His Own People Tried to Shoot Him

Brigadier General George McClure was the most hated man in Buffalo, New York, in the bitter winter of 1813-1814. He complained to his commanding officer that the locals shot at him as he walked down the street. What could he possibly have done to deserve this? For he did deserve it, and worse.

Our story begins at Fort George, on the Canadian side of the Niagara River but occupied by the Americans in the autumn of 1813. Brigadier General McClure was in charge. Most of his troops, however, were militiamen, signed on for a short term of service. Their terms being up in early December, none of them could be persuaded to stay, either for patriotism or for promises of money.

Somehow, McClure claimed, the Canadians got wind of the fact that his militiamen had all gone home. Word came to him that the enemy was on the march. Rather than stick around and try to defend the fort with 60 effective regular troops and 40 militiamen, he gave the order to evacuate the fort. Instead of destroying the fort, however, McClure permitted Colonel Willcocks, a turncoat Canadian with a personal grudge against his countrymen, to burn the nearby village of Newark (now called Niagara-on-the-Lake) and cast the residents—women, children, and the aged—out into the pitiless Canadian winter. Many froze to death when the fires went out.

"The houses were generally vacant long before," McClure whined in a lying letter to the Secretary of War. "This step has not been taken without counsel and is in conformity with the views of Your Excellency disclosed to me in a former communication." With the village all in flames, McClure and his men fled across the river.

In the ditch at the abandoned (but hardly destroyed) Fort George, the Canadians were delighted to find "one long 18 pdr., four 12 pdrs., two 9 pdrs., an immense quantity of shot, with camp equipage for 1500 men." McClure had destroyed the village but left the fort intact.

The wanton burning of civilian homes was considered outrageous on both sides of the border. "The destruction and misery which this dastardly conduct has occasioned is scarcely to be described, women and children being the principal inhabitants have nowhere to place their heads," said the New York Evening Post.

So McClure started it. The Canadians were nothing loath to carry it on, this burning of civilian dwellings, even though their generals shed crocodile tears about the sad necessity of making war on American non-combatants.

The people of Buffalo and the other towns of the Niagara Frontier also blamed McClure. Then the British crossed over and took Fort Niagara in the night, torturing the sentry to find out the password and bayoneting most of the Americans when they let them in. Where was McClure when this was going on? Where was the commander of the fort? You may well ask. As the British advanced on Buffalo, torches in hand, only Colonel Cyrenius Chapin and his militia stayed to defend the town. McClure, hearing that the British were advancing in force, once again gathered his men and marched them out of harm's way.

As he left he denounced the people of Buffalo as a pack of damned rascals who deserved to have their houses burned over their heads. "There is not a greater rascal exists than Chapin, and he is supported by a pack of tories and enemies to our Government," he wrote to Governor Tompkins, in the hope that he would be believed. Naturally they shot at him. Who wouldn't?

Kate Gallison

Racism and the War of 1812

Those of you who have been following my career (What! You haven't been following my career? What's wrong with you?) are aware that I have become strangely obsessed over the past few years with the Anglo-American War of 1812.

I have a hard time explaining to people why this is so. It has something to do with being an American with Canadian forbears, most of whom refused to fight in that conflict, but instead went on happily and profitably trading with the Enemy. Why were we fighting? In the modern day it's hard to find an American who thinks there was a good reason for us to attack and murder the Canadians, even the native First Nations Canadians, who could be very ornery and cruel when annoyed. "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights" is a nice slogan, but going to war is beyond ugly.

I like that war, first of all because it's long over, and the passions that ignited it long dead, and secondly because it was a cesspit of irony. I like irony. Wherever you look in the historical records of that conflict you see surprising events that subtly undermine the patriotic narrative that both sides teach in school.

The latest book about the war that I've been able to get my hands on is The Documentary History of the Campaign Upon the Niagara Frontier In the Year 1813, Part IV, Collected and Edited for the Lundy's Lane Historical Society by Lieut.-Col. E. Cruickshank, F. R. S. C., 1907. Yes! Virtually a primary source! Mostly it's made up of letters back and forth between military officers about strategy, tactics, and their immediate concerns. And the first thing I learned from it was that Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, great war hero, a distant cousin of mine, tried to quit his station on Lake Erie before the famous battle where he whipped the British fleet ("We have met the enemy, and he is ours").

Why did he want to quit? Because he felt he had been insulted by Commodore Isaac Chauncey, his superior officer. When Perry asked for reinforcements for his lake fleet, Chauncey sent him a number of Black seamen and men who were officially in the army rather than the navy. Perry complained, and Chauncey wrote him the following: "…I have yet to learn that the colour of the skin, or cut and trimming of the coat can affect a man's qualifications or usefulness and I have nearly 50 blacks on board of this ship and many of them are among my best men, and those people you call soldiers have been to sea from 2 to 10 years, and I presume you will find them as good and useful as any men on board your vessel, at least if I can judge by comparison, for those that we have on board of this ship are attentive and obedient, and, as far as I can judge, many of them excellent seamen." Perry found his remarks personally insulting for some reason.

Fortunately for Perry and his country, the Secretary of the Navy talked him out of such a career-killing move. He went on to clear out the entire British Lake Erie fleet, after which he went home to New England, covered with glory. Next week I will attempt to sort out for you the rights of the feud between Lt. Col. Cyrenius Chapin and Brigadier Gen. George McClure, and the story of the burning of Buffalo. Hang by your thumbs.

Kate Gallison

Research and Development

Some years ago I got interested in the War of 1812. It was one of those strange obsessions, like the one the Dickens character had with King Charles's head. It will make more sense to you when I explain that my forebears were on this continent in those days, some in Canada and some in the States, and so personally involved. What was that like? I was curious. In the course of reading about that war, and about the border between Maine and New Brunswick, where the ancestors lived in those days, I came across the story of the Reverend Mr. Duncan McColl. An extraordinary man. A saint, if the Methodists had saints.

No doubt you've asked yourself from time to time, what if they gave a war and nobody came? It actually happened on the Saint Croix River. Duncan McColl made it happen. After many years of his labors to save souls, he had built up a huge congregation from both sides of the border, including most of the people in the towns of St. Stephen (Canadian) and Calais (American). Living as they were in Christian amity, they didn't want to fight each other when the American government declared war.

So they didn't.

Duncan McColl went to the magistrates to urge for peace. They formed a committee of the prominent men on both sides of the border to keep order. All went well. The following year, American troops showed up in Calais. Luckily, or by the grace of God, the commanding officer and many of his men were Methodists. Duncan McColl preached to them and they agreed to keep the truce. British troops came to the other side, but Mr. McColl talked to their officers also, and they, too, kept the truce. They say a load of gunpowder that the British authorities sent to St. Stephen for self-defense was given to Calais so they could have fireworks for a proper fourth of July celebration. A picnic, I'm thinking, although with no dancing. Duncan McColl was sternly against dancing.

Lest you think that Mr. McColl was some sort of milksop, let me assure you that before he answered the call to become a preacher of the Gospel he had a distinguished military career, serving in the Argyll Highlanders, the famous 74th Regiment of Foot, where he saw sharp action at Castine, Maine.

It's all in his memoirs. These were serialized in the British North American Wesleyan Methodist Magazine of 1841 and 1842, ten years after Mr. McColl's death, printed out in tiny blurry print almost illegible to human eye or optical character reader. I'm here to announce that I spent all of last week, something like fourteen hours a day, scanning, copying, and parsing his words (and the words of whoever edited and annotated his work for the magazine) with a view to putting the memoir up on Kindle in legible form. This I have done. As a result I'm almost blind from eyestrain. I would be happy to give it away, but 99¢ was the least Amazon would let me sell it for. Go get it here.

…And now I'm going to go rest my eyes.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Groping for the Zeitgeist

I see that today is the last day of January 2014. Have I gotten with the program? I can't say. I have dated no checks January 2013 by mistake. I look out the frost-covered windows at the snowy yard and say, yes, it's winter. So to that extent I'm properly oriented. I open the morning paper and see the latest political scandals and say, yes, that figures, that agrees with my worldview, particularly after three days of bingeing on old seasons of The Good Wife. So you could say that I sort of know what's going on.

Of course I know what's going on. I'm on Facebook, for heaven's sake. Are the puppies and kittens not still cute? Are the politicians not still making themselves ridiculous? Are my friends' books not still getting regularly published, to the joy of readers everywhere? Are the celebrities not enraging doctors with their weird diets and home-made facelifts?

And yet. As I fold up the paper, gulp down the last of my second cup of coffee, and close the window on Facebook, as I boot Word and gaze at the blank screen, I find that I have nothing to write.

Part of the problem is that I never really got over the bronchitis of last month. I still can't breathe well enough to go back to the church choir. Either from a general feeling of unfitness or as a result of the drugs I'm taking I feel detached from reality. Nothing compels my attention. I should finish Bucker Dudley, so that the three people who read the first chapters might know how it ends, but somehow I've become too balled up in the disastrous Niagara campaign to move forward (almost like General Wilkinson himself, may he rot, the bounder.)

Here's an idea. I might pick a fight with somebody. Wilkinson, that reprehensible scoundrel, is dead, as are all his legitimate heirs, if any, so he won't be fighting with me any time soon. But Congressman Michael Grimm. Most likely I would be safe from his most aggressive impulses, since there's no balcony here for him to throw me off of, and even he can figure out that breaking an old lady in two would reflect no particular credit on him. The famous tape where he threatens the newsman has subtitles, in case you can't hear what he's saying. Why not substitute other subtitles, the way people do in the famous Hitler video? I could have a lot of fun with that, work up enough energy to get back to my writing.

It might even go viral, engage the Hive Mind. I could get with the zeitgeist. Here goes.

(Later.) I have been somehow stripped of my powers. None of my video software is working, not on the Mac, not on the PC. See, this is the sort of thing I'm complaining about, or trying not to complain about. One by one the systems fail. Anyway here's the original video, in the unlikely event that you missed it. The reporter tries to ask Congressman Grimm in a perfectly mild-mannered way what was up with his campaign finance scandal and the Congressman offers to kill him. Big tough marine. Boo-yah. I'm going to have to ask you to imagine the new subtitles, where Grimm asserts that he's wearing his big boy pants now and offers to show the reporter that he has Batman on his bottom. Because I'm not able right now to edit this &%$#! video.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

The Eighth of January

You'll be happy to know that today marks the 198th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, the last big battle of the War of 1812. The British sailed around Florida after being repelled from Baltimore – You remember that fight, it was where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner – and attacked New Orleans. Little did the combatants know that a peace treaty had already been signed and the war was over. It proved to be another rout for the unhappy British, celebrated by the Americans in song and story. The Eighth of January pretty much tells it like it was, except for the part about the alligators.

Kate Gallison

The War of 1812 Is Heating Up

There's a new book out on the War of 1812: Gillum Ferguson's Illinois in the War of 1812. Probably one among many, but this one looks like a corker. Full disclosure: I haven't read it yet, because it's going to take me a while to scrape thirty-five dollars together. So this isn't a review. More of a heads-up for my fellow War of 1812 buffs.

One thing I can tell you about this book, without even reading it, is that the account of the Fort Dearborn Massacre will raise your hair. Metaphorically speaking.

James Madison and the U.S. legislative branch gave little thought to reinforcing (or even warning) the outlying forts when they declared war on Britain, in a fit of spleen, on June 18, 1812. No navy? No army? No problem. The first they knew in the fur-trading fort on the island of Michilimackinac that war had been declared was on July 17, when they were surrounded and captured. And so it went, fort by western fort.

On August 15, 1812, Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago, was evacuated by the Americans, who went off into the woods with an escort of "friendly" Potawatomi, headed, as they thought, for Fort Wayne and thence to Detroit (being surrendered even then to the British). They hadn't gone but a couple of miles when the Indians turned on them, killing eighty of them, men, women, and a wagonload of children, and enslaving most of the others. Potawatomi chieftain Black Partridge helped a few to escape. But most of the Indians, let's face it, behaved very badly.

So that was the sort of thing that went on during the War of 1812. The outcome of the war meant a lot to Illinois, as you can discover from Gillum Ferguson's Illinois in the War of 1812.

Kate Gallison

Embracing the New Year

Yes, folks, 2012 is here, probably not the year the world will end. I think we were a lot closer in 1953. Remember the doomsday clock? Remember how the authorities told us to duck under our desks and cover our heads? As if that would save us when the ICBMs came raining down. Remember the house the government built out in the desert somewhere, a nice split-level like the ones we all lived in, so that they could blow it up with an atomic bomb and show us the footage on TV? I particularly recall the venetian blinds, how they flew off the windows and sliced the dummies all up. Don't use venetian blinds, the voice-over guy told us. They'll cut you to ribbons before you have a chance to burn to death when the bombs come.

So I ain't scared of a bunch of dead Mayans. Our government has them way outclassed in the way of spreading the fear of the End. No, I'm looking forward to 2012, and the two-hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, one of my favorites, where Canada and the US fought to a draw and later on decided to be friends. Or earlier on, in the case of the St. Croix River Valley. In honor of the new year, and in the confident hope that I'll survive to see the end of it, I'm overhauling my web site yet again.

Check it out. Harold says I should get a focus group to look at it and tell me what they think. I started out by tinkering with the author photo, where I thought my face might be a tad too red. Nice photo, by the way; it was taken by photographer Maureen A. Vacarro, who likes a credit when I can fit one in. But I tinkered with it until I looked about three days dead, and I sort of liked it. Harold didn't, though. Of course he was right as usual and I put it back.

You'll notice that the page has a big white space in the middle. There I mean to post little YouTubes from time to time, new trailers and items of interest. You'll notice also that the links lead to the same old inner pages, which need work. I'll get to that. Also I have to post the press photos. Right now the press is not beating down my door for photos and interviews, but it never hurts to be ready.

And so, Happy New Year! Onward and upward!

Kate Gallison

Perhaps you're thinking, "She's gone mad"

Those of you who have been following my personal blog (kategallison.blogspot.com) for the past couple of weeks have doubtless noticed that I have embarked on a long rant about the War of 1812, the one we fought for two years against Britain. Perhaps you're asking yourselves, "What is she thinking? Here she has a new book coming out scarcely six weeks from now under the name of Irene Fleming, The Brink of Fame. It's about early twentieth-century Hollywood, not the War of 1812."

This is true. It's also true that under the name of Kate Gallison I'm hard at work writing a suspense novel, set in the present day, which has nothing to do with the War of 1812 either.

And yet. The story of Bucker Dudley, the girl who dressed as a boy and went to sea on a merchant ship, only to find herself pressed to serve on board the British frigate HMS Macedonian, is still rattling around in my head. I think it's worth pulling together. This is the tale I was telling my friend Donna Murray some years ago as she drove us to Pittsburgh to the Festival of Mystery. At a certain point in the story she became so enthralled that she nearly ran the car off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So it has a certain narrative force.

And I'm still fascinated with that war, the last armed conflict we had with the British.

I tuned in to BBC news the other day and saw two talking heads discussing economic conditions in California, which they said were not good and prefigured the general ruin of the United States. I thought I saw one of them smirk, like a spiteful cousin at the Thanksgiving table who hears that you've just lost your job. Yes, we fought them, two hundred years ago, a war between cousins. Some of it was glorious, most of it was kind of pathetic. I know a lot of stories about it, and I want to tell some of them, even though there are forty things I'm supposed to be doing instead, including publicizing Irene Fleming and The Brink of Fame. I just want to.

Or it may be that I've gone mad. Bwahaha.

Kate Gallison