John Galt and the Subaltern's Wife: Writing the History of the War of 1812

Abstract

In the Special Materials Reading Room in the National Library of Scotland is a document entitled “A Lady's Campaigns in Canada: Extracts from the Journal of a Subaltern's Wife, Written in Canada in 1812, 1813, and 1814.” It is part of the William “Tiger” Dunlop portion of the Dunlop Collection and is Manuscript 9303, folios 62–74. The extracts tell the story of a small, young, English military family's encounter with war on the Canadian frontier. In so doing, it reveals the gendered emotional landscapes of the war, the lived content of genteel female respectability and martial masculinity. It includes both genders centrally in the history of war. “A Lady's Campaigns in Canada” deploy, apparently unconsciously, the racialized tropes powerfully operating within the colony and the empire (because they are “uncivilized” in the document, “Indians” commit “murder” even in warfare). In this regard, the extracts make early nineteenth-century racism visible to today's readers. The document is of extraordinary note, too, in the way it conceives of history. It is a history of the War of 1812 in the Canadas that resists teleological repurposing by nationalistic myth makers. The story it tells is a fractured one that speaks through fragmentary and shifting points of view: of the subaltern's wife, of valourous officers, of husbands, and of silenced First Nations warriors only seen through a white lens. To a startling extent, “A Lady's Campaigns in Canada” leap-frogs over two centuries of manufactured myth and memory to remind historians that the calls to acknowledge diversity, tension, and racism, for example, echo the knowledge of near contemporaries about this war.