Index of Historians

Question: In any kind of war there are heroes and heroines and they're used by later generations to justify going to war again or for whatever political purpose. Were there heroes and heroines in the war of 1812? Are there some we know nothing about, or some we know little about?

George: Usually around the 1860's or so, there was a revival of interest in the war of 1812, and those names continue to pop up...General Brock, Tecumseh, Laura Secord. What's missing, of course, are the ordinary males of this Province. There were many, and there was an attempt, actually, to reward a number of them.

A group called the Loyal and Patriotic Society was started here in Toronto in 1812. It was designed to help people who were hard done by in the war, widows and orphans and that sort of stuff, but also to reward meritorious conduct. And part of its aim was to hand out medals at the end of the war. So the war ends and they send out circulars asking, you know, "Who do you have that's really great?", and they only get a partial response back, but they did get 147 names or so.

Now, out of the 147 names, none of the people who founded the Loyal and Patriotic Society are included, so they're a little bit upset about that. So what they do is they have a committee...they strike another committee to examine the issue, and they decide that they'll order extra medals, put their own names in, and they'll go around handing them out eventually.

It then becomes tied up in a very complicated series of shenanigans. Some of these guys realized that they can't hand out the medals, because some of the people who really served, they have decided - this Loyal and Patriotic Society has decided - they'll only get ribbons, and they themselves, on the other hand, will get the medals. So they eventually put the medals in a vault in the bank here in Toronto. And years later, in 1840, they smashed them, rather than see them distributed to these ordinary men who really deserved them.