Index of Historians

One of the confusions about the war is that Canadian militia units were untrained and hopeless and almost useless except for running errands and stuff like that. That oversimplifies things vastly. A lot of the British army, in fact, was made up of Canadians. Some of the regiments were called Fencibles, and they were regular British regiments, but they were recruited here and often their officers were Canadian. Now the Voltigeurs were not Fencibles; they were militia, and as militia, these were men who had enlisted for the duration of the war. They were trained by a man named Charles De Salaberry.

De Salaberry was of an upper class family of Quebec, and in the tradition of his family, they had always served the King in the military, at first, the French King, and when the King changed, that really didn't change anything for them. You go on serving whoever, whichever King God has sent you. And so the young De Salaberry, at the age of fourteen, entered the army, became an officer. He was commanding men in action at sixteen.

He was a very fine officer. He came back here and shortly before the War of 1812 began, he was commissioned to raise a regiment...largely francophone and from his own community, to a large extent. He did so, and trained it very well indeed. So you had a militia regiment..supposedly, most militia were not trained, but a regiment like the Voltigeurs were very well trained indeed, and they fought extremely effectively.

Their two most notable engagements were the one in the Chateauguay valley, where they defeated an American army about ten times their size, and the battle at Chrysler's farm. And there again, they defeated a much, much larger American army. And they usually fought, not as regiments of the line, you know, firing volleys. They usually worked as skirmishers on the flanks of the army. They were very skilled musket men, skilled woodsmen, and so you had a combination of the fighting skill of the frontiersman with the discipline and the leadership and the tactics of the British army. Very fierce in combination.