by Mark Zuehlke
Vincent’s scouts kept him well informed of the American progress. When nineteen-year-old militia scout Billy Green found his brother-in-law hiding from the Americans who had tried to take him prisoner, the fugitive revealed the enemy’s password. Green rushed this information to Vincent. Meanwhile, Lt. Col. John Harvey had been creeping about the edges of the American camp, finding it haphazardly placed and poorly guarded. Not cooperating with each other, Winder and Chandler had failed to tie their lines together. Men were strewn everywhere, companies setting up and lighting cooking fires wherever they liked. Harvey urged Vincent to attack at once.
At about 11:30 that night, Harvey returned with 700 men. Armed with the password, they closed on and bayoneted the first sentries. Then they formed a line and charged. The Americans sitting around fires recovered quickly, snatching up guns to meet the attack. Charge thrown into chaos, the British troops broke formation and became entangled with the Americans.
Chandler and Winder lost control over their men, as did Harvey. Vincent, who had accompanied the attack, got turned around in the dense woods and only reappeared at his headquarters the next morning, having lost horse and hat. Chandler kept yelling, “Where is the Line? Where is the Line?” until he was silenced by a British soldier from a twenty-man unit commanded by Maj. Charles Plenderleath of the 49th Regiment. The general was taken prisoner. Sgt. Alexander Fraser of the same unit came face to face with Winder, and when the general raised his pistol, calmly advised: “If you stir, Sir, you die.” Winder lowered his gun. Plenderleath and his intrepid band bagged not only two generals but also five field officers and captains and more than 100 troops. Although the British suffered more casualties than the Americans—214 to 168, including the prisoners—by morning they held the field.11
Command of the Americans devolved to cavalry officer Col. James Burn, who later informed Dearborn that he had been “at a loss what steps to pursue in the unpleasant dilemma, occasioned by the capture of our Generals, finding the ammunition of the troops nearly expended.” A hasty council of war produced the inevitable result. The American officers agreed to retire briskly to Forty Mile Creek. There they remained until the afternoon of June 7, when Yeo showed up and subjected them to a heavy naval bombardment that sent the column scuttling back to Fort George. Dearborn, thoroughly alarmed, ordered Fort Erie—which had been taken without a shot fired—burned and abandoned. He then drew his entire army in behind the dubious walls of Fort George and prepared to meet a siege.12
Believing he faced at least 6,000 Americans at Fort George, Vincent could do little to exploit this unexpected failure of will. A consequent lull ensued that Prevost put to good use by reorganizing his command. Maj. Gen. Roger Sheaffe’s ignominious abandonment of York garnered no thanks from the inhabitants of Upper Canada, so the governor sent him packing to Montreal and brought in Maj. Gen. Francis de Rottenburg. The fifty-six-year-old baron had been born in Danzig and seen service in both the French and Polish armies before joining the British army in 1794. After several postings in various corners of the empire, he was promoted major general in 1810, sent to Canada, and had since held various commands in Lower Canada.13 Cautious but competent, de Rottenburg kept his emotions and temper on such a short rein that he seemed unshakably calm no matter the crisis. No Brock, he was a commander who would husband his resources but not shy from giving battle.
Dearborn, meanwhile, finally admitted to ill health and handed off to his surviving senior officer, Brig. Gen. John Boyd. With Canadian irregulars and Indians roaming at will throughout the peninsula and routinely sniping at American foraging parties, Boyd decided some offensive action was needed. He also wanted to prove his worth as an officer and assuage American pride after the humiliation of Stoney Creek. On the road leading from Queenston to St. Davids, near a place known as Beaver Dams, the British had established a small outpost. Its commander, Lt. James FitzGibbon, was headquartered in a stone house. To the northeast, a gathering of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians was camped, and it was from here that the raiding warriors operated. Sending the redcoats off and then sorting out the Indians seemed easy enough to Boyd, a former soldier of fortune who had served in India and pretended to have great experience in handling troops. Winfield Scott distrusted the man’s competency, thinking him more bully than soldier, but being subordinate held his peace.14 The operation seemed straightforward, the kind of punitive strike frontier American soldiers had conducted for decades. Boyd assigned the job to Lt. Col. Charles Boerstler of the 14th United States Infantry, who sallied forth with a mixed cavalry and infantry force of 700 men and two field guns.
What followed was the kind of comic farce that had signified American performances during 1812. It also gave birth to a Canadian legend forever wrapped in mystery and the subject of countless debates regarding its credence.
On June 23, Boerstler set out, guided by a freebooter partisan from Buffalo named Cyrenius Chapin—who claimed to be a doctor—and his irregulars whom the regular soldiers disparaged as the “Forty Thieves.” The American column slogged through the heaviest summer rains in twenty-five years, Boerstler increasingly disenchanted by his guide’s blundering about in such a manner that it was evident he little recognized any of the country through which they passed. In addition to the unwieldy cannon trains, the soldiers dragged along wagons brimming with supplies as if on a protracted campaign rather than a hit-and-run mission. Wading through a miasma of mud, the column managed only eight miles the first day before stopping about midnight at Queenston. Boerstler commandeered a house and ordered its residents to serve dinner. The Americans were still about the same distance again from their objective and Boerstler issued instructions that come morning the force would bring the enemy to battle.
How then to explain, just before dawn on June 22, a day before Boerstler’s arrival, the departure by a Queenston housewife and mother of five on a mission to warn FitzGibbon that the Americans were marching on his position? Thirty-five years old, Laura Secord could give FitzGibbon no other details. Despite this paucity of information, the lieutenant credited it sufficiently to warn the Indians and put his small garrison on alert.
Consequently, when the Americans started up the road to the Niagara Escarpment, the British, Indians, and Canadian militia lay in ambush at Beaver Dams. Boerstler and his men faced tough going, worse than the previous day’s advance. Men slipped and slid in the mud that greased the road.
At nine o’clock that morning 300 Caughnawaga struck the rear of the column and were soon joined by 100 Mohawks. Disoriented by the dense woods lining the road, the Americans fired at shadows more than the fleeting Indians. After three hours of this harassment they were totally demoralized and would surrender but for fear of being massacred. That was when FitzGibbon and fifty redcoats materialized out of the woods. By his own account the British had not yet fired a single shot. But the Caughnawaga and Mohawk had “beat the American detachment into a state of terror, and the only share I claim is taking advantage of a favourable moment to offer them protection from the tomahawk and the scalping knife.”15
FitzGibbon engaged Boerstler long enough in negotiations through various blustering proclamations to enable Maj. Peter DeHaren to hasten in from Twelve Mile Creek with three companies of regulars to enforce the lieutenant’s claims that between the Indians and redcoats they could easily butcher the Americans. Sufficiently cowed, Boerstler surrendered. The American militiamen with the column were paroled, but 462 officers and men of the regular army were made prisoners and all the supplies and the cannon they had lugged with them were captured. Although in the confusion Boerstler managed to slip away, he was damned as a coward by the Americans despite his claims that the men were so exhausted that further fighting would have been futile.
Beaver Dams was truly an Indian victory for which they were barely thanked by the British despite suffering about 15 killed and 25 wounded. It was also the final straw for the Americans on the Niagara Peninsula. After this debacle Dearborn simply hunkered down in Fort
George, waiting for inevitable attack. But, rather than the British coming for the old general that everyone now disdained with the nickname Granny, there came instead a short note from Secretary of War John Armstrong. “I have the President’s orders to express to you his decision that you retire from … command … until your health be re-established, and until further orders.”16
Despite her making little of it herself, Laura Secord’s trek was soon enlarged into myth, and she became a Canadian hero of the war even as it remained unclear how she came about her knowledge. Over the years Secord provided contradictory and vague details. By one account her husband had overheard an American officer discussing the planned operation. But where he was at the time was never clarified. At other times the story was that she heard it personally from enemy soldiers while forced to serve them dinner. Who were these men? Certainly not Boerstler, as some accounts would claim, for he had not yet led the column out of Fort George. Perhaps, however, they were some of Chapin’s scurrilous characters. Just as probable, Secord picked up nothing more than a rumour—for rumours flowed like water over Niagara Falls in this region because almost everyone knew someone or was related to someone on the other side of the border—and decided it warranted bearing to the nearest British officer.17
FitzGibbon little helped to clarify matters. His reports on Beaver Dams filed shortly after the action failed to mention her at all. Sometime after the war, when a debate as to the credence of her story was raised, FitzGibbon issued a signed certificate that a woman named Laura Secord, “a person of slight and delicate frame,” did make the journey.18 She would be the only hero to emerge on either side out of the seesaw of events that played out on the Niagara Peninsula in 1813.
In Washington, President James Madison had convened a special session of the Thirteenth Congress on May 24 primarily to enact legislation needed to keep the federal treasury afloat by introducing internal taxation and to have his appointed envoys to the Russian mediation offer endorsed. Typically, Henry Clay was elected Speaker by a hefty majority vote of eighty-nine to fifty-three. When news of the defeat at Beaver Dams and other failures on the Niagara Peninsula reached the city, Clay was so incensed that he sent Representative Charles J. Ingersoll to Madison with a formal demand that Dearborn be replaced. The president, who had fallen ill with a severe fever on June 11 that seemed at times life-threatening, was barely able to receive Ingersoll. Rising from his sickbed but briefly, Madison agreed that Dearborn must be replaced, and the bitter note had been duly issued under Armstrong’s hand on July 6.
Armstrong’s first instinct was to personally take command in the north, but there was little support among the rest of the administration for this notion. James Monroe and Armstrong were engaged in ever more public scraps over war policy. William Jones, the navy secretary, was disenchanted with them both but more so with Armstrong. Many, Jones wrote, “believe that the ‘Old Soldie.’ is not a legitimate son of Mars. He is descending very fast—and so are we all.”19 In Albert Gallatin’s absence, Jones had assumed responsibility for the treasury and found the double duties extremely onerous. He begged Madison to appoint a new treasury secretary, but the president ignored him.20 Madison was barely functional, laid out on what was alternately described, depending on the source of information, as his White House sickbed or deathbed. The latter prospect gave many a Federalist heart while adding to a general sense of demoralization in Republican ranks. A wet, searing summer gripped Washington in its maw. The House and the Senate sweltered. Their members bickered incessantly.
Madison had sought ratification of his appointments of Albert Gallatin, John Quincy Adams, and James Bayard for the Russian peace delegation. He also advanced the name of Jonathan Russell, whom he wanted endorsed at the same time as minister to Sweden.
The president had expected a rough reception to the taxation proposal, and that was exactly what he got. “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” demanded an editorial in the New York Evening Post. Macbeth, the editor wrote, “hardly felt less horror at the appearance of the bloody dagger staring him in the face, than must the good people of these United States at beholding a democratic President recommending internal taxes.”21 The taxes had been proposed by Gallatin, and when Jones presented the plan in the House he made this clear. One Federalist after another and many a Republican accused Gallatin of having fled his post by joining the Russian mediation delegation “to avoid the odium of the system of taxation.” When the proposals were forwarded to the Ways and Means Committee for consideration and discussion, the Federalists launched an all-out attack on the administration by challenging the appointments of Gallatin and Russell.22
Gallatin, they argued, could not simultaneously serve as a peace mediator while retaining helm of the treasury. Without addressing the proposal that he serve on the Russian mission, the Federalist senators objected to Russell’s appointment as minister to Sweden. The character and record of both men were impugned during the hearings that followed. Finally the Senate ended the matter of Russell by deciding there was no need to appoint any minister to Sweden at all. A covey of senators tried to mollify Russell by suggesting they would reverse their votes if he agreed to go to Sweden as something less than a minister. This proposal was “so pitiful in the parsimony … so incompatible with the national interests and dignity … that I did not hesitate for a moment in my refusal,” Russell wrote.23 Meanwhile, Gallatin’s appointment was rejected by an eighteen-to-seventeen vote. Only Adams and Bayard were approved.
On August 2 Madison advised Gallatin of “the painful manner in which the Senate have mutilated the mission to St. Petersburg.”24 By this time, it was equally clear that the Ways and Means Committee would not recommend Gallatin’s tax plan in full. Instead, a series of stopgap measures were accepted that would do little to raise significant amounts of money. The war would continue to be financed on the cheap.
While these debates had been under way, Armstrong confirmed Dearborn’s replacement, a matter that received little attention in the House or Senate. Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson, another Revolutionary War veteran currently posted to New Orleans, would assume command in the north. Gearing up for this change for some time, Armstrong had sent word four months earlier for Wilkinson to report to Washington. Fifty-six, Wilkinson was not one of the Revolution’s favoured sons. His was the reputation of a professional schemer and incompetent most notorious for participating in a cabal that had attempted to bring about the sacking of George Washington. Most U.S. senior officers despised him. His health in recent months had been poor.25 Sensing no urgency in Armstrong’s summons, Wilkinson turtled northward and had yet to pass all the way through Georgia, stopping here and there to visit acquaintances and take long rests, when he learned that Armstrong had fired Dearborn and he was to make haste to Washington. Picking up the pace to a shuffle, Wilkinson passed another four weeks moving along the banquet circuit, making speeches and currying favour as he went, before reporting to Armstrong in early August.
Meanwhile, the hot, dry summer of 1813 on the Canadian border had passed with the Americans doing little of anything. At best a stalemate had been allowed to develop. While this might suit the British, allowing them to continue building defences and assembling reinforcements, it did nothing to advance the American cause.
SIXTEEN
Have Met the Enemy
SUMMER 1813
The failed British attack on Fort Meigs in early May rendered both commanders on the Lake Erie frontier unduly cautious. Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison cancelled an attack on Fort Malden and instead passed the spring recruiting and training new regiments. Harrison waited for Oliver Hazard Perry. The young master commander at Presque Isle was busily constructing a small fleet to contest control of the lake. Once there were ships, an amphibious operation could be mounted.
Elsewhere on the western frontier developments indirectly strengthened his position at Lake Erie. Illinois governor Ninian Edwards spent a busy spring building forts at Peoria, Fort Madison, and Prairie
du Chien and at Rock Island Rapids. The last three, on the Mississippi River, marked the outer limits of American influence in Indian territory. On the negative side of the ledger came word that the tenuous claim America had made to any presence on the Pacific coast had been erased by the surrender that April of Fort Astoria on the Columbia River mouth. North West Company traders had appeared at the fort to inform the American fur traders there of the war and the inevitability of an imminent attack by the Royal Navy. To avoid bloodshed, the Canadian traders offered to buy the fort, and the American Pacific Fur Company manager astutely accepted. American colours were exchanged for the Union Jack.1
Back on Lake Erie, Perry was well aware that the fate of American operations rested on his ability to float a fleet and destroy the British ships. Under construction were two brigs to be called Lawrence and Niagara. Weighing 500 tons and brig-rigged with two masts that mounted square sails, the two ships were to be fitted with eighteen 32-pounder carronades and two long 12-pounder guns. Perry also had eight smaller schooners, some built from scratch and others, like Caledonia, that had been captured earlier. Most of these vessels had been trapped at Black Rock until Fort Niagara’s fall. But he lacked sufficient sailors to crew them all. Naval reinforcement flowed through Commodore Isaac Chauncey at Sackets Harbor and most were kept there.2
More immediate was the problem that the British had Presque Isle blockaded. Because Lake Erie’s southern shore lacked an ideal harbour, Presque Isle had been selected only out of necessity. A long sandbar that choked the mouth of the bay to a width of only eight-tenths of a mile and a depth of only five to seven feet made it too shallow for the British warships to enter. But this protection came at a distinct disadvantage. When fully loaded with armaments, Perry’s new brigs had insufficient draft to cross over the sandbar. So long as the British maintained the blockade, any attempt to float the vessels over the bar and then mount the guns could be easily thwarted.3
