’s access to the claims process. The decade that passed between period of loss and review of claims likely reduced the number of women claimants who may have moved beyond the reach of the advertisements soliciting claims, remarried and were comfortable enough to neglect to submit a claim, or had passed away. For many inhabitants, even learning about the call for new claims was not guaranteed. In their final report, the commissioners claimed “that they did not fail to adopt every means which occurred to them of giving general information of their days of meeting” in the form of “public newspapers as well as printed handbills circulated throughout the Province.” Considering these efforts sufficient, the commissioners argued that any outstanding claims were “wholly owing to the neglect of the claimants themselves.”²⁶⁴ Even if women who suffered losses during the war had survived long enough, were head of their household, and heard about the commission, they had still to overcome the final hurdle of providing sufficiently detailed lists of articles lost and evidence to support their claim.

Evidence from women who did not submit claims is difficult to find but the women who successfully made claims offer clues to the changes in situation that may have disqualified others who were less fortunate. Isabella Hill had received support from the LPS for a journey to Jamaica and submitted a claim in 1815 to compensate for the losses of her houses, a stable, bricks, and fruit trees. By 1823, Hill was not in Jamaica but was instead residing in England. Despite her removal from the province and the distance involved, she employed James FitzGibbon as her agent in Upper Canada and he administered her submission to the Board. Her renewed claim relied on the previously submitted documents, which included a statement of support from two carpenters from Newark attesting to the value of the buildings lost.²⁶⁵ FitzGibbon also sought out an additional witness, John Eggleston, who made a general statement verifying the account and articles lost. As a result of satisfactory proof, the Board awarded £346 for the claim, which had been estimated at £628/5s.²⁶⁶ Isabella Hill leveraged social connections and respectability to follow through on her claim, which may have also required some financial investment to employ FitzGibbon to work on her behalf. These kinds of resources were beyond the means of many inhabitants of Upper Canada who suffered losses during the war, especially widowed women who were struggling to provide for their families while recovering from substantial losses.

Comparison of women’s representation in the records of the Loyal and Patriotic Society (LPS) and the Board of Claims for Losses (BCL) indicates that women in Upper Canada were significantly more likely to receive relief for their immediate situations than to submit a claim for compensation from the government. Women account for approximately 45% of relief payments by the LPS but only 8.1% of the claims reviewed by the BCL. The explanation for this difference is that the private society provided aid to relieve immediate distress, while the government board investigated and reimbursed the loss of existing property. The mission and criteria of the LPS not only acknowledged that women were often in severe need but also encouraged them to apply by setting a standard amount for widows and recognizing that women in households where male family members had been killed or disabled often needed additional support. While the directors sometimes recorded comments on petitioners’ loyalty, level of distress, and other sources of support, many payments were made simply to provide for the present survival of the sufferers by helping them reach their homes, feed their children, or travel to safer places. The basic criterion of need opened eligibility to a much wider range of inhabitants, especially women, because the LPS was not concerned with marital status or property rights in determining whether to provide relief.

The work of the BCL, however, was driven primarily by concerns about property ownership, which excluded many women in Upper Canada who had suffered during the war. Tasked with investigating and compensating inhabitants for property taken or destroyed, the commissioners required that claimants prove they owned the articles listed in the claim. Demonstration of ownership was not an option for married women due to coverture, an element of British common-law entailing “the absorption of a married woman’s property into her husband’s control during the life of their marriage.”²⁶⁷ Only one married woman submitted a claim to the board, listed with her husband as co-claimants. In 1816, John and Lydia Evans submitted a claim for clothing taken by British soldiers and “Fences, Fixtures, and Furniture destroyed by the Garrison troops.”²⁶⁸ John and Lydia both signed the sworn statement, which used the collective noun “we” to describe the property lost. When reapplying to the board in 1825, John alone signed the statement referring the commissioners to the previous documents. We can only speculate why the Evans’s initial claim included Lydia as co-claimant, but its uniqueness indicates that married women’s losses were almost always represented by their husbands.

Because married women generally did not submit claims to the board, claims linked to female inhabitants fall into one of two categories: claims submitted by widows and claims inherited by widows of deceased claimants. Women who were widowed before or during the war submitted claims on their own behalf, though some mentioned their late husbands in their statements. In 167 individual claims identified as linked to women as either claimant or final administrator, women representing themselves account for 105 of the claims. The remaining 62 claims were inherited by women whose husbands died sometime between the initial claims made in 1815-16 and the final payments made in 1824-25. In all these cases, the records indicate that the commissioners did not subdivide property or compensation based on the principle of a one-third dower for widows. For the purposes of remunerating inhabitants for property lost during the war, the BCL operated as though widows inherited all their late husband’s property and thus deserved to be paid the entire awarded reimbursement.

Another factor that determined whether widows received and controlled the compensation on their claims was the age of their eldest sons. If her children were not of age when her husband died, a widow often took control of all property until her husband’s male heir was old enough to inherit. In the decade that elapsed between submitting their initial claim and receiving final payments, a small number of widows had to deal with changes in their estate due to sons reaching the age of majority. Elizabeth Campbell’s son Edward became heir to his father’s estate between 1816 and 1823, so mother and son divided the earlier claim for the entire estate into two separate claims. Edward was given ownership of the house and other buildings on the family lot that had been burned in 1813, making his claim worth £405. Elizabeth retained her claim for household goods totaling about £120.²⁶⁹ This unusual case was relatively simple to unravel because both claims were filed together and referred to one another. The interpersonal relationships behind other claims are not so easy to understand. In 1824, Dominique Pouget and his agent Charles Richardson resubmitted a claim initially filed by his father, Joseph, in 1816. The signature on the voucher for the claim, however, was that of Thomas Clark, an agent for Dominique’s mother, Josette. This case is unique among the 167 claims with female claimants or administrators. Did Dominique and Josette both seek payment on Joseph’s claim? Was the ownership of the property and claim contested? Unfortunately, the records of the BCL do not provide clarifying information. Yet the Pouget and Campbell cases indicate that widows seeking compensation for their wartime losses had to consider and possibly plan for a time when their sons would inherit the lost property and associated award.

Whether they later remarried or dealt with other male heirs or not, women who submitted claims to the Board for compensation appeared comfortable using the same approaches as male claimants in making their cases. In the 167 claims by women analyzed in this study, nearly all included the same elements as claims submitted by men: 1) a statement made under oath before a justice of the peace outlining the general facts of their claim; 2) an itemized list of articles taken or destroyed, with values; and 3) evidence given by neighbors or relatives in support of their ownership of the articles and the loss thereof. Many of the statements by claimants follow a pattern similar to the one given by Ann Graham:

I Ann Graham of the Township of Bertie do hereby solemnly declare that I have actually sustained the damage in the accompanying claim set forth and that I have not received any remuneration whatever either from His Majesty’s Government or from the Individual who committed the damage claimed for or from any person or persons for them.²⁷⁰

These formulaic statements were likely prepared by the justice and signed or marked by the claimant, but some were customized to include pertinent details of their cases. Catherine Lowell’s statement explained that her losses were “sustained when Plundered and Burnt by a Party of the Enemy under the Command of General Brown on or about the 16th of July 1814.”²⁷¹ Some of the documents submitted, particularly those sent to government officials or the earlier boards in 1815, were more personal in nature. In 1814, Elizabeth Campbell sent a letter to Sir Gordon Drummond detailing the loss of her husband and her home, asking if he might “perceive the extent of her misfortune, and afford her, if possible, some remuneration.”²⁷² The personal appeal for sympathy in this early letter was accompanied by a more formulaic statement from a justice of the peace, a witness statement by three gentlemen of Niagara, and a detailed list of articles lost during the burning of Newark. Most of the claims submitted or resubmitted in 1823 did not include personal appeals for sympathy or descriptions of the suffering caused by losses, but were instead limited to the more factual, objective lists of losses and accompanying values that the commissioners preferred.

Unlike women who applied to the Loyalist Claims Commission after the Revolution, who “were largely insulated from the agricultural and business worlds in which their husbands engaged daily,” women in Niagara demonstrated broad knowledge of both typically female and male worlds.²⁷³ Whether they lived in towns or on farms, they provided lists and values of household goods, farm equipment, crops, and other trade goods in remarkable detail. Mary Bunting of Stamford listed blankets, coats, vests, pants, shirts, and other specific items that were taken by looters.²⁷⁴ The raiders also plundered the homes of other Stamford residents such as Charlotte Carmichael, Elizabeth DeForest, Rachel Lundy, Jane McKerlie, Lydia Peer, Elizabeth Skinner, Mary Stickle, and Debora Wilson. The women of Stamford itemized the loss of a variety of household goods such as gold rings, silver buckles, beds, blankets, pillows, furniture, clothing, molasses, pots, rock salt, books, wash tubs, saddles, and buckets.²⁷⁵ Whether they were present during the losses or not, in the aftermath each woman went through their houses and tallied the items that were missing, keeping those lists for up to ten years before having a chance to submit them and claim compensation.

Women who submitted claims for the contents of their homes that were burned demonstrated an even higher level of detail in their ability to recall the many items they lost and importance of each item in their lives. Although some women’s claims simply listed the loss of a house and all its contents, others were painstaking reconstructions of their homes and possessions. Elizabeth Campbell’s claim included line items for the house, stable, and other outhouses along with forty-six other kinds of items of which some were sets (i.e., ten table spoons). In addition to specific numbers of each item, she was also attentive to the characteristics of many items like the “Black Walnut dining Tables,” “Walnut beds,” and “Copper Tea Kettle.”²⁷⁶ Considering the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the burning of her home and subsequent winter journey to find refuge, Campbell’s capacity for recollecting her property in such detail indicates that she was intimately familiar with each item in her home and hoped to receive compensation that accurately reflected her losses. Ann Butler of Niagara described the loss of her house and household goods as well as barns, sheds, and other buildings along with acres of planted crops, bushels of harvested potatoes, and thousands of fence rails.²⁷⁷ Hannah Secord, who operated a mill near St. David’s, provided separate lists of damages done by British and American troops. The British had appropriated or stolen crops, animals, and equipment; the Americans had plundered her house, set it aflame, and raided her mill.²⁷⁸ These detailed lists and valuations indicate that women in Niagara were intimately aware of their property, regardless of the imaginary line between men and women’s worlds. They also suggest that women recognized the importance of being accurate and precise in descriptions of their losses and were able to prepare such lists from memory even after suffering traumatic events.