The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock eBook

Ferdinand Brock Tupper
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 433 pages of information about The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock.

The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock eBook

Ferdinand Brock Tupper
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 433 pages of information about The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock.

A Montreal newspaper of the day also contained the following observations:  “The private letters from Upper Canada, in giving the account of the late victory at Queenstown, are partly taken up with encomiastic lamentations upon the never-to-be-forgotten General Brock, which do honor to the character and talents of the man they deplore.  The enemy have nothing to hope from the loss they have inflicted; they have created a hatred which panteth for revenge.  Although General Brock may be said to have fallen in the midst of his career, yet his previous services in Upper Canada will be lasting and highly beneficial.  When he assumed the government of the province, he found a divided, disaffected, and, of course, a weak people.  He has left them united and strong, and the universal sorrow of the province attends his fall.  The father, to his children, will make known the mournful story.  The veteran, who fought by his side in the heat and burthen of the day of our deliverance, will venerate his name."[99]

And the sentiments of the British government, on the melancholy occasion, were thus expressed in a dispatch from Earl Bathurst, the secretary of state for the colonies, to Sir George Prevost, dated December 8, 1812:  “His royal highness the prince regent is fully aware of the severe loss which his majesty’s service has experienced in the death of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock.  This would have been sufficient to have clouded a victory of much greater importance.  His majesty has lost in him not only an able and meritorious officer, but one who, in the exercise of his functions of provisional lieutenant-governor of the province, displayed qualities admirably adapted to awe the disloyal, to reconcile the wavering, and to animate the great mass of the inhabitants against successive attempts of the enemy to invade the province, in the last of which he unhappily fell, too prodigal of that life of which his eminent services had taught us to understand the value.”

The Montreal Herald of April 29, 1815, blames Sir George Prevost for having suppressed, in his general order, much of the preceding letter from Lord Bathurst, and remarks:  “We repeat that the said letter was not published to the army or to the public, a part of which the latter ought to have known, because the sentiments expressed by the prince are those of the loyal people of Upper Canada, who would be glad to have seen them soon after the official letter arrived in Canada.”  The following was substituted for this letter in a general order of the late commander-in-chief, dated the 10th March, 1813, said to have been published to the army at the time of its date: 

    ’His royal highness is fully aware of the severe loss which
    his majesty’s service has experienced in the death of
    Major-General Sir Isaac Brock.’

“But we have been told that even the said general order was not known to some regiments of the right division, until it appeared in the Quebec Gazette of the 20th instant.”  And “considering the character of the distinguished chief who fell on the British side at the Queenstown battle,"[100] we certainly do not think that Lord Bathurst intended his dispatch, relative to that officer’s death, should have been thus mutilated or suppressed in the Canadas.

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The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.