Tecumseh and Brock

by James Laxer

  During the American occupation, Willcocks and the Volunteers participated in the burning and looting of farms. They arrested well-known Loyalists and dispatched them to U.S. prisons across the river. Most notoriously, Willcocks supported and participated in the burning of the village of Newark on December 10, 1813.

  Early that year, U.S. Secretary of War John Armstrong had decided that if British troops threatened to take cover in Newark, which was adjacent to the U.S.-occupied Fort George, the Americans could take the pre-emptive step of destroying the village. During the first week of December 1813, Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond replaced the cautious Major General Francis de Rottenburg as the commander of British forces in North America. Drummond, the youngest officer to serve in Canada during the period, ordered the British units at Burlington Heights to advance toward Niagara.

  On December 10, U.S. Brigadier General George McClure, who had emigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1790, become a businessman, and risen through the ranks in the New York Militia,26 decided that his under-strength complement, which included one hundred members of the Company of Canadian Volunteers, was insufficient to hold Fort George. He pulled his men out of the fort and moved them across the river to Fort Niagara. The retreating Americans threw the cannon from Fort George into the surrounding ditch. Then McClure gave the order to burn the village of Newark to the ground.

  With the active participation of the Company of Canadian Volunteers, that order was carried out, leaving only one of the 150 houses in the village standing. Given little warning to retrieve their belongings from their houses, the inhabitants of Newark, who were mostly women and children, were rendered homeless in the bitter cold of a mid-December night. Left destitute in the snow with only a few of their possessions, the four hundred townsfolk desperately sought shelter, some finding it in Fort George and in a nearby barracks. Others built makeshift shelters by leaning partially burnt boards against the chimneys of gutted houses. When the sun rose the next morning, the bodies of women and children were found in the snowdrifts.

  The Company of Canadian Volunteers was created to win wavering Upper Canadians over to the American side. The depredations of the unit, climaxing in the burning of Newark, had exactly the opposite effect, driving inhabitants sharply to the British side and leaving them thirsting for revenge.

  Vengeance came quickly. Having retaken Fort George, the British were in a position to threaten Fort Niagara and the surrounding region on the American side of the river. On the night of December 18, Drummond sent a force of over five hundred men across the river. Having forced a U.S. picket to reveal the American challenge and password, the British approached the fort’s gate and used this intelligence to gain entry. Resistance was soon overcome, except for a stout defence put up by U.S. troops in one of the fort’s buildings. After the Americans refused a British demand to surrender, the attackers forced their way inside. The order was then given to “bayonet the whole.”

  Only six British soldiers were killed and five wounded in the attack. Sixty-five Americans were killed, and fourteen were wounded and taken prisoner, along with three hundred and forty-four others. The American toll did not include those bayoneted, who numbered at least eighty.

  From Fort Niagara, the British marched through the American settlements along the Niagara, dispensing destruction and death along the way. Much of Lewiston and the villages of Manchester and Schlosser were laid waste. Several days later, the British again crossed the Niagara River to assault Black Rock and Buffalo. British soldiers torched the buildings in Black Rock and then meted out the same punishment to Buffalo before destroying the naval yard at Buffalo Creek. They left more than forty Americans dead, losing close to that number themselves, and took ninety prisoners back with them to the Canadian side of the river.

  Brigadier General McClure’s order to burn Newark, which started the round of destruction on both sides of the border, was later disavowed by the U.S. government. In the spring of 1814, in what came to be known as the Ancaster Bloody Assize, Upper Canadians were tried in absentia for high treason. John Beverley Robinson, the attorney general of Upper Canada, was the prosecutor. Fifteen Upper Canadians, including Joseph Willcocks, were convicted. Eight of them were later captured and hanged at Burlington Heights on July 20, 1814. Willcocks met his death when he was shot in the chest during the siege of Fort Erie on September 4, 1814. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery.

  Chapter 16

  Bloody Niagara

  WHILE THE TWO SIDES were inflicting atrocities on one another along the Niagara Frontier, cooler heads on the other side of the Atlantic were once again considering ways to bring the war to an end. In the later months of 1813, hopeful for a victory over Napoleon and the end of decades of fighting in Europe, the British government was also in a mood to seek peace with the Americans. In November 1813, Lord Castlereagh offered to begin direct negotiations with the United States to end the war.

  By the time the British took this initiative, the earlier Russian offer to mediate the conflict had come to nothing. In May 1813, the Madison administration had dispatched Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin and Senator James Bayard on a journey to St. Petersburg to serve as American negotiators. When the two reached Russia, they soon found that their mission was doomed to failure. The British were not interested in having the Russians mediate the war in North America. In January 1814, Gallatin and Bayard left Russia with nothing to show for their efforts.1

  On January 5, 1814, the Madison administration accepted the offer from the British government to open direct negotiations, and the president added two additional members to the roster of American commissioners: Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell, a New Englander, who had been U.S. chargé d’affaires in Britain when the war broke out.2

  The American commissioners travelled first to Göteborg, Sweden, where talks with the British were initially scheduled, and from there to Ghent, in present-day Belgium. The British, confident that the war with Napoleon was over, dragged their feet, hoping that the veterans dispatched to North America might achieve victories that would strengthen their hand in the talks.

  The British commissioners, men of lower political stature than their American counterparts, were not selected until May 1814, and they departed for Ghent on August 2. Moreover, they were close enough to home that they could quickly consult their government, which the Americans could not. Leading the British commissioners was Admiral Lord James Gambier, who had participated in the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 and had served in Newfoundland during the American Revolutionary War. William Adams, LL.D., a distinguished maritime law expert, was also on the negotiation team, as was Henry Goulburn, a young undersecretary for war and the colonies who went on to have a successful career in politics (a town in New South Wales is named after him). The final member was Anthony St. John Baker, who was to serve as secretary to the commission.3

  John Quincy Adams, the future secretary of state and president, was infuriated that the British were delaying the start of talks, leaving the Americans to cool their heels. “They have kept us waiting nearly four months since the arrival of Mr. Clay and Mr. Russell in Europe,” he complained in a letter, “and their commissioners are not yet here to meet us. In the mean time they have sent to America formidable reinforcements . . . and I can imagine no other motive for their studied and long protracted delays to the commencement of the negotiation, than the intention of waiting for the effect of their forces upon our fears. Whatever they may do, I trust in God that they will find in our country a spirit adequate to every exigency.”4

  While the fighting continued on the other side of the ocean, talks proceeded at a glacial pace. There were two broad ways a territorial settlement could be reached, and two other large questions that had to be resolved. On the territorial issue, one way forward would be for both sides to keep the territory they held when the fighting ceased, according to the doctrine of uti p
ossidetis. Alternatively, the two sides could restore the boundaries that had existed between them when the war started, with each agreeing to withdraw as speedily as possible from its positions on the other side’s territory.

  In addition to resolving this fundamental question, each side had a major issue it intended to press on its adversary. The Americans were determined to push the British to end the impressment of American ships in their quest for runaway British sailors. For their part, the British were concerned about the question of the creation of a native state between Canada and the United States. This was a means of both securing Canadian territory against American attack and meeting the commitment they had made to their native allies.

  Negotiators on both sides acted on the instructions they received from their home governments, the Americans having to wait several months to send a missive to Washington and receive a reply, while it took the British only a couple of days to hear from London. Secretary of State James Monroe had given the U.S. commissioners a series of instructions on the opening positions they were to adopt. “On impressment,” he primed Henry Clay before he departed for Europe, “the sentiments of the President have undergone no change. This degrading practice must cease.” A few weeks later, on February 14, 1814, Monroe wrote that he hoped that Britain’s recent triumphs against Napoleon would cause the British to ease up on the issue of impressment. John Quincy Adams wrote back that he feared that Britain’s victories in Europe could have precisely the opposite effect and could prompt the British to harden their stance in North America. Their winning hand on the continent, he replied, “has undoubtedly made the continuance of the war with America, a purpose of policy with them, as much as it is a purpose of passion with their nation.”5

  In June 1814, Albert Gallatin reinforced the anxieties expressed by Adams in a note to Monroe. “You may rest assured of the general hostile spirit of this nation [Great Britain],” he wrote, “and of its wish to inflict serious injury on the United States; that no assistance can be expected from Europe; and that no better terms will be obtained than the status quo ante bellum.”6 With talks to resolve the conflict proceeding slowly, the miseries of the war continued.

  By the summer of 1814, the war was in its climactic phase. British veterans freed from the Napoleonic Wars were on their way to Canada to take up arms against the Americans. Along the Canadian-American frontier, the fighting continued, with engagements won by both sides. But there as well, the conditions of the war were changing. The injection of British regulars would fortify the defence of the Canadas. And American regulars, under a new generation of commanders such as Brigadier General Winfield Scott, were much more fit to fight their British counterparts than they had been two years earlier.

  The rapidly evolving war in Europe had direct implications for the related struggle in North America. Buoyed by Napoleon’s catastrophic defeat in Russia, a new coalition of powers — which included Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal — took shape to combat the French Empire. While Napoleon’s armies achieved some successes, the heavily outnumbered French were defeated at the crucial Battle of Leipzig in October 1813. Napoleon retreated into France, his once-dominant Grande Armée badly depleted. In March 1814, the coalition forces captured Paris. On April 11, with his top marshals no longer supporting him, Napoleon abdicated and was exiled to Elba, an island off the coast of Tuscany.

  With Napoleon safely exiled, Lord Bathurst wrote Prevost to let him know that large numbers of foot soldiers and artillerymen were on their way to Canada. During the winter of 1814, Bathurst had written to the Duke of Wellington to seek his views on the conduct of the war in North America. On February 22, the Iron Duke replied candidly that he was not well informed about the affairs of the continent or its topography, but he did have some sound points to make. “I believe that the defence of Canada, and the co-operation of the Indians,” he ventured, “depends upon the navigation of the lakes . . . Any offensive operations founded upon Canada must be preceded by the establishment of a naval superiority on the lakes.

  “But even if we had that superiority, I should doubt our being able to do more than secure the points on those lakes at which the Americans could have access. In such countries as America, very extensive, thinly peopled, and producing but little food in proportion to their extent, military operations by large bodies are impracticable, unless the party carrying them on has the uninterrupted use of a navigable river, or very extensive means of land transport, which such a country can rarely supply.

  “I conceive, therefore, that were your army larger than the proposed augmentation would make it, you could not quit the lakes; and, indeed, you would be tied to them the more necessarily in proportion as your army would be large.”7

  With the promise of more British troops on the way, Prevost had to conceive a plan to deploy and support these forces. A major shipbuilding effort on the lakes would be a basic part of the strategy.

  As it had been over the previous two years of fighting, the narrow strip of land between Lakes Ontario and Erie along the Niagara River was the vortex of action. On the morning of July 3, 1814, American forces commanded by Winfield Scott crossed the Niagara River, landing near Fort Erie on the Canadian shore.8 Realizing its position was hopeless, the small garrison at the fort surrendered. In preliminary fighting on July 4 and a major battle at Chippawa, upriver from Niagara Falls, on July 5,9 the Americans were victorious. Leading the British was Major General Phineas Riall, who made the foolish assumption that he could take the Americans lightly as inferior fighters. In truth, the quality of the American army was dramatically better by the summer of 1814 than it had been as recently as a year earlier. The soldiers were better trained, and the leadership was vastly more competent.

  When the British advanced on Chippawa, Scott set up his three battalions to meet the attack with his troops facing obliquely forward to prevent them from being flanked and to allow him to concentrate his fire on the centre of the British line. Taking heavy casualties and facing an assault from the American lines, Riall ordered his men to retreat. Later, accounting for his defeat, Riall explained that he “immediately moved up the Kings Regiment to the right while the Royal Scots and 100th Regt. were directed to charge the Enemy in front, for which they advanced with the greatest Gallantry, under a most destructive fire. I am sorry to say, however, in this attempt they suffered so severely that I was obliged to withdraw them, finding that their further Efforts against superior numbers of the Enemy would be unavailing.” In fact, Scott’s U.S. troops were slightly fewer in number than Riall’s forces, but they prevailed.10

  After losing the engagement, the British soldiers in the 1st and 100th fell back in orderly fashion. With the support of dragoons, they made it back across the wide Chippawa River, taking their artillery with them. Once across, the engineers deftly dropped the central span of the bridge into the water.11

  Absorbing the hard lessons learned at Chippawa and confronting the fierce new effectiveness of the American regulars, the British prepared for the next round of the campaign. On July 24, Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond left York to sail across the lake to Fort George and take personal command of the campaign along the Niagara.

  Having prevailed at Chippawa, Scott’s brigade moved north along Portage Road to Niagara Falls. On July 25, the two sides encountered each other at Lundy’s Lane, a road running at right angles from Portage Road, alongside the Niagara River. As the U.S. troops advanced toward the lane, they came upon the British force commanded by Riall. Drummond, who had arrived from York that morning with additional soldiers, countermanded Riall’s initial order to his men to withdraw. The British deployed along Lundy’s Lane with their artillery positioned on a slope above the road. Scott’s men, who had arrived in the area the previous evening, moved out of the thick woods to the south of Lundy’s Lane and readied themselves for the fight. Fearing that he was outnumbered and that he would have a tough time of it a
long Portage Road if he was forced to withdraw, Scott threw caution to the wind and attacked.

  U.S. assaults on the British left and centre were met with fierce resistance. Repeated charges by Scott’s men were countered with artillery volleys from British gunners. An American force did succeed in crossing Portage Road on the east side of the battlefield and swung through the woods so that they were able to outflank some militiamen and a small force of Royal Scots. In this attack, Major General Riall was hit in the arm and captured. The British managed to overcome their problems on the flank, however, by turning to face the enemy and refusing the line.

  Neither side had gained a decisive advantage over its adversary. Both received reinforcements. As night fell, the Americans managed an attack up the slope in the direction of the British guns. With a desperate bayonet charge, they overcame the British artillerymen and seized the guns, opening the way for an American advance to the high ground. Drummond undertook repeated counterattacks but failed to take back his lost artillery.

  In the end, the Americans withdrew from the field, leaving the bruising battle at Lundy’s Lane a tactical British victory. According to the British account, British and Canadian losses at Lundy’s Lane totalled 84 officers and men killed, 559 wounded, 193 missing, and 42 taken prisoner. The Americans compiled their losses at 173 dead, 571 wounded, and 117 missing.12