The Astonishing General: The Life and Legacy of Sir Isaac Brock (review)

Wesley Turner’s new and well-timed biography of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock is a book about a hero. Taking the idea of ‘the hero’ as a matter of common sense, rather than attempting to theorize it, Turner’s is an accessible work that will attract a general, educated, readership beyond those academics and popular practitioners already interested in the War of 1812. If it does not present startling new material, the Astonishing General does ask a new question: why was it that this man was embraced as a hero by a populace at war and by Canadians (and Americans) ever after? He was, after all, an ‘upper-class’ (p. 10) man who bought most of his promotions in the Army. He had limited combat experience and died in the Canadas at Queenston Heights only five months into the War of 1812. He was, in some ways, ‘the most unlikely of heroes.’ But he also possessed great attributes as an officer. While maintaining discipline he was sensitive to the needs of the men under his command, whether regulars or militia; he co-operated ably with First Nations warriors, indeed genuinely admired the Shawnee and western confederacy leader, Tecumseh; he was a decisive and forceful military strategist. The answer to the question ‘why is Brock the hero of 1812?’ is well-suited to a biographical treatment, for in Turner’s forthright analysis, Brock became a hero because of the man he was.

There is but brief treatment of Brock’s early years. He was born, in 1769, into a large gentry family on the Channel Island of Guernsey. At age fifteen, his family purchased him a commission as an ensign in the 8th (or King’s) Regiment of Foot, and he joined four brothers already in the army. He had a gentleman’s education and a robust physicality – excelling in both swimming and boxing. By the age of twenty-one he was a captain, and at twenty-two exchanged into the 49th Regiment which would be sent to Canada in 1802 with Brock as its senior Lieutenant Colonel. From this point on the book traces Brock’s career as he rose to be commander of the forces in Canada by 1807 and a Major General in June 1811. There are extensive accounts of Brock’s preparations for war, the victory at the Battle of Detroit where ‘it was Brock’s leadership’ (p. 143) that won the day, the story of Brock’s last battle at Queenston Heights, and, ultimately, a consideration of how this ‘large man of great character’ (p. 240) came to be commemorated as a hero.

Throughout, Turner is careful to focus on the nature of the man himself. He is not uncritical. Brock, for example, at one point advocated expelling the Six Nations from their lands on the Grand River tract, an ‘extremely harsh measure,’ as Turner observes (pp. 120–1). Yet, on the whole, the book exhibits an unfortunate tendency to echo the ‘hagiographic’ (Riley, xi) tone of one of its most cited sources – Ferdinand Tupper’s (Brock’s nephew) 1847 The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir Isaac Brock, K.B. Thus the reader is reminded perhaps too often of Brock’s ‘acute insight,’ his ‘early demonstrations of a quality of leadership that would later be tested in Upper Canada,’ his ease with the ‘inspiring gesture,’ of the ‘prophetic’ nature of his ‘assessment[s],’ or how he would ‘never ask the men to go “where I do not lead them”’ (pp. 28, 29, 132, 149, 173, 138). There are other issues of tone. For example, the jacket blurb assures potential readers that part of Brock’s success was ‘ensuring’ that Tecumseh’s ‘formidable army was loyal to the British.’ That is a dated perspective that ignores the motives and strategies of First Nations and, indeed, the scholarship that situates the War of 1812 within Native historiography. Similarly, I query the editorial decision to refer to Tippecanoe...