Shank, David

  • From Access Heritage at https://www.warof1812.ca/fd_offr.htm
    • David Shank, a 56 year-old officer who had served in the American Revolution, became the first lieutenant colonel of the Canadian Fencibles. From 1776 to the end of the American Revolution, Shank had been an officer in the 1st American, or Queen’s Rangers achieving promotion to the rank of captain in the Queen’s Ranger Dragoons. In his military journal of the service of the Queen’s Rangers in the American Revolution, Sir John Graves Simcoe recounts the role of Shank in many of the skirmishes prior to the surrender of Yorktown.
    • After Yorktown, Shank was a prisoner of war and was paroled to England where he remained until receiving a commission in the reformed Queen’s Rangers in Upper Canada in 1792. Raising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, it appears Shank was quite skilled in the business of recruiting, for he spent his last years in the Queen’s Rangers (1800 to 1802) recruiting in England.
    • He joined the Canadian Fencibles in Scotland the following year. Shank was the ideal candidate for recruiting the Canadian Fencibles in North America and played an important role in attracting able-bodied men into the reformed regiment. In 1810 however, Major General Francis De Rottenburg reported Shank as “unfit to form a regiment of that description” with regards to the regiment’s discipline and interior arrangements. Governor Sir James Craig noted to the War Office the same year: “Colonel Shank is… a respectable character, and an old officer, but totally unequal to the situation in which he is now placed. His services indeed, tho’ I myself remember their being always talked of, during the American war, as highly creditable to him, were not however of a nature to give him much insight, into the interior economy of regimental service, as he began his career in Simcoe’s Corps and I beleive never was in any other.Unfortun- ately too, this Gentleman, with an easiness of temper, which precludes every idea of that firmness and steadiness of discipline, which are so requisite in the formation of a young Corps, is at the same time possessed of that, not uncommon species of disposition, which will not allow him to admit of the exertion of the next officer to him.”
    • Presumably, Shank’s absence from the Queen’s Rangers from 1800 to 1802 was detrimental to his developing the administrative skills necessary to the management of a regiment. As early as 1808, Shank was noted for irregular practices with regards to the manner of issuing pay, and the charging of clothing.
    • Shank was subsequently removed from his regimental duties through promotion. In 1810 he was given the Brevet rank of Colonel and in June 1811 was promoted to Major General and put on staff at Quebec. The following year, Shank was transferred to staffing duties in Europe. He remained on the regiment’s strength as a lieutenant colonel until the Canadian Fencibles disbanded in 1816.
  • United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7470
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