The Canadian Civil War
Volume 1 - Birth of the Nation
by William Wresch
Copyright 2013 William Wresch
Chapter 1-
So Many Ways to Start the Story
Many people have asked me to write a history of the Canadian Civil War. After all, I am a trained historian, I was there, and I was involved – far more than I wanted to be. At some point, maybe a decade from now, I will write a formal history that will make all my graduate professors proud. But now, in this first attempt, I think I want to begin with Elise. That means in some ways this will be a love story rather than a war story. But I think if I tell you about her, you may actually have a better sense of what was really going on than any list of leaders and incidents and dates.
To make matters even a bit more confused, before I can tell you about her, I have to tell you about me. For instance, what was I doing in Green Bay in the first place? After all, I hate Canadians. Don’t all Americans? So why go to live in the capital of the enemy?
The answer to that is George Washington. I met him in the Philadelphia Public Library. I was ten. He was dead. He had been for centuries, and his memory had disappeared practically to the point of invisibility. But then I happened along. By age ten, I was tired of the kid’s section of the library, and was hitting the adult section, but of course I was still a boy, so I headed straight for the books on war. And what war was I drawn to? The French and Indian war, of course, because what boy could pass up a chance to read about Indians with wild raids and scalpings, and all the stuff that boys love.
It was in this section of books that I discovered Washington. I was drawn to him first, because his book was just 100 pages long. “Washington’s War” was perfect for a precocious but lazy kid. I could take out an adult book, but I really didn’t have to read that much, since, after all, the man’s career was pretty short. He fought twice; he lost twice – end of career.
But after a few pages, I found a few things to like about the man. For one thing, he was really young when he was doing all these wild things. He was just twenty-one when he was enrolled as a major in the Virginia militia. And at twenty-one he was sent by the Virginia Governor to find a route over the Appalachians and begin the expansion of the Virginia colony into the Ohio River Valley. And that’s exactly what he tried to do – over and over and over again.
This first time he was practically alone. He was accompanied by a fur trader who wanted to come along, a translator in case they found any French along the way, and four servants (he was, after all, a gentleman). So the seven of them load up their pack mules and horses and head out in the middle of November 1753. It’s the dead of winter, but Washington wants to get over the mountains and have a good trail scouted out so he can bring a column of troops over in the spring. It’s cold, there’s snow drifts, the trail wanders through endless, trackless forest, and they have one mountain pass after another to climb. They spend a month on the trail, sleeping on the ground next to camp fires, always one man standing guard in case they are seen by Indians.
After four weeks of sleeping in the cold and riding into the wind, they cross their last pass and come down into the Ohio valley. The streams now run west, and there are more of them. Washington has mapped and measured every foot of their journey, and they know they have a good way west. And then they spot it -- Fort LeBoeuf. The French are already here
This was one of those brief periods where the French and the English were not at war, so Washington and his party rode right up to the fort. The French admitted his party to the fort, and spent four days talking with him through his translator. Why had the French fortified lands that belonged to the English King, Washington wanted to know. Why was Washington on lands that had been claimed by the French since the time of Jolliet, was the response from the French. This went on for four days. Meanwhile Washington is counting French troops, examining the fortifications, and determining how many men it will take to get the French out of the fort in the spring. The French may have gotten there first, but there aren’t that many of them, and wooden stockades don’t stand up to cannon balls.
At this point I was sold on Washington. After all, how cool was it to just ride up to the other guy’s fort and say “What are you guys doing here?” If you wanted to impress a ten-year old, that was the way.
But I was just ten, and I have to admit I really didn’t understand all the implications of what Washington was doing. I saw him as brave, when a more mature man would have seen he was also brilliant. It would take me ten years to finally understand why Washington had made the trip. He actually had two enemies at the time. One was the French, and the other was the Pennsylvania colony. The Pennsylvanians wanted the head waters of the Ohio too, and even had crude maps showing the lands as part of Pennsylvania, with cities plotted where Fort LeBoeuf was. They always named the cities after their patron, William Pitt, sometimes calling the cities Pittsville, or Pittston, or Pittsburgh, but of course these cities were just imaginary ink blots on overly ambitious maps.
Why did the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians and the French all want this little fort in the middle of nowhere? Because the fort controlled the Ohio, and the Ohio led right through the interior of the continent, right into the middle of the French holdings on the Mississippi. Take the fort, and it was just a matter of time before you took the Ohio Valley. Who knew what might follow from that? Washington wanted to grow his colony to the west. The French wanted to stop him. Now do you see the attraction of the man? At twenty-one, he is trying to take an entire continent from the French. Here’s a guy worth more than a few paragraphs in a history text.
Things didn’t go so well for Washington on his way back from the French fort. He leaves the French and tries to ride back over the mountains. Rivers that should be frozen aren’t, so he has to ride around them. Indians in the woods take shots at him. Finally he leaves the rest of the party at a farm and WALKS back to Williamsburg. Have you ever looked at a map of Virginia? This guy walked across the entire state in the dead of winter! He arrives in Williamsburg in the middle of January, meets with the Virginia governor, and things start moving pretty quickly toward war.
By February Washington was leading Virginians back to the west. He starts with 150 men on the eastern edge of the mountains and drills them, hoping to turn volunteers into soldiers. Meanwhile, the Virginia Governor sends forty men over the mountains to build a fort farther up the headwaters of the Ohio. The fort is only partly built when the French show up. They have 500 men and cannons. The boys from Virginia have 40 guys led by a lieutenant who is off visiting a lady friend. The sergeant in charge of the fort does the reasonable thing – they pack their bags and head back over the mountains.
The French like the site of the fort so much, they take it over and expand it, not the first or the last time the French will take American goods and claim them for their own. This fort they call Fort Duquesne, and of course it still remains, now part of the French city of Duquesne. It is garrisoned with hundreds of Frenchmen, who settle in and wait for Washington to attack. They don’t have to wait long.
Washington at this point was in charge of half the Virginia militia – 150 men. He was second in command to a Colonel Fry, but Fry was back in Williamsburg trying to convince 150 men to join the militia. He wasn’t having much luck, so Washington’s “half” of the militia was really all there was. The Governor orders Washington to go about halfway over the mountains, build a road so supplies and cannons could make the trip, and then wait for Fry to show up with the rest of the men. Washington’s men cut their way
through the forests, at one point going just twenty miles in twenty days. Fry never shows up. He has managed to recruit another one hundred fifty men, and even has a few dozen British regulars under his command, but he takes ill and dies along the trail. The troops under his command complete the journey on their own and join Washington. He is now the commanding officer for this expedition.
Washington has a decision to make. With the Colonel gone, he can decide to turn back to Virginia, or he can wait where he is for the governor to appoint another colonel, or he can proceed against the French. He doesn’t even hesitate. He has just had his twenty-second birthday, he has three hundred men and four cannons, and he knows the way over the mountains. He heads west. By mid-May, they are at one of the tributaries of the Ohio, and build themselves some defenses.
Good thing. Men building a road in the forest are hardly invisible, so the French have had a month of advanced notice to the invasion. Rather than sit in Fort Duquesne and wait for Washington, they go out to meet him. Washington’s Indian friends tell him the French were coming, and so a week goes by while each side sends out search parties, playing blind man’s bluff in the virgin forests.
Washington gets lucky first. At the head of forty men, traveling through woods so thick seven men get lost and are left behind, Washington finds a party of thirty two French troops hiding in a hollow. The Virginians open fire immediately and kill ten French, including their commander, and capture all the rest. Thus, the French and Indian War is started. In Europe it will be known as the Seven Year’s War, and will be fought all over the world, one more blow up between France and England. In America it is a simple battle – see the French, shoot the French. Unfortunately, this is the last fight Washington will ever win.
Should I tell you the rest? I have to warn you things go down hill pretty fast, but given even a vague awareness of our history, you probably already guessed that we would not fare very well.
Washington has his victory, and of course now he also has a war. He marches his men and his captives back to his encampment, and digs its defenses even deeper, since he now assumes – correctly – that the French will find him and attack. He has barely forty-eight hours to get ready.
In the French side, reinforcements have arrived, bringing their numbers to nearly a thousand. After many councils with local Indians, the French are able to get their help as well, and come at Washington in a pattern that has become so familiar whenever we have faced the French. They always have the numbers, and they always have the terrain. In this case, they arrive at, and surround Washington’s defenses on July third. It rains the whole day and each side has trouble keeping their power dry. It’s a nasty fight with shots coming out of the woods on all sides of Washington’s men. For nine hours men shoot across distances of thirty or forty yards. The dead and the wounded pile up on both sides, but the French not only have the numbers, they eventually get the high ground. They position a cannon to fire right down into Washington’s fort, and the outcome is inevitable. The only decision left is whether any Virginians will leave alive. At midnight Washington signs a surrender. He spends July 4th, 1754, carrying wounded men back up the mountain trails, back to Virginia.
Of course you know what happened the next year. Washington comes back again, this time second in command to Braddock and his regiment of British regulars, but the result is the same – one more retreat among the wounded, and defeated, back to Virginia. Braddock’s body is buried under the wagon road so the oxen and wagons can beat his bones into the ground and forever hide his burial place from Indian grave robbers. Washington is twenty three, and he is once again in command, and he is once again beaten by the French. Three times he has been over the mountains, looking to expand his colony, and ultimately his country, and three times he loses. What kind of burden is that for a twenty-three year old to bear?
Is that why I hate the Canadians? Hatred of the French is common among Americans, and I certainly share all the reasons my countrymen do. But to me, there is also Washington, and his dream for a larger America. That dream is largely dead now. We no longer look west. We eventually went south, beating the Spanish and taking Florida, and moving north and gradually wearing out the Iroquois so that we enlarged the colony of New York, and there were occasional efforts west again, but they were so soundly defeated that it became accepted that the mountains would be our western boundary. Instead, we turned east. The Atlantic became our pond. We were the seamen, the traders, the ship builders, the insurers who moved people and cargo across the Atlantic and eventually around the world. We became a different kind of people – merchants rather than farmers, seamen rather than trappers, and we forgot about the west.
But I didn’t forget. Sitting in the Philadelphia library, reading about those old wars, something took hold of me. I became possessed about Washington, the Ohio, and the America that might have been. He climbed those mountains and fought those battles for a dream. I decided I would learn more about that dream. I might never be able to make that dream become real, but I could at least do what I do best – learn. And maybe someday I would have something useful to say about those days at the headwaters of the Ohio.
By the time I was seventeen I decided that I would leave my native Philadelphia and go to college at the University of Virginia – in the land of Washington. I learned a great deal there, including the fact that I wasn’t the only one who understood the value of the Ohio. There was a professor -- Bernard DeVoto – who had written books about the Ohio and its implications. Right up until his death, DeVoto was arguing that the U.S. could have extended clear to the Pacific. It needed the Ohio, just as Washington had seen, but with the Ohio in hand, the U.S. could have cut off the French in the north, taken the Mississippi Valley, then the Missouri, and ended up ruling all the way to California. It is true Harvard thought his theory too controversial and never gave him tenure, but he found a more welcome home in the heart of his country – the University of Virginia. There his books gave a shape to the kind of speculation some of us have had over a quiet evening. The United States could have been a continental country.
With DeVoto’s death, historians moved on to other issues and his hypothesis lost much of its allure – except to me. I read all his books, and in the process came upon another name that would change my life – Louis Jolliet. Everyone knows that it was Jolliet who discovered the Mississippi, but I learned more. Jolliet had started a family – a family that ruled New France to this day. It was that family as much as anything else that blocked American ambitions. These people led their country, and on several occasions had saved their country. In time, my generalized hate for the French, resolved itself into a particular hatred for the Jolliets. This was a family I would learn about and somehow damage.
First came my preparation. I finished my degree (American History, of course) in three years and stayed on to earn a Ph.D. I chose my thesis advisors carefully – each had been a student of DeVoto. At age twenty six I felt like DeVoto reincarnated. I burned with a thirst for what might have been. But unlike DeVoto, I had two special advantages – I spoke fluent French, and my family ran an export business with an office in Green Bay. I could walk into the lion’s den, and I would. I would travel to Canada on a personal quest to find the dark underbelly of the Jolliet family history, and set the historical record straight, embarrassing the French, and avenging my country’s honor. Said another way, I was twenty-six, and driven.
Immediately upon graduation I made my parents proud by telling them I (finally) was interested in the family business. I asked for, and received, a job in the Green Bay office. I was on my way. Somehow, some way, I would strike a blow for Washington.
Chapter 2
The Bay of the Stenches