Stan Rogers and the Historicity of 'The Nancy'

A song about the War of 1812 from the Canadian side: REPOST

Originally published in December 2023, therefore new to most subscribers.

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Released in 1984 after his untimely death at 33, From Fresh Water found Stan Rogers still exploring westward from the Davis Strait, through Canadian history, to put his national character to song. Rogers loved Canada, and the Canadian ‘working man,’ like a great extended family. Poetic patriotism is a coherent theme throughout his life’s work and certainly in this album. It is at least as present in his lyrics as shipwrecks and seafaring are.

Two songs on the LP are straightforward peans to Canadian military history: “MacDonnell on the Heights,” which we shall review in a future edition, and “The Nancy,” our subject here, which is almost a genre on its own. Rogers jokingly called it “folk rock.”

According to the liner notes of the first edition From Fresh Water LP, “There were countless skirmishes on the Great Lakes between ships and boats of all makes and sizes during the War of 1812-1814. ‘Well,’ Stan said, ‘we won the damned war but from some of the accounts you’d really have to wonder how?’” Contesting the Great Lakes cost both empires, British and United States, far more in money and manpower and material losses than either combatant had planned.

Logistics were impossible except by water, for there were almost no roads, and the literally-fluid nature of the geography made for a very dynamic battlefield. Low population density also limited the availability of militia troops. Both sides therefore relied on local partners — Native American tribes — who leveraged the situation to their own advantage.

Although Rogers’s narrator has “scorn” for military uniform, this is not an antiwar song. Rather, the lyrics point to the sharp differences between those who lived on the frontier and those who governed it from afar during the War of 1812. Miserable conditions and a policy dependent on local assistance, divorced from ground reality: echoes of more recent imperial adventures should occur to any reader who has not been living in a cave since this album was pressed. Enlisted men who served bravely and proudly in uniform in Afghanistan have the same “scorn” for their own leadership today.

The lyrics below are from the original liner notes, but the discerning listener may notice Stan Rogers seems to diverge from the text at a few points. This is not unusual in music production of any era. We shall note possible sonic divergences as they happen, working our way through the lyrics one stanza at a time, below the song embedded here.

The clothes men wear do give them airs, the fellows do compare.

A colonel’s regimentals shine, and women call them fair.

I am Alexander MacIntosh, a nephew to the Laird

And I do disdain men who are vain, the men with powdered hair.

In terms of historicity, Rogers is quite behind the times at the outset of the song. Short hair was the hip new fashion all over the western world by 1812. Powdered hair was associated with powdered wigs, which had long fallen out of fashion.

The French Revolution regarded them as aristocratic, while American revolutionaries decided that powdered hair was a British habit. Across the New World, frontier men despised wigs for being hot, prone to insect infestation, and expensive to maintain. Thomas Jefferson stopped wearing them early in his first term as president and the new United States followed his example. Canada was not far behind the Americans.

Meanwhile, British periwiggery (wig-wearing) and hair-powdering plummeted after The Hair Powder Act of 1795, one of William Pitt the Younger’s revenue-raising acts during the Napoleonic wars. Nobody wore hair powder in 1812.

Of course, where Rogers loses a few points for not being a historian of hair fashion, his lyric nonetheless captures the universal spirit of the common soldier or sailor encountering lofty, out-of-touch superiors. And it is the only major departure from historicity in the whole song.

Stan Rogers sang about a real ship, a schooner called Nancy, that had a real captain named Alexander Mackintosh, who really was the nephew of a genuine Scottish ‘lord’ (Laird). Today, the reader can visit a museum in Canada and see what is left of the Nancy for themselves. The battle in this song really happened. Rogers did not invent a single detail, though some have been rearranged in the singing. Indeed, he only told half of what he might, for this was an epic escape.

Built in Detroit by Dorsyth, Richardson & Co. in 1789, the real Nancy schooner was 80 feet (24m) long, 20 feet (6m) wide, with fore and aft sails fitted with square topsails. Named for the wife or daughter of Alexander’s father, Angus, her prow featured the figurehead “of a fashionable dressed lady, complete with a hat and a feather.” She was designed for handling by a crew of just eight, and she could fit 359 barrels in a hold just 8 feet (2.4m) deep, allowing her to transit the shallow St. Clair River between Lake Huron and Lake Erie with a full hold at low cost. A pair of brass 6-pounder swivel cannons were enough firepower to deter potential marauders in peacetime.

Nancy brought supplies of food, sugar, gunpowder, and liquor to the island trading post at Michilimackinac and brought back furs from the entire northwestern interior of the continent. The North West Company network reached all the way to the Pacific Ocean. By the War of 1812, the Nancy had already helped them outcompete the Hudson Bay Company. Indeed, the Mackintosh clan were so successful at trading arms and ammunition to the American frontier that they helped start the war.

Angus Mackintosh, Alexander’s father who ran the fur-trading network, had moved across the Detroit River to the British side after the 1783 peace treaty that recognized the new United States of America, resettling in what is now Windsor, Ontario. There, he built “a two-storey house, a warehouse, a wharf and a store” that he called The Moy “after his family’s ancestral home in Scotland,” according to Barry Gough in the 2006 book Through Water, Ice & Fire: Schooner Nancy of the War of 1812.

Alexander, the second oldest of Angus’s fourteen children, took command of Nancy in 1805 at the age of 18. A man “of self-assured and fiery disposition,” he was 25 years of age, only two years older than his ship, when the war began. British naval forces on the Great Lakes were badly outnumbered, and even more badly outgunned, from the beginning, which made the Nancy all the more valuable for supplying Sault Ste. Marie and Michilimackinac, the keys to British power on the upper Great Lakes.

We return to Stan Rogers as the voice of Alexander Mackintosh:

I command the Nancy Schooner, from the Moy on Lake St. Clair.

On the third day of October, boys, I did set sail from there.

To the garrison at Amherstburg I quickly would repair

With Captain Maxwell and his wife and kids and powdered hair.

The date is correct but the lyrical direction of the text is not, and that may be a production error. Contrary to the preposition used in the liner notes, Rogers seems to sing “I did set sail for there,” which is consistent with the factual voyage. Nancy did indeed leave port on 3 October 1813, but departed from the island of Mackinac, southward bound for Lake St. Clair, rather than going north from there.

Aboard the Nancy

In regimentals bright.

Aboard the Nancy

With all his pomp and bluster there, aboard the Nancy-o.

Gough says that there was indeed a civilian complement aboard, as well as a “Captain Maxwell and his family, who were likewise rejoining the British garrison” at Amherstburg. They had no way of knowing that both sides were about to meet in the Battle of the Thames on 5 October, resulting in the death of Chief Tecumseh and the defeat of British forces west of the St. Clair River.

Rogers likely overstates any personal tensions on board. According to Gough, the real Alexander Mackintosh took part in the militia and worried about the food supply during 1813 because farms were not being tended. Any resentment he may have really felt towards regular military officers likely started with that request for regular troops to come relieve him and his fellows from their guard duty against William Henry Harrison and American invasion of the Ontario Peninsula.

Maxwell was hardly the highest-ranking officer to board the Nancy, however. During the summer, Alexander and his ship helped convoy supplies and troops in the failed siege of Fort Stephenson, including Gen. Henry Proctor “and his staff, as well as several artillery pieces and some sheep for the British army.” The experience had been underwhelming. “Mackintosh, eager for some idea as to what was expected of the Nancy, was disappointed in the vague instructions he received” from Proctor during the operation, Gough says. Likewise, Gen. Harrison complained that the US Army lacked knowledgeable engineers to build good fortifications.

Which is not to say that amateurs generally fared any better than professionals in the Great Lakes theater of war. Logistics were the greatest challenge for all combatants. During April, the siege of Fort Meigs, a stronghold Harrison set up in haste, had also failed because there was not enough food for the Canadian militiamen, while their Native American allies had prisoners and plunder to take home. “Siege warfare required patience and an understanding of the logic of attrition. The militia possessed neither,” Gough says, and so that entire operation fizzled.

The Amherstburg fortress was south of Detroit. Lake Huron is at the top. The events of the song took place near Sarnia and Marysville

When the Nancy set sail on 3 October, per the song, she “made the quick run down Lake Huron and reached the entrance to the St. Clair River at two o'clock on Tuesday 4 October.” This river is narrow, with a swift current despite only falling five feet (1.5m) in elevation over its 40 mile (60km) length because of the rapids at the northern end, where Lake Huron pushes against the shore. Nancy could ride this current south by steering carefully, but the reverse trip took much longer. “It had taken the Nancy days to inch her way up against the river’s flow on the way to Michilimackinac, and if the wind was unfavourable the Nancy could well end up stuck out of reach of the comforting open waters of the lake,” Gough explains.

Warned the day before by a Native American named Black Bird that American ships were already in control of Lake Erie, Mackintosh wisely dropped anchor and sought further intelligence before risking the St. Clair. Had he simply proceeded without reconnaissance, American and Canadian history, and the War of 1812, might have taken a very different turn.

Below the St. Clair rapids I sent scouts unto the shore

To ask a friendly Wyandotte to say what lay before.

“Amherstburg has fallen, with the same for you in store!

And militia sent to take you there, fifty horse or more.”

Mackintosh put one of his small boats in the water. As four hands rowed two male passengers ashore, however, the wind blew harder out of the north and Lake Huron was “swelling hard,” causing the boat to lose a rudder, so that the crewmen barely made it back to the Nancy. When the two men returned to the shore with their news, the boat could not retrieve them, for the waves were too high against the shore. All they could understand from the scouts, who shouted over the crashing surf, was that a fort had fallen.

Mackintosh now consulted Maxwell and two others in his cabin. Together, they agreed to sail into the St. Clair with the advantageous wind and pick the two men up again in calmer inland waters. If Mackintosh had really been violently opposed to Maxwell or “military gentlemen” in general, he would not have included the captain in his decision. Low on supplies, the entire ship’s company was taking a huge risk. Ominously, the anchor cable snapped when they tried to pull it up from the lake bottom. Leaving that behind, the Nancy darted into the river and Mackintosh dropped his sails at six o’clock in the evening, allowing both of his civilian scouts to rejoin the voyage.

The news they delivered was “a catalog of disasters.” Both Detroit and Amherstburg had indeed fallen to the Americans. Worse, “downstream two schooners and two gunboats of the United States Navy were lying in wait for the Nancy.” A third shore scout returned at eleven o’clock in the evening, when it was too late to return to Lake Huron, with news that the ship “could not return to Moy, and would have to try and escape from the river as soon as possible.” Mackintosh kept a double watch all night.

The next morning, 4 October, William Henry Harrison caught up with Proctor’s force at the Thames River and destroyed it. “Tecumseh, the great organizer of Native resistance, was killed — and with him the hope for an independent Indian state somewhere in the heartland of America,” Gough writes. “The Americans now controlled every inch of territory for more than one hundred and fifty miles around the spot where the Nancy had gently dropped her anchor” in the St. Clair.

Although the passengers on the Nancy did not know about the battle, they knew they were potentially surrounded. Worried about an ambush in the narrow river, the civilian passengers and Maxwell “wanted to get off the vessel as soon as possible” along with their possessions. They were still finding local boats to unload everything when a local Native American (the “friendly Wyandotte” of the lyric) who had volunteered as a fourth scout for Mackintosh returned, “saying that there were some Americans on horse on the way up,” as the ship captain reported later.

Mackintosh was prepared to blow up his ship when he saw a group of men appear on the American side of the river. Now his passengers “hurried ashore” to the west bank, where they were captured right away. “I soon after saw a canoe crossing below with a white flag & as full as they could cram,” Mackintosh recorded. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, the Americans called on him to surrender his ship, but now the wind had shifted, turning into a light southerly breeze. If it continued to build up, the Nancy might be able to get away, after all. Mackintosh began to play for time.

Up spoke Captain Maxwell then, “Surrender, now, I say!

Give up your Nancy schooner and make off without delay!

Set me ashore, I do implore. I will not die this way!”

Says I, “You go, or get below, for I’ll be on my way!”

Aboard the Nancy!

“Surrender, Hell!” I say.

Aboard the Nancy

“It’s back to Mackinac I’ll fight, aboard the Nancy-o.”

Here we have unarguable differences between liner notes text and the lyrics as sung. “Up comes Captain Maxwell” rather than speaking up. Rogers also substitutes “die this day” for “die this way.”

Poetry diverges from precise history here, too. Just as a movie about real war must combine some characters and events in order to tell a ‘true story’ within a limited timeframe, Rogers has glossed the sequence of events in his lyrics, getting many details right in this stanza, even if they are not told in the right order.

For example, when the Americans called on him to surrender, Captain Maxwell was an American prisoner, though he would communicate the advice in the song to Mackintosh later, as we shall see.

Hearing the first call to give up his ship at 1 PM, Mackintosh went ashore to parley, encountering “a lieutenant colonel of the militia by the name of Beaubien.” Beaubien “once again insisted that the Nancy surrender and pledged that he would gladly guarantee the property of its crew,” an offer whose generosity spoke to the value of the schooner in American eyes.

Following the recent battle on Lake Erie, she was almost the last British ship left on the Great Lakes. Her capture would have made Mackinac Island and the Michilimackinac trading post untenable, leaving the entire northwest open to American dominion. Small as she was in such a vast wilderness of rivers and lakes, the Nancy had just become the most important ship in the world. Mackintosh asked for an hour to consult his men, which Col. Beaubien granted. This, too, was a measure of the schooner’s value in the moment.

The identity of this colonel is of course uncertain. Beaubien was a common surname on both sides of the war; indeed, the richest man in Detroit after the war was the famous Jean Baptiste Beaubien. However, a Lt. Col. Louis Antoine Beaubien did serve on the American side, and in the Detroit area, which makes him a good suspect for our colonel.

At the outbreak of war, Nancy’s brass guns had been removed for use elsewhere, and only later replaced with two iron 6-pounders. Now Mackintosh “was able to move both of the six-pounders to the port side of the vessel, where they could be brought to bear against the Americans lurking on the wooded bank,” Gough narrates. Mackintosh “then spelled out the situation for his men,” because as Englishmen and merchant sailors, they expected to be consulted in these circumstances.

They could surrender the Nancy, and give her and her cargo to the Americans. Or they could fight. To a man, the Nancy’s crew pledged to fight for the ship. With the guns ready, Mackintosh went back to Beaubien.

Beaubien was not pleased with Mackintosh’s dismissal of his offer. He claimed to have fifty men under his command and threatened to open fire on the exposed little schooner the moment Mackintosh moved to sail upriver. A defiant Mackintosh told him he would shoot back, spun around on his heels and returned to his vessel.

Making use of his poetic license, Rogers presents this final ultimatum as if it was the first contact with Beaubien and the number fifty as the Wyandotte scout’s report. He certainly gets the spirit of Mackintosh’s defiance right, and spirit matters very much in music, whereas accurate chronology does not even rate consideration.

Also note that Stan Rogers clearly sings the first line of this stanza as “draws near” instead of comes near. Beaubien calls for Mackintosh to “give up your Nancy Schooner” rather than “surrender up your schooner,” diverging twice more from the liner note text.

Up comes Colonel Beaubien, then, who shouts as he comes near.

“Surrender up your schooner and I swear you’ve naught to fear.

We’ve got your Captain Maxwell, sir, so spare yourself his tears.”

Says I, “I’ll not but send you shot to buzz about your ears.”

As good as his word, Beaubien ordered his men to fire on the Nancy the moment her crew began to raise their anchor. This was musket fire, however, and it proved to be less dangerous than the accidental ammunition fire on deck that inflicted minor burns on one sailor and reached the mainsail. Inexperienced in combat, both gun crews still kept their heads, and kept firing their guns, while the rest put out the fire.

None of the crew were hit, though ropes and rigging were damaged by the American fire. After fifteen minutes of combat, the Americans fell back into the forest. “They then escaped & went off, whether for want of powder or that we had killed or wounded any of them I know not,” Mackintosh wrote. Under the circumstances, either tactical explanation is fully plausible. Beaubien likely did not have a ready store of gunpowder close at hand, nor would he want to take heavy casualties if the winds should fail and deliver her to him regardless.

Well they fired as we hove anchor, boys, and we got under way,

But scarce a dozen broadsides, boys, the Nancy did then pay

Before the business sickened them. They bravely ran away.

All sail we made, and reached the Lake before the close of day.

Rogers has glossed the truth again. He places the moment of triumph here, but in fact the most arduous part of the Nancy’s journey was only beginning. Raising the anchor, Mackintosh and his men began a slow crawl towards Lake Huron on a light southwesterly breeze. At sunset, the crew tried hauling the ship over the rapids with a tracking line, but gave up after two hours of exhausting effort and dropped anchor to wait for better winds.

Aboard the Nancy!

We sent them shot and cheers.

Aboard the Nancy!

We watched them running through the trees, aboard the Nancy-o.

Where Rogers sings of only one encounter with Americans on shore, in fact there was a second. “At ten o’clock that night, with the Nancy in such a vulnerable position, the Americans again made entreaties to Mackintosh,” Gough writes. The same Col. Beaubien now sent aboard Mr. Beaume, one of the civilian fur traders he had captured with Captain Maxwell, along with a letter repeating his former offer.

Beaume told Mackintosh that Maxwell agreed the odds were against the Nancy crew, who should dump their cargo of gunpowder overboard and surrender the ship. It was enough to convince the First Mate. Faced by this new disunity, Captain Mackintosh at last made an executive decision against the desires of some of his men. “Let the consequences be what they will, I will attempt to get into the lake & go for Mackinac,” he recorded.

“Unnerved,” one sailor refused his watch that night. When morning came, however, there were no Americans in sight, perhaps because of the miserable rain. With the barometer falling, Mackintosh ordered all the canvas set to catch the wind. “After forty-five minutes of fighting the rapids, the Nancy’s bow cut through the last of the current, and at eight o’clock in the morning on Thursday, 7 October, she made her return to Lake Huron.” They soon found and recovered the lost anchor.

Stan Rogers ends his story at Lake Huron, but the adventure was not over. “By eleven o’clock that morning, the wind swung to the west-northwest. It built to a gale, and showers began to pelt the beleaguered little vessel. The next day, the wind shifted again, blowing straight this time from the northwest — from the direction of Mackinac.” It was the leading edge of a winter storm that made the next week miserable for everyone as supplies ran low and the Nancy tacked into the wind, struggling to stay afloat.

In a historical irony, the same storm convinced William Henry Harrison that it was too late in the year to make an assault on Mackinac Island. That threat would never materialize, and Michilimackinac would remain a British gateway to the continental northwest. The result is modern Canada.

Rogers ends his song on a populist theme of class resentment, hair powder versus gunpowder. This is not a surprising choice. Being a folk singer grown up in the 1970s, Rogers was hardly going to write a jingo lyric, nor would his audience have appreciated a happy pean to the god of war. Vietnam was a fresh memory. Overstating the differences between Maxwell and Mackintosh made the story of a battle more palatable to his contemporary listeners.

Oh, military gentlemen, they bluster, roar and pray.

Nine sailors and the Nancy, boys, made fifty run away.

The powder in their hair that day was powder sent their way

By poor and ragged sailor men, who swore that they would stay.

Aboard the Nancy!

Six pence and found a day

Aboard the Nancy!

No uniforms for men to scorn, aboard the Nancy-o.

Six pence a day and “found,” the archaic term for a sailor’s room and board, does not do the Mackintoshes justice as business owners. In reality, “experienced sailors could earn considerably more money working for the fur traders or private ship owners than they could in the service of king and country,” Gough writes.

Hardly “poor and ragged,” Alexander Mackintosh and his men had volunteered to serve the British cause along with their ship. When Mackintosh considered destroying the Nancy, he mentally prepared to destroy his own fortune. When he refused to toss his gunpowder cargo in the river, vowing that he “would never heave public property overboard to save private,” he was acting out of patriotism.

Moreover, Mackintosh behaved with exemplary military efficiency himself, uniform or no. He made deft use of intelligence sources, leveraged friendly relations with local residents, concentrated his firepower at the critical moment, defied the enemy, and escaped an ambush with his ship. Borrowing Wellington’s description of Waterloo, the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” For two days, the entire war seemed to hinge on one small schooner and her crew. Canada could not ask for greater heroes.

The story of the Nancy was not over yet. Sailing under a new captain, she was sunk and burned in 1814, and then avenged in a second chapter that could have served for yet another Stan Rogers song, had he lived long enough to sing it. What a tragedy of music history that he did not.