Impasse

• Author: Craig Forcese
• Pages: 73-80

73

Chapter 10

Impasse

The authorities were either unwilling or unable to prevent

aggression again Canada.

—   1

A  , John Forsyth and Henry Stephen Fox

continued their diplomatic exchanges. In his formal response

to Forsyth’s 5 January letter, Fox repeated his characteriza-

tion of the Caroline’s conduct as “piratical.”2 The British produced an

adavit from an American captured during the raid asserting that

the boat was the “property of the patriots on Navy Island,” employed

to take provisions and stores to the island. Moreover, the deponent

claimed to have heard the ship’s watch admonish the boat’s company

to sleep well the night of 29 December, because the next day, they

would be tasked with ferrying more men to the island.3

Ambassador Fox also complained pointedly that the United

States had failed to enforce its laws along the New York frontier: “At

the time when the event happened, the ordinary laws of the United

States were not enforced within the frontier district of the State of

New York. The authority of the law was overborne, publicly, by pirat-

ical violence,” which resulted in injury and threat to Canada.4 Under

these circumstances, “Her Majesty’s subjects in Upper Canada” were

necessarily impelled “to consult their own security, by pursuing and

destroying the vessel of their piratical enemy, wheresoever they