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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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>> Mary Lou Reker:  Hello, my name is Mary Lou Reker, and on behalf of the Library of Congress' Office of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center, I welcome you to a lecture by Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, entitled, "When the U.S. Went to War with Canada:  Competing Narratives of the 1812 War."  Now, first of all, I want to remind you to be sure your cellphones are off, and that if you should ask any questions at the end of the session, it constitutes permission for us to record those questions.  And I also want to thank the John W Kluge family for their continued support of the Kluge Center and the wonderful fellowships that have brought so many scholars to us.  If you want to learn about more about our programs, just go to loc.gov/Kluge, K-L-U-G-E.  

Dr. Godeanu-Kenworthy received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Bucharest in 2006.  Her dissertation, which was on "British Colonialism in 19th Century Canada," received the Best Doctoral Thesis in Canadian Studies award as granted by the International Council for Canadian Studies.  She is a lecturer in the American Studies Department of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and prior to this, was an Assistant Professor in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Spiru Haret University in Bucharest.  Dr. Godeanu-Kenworthy's research looks at Canada against the historical intersect of British and American interests.  Her work has been published in a number of journals, including the "Journal of European Studies," the "American Review of Canadian Studies," the "Early American Studies Journal," and the "Central European Journal for Canadian Studies."  She has contributed articles and chapters to edited volumes published in Romania, Poland and Serbia, and her book, which she has been working on this year under her Kluge Fellowship, is currently under contract to the University of Toronto Press.  Please help me welcome her today, Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Dr. Godeanu-Kenworthy:  Thank you all for being here.  And before I start, I want to say how grateful I am for having had the opportunity to be here at the Kluge Center to research every day in this beautiful building.  It's been a great experience.  Thank you, Mary Lou, thank you, Calan [phonetic], and all the staff at the Kluge, and our interns -- I see Becky in the audience -- thanks for making this a very productive stay.  

My talk today draws upon the book manuscript, which I completed during my stay at the Kluge and which deals with the literary representations of the U.S. in colonial Canada.  My focus is on the relationship between 19th century debates surrounding republicanism and popular democracy and the literary image of the U.S. in colonial Canada.  My argument is that because of the similarities between, particularly English Canada in the U.S., the emphasis on the political distinctions and the values that upheld the two forms of government, the two communities embraced, are central to the shaping of almost decentralized national images about the U.S. in Canada.  Right now, I will focus on the role of the War of 1812 in the articulation of a Canadian colonial response to the American cultural nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s.  First, I will give a full presentation of the War and of the role of memory of the War of 1812 in Canadian cultural nationalism.  Then I will turn to discussing how narrativizing the War in the fiction of a colonial Canadian writer, John Richardson, fits in the political context of the decade of the 1830s, early 1840s.  And I will contrast, I will conclude by contrasting Richardson's fictional work and fictional use of the past and of North American geography with that of his contemporary and model, the American writer, James Fenimore Cooper.  

A short historical background.  In Canada and the U.S., the nation building process happened at different times and responded to different needs.  In the U.S., the military and political struggles of 1776 galvanized a sense of nationalism early on, so that American artists, journalists, cultural elites in general, were virtually, from the moment of political independence, concerned with the developing a native literature.  American literary nationalism stemmed from the need to create a cultural break with England to parallel the political break, the revolution.  Before Herman Melville, before Whitman, before "Moby Dick" and "Leaves of Grass," there was Fenimore Cooper who successfully integrated North American content into British templates.  His Leatherstocking saga featured the adventures of Natty Bumppo in the American West of the late 18th century, and adapted the model of Sir Walter Scott, romantic historical fiction, to these North American historical events, which he used to craft a usable past for the new nation.  As I will show in my talk, the same 18th century past is used by Canadian John Richardson to try to create a usable past for the Canadian colonies still within the empire.  

Cooper effectively inaugurated this new genre frontier fiction, which spawned multiple imitators, and he casts North America as the cradle of the new American nation, the North American wilderness as the crucible of American character, and the anticolonial struggle with Britain as the defining moment of the nation's history.  Yet, continental history looked different from north of the Great Lakes.  Britain took over Quebec after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and thus inherited the French-speaking Catholic colony in the New World alongside the rest of its American possessions.  The Treaty guaranteed the French colonists their cultural and religion rights, and the status was reinforced by the Quebec Act of 1774, which extended the boundaries of the colony onto the Ohio Valley.  You see on the map on the left the boundaries of the province of Quebec in 1774, and extended French law and practice of Catholicism to that region.  Incidentally, this is one of the grievances in the American Declaration of Independence, the fact that French law had been introduced in those territories, which had been until then, under English law.  

The British Empire was no evil oppressor in Canada, but rather at the core of local allegiances.  Between 1776 and 1783, 30,000 loyalists had left the American republic and took their possessions, abandoned their homes, and trekked north in order to be in the territory still under the British crown.  This influx of loyalist anglophones changed the demographics of Canada, bringing a sizeable population that wanted to live under English law and worship in their own way.  So this led to the division of the province of Quebec in 1791 into upper and lower Canada.  And you see on the map, lower Canada was French Canada, upper Canada was roughly the equivalent of southern Ontario of today.  Each had its own legislative assembly and government, and these two colonies were to continue separate until 1841 when they were united into the province of Canada with one legislative assembly.  This is the period during which the novel that I'm going to focus on was written, Canada in the years preceding the union of French and English Canada, and the decades after the War of 1812.  In other words, oh, this is the dominion of Canada, which was created in 1867, and even then, it only included the eastern part of what we know today as Canada, adding the maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to the province of Canada created in 1841.  So at the time when, in the 1840s, American cultural nationalism was in full swing, and while American writers were struggling to create a native literature to match the political entity of the U.S., Canada was facing multiple challenges when it came to identifying a cohesive, consistent narrative about its national identity.  

There were three main challenges.  First, the internal division between French and English in Canada, which led to competing views of history.  The French saw themselves as a conquered people and resisted integration into a narrative of national identity or colonial identity under the British rule.  The second was precisely the supranational framework of allegiance provided by the British Empire, which meant that most English Canadians even defined themselves as British rather than Canadians and thought about the transoceanic community of the Empire as their extended home.  And the third challenge was the threat of cultural and territorial imperialism from the U.S.  Culturally, Canadian colonists read American periodicals, Canadian writers published in Canadian, as well as in American periodicals.  They had close family contacts south of the border.  And the other source of cultural influence came from American settlers that moved north into the crown land and by taking simply an oath of allegiance to the crown, they could get free land.  So they brought with them their value, their mores, their political views, a preference for certain forms of organization, and, like the War of 1812 will show, their loyalty to the Canadian colonies was viewed as tenuous in the case of an American military aggression.  But most importantly, there was no sustained centralized movement to create a national literature.  Although the 1840s do mark in Canada a growing interest in the teaching of colony history, in the creation of monuments and celebrating the past, Canadian literature as a discipline only came into existence in the 1960s.  However, as my research in early Canadian writing shows, there was a sense of Canadian distinctiveness prior to the Confederation of 1867, although it did not build upon separation from the British Empire, but rather upon continuity with it.  Early Canadian fiction tried to craft stories that would reconcile all these three dimensions of Canada realities and struggle to craft a coherent story about the community, its past, and the future.  In John Richardson's fiction, the War of 1812 emplots the same history and geography that American authors were using south of the border, but with a goal of asserting Canadian loyalty to the British crown.  

Now, a few words about the War.  The War started as an extension of the Napoleonic wars in North America, or the North American battlefield, so to speak.  But it also reflected unresolved tensions between Britain and the U.S.  There were three main problems that marred Anglo-American relations after the Revolution.  First, Britain provoked the U.S. in 1807 by banning neutral powers from trading with France, and this disturbed American trade and upset many people.  Second, there was the Impressment Controversy, which was actually at the center, or the main reason for the war as it was declared.  So in order to refurnish a depleted army, the British government declared that over 2,000 British subjects were serving in the American Merchant Marine.  So the Navy routinely intercepted U.S. ships in the high seas and impressed sailors on board on the grounds that they were British subjects.  Now, these were primarily Irish immigrants or British immigrants to the U.S. that had been naturalized.  But by impressing them, by taking them in that way, the British government refused to acknowledge that a British subject could be turned into an American citizen through naturalization.  I'll get back to this and to the symbolism of the Impressment Controversy later.  The third concern centered around the creation of an Indian state.  Between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley, this was a project that was supported by the powerful fur lobby in Montreal, because they viewed an Indian state as providing a buffer against American competitors from encroaching on their turf.  And the British promised support for the creation of this.  The alliance of Britain with Native Americans was to offer much fodder to American propaganda both before and during the War of 1812.  

Now the less acknowledged issue had simply to do with the desire to annex Canada.  By the early 1810s, resentment against Britain had inspired a loud faction of Republicans in Congress to call for war.  These politicians came primarily from the western states, so restrictions on trade or the impressment of American sailors did not affect them directly.  They called for war.  They claimed it was going to be an easy, cheap, painless war that would expand the boundaries of the U.S.  When President Madison signed the Declaration of War against Britain in 1812, the U.S. War Hawks, and there's a photograph of War Hawk, Henry Clay, who was Speaker of the House and pushed for the War, and he was also one of the American dignitaries that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that concluded the War.  So they couched this war as they held the conflict as a second war of independence, and presented it in the language of a war to liberate Canada from the British imperial yolk.  This is a photograph of the Declaration of War.  It's in the Library of Congress holdings.  Now, much like the American Revolution before it, the War of 1812 was a civil war fought among essentially similar groups of people divided by allegiance to different forms of government, rather than by a language, religion or ethnicity.  The impressment that I mentioned earlier opened the not yet healed rift, which the American Revolution had introduced in British national self-definitions, because the conflict, as I said, pivoted on the contentious boundary between being a king's subject and the republic citizen.  Citizenship was chosen.  It had been chosen in the Revolution.  It was chosen again by immigration by individuals.  Whereas being a British subject was something that was established at birth.  And by denying that the Americans could convert a subject into a citizen through the process of naturalization, Britain was symbolically refusing to acknowledge the national sovereignty gained by the War of Independence.  But defending one's country in the war also tested allegiances to a particular country, and also the legal categories of citizen and subject.  The tenuousness of the line dividing British subjects from American citizens in the War underpinned the rhetoric of the conflict and justified many of the strategies employed.  For instance, a month after President Madison had declared war, the governor of Michigan, General William Hull, marched into Detroit, and because he didn't have enough men to take the garrison across the river, he thought it would be a good strategy just to invite the Canadian militia to dessert and join the American troops.  So he launched a proclamation that is, again, in the holdings of the Library of Congress, the Proclamation of General Hull, encouraging them to abandon their posts, and hoping that left without the Canadian militia and just with a handful of British regulars, the Amherstburg garrison would be easily taken.  

Now the proclamation was printed in English and French and encouraged neutrality, but also warned against those who resisted the invasion.  This is a paragraph from the proclamation.  I want draw your attention to the part that states that, "No white man found fighting by the side of an Indian will be taken prisoner.  Instant destruction will be his lot."  Now, this proclamation hinted at the widely used practice of including Indian warriors in the British troops and American soldiers, as well as American settlers, were terrified of the natives, and this fear was an important factor in the war.  This is a cartoon at the time criticizing the British use of savages, were portrayed as barbaric and not respecting the civil conventions of warfare.  As I will show later, there was an entirely different perception and construction of the British-Native alliance on the Canadian side.  So basically, Hull's proclamation offered a proposition of integration in the U.S. if Canadian militiamen chose to become citizens and abandon their British positions, but also represented a threat, because British-led forces in Canada almost always included Indians, so that any militiaman doing his duty would have been risking execution if captured by Hull.  Now, the threat of American invasion drew Canadians together, and even the French Canadians who were unhappy with the British occupation decided to throw their lot in with the crown for fear that an American rule would take away their linguistic and religious rights, which the British rule had guaranteed.  The way that war was remembered after its conclusion emphasized this cooperation.  This is a painting of the time showing a battle of Canadian victory under a French Canadian officer when American forces were heading for Montreal and the Canadian militia stopped them.  Not only victories, but also defeats, helped afford a sense of Canadian solidarity in the war.  In April 1813, the Americans launched a raid across Lake Ontario to York, present day Toronto.  The provincial capital, complete with public buildings, a garrison, a weapons store, and as the British troops retreated, the American soldiers went on a looting spree and ransacked every unoccupied house and burned down the upper Canadian Parliament to the ground.  Another defeat, which is celebrated on the American side, but also remembered on the Canadian side, is the Battle of Moraviantown where U.S. troops crushed the Canadian militia and killed the Shawnee leader, Tecumseh.  This is a painting presenting the death of the Indian leader.  

Now what happened in York served as precedent for the other iconic episode in American national mythology connected to the War of 1812, because in August 1814, the British, under Admiral Cockburn, marched directly on Washington and inflicted upon the city the same treatment the American troops had inflicted on York.  The capital was burned to the ground, and the White House was burned and ransacked.  It is said that President Madison had to flee the White House and left behind a fully prepared meal, which the British soldiers enjoyed before trashing the place.  And this is a British cartoon presenting the fall of Washington.  And I don't know if you can read the captions basically suggesting that Madison is fleeing and is going into the arms of his friend, Napoleon.  This is another set of illustrations that showed the burning capital, the burned capital, and the portrait of Admiral Cockburn and the background is the burning capital.  The end of the Napoleonic War in Europe sealed the fate of the conflict in North America, because more troops were free to be sent to Canada.  So Britain and the U.S. negotiated peace at Ghent two weeks before the famous American victory at New Orleans.  There is Andrew Jackson, a central figure in this image.  So the battle of New Orleans and the American victory of New Orleans was an unnecessary carnage because the American and British governments had already decided to reaffirm the status quo from before the War.  So the Anglo-American was over in 1814, at least 15,000 combatants had been killed or wounded, and nothing had been changed.  The three-year conflict amounted to little more than a series of stalemates in which both sides won and lost battles, celebrated heroes, and boasted their respect of national identities.  The most tragic stories, that of the Indian nations involving the conflict, because the end of the war brought little change to the white power balance in the region.  At Ghent, Great Britain betrayed again her allies and gave up support for the creation of the Indian state when it became clear that the United States was not going to accept it.  

The War was not a unanimous idealogical success on either side.  In Canada, some of the more recent immigrants went back to the U.S., the immigrants that had moved from the U.S. north just for free land.  Others felt ambivalent about fighting the Americans, so they just refused to join the militias.  On the American side, the Federalists were vocal opponents of the War.  The New England states protested the War and even threatened with succession.  But in retrospect, the War managed to galvanize the public imagination in the decades after its end, and remolded, in the long run, the political and cultural fault lines of North America.  Both countries emerged from the war thinking it had won with fortified self-images of rounds of liberty and generations of historians on both sides claimed victory.  The U.S. promised its citizens an empire of individual liberty and democratic government, which, of course, drew the boundaries of citizenship around whiteness, while north of the border, British North America defined itself as an empire of ordered liberty anchored in hierarchy and constitutional monarchy, and ostensibly inclusive of multiethnic differences.  The greatest legacy of the War in British North America had to do with its place in Canadian cultural nationalism.  The War transformed the collective identity the same way as the American Revolution had done for the U.S.  It made Canadians choose between monarch and republic, it asked them to fend off an invasion by a larger power, and it required many residents to balance their personal and local loyalties with allegiance to the British rule.  Only this time the supporters of the empire won, the American Republicans lost, so that Canadian nationalist historians were able to fold their War together with the earliest loyalist migration, and effectively rewrote the story of the defeat of 1776 into a tale of national redemption and unity.  

Today in the U.S., the War is more or less a forgotten conflict overshadowed by the symbolic prominence of the Revolution and the Civil War in national mythology.  And although 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the conflict, with the exception of states directly affected by the war, such as Maryland, there's little done on the federal level to commemorate the event, which is very different from the massive efforts to celebrate the anniversary of the War in Canada.  What's interesting is that in the U.S., the War is cast as a war with Britain, which overshadows the Canadian involvement in the conflict, the role of Canada in starting the conflict, and allows for this re-reading and re-celebration of the war as a second war of independence.  On the Canadian side, the War is remembered as a war with the U.S. in which French Canadian natives, English Canadians fought against a common enemy.  Now in the 1830s and 1840s when the novel I'm going to talk about in the rest of my talk was written, the colonies were trying to figure out their future and North America.  In 1837 and 1838, there were two violent colonial rebellions that were, although they had more complex causes, they were largely perceived to be the result of republican influence on Canadian mores.  Politically, the end of 1812 had repositioned Canada at the interface of two ideological realms structured around two forms of government:  American republicanism and British constitutional monarchy.  And as the 19th century was gradually morphing into an idealogical contest between monarchy and republic, Canada became a testing ground for colonial policies meant to see if democracy and self-government were compatible with a constitutional monarchy.  

The existence of a loyal and monarchical Canada right next to a democratic republic in the U.S. would have legitimized and validated the organizing principles of the British Empire at a time when the American model was becoming more and more powerful, and American political life was becoming more populous, starting with Andrew Jackson's presidency.  The Canadian political culture held republicanism and popular democracy and mistrust, and this was not a midnight [inaudible] phenomenon, nor was it uniquely Canadian, because starting with the American Revolution, and even more so, after the French Revolution, European politicians, philosophers, and artists alike had voiced their skepticism toward the future of republics and expressed doubts about the desirability or possibility of absolute equality and the rule of the people.  In Canada, the society was not an exact replica of the mother country; it was more democratic.  But the choice between monarchy and republic, any debates, colonial debates surrounding the introduction of more democratic elements in the government of the province always kept in mind a larger choice that the colonists felt they had to make between being British and being American.  There's always a constant association between national identity and support for a particular form of government over the other in the early Canadian texts that I have examined.  So colonial authors reflected on British-ness, imperialism and the incompatibility between American and Canadian cultures.  And their writings can be best understood by situating them in this idealogical context, which projected the British North American colonies to the forefront of more general speculations about the future of the monarchy as a political institution and its chances of survival in a democratic world.
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Major John Richardson was born in 1796 in Queenston on the Canadian side of the Niagara River.  He was the grandson of a prominent loyalist who owned large tracts of land in the Niagara region, and was part Ottawa through his maternal grandmother, although he cultivated his public persona as a white, British, protestant male.  But his writings show great sensitivity to issues of race.  His portrayal of Native Americans is very nuanced and one can explain this through his awareness of his heritage, as well as through a very intimate experience with natives in the house of his grandfather.  He personally met Tecumseh.  He fought alongside him in the War of 1812, and he was only 15 when he joined Canadian militia.  He was captured by the American troops, was a war prisoner in Kentucky for a year, and then he spent the rest of his life, after his release, as a half-pay officer in various points of the Empire.  In 1838, at the end of the colonial rebellion, as I mentioned, he was sent to Canada as a correspondent for the London Times, but he only remained in the country eight years.  While here, he tried his hand at politics, journalism, started a literary magazine, wrote the history of the War of 1812, and petitioned the government to have it used in schools, because he was appalled to find out that Canadian school children learned history from American textbooks, who he said told an entirely different story about the War and who the bad guys were.  And in 1840, he published the "Canadian Brothers."  Now his efforts to start a literary nationalist movement in Canada failed.  He couldn't make a living from his literary magazine, and in 1849, ironically, he moved to New York where he wrote pulp fiction for the rest of his life.  

Together with its prequel, published in 1832 in London, "Wacousta," the "Canadian Brothers" is now part of the National Literary Canon, because it tells a story of the foundation of Canada within the framework of empire.  Like I said, Richardson modeled his work on Sir Walter Scott's fiction, but also on Fenimore Cooper's frontier romances.  His goal was to offer an alternative to American interpretation of North American history and geography, and thus try to reconcile the colonial and local dimensions of belonging in Canada by offering his readers a national past.  And he invented a national past in which natives are French Canadians and English Canadians were all participants, equal participants, into a British struggle for freedom against a republican chaos to the south.  Now, the story of the "Canadian Brothers" focuses on two Canadian brothers in the background of the War of 1812.  During a routine operation, one of the brothers, Gerald, captures an American ship.  On board he meets the beautiful and mysterious American, Matilda Montgomerie, falls in love with her, and is ready to sacrifice his career and duty to be close to her.  His brother, Henry, watches Gerald's growing infatuation and Gerald's gradual descent into depression and alcoholism as he struggles with his love for the American woman.  Throughout the novel, Gerald is the loyal brother who tries to pull his brother back to his duty in the war, and as the story unfolds, we're informed that Matilda is the daughter of an American spy living in Canada.  In the pursuit of his romantic obsession with Matilda, Gerald is also involved in the historical events of the war, which enables Richardson to include them in his story, but in the end, he returns to his garrison.  Although, consumed by guilt, the return to his duty is not a happy ending, and he dies on the battlefield at [inaudible], accidently killed by his own brother who mistakes him for an American.  The brother is also killed by Matilda's American father.  Everybody dies.  As a hybrid between a frontier tale and a historical novel, the "Canadian Brothers" is, in many ways, an imitation of Cooper's frontier novels, which were so popular during the 19th century and even later.  

Now I argue that Richardson's use of the land, of the frontier and of the past in his fiction departs from Cooper's model in ways which illuminate the particular take, Canadian take, on North American history.  First, Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" locates the origin of the American character in a struggle between wilderness and civilization.  Natty's adventures in the North American forests of the 18th century are constantly juxtaposed to references to the settled geography of the American republic in the 1820s and the 1830s.  And references to the continent's colonial past exist, but they're marginal to the overall thrust of the series and positive as irrelevant to the course of development of the young republic.  By contrast, Richardson's Canadian community emerges as a result of war and as a result of a choice of political allegiances and commitment to a form of government.  In other words, the frontier, which, in Cooper's fiction, separates wilderness from civilization, is, in Richardson's fiction, an idealogical borderland dividing the American republic from British monarchy.  Second, Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, flees settlement.  His journeys into the wilderness offer him on open path for individual self-exploration and discovery.  He rejects the frontier -- sorry, he embraces the frontier and rejects the rules that settlement brings about.  And as such, he's coded as the true American, the one that really imbued the spirit of the new land, is an individualistic, self-reliant frontiersman who rejects the conventions associated with the old world and in the context of Cooper's novels with the East Coast.  To Richardson, by contrast, it's the community rather than the wilderness that offers safety and protection.  And the novel's naturalization of the War of 1812 frames the conflict as a clash between Canadian communitarianism and loyalty to the crown, and American individualism and republicanism.  Matilda is a temptress.  But the temptation she represents also is a temptation of individual desire and over the duty toward the community.  Significantly following one's impulses and desires is not liberating.  As I said, Gerald is depressed, is consumed by guilt, succumbs into alcoholism, and his brother's efforts to get him back to the garrison dramatized the pull of the community as the safeguard against the destructive effects of personal desires and impulses.  

Conversely, the North American frontier is coded differently by the two authors.  The Canadian characters flee into the wild when they abandon their duty, but the forest is not presented as a place of freedom, but as a place of chaos and anarchy.  The law, or respect for the law, is also used as markers of nationality, the law-abiding Canadians versus the lawless Americans.  The most powerful scene of the American characters in the novel as rejecting conventions of all sorts are in the scene where Matilda's father hides -- the spy -- hides in the Canadian woods and commits cannibalism, but in an ultimate reversal of Gothic convention, he eats Indian flesh.  So when he is caught by two American officers he says, I do not eat American subjects.  The American law has no right to do anything to me.  The third difference between Cooper and Richardson is their use of the natives in fiction.  Richardson uses the war to craft a national epic that includes the natives, rather than exclude them.  Cooper's frontier is the place where the Indian tribes vanish in the wilderness, dying away as the young republic takes over.  To Richardson, the wilderness is never presented as about to be domesticated, nor are the natives picturesque appendages of the wild.  There are no certainties about the success of European settlement.  

Reflecting historical realities.  The natives are vigorous partners and allies in war, and what unites them to the British and Canadian characters in the novel is their loyalty to the crown.  Rather than isolated psychics, the white characters, like Natty's Indian friends in Cooper's novels, Richardson's characters are included in the Canadian community forced in conflict.  For instance, the concept occupies a central role in the plot of the novel.  He and the two Canadian brothers, Gerald and Harry, fight side by side against Americans, and he's a valued military leader whose suggestions are followed by British officers.  He's described in terms which challenge the typical portrayals of the natives in frontier fiction.  The language Richardson uses in describing him and the motives behind his decision to make an alliance with the British is a language of European conventions of warfare.  The Indians are patriots fighting for their country against American aggression and abuse.  And by doing so, Richardson rhetorically cancels out the common accusations on the American side that Britain was using savages in the war.  Throughout the novel, what we have is a presentation of military alliances strategically made because of the love for country rather than using the natives as tools in war.  This is a watercolor published at the turn of the century that captures this sense of native British relations in the 1812 War.  You see the British, General Isaac Brock, who's also a hero of the war and a Canadian imaginary, and Tecumseh, shaking hands as equals, equal partners in military conflict.  

Conclusions.  So the War of 1812 serves as the background against -- John Richardson crafts a story of Canadian loyalty, which has potential relevance for the choices Canada had to make in the 1840s as the two provinces were united and were pushing for self-government.  The choice was whether to pursue a form of government that would bring them closer to the American model and possibly incorporated into the U.S., or to find a balance, to find a middle way that would reconcile membership in the Empire with more presentation on the colonial level.  First, the conflict functions as a usable test that legitimizes the continuity of the British imperial rule in North America, and the same war which is hailed south of the border as a second war of independence becomes, under Richardson's pen, the ultimate test of Canadian allegiances to constitutional monarchy and to the emotional bonds of empire.  Rather than granting symbolism to the frontier as the cradle of a future nation, Richardson frames North American wilderness as an idealogical frontier.  The choice is emotional as much as rational, allegiance to the crown, but also commitment to the best form of government.  And the result of this choice will be a continuum which recasts colonial history from early settlement into self-rule in the 1840s and Commonwealth later on, but in which empire remains the center element of Canadian self-definitions.  

Second, the novel uses the War as a crucible in which natives, American loyalists, English Canadians and French Canadians, have the opportunity to fore go their differences and discover their shared values by fighting against the common enemies.  And this native of the War proved particularly resilient inasmuch as it served later 20th century policies of multiculturalism and their importance for Canadian self-definitions to this day.  And third, to Richardson, historical fiction is the vehicle of a national fantasy, not only of indigeneity, but also of a British-ness predicated on cultural affinities which are essentialized as national characteristics.  Canadian-ness becomes dependent on the rejection of the American form of government, but also in support of a set of values incompatible, or described as incompatible with American ideology.  The very conceptual categories, which Richardson uses to define his characters, construct his plots, reflects his constant negotiation between the two national meta-narratives competing in a North American world.  To the lawlessness of the American republic or the perceived lawlessness of the American republic, the British North American space articulates a local identity rooted in tradition, lawfulness and conservatives, as markers of a civility in which all Canadians could share.  American narratives of liberty predicated on individual will and individual rule are coded as anarchic and dangerous.  Republicanism and popular democracy become symbols for organized selfishness in early Canadian fiction, and the community emerges as the only protector against one's own instinct.  In the "Canadian Brothers," the community is multifaceted, and it evolves from the family, which in the plot of the novel, is represented by the pull of fraternal love, the brother that tries to get Grantham back to his duty; to the nation, as in -- to the garrison, sorry, represented by the Grantham's fellow officers, particularly, General Brock, who appears in the novel; to the nation, or the colony, as in Canada, and to the larger transoceanic community of the British Empire.  Going back to the community rather than following one's individual impulses is the final choice of the protagonist, because imperial law, in Richardson narrative, the War of 1812, the defining form of freedom that shapes Canada.  Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Shall we open it up for questions?
>> Dr. Godeanu-Kenworthy:  Yes.
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[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:47:23
Well, I can start with the second question, because the First World War represents the kind of endpoint of what is called Canadian imperialism.  Canadian imperialism started in the second half of the 19th century, and it doesn't represent, it doesn't mean the same thing as imperialism as we understand it today.  It meant commitment to the idea of, to the community of greater Britain.  There were talks about creating an imperial federation, bringing the colonies more representation for the colonies in London, but the sense of belonging to greater Britain was very powerful in the second half of the 19th century and into the turn of 20th century.  But World War I marks the end of that point.  This is when allegiance to this idea, abstract idea, of the British Empire starts to falter.  I would say, perhaps because there's less perception of the U.S. as a kind of an enemy from which Canada needed protection, but also because the War asked Canadians to fight and test their allegiance in a war that could not be idealogically in any way supporting a sense of Canadian-ness.  But the War marks the end of allegiance, the kind of powerful allegiance to empire that characterized second half of the 19th century.  As to the first part of your question to the conceptual use of nation, what I -- this is something that I'm struggling with in the sense that for early Canada, the nation state was not something that was pursued in any way.  There was a sense of a colonial community and allegiance to the colony, but as that colony was part of imperial framework.  Early Canadian definitions of, or self-definitions as I discover them in my research, in a way, bypass the model of the nation state.  They show the possibility of kind of articulating belonging in terms that are not predicated on separation from empire on clearly the limited nation state.  And this existed in parallel with what became the dominant model for the New World, like the American model, the republic, separation from empire, nationalism.  It's interesting, imagine communities, Benedict Anderson just dismisses Canada to an alliance like, well, that was the exception of the rule.  But I find it fascinating that there is an enduring strategy of articulating identity that does not need the nation state.  The term that I also use is cultural patriotism more than nationalism, because I try to capture this sense of allegiance to the community that is more flexible and allows for allegiance to the Empire at the same time.  Early Canadians did not see any contradiction between defining themselves as British and Canadians at the same time.  I don't have that answer to your question.  Yes?
^M00:50:47
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:51:00
Well, my first experience with how -- I have not studied how it's taught, anecdotally because the first time I went to Canada for research, I was talking to a student and he said, yes, the War of 1812 is when we fought the Americans and we beat them.  My American students don't really know much about the War of 1812.  I would say that the way it's remembered, based on what I see around me, is more like a series of vignettes, I mean in the U.S., vignettes that kind of complement the nation-building process inaugurated by the American Revolution.  So there's the "Star Spangled Banner," and there's the Battle of New Orleans, there's a kind of a reaffirmation of British, of American separation from Britain.  But I couldn't tell you how it's taught in schools, so if anybody has a better sense of how it's taught, that would be good to hear.  [inaudible comment]  No, that would be fascinating, yes.
^M00:52:04
[ Inaudible comment ]
^M00:52:13
Yeah, I know, I have --  Yeah, I know.  [inaudible comment]  Yeah, true.  I don't know, I haven't come across any documents.  I don't even know if there were any written that would be any written documents capturing.
^M00:52:33
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:53:44
Well, this is not something that I'm concerned with, but it is, there's a great book by Andrew Cayton called "The Dominion of War," and part of it deals with the legacy of French settlement in the New World in terms of native European relations of the French.  His argument is that the, the second British Empire inherited many of the practices of French Canada, more integration of natives in the fabric of society, French Canadians intermarried with natives, the [inaudible], the early fur traders established communities.  There was less of a racial divide and more integration than in what became the 13 colonies, where I think that the model that he uses was the Dutch template of separation of the white settlements from the natives as opposed to trying to cooperate with them.  There was also a difference in patterns of settlement, because the French colonists were more interested in trading, fur trading, so they needed native cooperation versus what became the American colonies where it was more about settling the land, creating communities, working the land.  So I would, I think there are parallels that go earlier, but this is not what I'm working with.  What I'm interested in is how 19th century discussions about forms of government kind of filtered into the literary language used to describe American national identity.  So it doesn't really deal with that.  Yes.
^M00:55:33
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:55:39
I'm sorry, if I know where Canadian literature -- [inaudible question]  There were subscriptions.  Most of the literature published in colonial Canada was serialized in the literary periodicals.  There were many literary periodicals, many of them short-lived.  The longest and the most famous is the Literary Garland, and the library has a great collection of the Literary Garland for its eight years, I think, that it ran, so that was the longest.  And novels were serialized, authors published short pieces, short stories or fragments of novels in these periodicals that included everything from comments on political affairs to ads for goods, to literature.  And they were available, they were, there weren't many cities to begin with, so it was pretty much all semirural area.  And what's interesting is that American periodicals were very affordable in Canada.  So Canadian colonists would be as likely to read something published in the U.S. as they were to read something published in the colonies.  The fact that the American periodicals were so cheap and so available drew many Canadian literary magazines out of business, because they couldn't compete.
>> I think we have time for one more question.
^M00:57:10
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:57:23
>> Dr. Godeanu-Kenworthy:  Well, "Wacousta," the prequel to the "Canadian Brothers," was very popular in England when it came out in 1832.  It was popular in Canada.  The "Canadian Brothers" came out in Montreal.  It was never published in England.  And it wasn't that popular with Canadian audiences for some reason.  And in 1852, actually, Richardson launched an edition for the American market.  But if you look at the book, the Canadian edition and the American edition, you see the difference, because he had to get rid all of the passages that deal with Canadian loyalty to the crown.  The description of the War was trimmed to the minimum, and so he foregrounded the romance, the love affair between the Canadian brother and the American woman.  And most importantly, there's a Chapter 6, which basically is a conversation between British and American officers at a dinner party where, and Canadian officers, who discussed the use of the natives in the War.  And it is in this chapter that Richardson kind of explains, or has the most articulated presentation of the natives as patriots, of the American treatment of the natives.  One fragment that I find ironic was that, well, the entirety of -- what was it -- if the U.S. had to live with the, say, on the same amount of space as European countries, they could dispense themselves with half of the union easily.  They don't need more land, they're encroaching upon other countries' territory.  That chapter, there's barely a few pages left of it in the American edition.  So it was heavily expurgated.  So what resulted, the romance of the Canadian and American on the background of a war, was fairly popular in the U.S.  But it was a different book.
>> Thanks.
>> Dr. Godeanu-Kenworthy:  Thank you.
^M00:59:19
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^M00:59:28