Richard III wrote:
Sorry, Yankee friend, I'm happy that relations were normalized, but you're slightly off on two counts. York is York, not Yorke. Trust me; Greater Toronto is studded with names like City of York, City of East York, York Region, Fort York, York University, etc... This is not a coincidence!
Gosh, with a name as long and Polish as mine, and I'm being called a Yank! Thousand pardons. I wasn't correcting your spelling of "York". I vaguely recall reading of a "Yorke" somewhere, though not sure exactly in reference to what municipality.
But more importantly, Buffalo and Black Rock were burned, yes, but if it was in retaliation for York, it was more likely (given the theatre) in retaliation for the burning of Canada's Newark/Niagara on the Lake, which was directly across the Niagara river from the U.S. (and a place I might just live in someday, but I digress).
Indeed, the burning of the American side of the Niagara Frontier was in retaliation for George McClure's whole campaign of scorched Earth on the British side. I was lumping the burnings of York and Newark together because they were a part of the same campaign in the same way that "the burning of Buffalo" really means the burning of everything between the mouth and outlet of the Niagara River. McClure was an Irishman with little love for the British, and he took every opportunity to make their lives miserable. Interestingly, after the burning of Buffalo McClure had to flee for his life from American mobs who tried to lynch him, in the remains of Buffalo, in Batavia and Rochester. They blamed him both for the actions in Ontario and western New York.
So, don't forget the burning of Niagara on the Lake - the first major american "atrocity" of the war - which left the population largely homeless in the middle of a harsh winter. The decision to burn was criticized by American officers on the scene, if I remember correctly.
Yes indeed. There was another reason as well - the burning of Newark in particular wasn't just an American crime; there were about 100 very enthusiastic Canadian volunteers fighting on the American side led by a Joseph Willcocks who parttook in the burning, enthusiastically directing McClure where to burn. Some of the Canadians, including Willcocks himself (actually, he was a Brit transplanted to Ontario) had actually lived in Newark and were seen shouting insults and threats at their own former neighbors. Willcocks was a turncoat who had fought on the British side at Queenston Heights but was too radical for the stifling class system in Canada at the time, so he defected. Many of his ideas foreshadowed the democratic revolts across Ontario and Quebec a couple decades later.
Willcock's volunteers were American transplants (or sons thereof) who in the decade-and-a-half after the American Revolution before the Louisiana Purchase had migrated to British Canada for farmland. Someone in this thread had written already about how ridiculous it was that the Americans of 1812 could believe that their own former, loyalist compatriots who fled the Revolution would ever welcome an American invasion, and that indeed is ridiculous. However, the Americans were counting on the support of these American farmers who left after the Revolution in search of cheap or free land, not political beliefs. Madison also hoped the French Canadians would join them, but while Quebec was not enthusiastic about British rule it had little to gain living under American rule (because of the very apt Quebec Act of the 1760s).
So, well we can all quibble about the order, as you can see, you guys burnt first in two theatres, and what goes around comes around!
The War of 1812, especially along the border between the U.S. and the British colonies to the north, had many atrocities, enough for everyone to share. Have you ever read Pierre Berton's historical-fiction account of trhe war, Flames Across the Border? He recounts in the intro how Americans today learn about Detroit, and the burning of Buffalo and Washington while Canadians learn about York (proper spelling) and Newark, with nearly all sides (Americans, Canadians, Brits) feeling convinced they won the war somehow. Any objective reading however shows that all three lost much more than they gained, (Berton contends). This is why some have claimed this war should be included in this thread, because it seemingly had no clearly resolved ending. I've argued though that this very lack of a clear ending gave the impetus for all sides to come to a reasonable agreement in the decades after the war on borders and relations.
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The burning of Washington was in direct retaliation.
