by Mark Zuehlke
Clinton knew he could win only by crafting an alliance between anti-war Republicans and Federalists. Consequently, the election devolved into a contest between northern and southern states, with Clinton’s support concentrated in New England. It was soon evident that his anti-administration campaign was causing the most hotly contested presidential election in the nation’s short history. While Clinton spent the autumn stumping with frenzied haste throughout the northern states to drum up support from Federalists, disgruntled Republicans, and merchants suffering reduced trade because of the war, Madison adhered to the custom of the time by pretending that playing politics was beneath the dignity of his office. He made no speeches, released no campaign pamphlets, and was noticeably absent from public events where he could have shaken hands and solicited votes.1
Not that Madison was sanguine about being re-elected. By November, gatherings in the White House drawing room were notably “dismal and dark” and the ranks of supporters attending were “thin and solemn,” as many a Republican congressman and senator kept his distance for fear of the taint that might touch him from too close an association with a man soon to be voted from office. One observer noted that the month was punctuated by negative news of military and electoral setbacks “day after day, like the tidings of Job’s disasters.”2
Efforts to renew offensives against Canada in November had proved farcical. Finally rousing himself on November 28, Gen. Alexander Smyth crossed the Niagara River above the falls under cover of darkness and established two small bridgeheads on the Canadian shore near Fort Erie. But when he failed to reinforce the advance troops quickly enough they were thrown back. With 1,200 men in boats waiting to renew the attack, Smyth convened his senior officers for a council of war. Such councils generally resulted in cautious decisions. Predictably, Smyth was advised that this first wave of embarked troops was too small to carry Fort Erie by assault, so he cancelled the attack.
Two days later he loaded 1,500 men in boats and then convened another council of war, which drew the same conclusion as previously. Smyth defended these decisions, claiming that many of the regular troops embarked were so ill they could hardly have stood a day’s march and the militiamen could not be trusted to perform their duty. The militia, he wrote, tended to “look on a battle as on a theatrical exhibition; who if they are disappointed of the sights, break their muskets; or if they are without rations for a day desert.” After this debacle, Smyth applied to Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn for leave to visit his family. The old general cheerfully agreed. Smyth went off, keeping quiet the fact that he had no intention of returning to duty.3
For his part, although plagued by frequent, almost debilitating bouts of rheumatism, Dearborn had by mid-November assembled 3,000 regulars and an equal number of militia at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain, from where he marched on Montreal. The American force was quickly detected, and Maj. Charles-Michel d’Irumberry de Salaberry of the mostly French-Canadian Provincial Corps of Light Infantry moved to meet it with a mere two companies of Voltigeurs and 300 Indian warriors. Marching through swamps, the Canadians established a blocking position at Burtonville. On November 19, Dearborn’s army occupied Champlain on the western bank of the Richelieu River only to discover the Canadians on the opposite shore. Shortly before dawn, the Americans forced a crossing against scattered resistance from a thin screen of Voltigeurs and Indians. In the confused first minutes of this engagement a number of American troops fired upon each other. Several men were killed and a number of others wounded, prompting the rest of the invaders to retreat back across the river.
That was enough for Dearborn. He immediately led his troops back to Plattsburgh and wrote to Secretary of War William Eustis, “I had anticipated disappointment and misfortune in the commencement of the war, but I did by no means apprehend such a deficiency of regular troops and such a series of disasters as we have witnessed.” Dearborn asked Madison to allow him “to retire to the shades of private life, and remain a mere interested spectator of passing events.”4
The only good news from the Canadian front stemmed not from land-based operations but rather from the efforts of America’s small navy. Madison had always appreciated that whoever controlled the Great Lakes was free to move men and supplies with virtual impunity. American control of any of the lakes would jeopardize British ability to defend their communities and forts standing on the shoreline. Lying as it did at the nexus of Lower and Upper Canada, with York and Kingston on its shores, Lake Ontario was the most strategically important lake. Madison had ordered the navy to gain control of it, a duty that had fallen on September 3, 1812, to Commodore Isaac Chauncey. Establishing his headquarters at Sackets Harbor on the southeastern shore, Chauncey discovered his only war vessel was the brig Oneida. But several lake schooners had been commandeered and were being converted into fighting ships.
On November 10, Chauncey sallied forth with Oneida and six armed schooners. Overtaking the corvette Royal George, Chauncey chased it into Kingston harbour. Unable to press his advantage because of cannon fire coming from the town’s forts, the American commodore retired after exchanging cannonades with the British for two hours. Only one man on either side was killed and none of the ships suffered notable damage. But Chauncey could correctly assert that he now controlled Lake Ontario, for the British naval officers on the lake proved unwilling to venture out from Kingston harbour for fear of being intercepted. Their timidity was such that even Sir George Prevost reported that the “officers of the Marine appear to be destitute of all energy and spirit,” though he conceded this resulted partly from a lack of sailors. Royal George, for example, had just seventeen men fit for duty and Earl of Moira ten.5
The fact remained, however, that after Brock’s death, Prevost had assumed a purely defensive strategy. Clinging to the notion that the United States would agree to an armistice, the Canadian governor steadfastly refused to sanction any violation of American territory. While along the Upper and Lower Canadian fronts his forces were too weak to conduct major operations across the border, the potential existed on the western frontier for British troops to advance from Detroit in support of Tecumseh’s confederacy, which in September had launched a major offensive aimed at driving the Americans out of the territory north of the Ohio River.
On August 29, Brock had briefly outlined Tecumseh’s forthcoming strategy in a letter to Lord Liverpool. Explaining that Tecumseh “for the last two years has carried on, contrary to our remonstrances, an active warfare against the United States,” Brock wrote that the Shawnee chief now appeared “determined to continue the contest until they obtain the Ohio for a boundary. The United States government is accused, and I believe justly, of having corrupted a few dissolute characters whom they pretended to consider as chiefs, and with whom they contracted agreements and concluded treaties, which they have attempted to impose on the whole Indian race.”6 He also made the case, subsequently endorsed by Prevost, that any peace treaty with the Americans must include provisions for the Indians, particularly the return of “an extensive tract of country, fraudulently usurped from them.”7 In effect, the intent was to undo all the treaties negotiated by then Indiana governor William Henry Harrison. While the British hoped to achieve this through negotiation, Tecumseh determined to win the land back through military action.
Brock’s success at Detroit had emboldened many of the tribes that had earlier bowed to Harrison’s threats and entered into treaties. Shortly after Hull’s surrender the Potawatomi at Tippecanoe and Fort St. Joseph rebelled, laid siege to Fort Wayne, and sent an urgent message to Amherstburg for help from the warriors and British there. Tecumseh was soon on the march, while Lt. Col. Henry Procter, commanding the British forces after Brock hurried off to the Niagara front, first dithered, then reluctantly sent about 500 troops and a matching number of Indians under command of Maj. Adam Muir to establish a firm position on the Maumee River southwest of the dilapidated ruin of Fort Defiance in order to cut the easiest route by which Fort Wayne could be reinforced. Relian
t on boats to carry supplies and several small artillery pieces, Muir’s force crawled slowly forward, hampered by typically low late-summer river levels. The boats were dragged more often than floated.8 It was soon evident that the Indian confederacy’s campaign would be over before the British were in position.
While Tecumseh’s forces were formidable, they were also widely scattered and too short of gunpowder and shot for sustained operations. Tecumseh’s intelligence network also failed, for even as he led the tribes in an all-or-nothing uprising his old nemesis Harrison entered the Ohio Valley at the head of a vastly superior army of Kentucky militia and regular troops. Harrison, who had resigned the Indiana governorship to return to Kentucky and raise a militia army, had his sights set on command of a reconstituted Army of the West. Congressional Speaker and fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay supported this ambition, making it plain to the White House that Harrison should get the command.
Patriotic war fever burned more fiercely in Kentucky than elsewhere in the Union. While few other states were able to fill militia quotas, recruiting officers in Kentucky were overwhelmed with volunteers. When 2,000 men had mustered on a parade ground at Georgetown in August, Clay had been there to address them. “Kentucky was famed for her bravery” and so “they had the double character of Americans and Kentuckians to support,” he declared.9 The Kentucky militia had then expected to march north to reinforce Hull and join in the conquest of Canada. And it was widely believed that their leader would be the hero of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison. “If you will carry your recollection back to the age of the Crusades,” Clay wrote James Monroe, “and of some of the most distinguished leaders of those expeditions, you will have a picture of the enthusiasm existing in this country for the expedition to Canada, and for Harrison as the commander.”10
But Eustis had already given command of the Army of the West to Brig. Gen. James Winchester, another tired veteran of the Revolution and a former North Carolinian Indian fighter turned plantation owner in Tennessee. In late August, Winchester had camped at Cincinnati and was still preparing to march to the aid of Fort Wayne when Harrison rode in and announced that he was taking command of the Kentucky militiamen there while Winchester could lead the regular troops. He also insisted that overall command was his. Through an exchange of tightly worded notes the two men bickered until at last Winchester acquiesced.
Content for the moment, Harrison ordered Winchester to take 2,500 men and establish a position at the rapids of the Maumee River that could serve as the army’s forward base for the winter. Harrison, meanwhile, would move across country with 2,000 men to relieve Fort Wayne. Consequently Winchester was groping his way through the forests toward the Maumee at the same time as Muir approached it from the north. On September 25 some Indian scouts captured several Americans, interrogated them, and then killed the men before carrying back the news that a far superior force approached. Muir sought to ambush the Americans but was foiled when the bodies were discovered and Winchester ordered his men to cease the advance, throw up a stout wooden breastwork, and await an attack. Realizing he could never carry the field against a prepared enemy, Muir withdrew. As the Americans were now between him and Fort Wayne, the entire object of his mission was frustrated, so Muir and his men manhandled their boats back to Amherstburg.11
Although Harrison broke the siege of Fort Wayne, the western frontier ignited in the kind of vicious war that American settlers and Indians had fought so often before. Tecumseh’s warriors enjoyed limited success in attacks on various forts and settlements, especially against Fort Harrison, where they succeeded in burning most of the supplies stored there—including barrels containing 25,316 rations of whisky. Able bush-fighters, the warriors were tactically baffled as to how to breach the stout fortress walls behind which the Americans took shelter. Each attack was ultimately repulsed or brought to an end when reinforcements arrived to break the siege. Yet rather than drawing upon their fighting strengths by merely harassing the forts and blockhouses in which the Americans had taken shelter to keep them pinned uselessly inside and deploying their main strength to ambush Harrison’s badly extended supply lines, the warriors continued futilely trying to overrun these strongpoints. Tecumseh was too astute a tactician to not recognize where Harrison was most vulnerable, but just as his campaign was set into motion the warrior chief’s iron constitution failed him. Incapacitated by illness, he lay stranded in a small camp on the Wabash River unable to direct operations. So there was little cohesion in the offensive and almost no coordination of effort. By November, it was clear that Tecumseh’s all-or-nothing campaign had failed.
The vulnerability of his supply lines had haunted Harrison, for there was little he could do to protect the creaking, overloaded wagons, the strings of weary packhorses, defenceless flatboats, and large herds of cattle and hogs required to provision his army.12 When the Indians failed to strike these columns, Harrison thanked his good fortune and retaliated with a search-and-destroy mission. Regular cavalry and the ruthless mounted Kentucky volunteers rode hard through the forests, burning villages, destroying crops, slaughtering any Indian who crossed their path. No distinction was made between friend and foe. The Potawatomi and Miami—many of the latter having remained loyal to the United States—fled to Brownstown and Amherstburg and claimed British protection. Dependent on the British for food, these and other tribes switched their allegiances accordingly.
Raids and ambushes carried out by both sides raged on as the snows fell and the rivers and lakes froze hard, but it was clear that the winter would pass in a bloody contest where neither side could prevail.
In Washington, a gloomy pall pervaded. Madison, Monroe, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, and War Secretary William Eustis faced constant criticism for a mismanaged war. Even some War Hawks had turned against them, most noticeably Congressional Speaker Henry Clay. Eustis was under siege, constantly assailed by congressmen and senators demanding his resignation. Madison, ever faithful to those who served him, refused, even though such loyalty must surely cost him votes.
Hoping to bolster support for the war, as part of his annual address to the opening of Congress on November 4, Madison released the diplomatic documents exchanged between Britain and the United States during the summer. Here, he said, was proof that America had sought an honourable peace only to be spurned. He implored Congress to enact laws to increase the army, revise laws governing the state militias so they would be obliged to serve wherever they were sent, enlarge the navy and provide for strong squadrons on the Great Lakes, and prohibit American businessmen from continuing to trade with the British. By carefully avoiding any blockades of New England ports or seizure of ships from the northern states, Britain had been able to supply its armies in Canada and Iberia and its colonies in the West Indies with American agricultural products—a fact that infuriated Madison. In his mind, New England’s continuing trade with Britain was nothing less than treason. He sought reinstatement of an embargo to deprive the British of the goods they desperately needed.
Congress responded to the last request with customary horror and overwhelmingly voted against any form of embargo, rightly realizing that their constituents would not respond kindly to losing any source of income from the sales of agricultural products. The Senate also refused any attempt to confine trade so that the war against Britain could be waged on an economic front. That left Madison and his administration no alternative path to forcing Britain to seek terms with the United States but to conquer Canada.
Not that Congress had any intention of enabling the president to raise an army that would meet Dearborn’s estimates of what was required for this purpose. Thirty thousand men, Dearborn said, but as the end of the year drew close the entire army numbered barely 19,000. The committee studying the recommendations for reforming the army made repeated demands for ever more information and continued to express its lack of confidence in the war secretary.13
While Congress dithered the nation voted, and on December 3 the Electoral C
ollege revealed returns that gave Madison a sweeping victory, with 128 presidential electors to Clinton’s 89. The results, however, revealed a deep national rift that directly resulted from the war. Clinton had won every seaboard state from New Hampshire through to Delaware and a goodly chunk of Maryland. Madison swept the rest of the country.14
But the president’s re-election failed to quell the criticism being heaped on his administration by the House and the Senate. No sooner were the election results in than a strong lobby of Republican congressmen demanded Eustis’s removal. Before Madison could decide what to do, Eustis resigned. He left Washington in disgust and retired to Boston. Madison offered the position to Monroe, who agreed to assume it only temporarily, until a permanent replacement could be found. Consequently, for a little more than a month Monroe was both secretary of state and secretary of war, but his attention focused on attempting to manoeuvre a series of bills through the House and the Senate that would prepare the army and navy for operations in 1813.15
Two days before the end of the year, in a letter to a friend in Delaware, Henry Clay enumerated the errors of the campaigns of 1812. “Mr. Madison is wholly unfit for the storms of War. Nature has cast him in too benevolent a mould. Admirably adapted to the tranquil scenes of peace—blending all the mild & amiable virtues, he is not fit for the rough and rude blasts which the conflicts of Nations generate. Our hope then for the future conduct of the War must be placed upon the vigor which he may bring into the administration by the organization of his new Cabinet. And here again he is so hesitating, so tardy, so far behind the National sentiment.”
If Madison was unfit, Clay advised his friend, the same could not be said of Congress. Never “was there a body assembled more disposed to adopt any and every measure calculated to give effect and vigor to the operations of the War than are the members of the 12th Congress.”
