The American Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  But Brock has not the temperament for the kind of bloodless warfare that has been his lot since hostilities began. He is impatient for action and, since he cannot initiate it, hopes and expects the Americans will. He is convinced (correctly) that the Americans will have to make a move soon to keep their restless and undisciplined militia in line. To warn of attack he has ordered a line of beacon signals along the frontier. Now he can only sit and wait. His sword has yet to be raised in combat, and this clearly irks as much as it puzzles him:

  “It is certainly something singular that we should be upwards of two months in a state of warfare, and that along this widely extended frontier not a single death, either natural or by the sword, should have occurred among the troops under my command, and we have not been altogether idle, nor has a single desertion taken place.”

  Who, in Europe, can take this bloodless colonial fracas seriously? On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand™ a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada. On the Niagara frontier, two tiny, untrained armies face each other across the boiling river, each afraid to make the first move, each expecting the other to launch an attack.

  Brock is certain that something decisive will happen before the month’s end. “I say decisive, because if I should be beaten, the province is inevitably gone; and should I be victorious, I do not imagine the gentry from the other side will be anxious to return to the charge.”

  In short, he will either be confirmed as the Saviour of Upper Canada or there will be no Upper Canada. And whatever happens, Brock is convinced, this brief and not very bloody war will come to a swift conclusion. There are, of course, other possibilities, both glorious and at the same time tragic, but these he does not consider.

  •

  IN LEWISTON, during these same weeks, General Stephen Van Rensselaer finds himself pushed to the brink of a battle for which he is inadequately prepared by a series of circumstances over which he has little control. Events pile up, one upon another, like ocean breakers, driving him unwillingly towards a foreign shore.

  On August 27 the camp is subjected to a dreadful spectacle: across the river for more than half a mile straggle the remnants of Hull’s defeated army, ragged, shoeless, dispirited, the wounded groaning in open carts, the whole prodded onward by their British captors.

  “The sensations this scene produced in our camp were inexpressible,” Lovett writes his friend. “Mortification, indignation, fearful apprehension, suspicion, jealousy, dismay, rage, madness.” The effect on Van Rensselaer’s force is twofold: the militia is cowed by this demonstration of British invincibility while the Hawks among the officers salivate for action.

  “Alarm pervades the country and distrust among the troops,” the General writes to Governor Tompkins. Like Hull’s beaten soldiers, many of his own are without shoes; all are clamouring for pay. “While we are thus growing daily weaker, our enemy is growing stronger.” The British are reinforcing the high ground above Queenston, pouring in men and ordnance and fortifying every prominent point from Fort Erie to Fort George.

  Governor Tompkins, who is thunderstruck by the disaster, receives another letter from his political ally, the belligerent quartermaster general, Peter B. Porter:

  “Three days ago we witnessed a sight which made my heart sick within me, and the emotions it excited throughout the whole of our troops along the line...are not to be described. The heroes of Tippecanoe, with the garrisons of Detroit and Michilimackinac...were marched like cattle from Fort Erie to Fort George, guarded by General Brock’s regular troops with all the parade and pomp of British insolence, and we were incapacitated by the armistice and our own weakness from giving them the relief which they seemed anxiously to expect, and could only look on and sicken at the sight....

  “...This miserable and timid system of defense must be abandoned or the nation is ruined and disgraced. Make a bold push at any one point and you will find your enemy....

  “The public mind in this quarter is wrought up almost to a state of madness. Jealousy and distrust begin to prevail toward the general officers, occasioned perhaps by the rash and imprudent expressions on politics of some of the persons attached to them, but principally to the surrender of Detroit, which among the common people is almost universally ascribed to treachery.... “

  On September 7, a day before the armistice ends. Major Lovett, the General’s eloquent aide, comes to the conclusion that “we must either fight or run.... There are some pretty strong reasons to believe that Brock is attempting to Hull us....” Yet nobody on the American side can guess Brock’s intentions or even estimate the true strength of his force because it is impossible to persuade a single man to risk his neck by acting as a spy on the Canadian shore. Van Rensselaer must resort to the timeworn artifice of sending officers across under flags of truce to treat with the enemy on various pretexts while peering about at the fortifications.

  At Albany, General Dearborn’s resolve is wavering. As late as mid-August he stated his belief that Montreal and all of Upper Canada would fall to the Americans before winter. Now Hull’s defeat has shaken him. He still insists that he will attack Niagara, Kingston, and Montreal, but his purpose is circumscribed by a hedgerow of “ifs.” If the governors of the neighbouring states will supply enough reinforcements quickly; if the Quartermaster General can get him sufficient supplies, ammunition, and guns, then “I am persuaded we may act with effect.” If he can muster some five thousand regulars and additional militia, he will push on to Montreal to support Van Rensselaer’s offensive on the Niagara, hoping to cut communications between the two Canadas, “but whether I shall be able to effect anything or not depends on so many contingencies as to leave all in doubt.”

  He has dispatched some five thousand troops to Plattsburg on Lake Champlain and another two thousand (all militia) to Sackets Harbor and expects to have an army of seven thousand on the Niagara, including three thousand regulars. Unfortunately Brigadier-General Wadsworth, the New York militia commander, who has grossly overestimated Brock’s forces, has warned him that anything fewer than ten thousand will not do.

  In his reports to Washington, Dearborn manages to be gloomy and optimistic in the space of a single sentence: “I fear...that we shall meet with additional misfortunes on the borders of Upper Canada... but if we redouble our exertions and inspire a due degree of firmness and spirit in the country, all will ultimately go well.”

  He is an old man, indecisive, inexperienced, out of his depth, querulous and uninformed (“Will the militia consent to go into Canada?”), the victim of his country’s military myopia, the prisoner of its bureaucratic confusion. Hampered by lack of supplies, lack of men, lack of money, he tells Eustis: “I have never found official duties so unceasing, perplexing and fatiguing as at this place” and then adds a sympathetic postscript: “I presume you are not on a bed of roses.”

  At Lewiston, while Dearborn vacillates, Peter B. Porter chafes for action. He and his cronies mount a whispering campaign against Van Rensselaer’s command. The General’s aide, Solomon, is convinced that “they have so far succeeded in the Camp and the Country that in the former it is only whispered, but in the Latter it is openly said, that Gen. Van Rensselaer is a traitor to his Country and the Surrender of the Army when it crosses the River is the price of his Infamy.” As a result, “he cannot enforce the Subordination which is so necessary to the safety and glory of the Troops he Commands.”

  Reluctantly, Solomon writes to Morgan Lewis, a former Republican governor of New York and now the state’s quartermaster general, suggesting that another commander-somebody of the same politics as the government-replace his cousin on the frontier. Nothing comes of it.

  The General expects a British attack imminently and prepares to defend against it. He decides to maintain Fort Niagara, opposite Fort George, decrepit though it is, removes the roof from a s
tone building, sets up a battery of two twelve-pound cannon in its upper storey, establishes a second battery of three eighteen-pounders a mile upriver across from a similar British emplacement, builds a new communications road back of the river and beyond enemy fire, and co-opts an additional five hundred men stationed at Buffalo to strengthen his own force.

  The British are also active. Gazing across the narrow river, General Van Rensselaer can see the Royal George arrive with two hundred gunners. He has learned that one hundred smaller boats loaded with stores for the enemy fort have passed up the St. Lawrence together with two regiments of troops. The situation, he admits, is critical, but “a retrograde movement of this army upon the back of that disaster which has befallen the one at Detroit would stamp a stigma upon the national character which time could never wipe away.” He will hold out against superior strength until he is reinforced. There is no evidence that he contemplates an attack. It is the British who will attack, or so the General believes.

  But the British do not attack, and the promised reinforcements do not arrive. In Van Rensselaer5s army of two thousand, on September 22, one hundred and forty-nine are too sick to fight, including his cousin Solomon. The weather is dreadful; raw winds and cold rains harass the troops, soaking such blankets and tents as are available.

  After suffering for six days with fever, Solomon attempts to return to duty, suffers a relapse, is bled thrice and doctored with enough salts, jalap, castor oil, and calomel to render an ordinary man insensible. It takes him another week to recover from the doctors5 ministrations. By contrast Lovett, the amateur soldier, is in splendid condition, “hardened almost to the hide, muscles and houghs of an ox” and clearly having the time of his life:

  “We are every few days, deluged in water, such storms of rain and wind I think I never experienced, the cloth of my Tent is mere sieve stuff; every third night I get wet as a Muskrat. But in the worst of it I sing, in proper tune: ‘No burning heats by day, Nor blasts of evening air, Shall take my health away, If God be with me there.’...1 feel safe; for I feel myself in duty. I am glad I came...,”

  In Albany, General Dearborn continues to promise that money, men, and provisions are on the way, albeit tardily (“a strange fatality seems to have pervaded the whole arrangement” is the way he puts it), and urges aggressive action. His letter to Stephen Van Rensselaer bubbles with enthusiasm: on the western frontier, General Harrison is marching to the relief of Detroit with a new Army of the Northwest, six or seven thousand strong; two thousand more troops are stationed at Sackets Harbor; the American navy is operating in Lake Ontario. "In fact we have nothing to fear and much to hope.”

  Everything, however, depends on what happens on the Niagara River: “By putting on the best face that your situation admits, the enemy may be induced to delay an attack until you will be able to meet him and carry the war into Canada. At all events, we must calculate on possessing Upper Canada before winter sets in.” Dearborn underlines this passage as if, by a pen stroke, he can will his ragtag army into victory.

  At the end of September, the longed-for reinforcements arrive, including seventeen hundred soldiers under the command of one of the more curious specimens of American generalship, Brigadier-General Alexander Smyth. Smyth is bombastic, egotistical, jealous of his prerogatives. A regular officer, he disdains the militia and has no intention of co-operating with his nominal commander, Stephen Van Rensselaer. Though he knows nothing of the country and has only just arrived, he takes it upon himself to advise the General that the best place for a crossing of the Niagara would be above the falls and not below them. He has therefore decided not to take his troops to Lewiston but to encamp them near Buffalo, thus splitting the American force. Nor does he report personally to Van Rensselaer. He says he is too busy.

  By now. General Stephen Van Rensselaer has, in the words of his cousin Solomon, “resolved to gratify his own inclinations and those of his army” and commence operations. The British show no inclination to attack. Dearborn has demanded action. For better or for worse, Stephen is determined that he shall have it.

  If numbers mean anything, his chances for success are excellent. He now has some eight thousand troops under his command, half of them regulars, of whom forty-two hundred are encamped at Lewiston. (The remainder are at Fort Niagara and either at Buffalo or, in the case of some two thousand Pennsylvania volunteers, en route to Buffalo.) To counter this, force Brock has about one thousand regular troops, some six hundred militia, and a reserve of perhaps six hundred militia and Indians, strung out thinly from Fort Erie to Fort George. The bulk of his strength he must keep on his wings to prevent the Americans from turning one of his flanks and attacking his rear. Thus his centre at Queenston is comparatively weak.

  Yet numbers do not tell the whole story. Morale, sickness, discipline, determination-all these Van Rensselaer must take into account. By his own count he has only seventeen hundred effective militia men at Lewiston. The state of his army is such that he knows he must act swiftly, if at all:

  “Our best troops are raw, many of them dejected by the distress their families suffer by their absence, and many have not necessary clothing. We are in a cold country, the season is far advanced and unusually inclement; we are half deluged by rain. The blow must be struck soon or all the toil and expense of the campaign will go for nothing, and worse than nothing, for the whole will be tinged with dishonor.”

  The key word is “dishonor.” It creeps like a fog through the sodden tents of the military, blinding all to reality. It hangs like a weight over the council chambers in Albany and Washington. Stephen Van Rensselaer feels its pressure spurring him to action, any action. No purpose now in disputing the war and its causes, no sense in further recriminations or I-told-you-so’s. Detroit must be avenged! “The national character is degraded, and the disgrace will remain, corroding the public feeling and spirit until another campaign, unless it be instantly wiped away by a brilliant close of this.” The words might have sprung from the lips of Porter, the War Hawk; they are actually those of Van Rensselaer, the Federalist and pacifist.

  He knows that with his present force at Lewiston it would be rash to attempt an attack. But Smyth has arrived with an almost equal number and that is enough. He plans a two-pronged assault: Smyth’s regulars will cross the river near Newark and storm Fort George from the rear while he leads the militia from Lewiston to carry the heights above Queenston. This will divide the thinly spread British forces, cut their line of communications, drive their shipping from the mouth of the Niagara River (which will become an American waterway), provide the troops with warm and extensive winter quarters, act as a springboard for the following season’s campaign, and-certainly not least-”wipe away part of the score of our past disgrace.”

  The scheme is plausible, but it depends on the co-operation of Brigadier-General Smyth; and Smyth has no intention of co-operating. He acts almost as if Van Rensselaer did not exist. The Commander invites him to a council of officers to plan the attack. Smyth does not reply. The General writes again, more explicitly. Still no reply. Several days pass. Nothing. A fellow officer now informs Van Rensselaer that he has seen Smyth, who is unable to name the day when he can come to Lewiston for a council. The General thereupon sends a direct order to Smyth to bring his command “with all possible dispatch.” Silence.

  In no other army would such insubordination be tolerated, but America is not yet a military nation. The amiable Van Rensselaer does not court-martial his recalcitrant underling; he simply proceeds without him. He has already told Dearborn that it would be rash to attack Queenston with the militiamen under his command at Lewiston. Now, with Smyth’s regulars apparently out of the picture, he determines to do just that.

  He has very little choice for, at this juncture, an incident occurs near Black Rock that reduces his options.

  •

  BLACK ROCK, NEW YORK, October 8, 1812. Lieutenant Jesse Elliott of the U.S. Navy, a veteran of the 1807 attack on Chesapeake (and said to be a nephew
of Matthew Elliott), supervising the construction of three ships of war for service in Lake Erie, finds himself tempted by the sight of two British ships, newly anchored under the guns of Fort Erie. One is the North West Company’s two-gun schooner Caledonia, which Captain Roberts impressed into service during the successful attack on Michilimackinac. The other is a former American brig, Adams, mounting six guns, captured at Detroit and renamed for that city by the British. Elliott conceives a daring plan: if he can capture both vessels and add them to the fleet under construction, the balance of power will shift to the American side on Lake Erie.

  He needs seamen. Fortunately some ninety American sailors are on the march from Albany. Elliott sends a hurry-up call, selects fifty for the job. Isaac Roach, a young artillery adjutant (and a future mayor of Philadelphia), offers fifty more men from his own regiment. There is a scramble to volunteer. The battalion commander, Winfield Scott, then on the threshold of what will be a long and glorious career, warns his men that they can expect a hard fight, but this only excites them further. When Roach, a mere second-lieutenant, orders “Volunteers to the front: March!” the entire battalion steps forward. Officers senior to Roach attempt to resign their commissions in order to serve under him. Men are so eager for battle that Roach finds he must select ten more than his quota.

  The attack is made in two longboats, each carrying about fifty armed men, who must track their craft against the rapid current of the Niagara to the mouth of Buffalo Creek-difficult work. Here the men are forced to wade into the freezing water to their shoulders to haul the empty longboats over the bar at the creek’s mouth in order to enter Lake Erie. It is past midnight; the troops, soaking wet, with a chill sleet falling about them, must now row for three hours up the lake “and not allowed to even laugh to keep ourselves warm.”

  At three they come silently upon their unsuspecting quarry. A fire in the caboose of Detroit gives them a light to steer by. Roach and Elliott, in the lead boat, head straight for the vessel. Sailing Master George Watts and Captain Nathan Towson of Winfield Scott’s regiment take their boat under the stem of Caledonia. It is not possible to achieve complete surprise for the sleet has ended, the night is calm, the lake glassy. Two volleys of musket fire pour into the lead boat from the deck of Detroit, whose captain is the same Lieutenant Frederic Rolette who captured Cuyahoga at the start of the war. Rolette and his crew are quickly overpowered as Elliott manages to loose the topsails in an attempt to get the ship underway. Suddenly a British cannon opens up; a heavy ball whizzes twenty feet above the heads of the boarding party (“John Bull always aims too high,” says Roach), ricochets onto the opposite shore where half of Winfield Scott’s men are lined up to watch the action and tears an arm off a Major Cuyler of the New York militia, knocking him from his horse, mortally wounded. Roach, with a bundle of lighted candles in his hand, touches off Detroit’s six-pound deck guns in reply.