The central question of Richard V. Barbuto's Niagara, 1814: America Invades Canada is why the US failed to capture Canada in the War of 1812, despite having a far more professional and well-trained military force by 1814. The British General Phineas Riall assumed that Winfield Scott's grey-clad soldiers at the 1814 Battle of Chippawa were poorly trained militia, and when the men remained steadfast under fire he exclaimed, "Those are Regulars, by God." (This quote comes up frequently in histories of the US Army).
And yet, despite its advantages in population, agricultural production, and armaments manufacturing, the United States failed to conquer Canada. Barbuto answers:
The reasons reside on several levels and run the gamut of wise and poor decisions, glaring omissions, the strengths and weaknesses of personalities and polities, and luck.
At the strategic level, the outcome of the campaign was influenced by three factors: the inability of the American government to harness and focus its extensive resources, American strategic confusion, and a flexible and efficient British strategy.
Canadians tend to emphasize their fierce resistance to the US invasion (which is not unreasonable, given their experiences with their aggressive and meddling southern neighbor over the past 250 or so years), but Barbuto demonstrates that there was considerable sympathy to the US within Canada, at least at first. Pro-American settlers were silenced in part by martial law, and attempts to weed out disloyality, but the invaders squandered any goodwill with their repeated depredations. "When American forces managed to remain in Canada for any length of time, their tactic of destroying mills, and thus the food supply of civilians and soldiers alike, was counterproductive," Barbuto writes, "By 1814, [US General Jacob] Brown received little assistance from the populace."
(In)famously, the Treaty of Ghent restored the status quo antebellum, making a mockery of the years of suffering and sacrifices from all sides, but for a long time the assumption was that the war would conclude with uti possidetis, maintaining captured territories. (Somehow, this still didn't inspire incompetent American leadership on the Niagara peninsula).
The British truly sent their D-listers to the negotiating table, and demands for an Indigenous buffer state, safe from American or British expansion, were soon dropped. As it is, Article 9 of the signed treaty promised that the US would restore to Indigenous people "the lands, rights, and privileges they possessed in 1811"—but this was never enforced. Would the buffer state be any different, with settler-colonial powers on all sides?
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