U.S. Forces Failed to Conquer Canada 200 Years Ago (2012) | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Forces Failed to Conquer Canada 200 Years Ago (2012)

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43 pointsgscott62 comments

Canadian here.. why do we keep seeing these stories about how the US invaded "canada"?

wasnt "Canada" created as part of the British North America Act (1867)?

Didnt canada do a big "150" thing in 2017?

The US invaded "british north america" in 1812.

The article is also mistaken when it talks about "canadians" defending British North America. They were british citizens.

Confederation occurred in 1867. That is often considered to be the birth of the country. However, the concept of Canada as a place existed prior to that. And, yes, it was inhabited by people who called themselves Canadian even if they were also British citizens (until 1939, if memory serves correctly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_myth

Would you prefer Upper and Lower Canadians?

As an upper Canadian, yes, those filthy lower Canadians.

What I find amusing about both countries is that neither spends time on what was bloody obvious at the time. Namely that the reason why the US picked then to start a war was that Great Britain had their hands full with Napoleon.

Still the outcome was that Washington was burned to the ground, the US sued for peace, Great Britain granted it because the US had already proven to be ungovernable. However it was the last war where natives could fight open battles against the US, and with the decimation of the Iroquois the Western border was open. Also Andrew Jackson's victory in New Orleans (after the peace treaty was signed but before anyone knew about it) meant that the USA kept Louisiana rather than possibly giving it back to France.

So it was a net loss at the time, but set the stage for westward expansion.

Incidentally one of the things that the USA was upset about is now international law. Namely the pressing of US citizens into the British navy. But today if a US citizen visits a country that also considers him a citizen, and that country drafts him into the military, the USA has nothing to say about it.

> But today if a US citizen visits a country that also considers him a citizen, and that country drafts him into the military, the USA has nothing to say about it.

I imagine that they might have something to say about it if the other country considered all US citizens to also be citizens of that other country. It's been a long time since I got this in school, but I also seem to recall that they weren't conscripting US citizens visiting Britain, they were boarding US merchant ships at sea to conscript the sailors.

It was not all US citizens. It was ones who were also UK citizens by Great Britain's laws.

That said, there were a lot of problems with how impressment worked. But that was separate from the question of whether becoming an American citizen made someone no longer a British citizen.

I admit that I don’t know the details of how citizenship was handled after the American revolution, but that was only about 30 years prior. My understanding is that the vast majority of American citizens were considered by the Crown to be British citizens.

It was definitely pitched to me that way in grade school, that until 1812 England basically considered the US to be a self-governing piece of the empire instead of an independent country.

My understanding is that Americans born in America were recognized not to be British citizens, but those born in Britain who later emigrated were considered British citizens.

That said, over a third of sailors on American ships were British citizens who were pursuing higher pay and better conditions.

And then per https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/summer/1... there is the case of Charles Davis, an Englishman impressed into the US navy. We have no records of how common that was.

The US will also happily draft non-citizens.

https://www.sss.gov/About/History-And-Records/Non-Citizens-a...

See also plan red: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red

Not sure if this will cause an uproar. An Indian by birth here. As I see it, this was just Britisher's fighting the other Britishers on land(s) that does not belong to them?

PS: I've not read the history of both the nations (yet to open the book 1491), but I do know what the Britisher's did to India.

I agree it mostly a British thing, but I say it was their land. Never in history has territory been invaded and capture and then partially given back to the people with special rights like it has in North America. I think native Indians should just be Canadian and that's it, none of this special rights seclusion bullshit. I never did get why we did it? I feel like it's not even helping or what most want, is it just a bad compromise at this point?

> The Americans also captured York (now Toronto) and burned several government buildings there, an act the British reciprocated the following year (1814) in Washington, D.C.

The Canadian version sounds better: "Yeah! We burned down the White House!".

It's amazing how many Americas have no clue the White House was burned down by an invading army.

Interesting what the US history books choose to leave out.

Did they? I remember studying about that in Elementary school. Maybe most people forget history from Elementary school I suppose? We went over the Civil War and the World Wars for quite a while in Elementary school.

We also studied the War of 1812. It was a crushing, symbolic defeat in battle for the fledgling nation, although it didn't make much difference in total.

Lots of interesting battles too. I live in the corridor between Detroit and Toronto. Battles all up and down those lakes

Contrary to popular legend in Canada, the White House was not painted white in the aftermath of the fire. But it’s amazing how much was destroyed, including the entire Library of Congress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

I learned about this while in school in the southern US. I doubt it's a case of 'US history books choos[ing] to leave out' and more a case of US students failing to recall details that have little/no impact on current events (unless you confuse rhetoric with current events, I guess)

The history books I read in school didn't leave it out. But they did leave out the impetus (i.e. American troops burning down civilian buildings in Canada).

It is because they aren't subscribed to The History Guy on YT. ;)

Wasn't left out of the history books I read.

There was a serious war going on at the time in Europe[0]. It featured the largest army of all time until then and almost a million casualties, compared to the 5,000 toll of this border skirmish. And incidentally inspired one of the best known classical music pieces.

If anything it's good that American kids don't learn of this trifle in school, allowing them more time to study the events that really shaped the modern world. Right?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia

Where I went to school (in the US, but there weren’t unified standards at the time), US and European history were taught separately, in alternate years. So we got both the war of 1812, and the Napoleonic Wars, but there was little to connect them to each other except for the dates.

French Canadian here...

My impression on the 1812 war is that if the French had won the 1759 Battle of Quebec ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Plains_of_Abraha... ) then they would likely have lost to the Americans in 1812 ... There would be no Canada today.

But of course, this is just speculation.

If the French had won something in 1759, it's entirely possible that the American Revolution in 1776 would never have happened or would have played out completely differently.

If there had never been the Seven Years war, the world would probably look a lot different. You can make an argument that the Seven Years war caused the American War of Independence, The French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and the Wars of Spanish American independence.

Well in 1812 the US army wasn't in good shape compared to the Armies on the continent.

After going through the comments, I landed on Burning of Washington entry on Wikipedia. Too bad that many people were killed but it makes for an interesting read:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

The next foreign attack on Washington DC would be on 9/11.

The War of 1812 is a fascinating study in the ways we record and teach history. The US teaches it as a US victory because the US got everything it went into the war looking for and repulsed a British invasion. Canada teaches it as a British/Canadian victory because they too got everything they went into the war looking for and repulsed an American invasion.

I'm American and it was taught as a stalemate. I think most history classes probably teach it that way, and that's the most accurate interpretation. Your average American likely remembers nothing about their history class so asking an average American if it was a US victory is meaningless.

Also it's not accurate to say the British got everything they wanted from the war. The Americans got the British to stop the impressment and harassment at sea, which is why the Americans declared the war to begin with. I think the British would have preferred not having the war at all in the first place since they had bigger issues with their own war with France.

I am also American and I also learned it was a stalemate. The most significant battle of the war was was fought two weeks after the war ended!

American historians think that the British complied with the meager settlement of Ghent because of the battle of New Orleans.

We did get a nifty song out of it.

Ditto, it was taught as a stalemate.

I don't remember if they taught the White House was burnt down in my history books.

I remember reading a article much later about someone from the US Patent Office begging the British Army not to burn down the Patent Office due to all inventions and history recorded there. They didn't, and that is my strongest recollection.

Whereas, like many wars, it should really be taught as a mutual loss: a useless conflict that neither side needed.

The US barely won the revolution.

Luckily during the war, a volcano (Laki, Iceland) threw Europe & much of the British empire (including India & Africa) into a multiyear drought, causing one of the coldest/longest winters in the USA.

About 3 months after the eruption formal negotiations to end the war began.

No eruption, possibly no USA but historical accounts I've seen rarely mention the role of mother nature.

I don't think the timing makes sense for that. The Laki eruption was eight months long. Three months isn't enough time for Britain to have felt economic pressure from crop failures and related impacts and then for that pressure to build into political change.

Seems possible with a powerful enough eruption. The UK is periodically affected by mild Icelandic volcanic activity and this reads like an extraordinary event.

"The system erupted violently over an eight-month period between June 1783 and February 1784 from the Laki fissure and the adjoining volcano Grímsvötn, pouring out an estimated 42 billion tons or 14 km3 (3.4 cu mi) of basalt lava and clouds of poisonous hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide compounds that contaminated the soil, leading to the death of over 50% of Iceland's livestock population, and the destruction of the vast majority of all crops. This led to a famine which then killed approximately 25% of the island's human population.[4] The lava flows also destroyed 20 villages.

The Laki eruption and its aftermath caused a drop in global temperatures, as 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide was spewed into the Northern Hemisphere. This caused crop failures in Europe and may have caused droughts in North Africa and India."

It goes on, in relation to the UK...

"Inhaling sulfur dioxide gas causes victims to choke as their internal soft tissue swells – the gas reacts with the moisture in lungs and produces sulfurous acid.[20] The local death rate in Chartres was up by 5% during August and September, with more than 40 dead. In Great Britain, the east of England was most affected. The records show that the additional deaths were among outdoor workers; the death rate in Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire and the east coast was perhaps two or three times the normal rate. It has been estimated that 23,000 British people died from the poisoning.[21]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki

I've never heard of this idea. That's fascinating!

The US did get a National Anthem out of it I guess...

And a burned down White House

And speaking of capitals: York, the capital of what would become Canada at the time was also burned down.

In fact, it's the reason the capital of Canada is Ottawa today. When the Province of Canada was established, it was deemed that York (which is now Toronto) was way too vulnerable since a US army could get there from Buffalo in less than a day and ships from Rochester even faster. By contrast, Ottawa (then called Bytown) was surrounded by swamps, further inland, well away from any US city, but still had access to rivers so it wasn't excessively isolated.

That and the fact that it was halfway between Toronto/Kingston (the English cities) and Montreal/Quebec City (the French cities) also made it a good political compromise.

So without that war, Toronto would probably be the Canadian capital and Ottawa would be a glorified rest spot between Toronto and Montreal.

It wasn't white when it burned down, only after to cover up the damage.

I was taught (in the USA) that in the end nothing substantial changed (i.e., it was essentially a stalemate). I think that is more or less true.

I can attest it's taught as a victory in Canada. Actually we're pretty proud of it, it was really the first time all of Canada, both French and English and native fought as one. The US was the aggressor, albiet not unprovoked, so we can also rightly be proud of defending our country successfully. Had it happened after the civil war with the much larger battle hardened union army - the outcome would have been very different (and pretty much anytime since.)

> the US got everything it went into the war looking for

> they too got everything they went into the war looking for

Did they even try trading beforehand? Going to war when there isn't a conflict of interests in the first place is particularly stupid.

The U.S. wanted Britain to stop kidnapping American sailors for its own war against France.

I'd say there was a major conflict of interest there.

Sounds just as convoluted as the Ukrainian crisis 6 years ago (and counting?)

I was taught ( in the US - Pennsylvania) that the US lost just about everything - in fact, the only victory was the Battle of New Orleans (?) that was actually fought AFTER the war was over but before word had reached the Americas. Plus there's that whole burning of the capital.

That said, it wasn't taught as a loss that we should learn any lesson from. Much like the Revolutionary War, it was just "oh heck, those crazy Brits vs the indomitable American spirit again!" If we weren't good allies of the British today, I wonder what the teaching would be like...

The US didn’t lose any territory.

It's certainly not taught as a US victory, at least in Pennsylvania. It was taught as a stalemate at best, with a final battle at the end that gave Andrew Jackson an impressive victory.

The US (well, the Continentals) invaded British Canada early during the Revolution for some of the same reasoning-- rally the ethnic French and deliver a blow to British North America. That effort failed as well.

The "Presidents of War" book touches this story from the U.S. prespective and with a little bit background information on US, UK relationship during that period.

If only the US had won, then all those canadian programmers in Vancouver and Toronto wouldn't have to migrate to get a decent paying job.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It was a joke, lighten up!

There's nothing stopping Canadian companies from paying the same wages as American companies.

There's one thing stopping them, not enough Canadian programmers are willing to vote with their feet. So the supply is too high in the labor market.

I do my part, whenever a recruiter contacts me on linked-in for a domestic position, I reply thanks but I don't work for Canadian companies.

I like it. Do you work remotely for US companies in Canada?

Usually, but now I work unpaid on my own venture. I made an exception for a couple months last year and worked for a Canadian company at US level wages. They let me go pretty quickly. I think I was too expensive for them.

The VC market isn't as overheated as it is in San Francisco.

"There's nothing stopping New York companies from paying the same wages as..."

And they've been overcompensating since

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