Funny, In a Cute Sorta Way

Border salvos fired in outcome of War of 1812

"Here, 200 years later, is what Canadians know about the War of 1812:

A) We won.

B) We burned down the White House.

C) Sir John A. Macdonald played a pivotal role (no small feat for someone who wasn't born yet).

D) There was something about Laura Secord chocolates.

E) It was in 1812. We think.

Here is what Americans know about the War of 1812:

A) They won."

This is so true. I once worked with a woman who had been born and raised in the USA, and she swore by the belief that the Americans had won the war. All along, Canadians, if they knew anything about it at all, claim "we" burned down the White House, which, of course, isn't really true. It was the Brits that were responsible for that deed. But then again, maybe in 1812 Canadian settlers/colonials still considered themselves to be Brits, at least those who lived along the north shore of the Great Lakes.

"The poll showed Canadians think staving off American conquest saved us from sharing U.S. politics and government, their gun laws and, to a lesser extent, citizenship with the cast of Jersey Shore (I'm not making that up; turns out the funsters at the Historica Dominion Institute have a quirky sense of humour).

One-third of Americans, meanwhile, named the composition of the Star Spangled Banner as the most significant outcome of the war..."

[---]

"All of which misses the real point, which is how differently the story is told in Canada and the U.S., says University of Victoria historian Rachel Hope Cleves. Having taught the war in universities on both sides of the border, she has heard both versions.

"Canadians remember the War of 1812 as a war between Canada and the U.S.," she says. Americans, on the other hand, think of it as Round 2 of the War of Independence, with the U.S. fighting off a bullying Great Britain and Canada not really playing a role at all. The result is each country thinks of the conflict as a David and Goliath story, with itself cast as David."

[---]

"It's true that the war ended the question of whether Canada (or at least the colonies that would later become Canada) would be swallowed up by the newish U.S. republic. Many on the American side thought of themselves not as conquerors but liberators who would free their northern neighbours from a tyrannical monarchy. When Canadian militiamen lined up alongside the British soldiers and Tecumseh's coalition of native forces, it pretty much popped that balloon.

But the real winners and losers were not the nations, Cleves argues. Rather, the war was a victory for "settler culture" and a blow to indigenous groups on both sides of the border. In the U.S., the Creek people lost huge swaths of territory on the Gulf coast, while the end of Tecumseh's confederacy - he was killed at Moraviantown near present-day Chatham, Ont. - allowed the western expansion he had hoped to prevent. In Canada, the 1814 treaty that resolved the border issues, ending the American threat, made aboriginals less valuable as allies, and they lost political power."

RTWT

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