Copy and Paste Atrocity

The author, with his deep-seated desire to portray the British as the bad guys and the Americans as good, takes certain liberties with historical events. In that vein we come to the "sack of Sorel" in Chapter 9.

Though the author has had no problem blatantly copying and pasting historical events into his narrative despite them being wildly unsuited for his scenario, here we have something of field day with the British behaving badly. The author manages to in one scene, lift events from not one, not two, but three historical acts and splice them together in an unholy mess.

First you have the events that led to the American(!!) sack of York in 1813, right down to the death of Col. Christie being caused by an arsenal explosion, just like that of Zebulon Pike in that battle. So naturally, the British spend two days looting the town:

For 48 hours, Dr. Wolfred Nelson, the honorary “colonel” of the patriote militia in the town and a septuagenarian, operated on “his fellow creatures … burned, or mashed and mangled in every part, with a leg, an arm, or a body ground to pieces … some of the wounded screamed out and begged the doctor to kill them, rather than live with the pain.” After the explosion, resistance rapidly collapsed, and Christie’s cavalry rode into town. Before the battle, the British officer had told his troops that there was to be no plundering of private property, because “the unoffending people of Canada are our own countrymen, and the poor Canadiens have been forced into this war.” 

Nelson, as the senior officer left in Sorel, offered his surrender, but was soon recognized as having been among the “traitors” of the 1837-38 rebellions and quickly arrested. Without anyone with military authority to surrender the town, the situation rapidly deteriorated; a few shots were fired at Christie’s troops from windows or loopholes within the town’s wooden buildings, and the re-occupation of Sorel rapidly became a conquest. Sorel’s civilians tried to negotiate surrender with the British, who agreed to protect private property and to parole the local militiamen, who pledged not to serve unless formally exchanged. In return, the town fathers promised to surrender all government and military property. Both sides rapidly felt betrayed; the British because the American officer in command of the shipyard, Judson, succeeded in destroying much of the naval stores painfully assembled there, including the half-built gunboats, while the Canadiens watched as the British stood by and let the largely Anglophone volunteer cavalry loot the homes and property of the largely Francophone residents of Sorel as so-called “traitors.”

In fairness, part of this is taken from the Canadian Volunteers burning the homes of "traitors" in 1837 at Saint Eustache, Saint Charles, and in carrying out the arrest warrants of rebels. However, there's so much blatant historical parallelism that the author literally rips off the sack of Badajoz for good measure:

Whether it ever got to the levels propaganda suggested of an “something that more resembled Badajoz than anything one would have expected from a British army in the 1860s,” according to one critic, in unknowable at this remove; however, Paine, consciously echoing reports of that incident in Spain five decades earlier, wrote:
“The infuriated soldiery resembled rather a pack of hell hounds vomited up from infernal regions for the extirpation of mankind than what they were but a few short hours previously – a well-organized, brave, disciplined and obedient British Army, and burning only with impatience for what is called glory.”

To cap it off the rebel Nelson conveniently dies of a stroke while in custody just to make the British-Canadians look extra worse. An obligatory war crime scene, but obviously it can only be committed by the British (or the rebels).

Remember, British bad, Union good.