Burke and the War of 1812 plunged James Burke into a new theatre of war as he joined British forces defending Canada against an attempted annexation by the young United States of America. When I started writing the book, most people had never heard of the War of 1812, but Donald Trump’s announcement that he would like to see the USA annex Canada meant the war of 1812 was suddenly trending in social media.
What quickly became obvious was that very few people understood what had happened in 1812. It was not that surprising. The war was a scrappy affair. Both sides occasionally attempted bold strategic plans, but these usually came to nothing – from the first defeat of the United States when a grand three-pronged attack on Canada fizzled out as one failed invasion from Detroit, to the final defeat of the British (after the war had officially ended) with a doomed attempt to take New Orleans.
Political partisanship has further clouded the historical view. Well over 200 years later, people still view the war through politically partisan lenses. So, for example, a surprising number of people in the USA are convinced that the war was won by the USA. People on both sides of the conflict tend to downplay the role that native Americans played in the fighting (though Canadians seem to acknowledge this more than others) or how much the native tribes suffered in the aftermath of the war.
Now, with his new book, Black Redcoats, Matthew Taylor has highlighted another forgotten element of the war: the effect it had on enslaved people in the USA and the role that some of them played in aiding the British war effort.
In Burke and the War of 1812, the emphasis is clearly on the land war, but as the conflict went on, the role of the navies on both sides became increasingly important. Although the American navy was to prove its worth, the British had the ability to strike from the sea all along the eastern coast of the USA. They chose Chesapeake Bay as the focus of their efforts and established a base there. Eventually, the British had about twenty warships in the bay with some two thousand men capable of going ashore and taking the fighting to the enemy, most famously, in 1814, by marching to Washington and burning down the White House.
The White House after the fire
From early in 1813, enslaved African-Americans on the shores of Chesapeake Bay saw the British presence as an opportunity to escape to freedom. The first may have been nine men who, on 10 March, approached the guard boat of HMS Victorious and volunteered to serve in the ship’s company. Many more were to follow.
Soon, it was not only men who fled to join the British. Whole families were taken under the protection of the Royal Navy. Many of the men chose to join the British forces, but those who did not want to fight were given their freedom and evacuated to British territory in Canada or the West Indies.
The British action was driven by several motivations.
The men who chose to join them were valuable from a military point of view. They were loyal – desertion was not an option for them. They were committed to the British cause, which offered freedom to all the enslaved people in the territory under their control. They knew the geography of the area – an important factor given the guerrilla nature of many of the British raids – and they were soon to demonstrate that they were brave and able fighters.
The War of 1812 was a modern war, in that its economic element war was a strategic priority. To the farmers around Chesapeake Bay, their slaves were valuable stock and the British inflicted real economic damage by liberating them. Freeing enslaved people was also a blow to American morale as many Americans lived in fear of a slave rebellion.
Many naval officers were also motivated by sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Ironically, this was true even of some who themselves owned slaves in the West Indies. Slavery was already illegal in Britain and, whatever was happening in the West Indian plantations, British officers were uncomfortable to see slavery in a society which looked otherwise very much like that in England.
As the number of African-Americans serving the British military increased, a new military unit, the Corps of Colonial Marines, was formed in 1814 and volunteers were issued with red coats and given regular pay and rations.
The Colonial Marines proved excellent soldiers and were conspicuously active in many engagements, notably in the assault on Washington and the burning of the White House.
As the war drew to an end, the British planned an attack on New Orleans. It was probably always a step too far. Andrew Jackson had had time to construct a solid defence of the city and his troops were far from the inadequate opposition that the British had faced in 1812.
The British saw control of the coast of Georgia as important in enabling them to cut off the possibility of the Americans reinforcing New Orleans. The British task force sent to Georgia to accomplish this consisted of about 500 Royal Marines with 200 men from the 2nd West India Regiment from the Bahamas and 365 Colonial Marines. This meant that the slave state of Georgia was being threatened by a force that was majority black.
The British established a base at Cumberland Island where they were joined by many blacks fleeing from both Spanish and American slave owners. British forces were still based at Cumberland Island when news of the peace finally reached them and they were forced to withdraw. The island was held for approximately 8 weeks during which 1,700 enslaved people escaped to the British.
Meanwhile, in West Florida, the British had made allies not only of freed slaves but also of Native Americans. Thousands of Creek warriors had fled to Florida following war with the Americans and the British had organised a multiracial force of Creeks, whites, mixed race and black people to defend West Florida, then a notionally Spanish territory, against American attack.
The British formed a separate Florida Corps of Colonial Marines, based at Prospect Bluff, overlooking the Apalachicola River, about 15 miles north of present-day Apalachicola, Florida. The fort they built there was a moated, walled structure enclosing stone buildings. Bastions at the corner mounted defensive cannon. It was the largest man-made structure in Florida outside the cities of Pensacola and Saint Augustine. When the British withdrew they left at least 2,500 stands of muskets, 500 carbines, 500 swords, four 24-pounder cannon, and four 6-pounder cannon along with a fieldpiece and a howitzer. When the Colonial Marines were evacuated, as many as 450 of the men and their families decided to remain at the base, which became known as ‘Negro Fort’. It became the centre of the most well-armed Native American and free black community on the North American continent.
The continued existence of the Negro Fort, only 50 miles or so from the US border, was regarded as intolerable by the Americans and in the summer of 1816 units of the American army and navy attacked the fort. A gunboat opened the attack with a hot cannonball which, by chance, landed in the fort’s magazine. The explosion that it caused killed about 300 people.
The deaths at Negro Fort pretty much marked the end of the Colonial Marines, although individual marines seem to have continued as a thorn in American flesh, some becoming valued military advisers to Native American tribes in the region.
Matthew Taylor’s book explores an important and little known area of Anglo-American history. He looks at the possible influence of the Colonial Redcoats in history. It is, sadly, mainly a case of might-have-beens. If the British had responded to the diplomatic overtures of the Creek leader who travelled to London to plead for support; if a lucky shot hadn’t annihilated Negro Fort… Even so, the story tells us a lot about British and American attitudes to slavery and the start of the long, slow process of unravelling it.
Black Redcoats is an important book for anyone interested in the period and yet still immensely readable. I whole-heartedly recommend it.
Perhaps because I write historical fiction myself, I often struggle with reading the genre. So I’ve been really pleased to have read two HistFic books lately that have been a total joy. This week I’m delighted to review both of them.
‘Red Horse’ by MJ Logue
Set in the English Civil War, Red Horse is the first of a series by MJ Logue and I’ve already started on the second.
Hollie Babbitt is a mercenary soldier, fresh from the Seven Years War in Europe. Recruited by Parliament to lead a troop of cavalry, he has some sympathy for the cause but he is mainly in it for the money, though pay is always late and he is beginning to have his doubts as to whether the Parliamentary commander, the Earl of Essex, can afford him. He’s a professional soldier, though, and with the Seven Years War over, this is the best gig he can find, so he sticks around, doing what he is good at (mainly killing people) and waiting to see his money.
One of the many excellent things about this book is the way that we sympathise with Babbitt. In a funny sort of way, he’s a likeable person. The soldiers in his troop clearly see him as an excellent commander and underneath the gruffness and casual violence is a decent man. There’s a back story that comes out little by little: a violent abusive father, a lost love who died, one or two deep friendships that are all that seem to stand between him and madness. Then one of his only friends dies and he falls further into viciousness and despair.
It’s a violent, sweary book set in a violent, sweary time. (The proportion of the population killed during the Civil War is a matter for debate, but even the lowest estimates are appalling.) Despite this, it’s immensely readable, often very funny and although terrible things keep happening, underneath it all, it is warm and humane.
Ultimately, Red Horse is a story of redemption.
I recommend it.
‘The Private Misadventures of Nell Nobody’ by Jennifer Newbold
Almost 200 years later and we have another story of somebody escaping a brutal past by throwing themselves into warfare. This time it’s the Napoleonic Wars and our protagonist is a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by disguising herself as a man and running away to sea.
As a general rule I hate stories that feature a woman doing things that no woman in the period would ever do. But there were women who successfully passed as men in the French Wars and Jennifer Newbold makes Nell Nobody’s imposture credible.
Nell signs up to the army, but ends up assigned as a naval liaison and forms a very close attachment to Nelson. To my surprise, I found myself completely believing the story, helped by the meticulous descriptions of shipboard life and the battles she finds herself in on both land and sea.
Newbold weaves together Nell’s imaginary adventures as she struggles to keep her secret and accounts of real military victories, notably including Nelson’s triumph at Cape St Vincent. Newbold is clearly a Nelson fan and she draws a convincing picture of him. She also fleshes out Nell as a real, if unlikely, heroine.
I’ll give no plot details for fear of spoilers. The story certainly held my attention to the very end. Definitely to be recommended.
And a third
If you enjoy historical novels and are a visitor to this blog, I hope you have given mine a try. The next James Burke book, about a soldier-spy during the Napoleonic Wars, is out in Kindle on 26 April. It’s set in North America — a new theatre of war for Burke. It’s called Burke and the War of 1812 and it’s available to pre-order now.
If you can’t bear to wait until 26 April, there are seven Burke books already published. Have you read them all?
There have been stories of vampires – or something very like vampires – for thousands of years. Modern ideas about vampires can be traced back to mediaeval times, with vampire myths being particularly popular in Eastern Europe. Vampires entered English fiction in the early 19th century, but really took off with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.
Given the long history of vampires and the different cultures that produced vampire stories, it’s hardly surprising that there are many different versions of the vampire myth. Since Dracula, though, there have been some recurring tropes. Vampires burn in daylight, they can be killed by fire, holy water, or a stake through the heart. They are driven off by garlic. They can take the form of bats or wolves. Not all the stories include all the attributes and, lately, writers have had fun in twisting and experimenting with the attributes of their vampires. My own vampire creation, Chief Inspector Pole, enjoys cooking with garlic and certainly can’t turn into a bat, but he is, if not immortal, very long lived and he needs to drink blood to stay healthy. These two attributes seem to be the bare minimum and almost all vampire stories stick with them.
Kirsten McKenzie’s vampires are very much in this modern tradition. They have lived hundreds of years and they have to feed on blood, but beyond that she has chosen to concentrate on some mythic elements of vampire existence and twist or ignore others. Garlic, for example, does not feature at all, and her vampires have no links to bats, but (perhaps in the wake of Game of Thrones) they do seem tied to ravens, which feature ominously throughout her story.
The Vampires of York Tower starts with a prologue set in 1793. I found it a bit confusing, but stick with it. All will be revealed over 200 years later.
We move to today (and there are some neat contemporary references scattered through the book). We’re in York Tower, an upmarket apartment block in New York City. There’s no strong feel of the city as most of the action takes place in the building. York Tower is its own little world. Bronzed windows filter the light. (Picking up any clues yet?) Round-the-clock security keeps residents safe, insulated from the outside world.
We see much of the story through the eyes of the two guards manning the front desk on the day shift. Will and Rufus are ex-cops, happy to be off the beat but taking their responsibilities for security at York Tower very seriously. They care about the tenants and they are sad when several of them die suddenly. But these are elderly people and there is no reason to be suspicious.
There are some strange things going on, though. A mysterious messenger, always making deliveries to the same room – a room that should be empty. There are unexplained power outages and inexplicable smells.
Something bites Will’s neck. Nothing so 19th century as the twin puncture marks of a traditional vampire. In fact, we never really find out how the bite was administered, but this doesn’t get in the way of a pacey story that carries you along with it. Will thinks it’s just an insect bite but soon he finds he loses his appetite, becoming thinner and almost literally wasting away. He thinks it’s cancer, but his sudden sensitivity to light and increasing desire for red meat might give the rest of us a clue as to the real problem.
We begin to meet more of the residents. There are a lot of them, but they are well-drawn and quite easy to keep track of. This becomes even easier as the story moves on and there are fewer and fewer of them. We also meet the Tower’s owner, Richard Blackwood. (I told you to pay attention to the prologue.)
The New York skyline glittered beyond the tinted windows of the York Tower penthouse, a view that had captivated Richard Blackwood for decades. But tonight, his attention was fixed on his wife, Elizabeth, as she stood on the terrace, her silk robe billowing in the evening breeze.
“My dear,” Richard called softly, “you shouldn’t be out there. The sun has barely set.”
I’ll say no more about the plot. At this point you could reasonably assume that you can work the rest of it out, but you’d be wrong. McKenzie’s tale is full of unexpected twists. The finale, a battle royal conducted, naturally, in darkness, brings the book to a thrilling and satisfying conclusion.
Since I started my own Galbraith & Pole vampire series, I’m naturally interested to see how other writers approach the subject. The Vampires of York Tower moves at the breakneck pace that you might associate with New York, while Galbraith & Pole is more attuned to the rhythm of London. The New York vampires also, predictably, have a much higher body count. The dramatic action allows little time for the quiet humour of Galbraith & Pole, but readers are unlikely to miss this as they hurry through the pages. I loved it. The ending does leave the door very slightly ajar for the possibility of a sequel. I’ll definitely read it if there is one.
Galbraith & Pole
If you enjoy vampire stories, do please give Galbraith & Pole a look. One of the characters in York Tower is a dancer “who had spent Sunday afternoons dancing the tango in the park”. I’d love to think this is a nod from McKenzie towards Chief Inspector Pole, who is a great tango enthusiast. It’s a wonderful hobby for a vampire as tango clubs famously operate mainly in the hours of darkness. When a girl is found stabbed through the neck with the stiletto heel of a tango shoe, Pole gets quite upset about it.
The first, tango inspired, Galbraith & Pole book, Something Wicked is just £2.99 on Kindle. (£6.99 in paperback). And look out for a FREE Valentine’s short story on this blog on 14 February.
(AI image of ravens from Microsoft Bing Image Creator)
Jacqueline Reiter fans (and there are many) will know that she has been working on her biography of Sir Home Popham for so long that I’m not sure that her subject (died 1820) wasn’t still alive when she started writing. Late last year, the book was finally published by Helion (in their ‘From Reason to Revolution’ series) and it has been well worth the wait.
Popham was an unlikely naval officer. He had intended to pursue a career in law but financial problems in his family meant that he had to abandon his studies and find paying employment in a hurry. Aged just under 16, he joined the crew of HMS Hyaena as a first-class volunteer under Captain Edward Thompson, who became a surrogate father to him.
Under Thompson, Popham flourished, but when Thompson died, in 1786, Popham lost a valuable patron and learned a vital lesson about the reality of naval life at the time: promotion depended as much (or more) on who you knew than on your professional skill. Popham’s life from then on was as much about gaining political backing for his professional progression as about his naval skill and knowledge. Fortunately he had family connections in the East India Company and, for a while, he abandoned the navy to trade on his own behalf in the Far East.
From then on, his life was a confusion of political manoeuvring, naval work and making money, either alongside his official position or in independent ventures. Reiter’s biography is therefore a tale of ducking and weaving that would leave Del Boy speechless in admiration. Some of Popham’s activities resulted in official praise for his contributions to Britain’s naval victories, some went horribly, horribly wrong. Some were dubiously legal and some, Reiter suggests, were straightforwardly criminal. Popham seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of his time at courts martial, where his early interest in law was deployed in defences of breathtaking audacity, sometimes allowing him to talk his way out of trouble and sometimes digging himself deeper into it. As his career progressed, he spent time ingratiating himself with politicians and served as an MP himself, occasionally making lengthy speeches to defend his actions when they had become so outrageous that they drew the attention of Parliament.
It can be a difficult story to follow. Popham was not always entirely honest and some of his more controversial actions were concealed in a storm of verbiage that has clearly kept Reiter trapped in the National Archives for weeks.
In a career filled with stand-out moments, Popham is probably best remembered for two things. He developed the navy’s flag codes, most famously used when Nelson told the fleet that he expected every man to do his duty, and he took it upon himself to invade Buenos Aires, on the grounds that he was supposed to be in Cape Town and BsAs was so nearby that it would have been rude not to.
I admit an interest here. Popham features in my first book about James Burke, Burke in the Land of Silver, when he is on that infamous South American escapade. Whether he was just being Popham and mounting an invasion off his own bat or whether he had secret orders either encouraging him or directly telling him to do it, is one of history’s mysteries. Reiter is pretty sure he was on his own. I have my doubts, and I think that there is evidence to support his claim. But I’m biased. In Burke in the Land of Silver, I blame the army for the expedition’s ultimate failure and I back Popham.
Blaming the army when anything went wrong was a favourite Popham tactic.
Popham was an expert in combined operations at a time when they were even more chaotic than they are now – and inter-service tensions mean that combined ops are often a nightmare. Walcheren (in the Netherlands), which Napoleonic War enthusiasts can get very excited about, was a historic debacle on a grand scale. Popham was heavily involved. When it was going well, he claimed to be the mastermind behind the entire thing. When it failed (with around 4,000 dead of disease any many others desperately ill), it was all the army’s fault. Fortunately for him, the army was headed by John Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the subject of a previous Reiter biography, The Late Lord. Chatham was everything that Popham was not: solid, dull, not gifted with a great imagination, prone to idleness and a man of honour and probity. He was horribly ill-prepared to cope with the opprobrium directed at him by Popham and the naval commander who blamed poor Chatham for everything. The Earl took the fall, but Popham’s career never really recovered.
John Pitt, Earl of Chatham
Sidelined by the navy, Popham was sent to Spain to harass French forces in coastal areas and provide secure supply lines to Wellington. He proved really good at this but, as so often, over-reached himself, interfering in areas where his assistance was neither required nor appreciated and often alienating the people he worked alongside. (His repeated insistence in referring to the guerillas fighting alongside the British as “brigands” did not go down well.)
Having annoyed almost everyone who mattered, Popham ended up carrying senior diplomats out to India (feeding them at his own expense and, according to Lord Moira, feeding them badly). His irritation was taken out on the crew, who were flogged unmercifully, even by the standards of the day, and came close to mutiny. It was not a happy voyage.
Finally made a Rear Admiral, Popham would have been well-advised to count himself lucky and keep a low profile but that was hardly his nature. Shuffled off to a receiving ship in the Thames, his job was to reduce naval stations to a peacetime establishment. Essentially he was ushering in an era of naval austerity, so spending £5,000 fitting up his state cabin was probably not a good move.
His next job was a posting to Jamaica, ostensibly a respectable post but Jamaica was, literally, where the War Office sent irritating commanders to die. Sadly, his son was the first to go, dead at 17, followed by his daughter who succumbed to yellow fever. Ill himself (he had a stroke while in Jamaica), he returned to England in 1820, dying two months after his arrival back at Spithead.
This breakneck overview of Popham’s career comes far from doing him justice. There’s no mention of his various diplomatic efforts, some straightforward, some strictly unofficial, and some verging on espionage. He was busy on the diplomatic front in the West Indies, Russia, the Red Sea, and India. Sometimes he was very successful – the Tsar made him a Knight of Malta – sometimes less so – his unilateral attempts to negotiate with the Pasha of Egypt caused serious political embarrassment.
His hydrographic surveys resulted in charts that gave the British navy an edge over less well-informed enemies that lasted for decades. His involvement with submarines and torpedoes might have done the same with naval technology but his ideas were, perhaps, a little too far ahead of his time.
Nor does this summary cover his actual war-fighting. He was seldom on board a vessel involved in battle but, when he was, he often performed well. His efforts at Copenhagen were also, according to Rieter, “a complete success”, although the controversy surrounding the campaign meant that he did not, perhaps, get the credit he deserved.
Destruction of Danish vessels at Copenhagen
Popham was, indeed, a “quicksilver captain”: mercurial, hard to pin down, potentially valuable, but very toxic. The British do not like people who can be described as ‘too clever by half’, particularly when they are not shy of advertising their notion of their own genius. Popham was almost a caricature of the arrogant little swot who gets on everybody’s nerves. The sheer breadth of his achievements, far from working in his favour, simply annoyed people and, because he was always active, for every great success there was a highly visible failure.
Reiter’s biography tries to do justice to a man whose remarkable life can hardly be summed up in 350-odd pages but she has done us all a great service by giving us a solidly researched and highly readable account of a figure who deserves the attention he has not really been given over the past couple of centuries.
Popham features in the first James Burke book, Burke in the Land of Silver. The story is closely based on the adventures of the real-life James Burke, whose espionage activities laid the groundwork for the British capture of Buenos Aires in 1806. (The fact that the British had a spy in Buenos Aires is one of the reasons I suspect that Popham’s adventure had official backing.) Popham does feature in the story where he is presented in a generally favourable light. Like Popham, I’m inclined to blame the army for the debacle that followed the successful invasion. Whoever you believe, it’s a rollicking good tale. Buckles are swashed, women — including a princess and a queen — are wooed (almost certainly historically accurately) and villains are defeated. Burke in the Land of Silver is available in paperback or on Kindle.
Picture credits:
Popham portrait by unknown artist. Public domain
‘The Glorious Conquest of Buenos Ayres by the British Forces, 27th June 1806’ Coloured woodcut, published by G Thompson, 1806. Copyright National Army Museum and reproduced with permission.
Full disclosure: Donald is a friend I used to go street-skating with. So when he wrote a book about a teenage street-skater who gets involved with a ghost, I sort of had to read it.
I’m glad I did because it’s a blast. Fifteen year-old Stephen is orphaned when his dad dies of a heart attack while Stephen is out skating, leaving his son racked with guilt. Stephen’s father’s will has made his aunt Teresa his guardian. Teresa lives in Paris, so Stephen moves in with her in her apartment filled with old books of magic, the memory of her dead lover, and the ghost of a young boy.
Teresa used to be a research scientist working in the field of subatomic particles. Hounam has fun with the idea that modern quantum theory makes about as much sense to most people as magic. Teresa thinks that she can use quantum physics to recreate ancient magic. She tells Stephen that she might be able to use magic to summon the ghost.
Who is the ghost? Can Teresa really perform magic? Why have two young boys vanished mysteriously, close to Teresa’s apartment? And is Stephen himself in danger?
The mix of magic, mystery, murder, and other things beginning with M makes a satisfying page-turner of a story but Hounam uses this as a framework to hang a coming-of-age story on. Stephen is learning some hard truths about love, family, and relationships in between skating the famous Pari Roller mass street skate and learning to slalom on his roller blades. Hounam’s enthusiasm for the Paris street skate scene shines through and would probably have me picturing it even if I hadn’t actually lived it with him when we were both old enough to know better.
The assorted digressions from the main plot (an aunt with an obsession with religion, some nice observations of the casual cruelty of older teenagers to younger peers with romantic inclinations, discussions of guilt and loss) raise this above your standard ghost/horror story. I enjoyed it a lot and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read something out of the ordinary, even if they’ve never been on skates in their lives.
