Surviving on Thirty-five Percent

After the war, women who had suffered losses that could be assigned monetary value took their place alongside male claimants to seek compensation for the theft and destruction of their property. Both white and black women worked with local magistrates to prepare their claims, compiled from memory detailed lists of articles taken and destroyed by enemy and friendly forces, and relied on personal connections to neighbors, friends, and acquaintances to gather and present evidence to support their claims. Despite the apparent separation between black and white communities of claimants and witnesses, claims were assessed against the criteria and received compensation without discrimination based on race.

Some women waited patiently for a decade while the government decided how to proceed with war loss claims, preserving documents and collecting evidence for later submission. For the most part, the women of Niagara were successful in their claims, with only three being deemed inadmissible. In total, women of Niagara claimed £24,067/9s/2d (about £2.2 million today) in losses through appropriation, looting, or burning.281 As the commissioners reviewed claims, however, they adjusted the valuations of the articles lost and sometimes omitted any items they deemed not admissible. The amount awarded by the Board to women in Niagara totaled only £13,949/6s/3d (about £1.3 million today). Even more painful than the adjusted values was the further reduction in payments due to difficulties in raising enough money to pay out the awards in full.282 In 1824, the government issued vouchers for twenty-five percent of each claimants’ award. Over the next few years, the government distributed supplementary payments of an additional 10% on each claim, which most of the claimants received. This meant that in the end, the women of Niagara who successfully submitted claims initially valued at over £24,000 were paid just roughly £4,889 in compensation for their losses.

The crisis over the payments of war loss claims involved politicians and government officials battling over the future of the province but the delays, devaluations, and further reductions in payment severely impeded the recovery of women who had already suffered so much during the war. Compared to Loyalist women who claimed compensation after the Revolution, the women of Upper Canada received a much lower final payment on their claims. Although Loyalist women received a lower return on claims than Loyalist men (about 5.4% less on average), they were paid in full on their awards.283 In Upper Canada, the BCL made awards of approximately 55% on the losses claimed by women. But due to the lack of funds available to pay those awards, women received only 35% of those awards, a return of about 19.25% on their total losses. The postwar period that might have been made easier through satisfactory compensation instead required women to continue in their stalwart efforts to preserve their families and rebuild their communities.

  1. “Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1270 to Present,” Measuring Worth (https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/)↩︎

  2. For a more complete description of the claims compensation issue, see George Sheppard, Plunder, Profit, and Paroles: A Social History of the War of 1812 in Upper Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), chapter 8.↩︎

  3. Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women,” 394.↩︎

Surviving on Thirty-five Percent