An understandable rule of thumb regarding war is that if your country must fight one, you're better off winning than losing. But there are exceptions to every rule.
The United States declared war on Britain in 1812. The declaration was a long time coming. American grievances with Britain over maritime seizures of American commerce and American seamen had been building for more than a decade. Complaints against the British in Canada for arming Indians on the northwestern frontier were of even longer standing. By 1812 Congress had had enough. Following a request by President James Madison, it approved a declaration of war.
The advocates of the war, led in Congress by Henry Clay of Kentucky, speaker of the House, boasted that the war would be swift and brilliantly successful. American soldiers would march into Canada and liberate that oppressed colony from British rule, Clay said. The inhabitants would welcome their liberators, while the British, locked in a death struggle with Napoleon's France, would be unable to maintain their oppression.
Clay had never been to Canada. Few Americans had. Most Americans had no idea of the sentiments of the Canadians, who, as events soon proved, did not look on American invaders as liberators at all. The population of Canada consisted of three groups. Ranked according to length of tenure, these were the indigenous Indian tribes; the French Canadians, whose roots ran to the original European settlement of the country; and British Canadians, who had arrived since the British takeover of Canada in the 1760s.
The Indians wanted no part of an American seizure of Canada. Some were refugees from the United States after the American Revolution. All recognized the aggressive expansiveness of the Americans into Indian territory. The Indians didn’t much like the British rulers of Canada but considered them easier to deal with than the Americans.
The French Canadians were equally opposed to an American conquest of Canada. Over half a century, they had worked out arrangements by which their Catholic religion and French customs were respected under British rule. They had no reason to think American conquerors would be so tolerant, and ample reason, starting with that aggressive streak in the Americans, to think they would not be.
The opposition of the Indians and the French Canadians was no particular surprise to Henry Clay. What did surprise him was the resistance of the British Canadians. Clay and the other war hawks blithely assumed that the British Canadians now regretted their and their parents' decision not to join the American Revolution against Britain. Now that America, having won that revolution, had become a thriving republic, of course they would want to become part of it themselves.
Far from it. The largest number of British Canadians were refugee Loyalists from the American Revolution and their children. The Loyalists had fought against American republicans in that war, and though they had lost, they were proud of their resistance. They were even prouder of their attachment to Britain. After the manner of British abbreviated honors, the Loyalists and their children were permitted to write U.E. after their names, for United Empire, and they took great satisfaction in doing so.
All three groups rallied to the defense of Canada against American invasion. They delivered stinging defeats to the invaders, indeed turning the tables and attacking the Americans on American soil. In doing so they exploded any notions that Canada might be conquered easily, or at all.
The war was largely a fiasco for the United States. A British invading force captured Washington and burned government buildings. The one bright spot for the Americans was the victory by Andrew Jackson at New Orleans two weeks after a peace treaty had been signed at Ghent but before the news had crossed the Atlantic. Jackson's victory allowed the war party in America to cast the outcome as a victory, even though the treaty resolved none of the issues that had given rise to the war. In the glow of Jackson’s victory, Clay and the war hawks tried to forget that conquering Canada had ever been part of their agenda.
The defeat of this idea turned out to be a stroke of American luck. Annexing Canada would have been about the worst thing America ever did. During the era of American territorial expansion, from the early 17th century to the mid 19th, the United States never annexed territory inhabited by large numbers of people. The Indian tribes had been decimated by the diseases brought by the Europeans. The survivors resented and resisted American expansion, but their lack of numbers made success impossible. Moreover, they were divided into scores of tribes often at odds with one another more than with the newcomers.
The French Canadians and the British Canadians would have posed a very different challenge. Each had a population in the hundreds of thousands, and each possessed a coherent political identity. Each would have been unhappy under American rule. Each would have been tempted toward rebellion. Each would have treated the United States as a colonial power. Again, so did the Indians, but the French Canadians and British Canadians, acting separately or together, would have posed a much greater political and military threat to a Union newly expanded to the north. If they hadn't broken away by the 1860s, they might have done so in league with the Confederacy, compelling the Union government to fight a civil war on two fronts. The Union almost didn't win the actual one-front Civil War; it likely would have lost a two-front version.
The defeat of the dream of Canadian conquest spared Americans this nightmare. Sometimes people have to be saved from themselves. Thankfully, only rarely does this require a war.
Yes, the Canadians resistance in 1812 was fierce. I'm near the Canadian border in the Buffalo area.
Nearby, The Battle of Lundy's Lane was a fiercely fought Canadian victory over the invading US Army and state militia. l I highly recommend the museum and monument.
Understandably, the history of the War looks far different in Canadian history chronicles than in those of American history. The nation of Canada did not yet exist and would not officially until 1867, but the War was a massive factor in prompting the unification of the original provinces.