esponsibility for English
policy. The "war hawks" of the South and West called loudly for the
speedy invasion and capture of Canada as a means of punishing England.
In so far as the British North American colonies were but possessions
of Great Britain, overseas plantations, the course of the United States
could be justified. But potentially these colonies were more than mere
possessions. They were a nation in the making, with a right to their own
development; they were not simply a pawn in the game of Britain and the
United States. Quite aside from the original rights or wrongs of
the war, the invasion of Canada was from this standpoint an act of
aggression. "Agrarian cupidity, not maritime right, wages this war,"
insisted John Randolph of Roanoke, the chief opponent of the "war
hawks" in Congress. "Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign
Relations came into the House, we have heard but one word--like the
whippoorwill, but one eternal monotonous tone--Canada, Canada, Canada!"

At the outset there appeared no question that the conquest of Canada
could be, as Jefferson forecast, other than "a mere matter of marching."
Eustis, the Secretary of War, prophesied that "we can take Canada
without soldiers." Clay insisted that the Canadas were "as much under
our command as the Ocean is under Great Britain's." The provinces had
barely half a million people, two-thirds of them allied by ties of
blood to Britain's chief enemy, to set against the eight millions of the
Republic. There were fewer than ten thousand regular troops in all the
colonies, half of them down by the sea, far away from the danger zone,
and less than fifteen hundred west of Montreal. Little help could
come from England, herself at war with Napoleon, the master of half of
Europe.

But there was another side. The United States was not a unit in the war;
New England was apathetic or hostile to the war throughout, and as late
as 1814 two-thirds of the army of Canada were eating beef supplied
by Vermont and New York contractors. Weak as was the militia of the
Canadas, it was stiffened by English and Canadian regulars, hardened by
frontier experience, and led for the most part by trained and able
men, whereas an inefficient system and political interference greatly
weakened the military force of the fighting States. Above all, the
Canadians were fighting for their homes. To them the war was a matter of
life and death; to the United States it was at best a s