Tecumseh and Brock

by James Laxer

  With Ross gone, command of the British troops passed to Colonel Arthur Brooke. The new commander led his troops toward the main American line, where three thousand men were deployed. With the two sides facing each other, most of the British soldiers calmly lay down to eat their lunch while sections of the 21st Fusiliers and Royal Marines launched an attack on the enemy’s left flank. Lunch over, the British attacked along the whole American line. Following several exchanges of fierce volleys, the Americans broke and fled. The British won the engagement in less than half an hour.

  Twenty-four Americans were killed, 139 were wounded, and 50 were taken prisoner. The British casualties numbered 46 dead (including General Ross) and 295 wounded.48

  The British managed to win the battle that followed the death of General Ross. How they would fare under less seasoned leadership in the days to come was yet to be determined.

  The morning after their victory at North Point, the British advanced to within 2.4 kilometres of Baltimore while their ships began the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Brooke had gone ahead of the main body of his troops to reconnoiter the defences the Americans had assembled around the northern approaches to Baltimore. British intelligence had concluded, quite accurately, that the Americans had about fifteen thousand men in position to protect the city. To mount an assault on Baltimore, Brooke would need ammunition and rations, including rum, to be sent to his lines from the HMS Seahorse. While Brooke was considering his options, the navy launched their attack on Fort McHenry. The British sent a squadron of seventeen vessels — frigates, sloops, schooners, bomb boats, and a rocket ship — into the Patapsco River. Admiral Cochrane took personal charge of the attack from the deck of the light frigate Surprize.49

  The Americans had previously sunk twenty-four ships in the waters between Fort McHenry and Lazaretto Point to prevent the British ships from sailing in to make a direct assault. Major George Armistead commanded the one thousand soldiers guarding the fort.

  Initially, the British ships were positioned just under 4.8 kilometres from Fort McHenry, out of range of the fort’s guns. Congreve rockets were launched from the Erebus but did little damage. In their wake came a bombardment opened up by two frigates. When their initial volleys fell short into the water, the ships sailed forward into range. In response, Major Armistead ordered his gunners to fire their 24-pounders and long-range 42-pounders at the ships, which forced the frigates to shift back out of range.

  Then the British bomb vessels sailed in and launched their own barrage. When the U.S. defenders replied, their cannonballs fell short of the targets. The British could now assail the fort at will.50 While the British guns could fire far enough for their shots to hit Fort McHenry, the bomb vessels could not close in without making themselves choice targets for the fort’s gunners.

  The long-range shelling of Fort McHenry went on for hours. Over the course of the battle, Major Armistead estimated that between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred 10- and 13-inch shells were fired. About four hundred struck within the walls of Fort McHenry, in the process killing four of the defenders and wounding twenty-four.51

  While their gunners shelled the fort, the British commanders considered their options. Characteristically, Cockburn favoured going ahead with an assault on Baltimore, while Brooke had other views. He was no Ross. “If I took the place,” he wrote in his diary, “I should have been the greatest man in England. If I lost, my military character was gone for ever.” He was prepared to attack, but only if his ground assault could be reinforced by additional troops from the British ships.

  Admiral Cochrane, who was already thinking ahead to an attack on New Orleans, had instructed his subordinates not to press on against Baltimore “unless positively certain of success.”52 When Brooke received a dispatch informing him that Cochrane had decided not to contribute to the attack on the city — “It is impossible for the ships to render you any assistance” — Brooke concluded that he could not proceed on his own.53 His hopes of commanding British troops in a glorious victory were dashed.

  While the commanders were still deciding what to do, twelve hundred Royal Marines were undertaking a diversionary attack on Fort Covington, located on the far side of the peninsula, near Fort McHenry. The plan was for boats to carry the force in stealth up the Patapsco so they could execute a surprise attack simultaneously with the shelling of Fort McHenry. But the American defenders detected the coming assault and opened fire on the marines with guns based in Fort Covington and Battery Babcock. Royal Navy Lieutenant Charles Napier, who was in command of the operation, decided to call off the assault at about 2:00 a.m. He pulled back the marines, whose boats were under a heavy barrage. As the sun rose, the dead bodies of marines could be seen floating in the river.54

  On September 15, the British forces pulled back from their positions, boarded their boats, and returned to their ships. Cochrane was preoccupied with the coming British assault on the port city at the mouth of the Mississippi, a campaign that would deliver a further blow to the commerce of the United States. The admiral knew that more British troops were on their way across the Atlantic. On September 19, his forces set sail for Halifax, where they would be refitted and prepared for the later descent on New Orleans. Cochrane meantime had dispatched Cockburn and a part of the fleet to blockade the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. The intention was to draw American forces away from the defence of New Orleans, the real target.55

  For the Americans, the British assault on Baltimore and Fort McHenry took on a meaning that would be remembered long after the battles were waged. Francis Scott Key, a Baltimore lawyer, watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the vantage point of a truce ship. Days earlier, Key had paid a visit to the British commander, Admiral Cochrane, to seek the release of William Beanes, a medical doctor from Maryland who was a personal friend of U.S. President James Madison. Key went in the company of John Skinner, a United States agent for the release of prisoners. The two sailed on a sloop sporting a white flag of truce to make contact with the British fleet.

  Skinner and Key were welcomed on board Cochrane’s flagship, HMS Tonnant. But they were then not allowed to leave with Dr. Beanes until the coming engagement against Baltimore was complete. The two were invited to join the British officers for dinner. Cochrane informed his American guests that they would have to be held aboard the frigate Surprize, which was commanded by Cochrane’s son. Even though they were quartered on the smaller vessel, the Americans continued to have dinner each evening with the British officers. In a letter he wrote three weeks later, Key expressed his feelings about those with whom he had spent time: “Never was a man more disappointed in his expectations than I have been as to the character of British officers. With some exceptions they appeared to be illiberal, ignorant and vulgar, seem filled with a spirit of malignity against everything American.”56

  Growing weary of being held by the British, Skinner eventually managed to convince Cochrane to let the Americans return to their own sloop, where they were to be guarded by British sailors and marines until the battle was over. Throughout the night when Fort McHenry was shelled, Skinner and Key remained on deck, anxiously awaiting the outcome of the encounter. At dawn, as the famous story recounts, the two men looked toward the fort to make out which flag flew above it, and Key spotted the huge star-spangled banner above the ramparts. As he later related the moment to his brother-in-law, Roger Taney, “Our flag was still there!”

  Key began scribbling his feelings and reflections on the back of a letter he had in his pocket.57 The resulting work, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was adopted as the U.S. national anthem in 1931.

  The divisive war was being transformed into a patriotic crusade. The battles of Lake Champlain and New Orleans would put the finishing touches to this heroic recasting of the conflict.

  * * *

  **** The new capital city, fit for a world power, was designed by the French planner Pierre L’Enfan
t. No one could work with L’Enfant for long, and eventually he was dismissed as the District’s conceptual planner, but not before he had left his indelible mark on Washington.

  Chapter 18

  American Victories at Lake Champlain and New Orleans

  THE CALAMITOUS REPORT that Washington had been occupied and devastated by the British came as a heavy blow to the American commissioners in Ghent and had the sobering effect of removing some of the more fanciful ambitions from the American agenda. Even Henry Clay, the War Hawk westerner whose goal was the conquest of Canada, expressed fears about what might lie ahead. In a letter he wrote in October 1814, he confessed, “I tremble indeed whenever I take up a late newspaper. Hope alone sustains me.”1

  By the summer and autumn of 1814, earlier hopes of acquiring Canada had faded. Gone was the sentiment expressed by Monroe to U.S. negotiators in June 1813 that “it may be worthwhile to bring to view the advantages to both Countries [Britain and the United States] which is promised, by a transfer of the upper parts and even the whole of Canada to the United States . . . The possession of it [Canada] by England, must hereafter prove a fruitful source of controversy which its transfer to the United States would remove . . . That these provinces will be severed from Great Britain at no distant day, by their own career, may fairly be presumed, even against her strongest efforts to retain them.”2

  President Madison’s message to Congress in September 1814 presented an administration that hoped for peace. He noted with foreboding that the outcome of the war in Europe had removed “any check on the overbearing power of Great Britain on the ocean; and it has left in her hands disposable armaments with which, forgetting the difficulties of a remote war with a free people, and yielding to the intoxication of success . . . she cherishes hopes of still further aggrandizing a power already formidable in its abuses to the tranquility of the civilized and commercial world.” The president went on to say that in the present campaign against the United States “enemy, with all his augmented means, and wanton use of them, has little ground for exultation.” He referred to “a series of achievements which have given new luster to the American arms.” It was a statement that balanced the prospect of peace with the willingness to fight on if necessary.3

  The British took a tough line on territorial issues. They were intent on achieving the demilitarization of the Great Lakes and navigation rights on the Mississippi in return for American access to the fishery on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. This was needed, the British insisted, so that the Americans would give up their determination to conquer Canada.

  The Americans baldly replied that the annexation of Canada had never been the goal of the United States. The British scoffed, pointing to General William Hull’s proclamation to the people of Upper Canada in the summer of 1812 that he was invading their province to protect them. The American rejoinder at Ghent was that Hull’s bombastic proclamation had not been sanctioned by Washington. To claim that the acquisition of Canada was not a war aim of the United States was clearly disingenuous, given the letters sent by Secretary of State James Monroe to the American negotiators in 1813 and 1814, which repeatedly raised the prospect of the United States’ gaining some or all of the Canadian territory at the conclusion of the conflict. In a letter to his government’s negotiators in January 1814, Monroe referred to his letter of the previous June “in favour of a cession of the Canadas to the United States,” which he said had “gained much additional force from further reflection.” He went on to assert that “the inevitable consequence of another war, and even of the present, if persevered in by the British Government, must be to sever those provinces by force from Great Britain. Their inhabitants themselves will soon feel their strength, and assert their independence. All these evils had therefore better be anticipated, and provided for, by timely arrangement between the two Governments, in the mode proposed.”4

  By the time serious negotiations got underway in the late summer of 1814, the conquest of Canada was falling off the list of achievements on which the Americans were intent. The same happened to their demand that the British stop the practice of impressment. Given the Americans’ heated feelings on the issue, backing off on impressment was a major development. When President Madison met with his cabinet on June 27, 1814, he polled its members on whether they could contemplate a treaty that was silent on impressment. All responded in the affirmative. In a letter of instruction to his commissioners in Ghent, the president wrote, “You may omit any stipulation on the subject of impressment, if found indispensably necessary to terminate it. You will, of course, not recur to this expedient until all your efforts to adjust the controversy in a more satisfactory manner have failed.”5

  The British, meanwhile, opened with an apparently strong position on the creation of a native state. From England, Foreign Minister Castlereagh was constantly updating his commissioners in Ghent with fresh instructions. Through them, he advanced the initial propositions the British negotiators placed before the American team in mid-August 1814. As reported to Washington by the U.S. negotiators, the British maintained that their country sought no increase in territory on its own behalf. They did, however, insist that “the Indian allies of Great Britain” must be “included in the pacification and a definite boundary to be settled for their territory.”

  “The British Commissioners stated,” the U.S. negotiators reported, “that an arrangement upon this point was a sine qua non: that they were not authorized to conclude a Treaty of peace which did not embrace the Indians . . . and that the establishment of a definite boundary of the Indian Territory was necessary, to secure a permanent peace, not only with the Indians but also between the United States and Great Britain.”6

  With this proposal, the British were putting Tecumseh’s vision of a native state on the table. It would be established between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, in a territory to be agreed on by the U.S. and Britain. It would encompass much of the region the Americans called the Old Northwest. In a memorandum addressed to the British commissioners, Canadian fur traders brashly suggested that the native state’s boundary should be drawn south from Erie, Pennsylvania, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, south to Pittsburgh, and from there westward along the Ohio River.

  For Henry Clay, who was committed to the cause of the settlers, the Canadian proposal was anathema, the negation of everything he had hoped for from the start of the war. The Canadian plan would have handed over the territory of Ohio, which was admitted as the seventeenth U.S. state in 1803. Even the less ambitious idea of creating a native state farther west along the Wabash River, which would cut through the present-day state of Indiana and along the boundary of Illinois, horrified Clay.

  Over time, Clay had softened his position on the conquest of Canada. By the end of 1812, the discouraging course of the war had caused him to rethink. In a letter he wrote at the end of the first year of the war, he opined that “Canada was not the end but the means, the object of the War being the redress of injuries, and Canada being the instrument by which that redress was to be obtained.”7 But he refused to surrender settler territory west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Native peoples.

  In the end, just as the Americans gave up on their insistence that the British put an end to the practice of impressment, the British abandoned the idea of a native state.

  The same week that the British unleashed their attacks around Baltimore and their salvos on Fort McHenry, they launched a second assault on the United States from the north. With peace talks underway in Ghent, the British were determined to drive as hard a bargain as possible with the U.S. Facts on the ground were crucial to their negotiations. Eliminating American power on Lake Champlain would powerfully assist the British negotiators.

  The thrust southward came a few days after the successful and nearly bloodless occupation of eastern Maine by the British, which began in July 1814 with the seizure of Eastport, the easternmost point in Maine. (Maine remained a part o
f Massachusetts until it was established as a separate state in 1820.) Because Major General Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, who had served as lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia since 1811, had only twenty-five hundred soldiers available to him, the plan was to advance into Maine from the New Brunswick border only as far as the Penobscot River. This would place a substantial portion of the Maine coast in the hands of the British without taking them farther southwest into the more populous regions of Maine, which would be harder to secure with such a small occupying force.

  Sherbrooke’s attack went smoothly, with the Americans blowing up their installations as the enemy approached. From the coast, the British proceeded upriver and took the towns of Hampden and Bangor. Farther along the coast they occupied Machias. During the two-week operation, with only one of their soldiers killed and eight wounded, the British took 161 kilometres of coastal Maine and the adjacent backcountry, territory they held until the end of the war. Following the occupation, the male inhabitants of the region took an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.

  The British hoped that by occupying territory in Maine, they would draw more of the commerce of New England, where enthusiasm for the war was tepid at best, into their sphere. They established a customs post at Castine and appointed a military governor to administer the occupied region. Under this regime, Swedish and Spanish commercial vessels carried large shipments of British goods to Hampden, next door to Bangor. From there, they were distributed across New England. The arrangements fostered robust trade between New England and Nova Scotia.††††8

  By 1814, the British blockade was so effective that many New England communities suffered severe economic hardship and even sought ways to reach their own arrangements to end the war against Britain. For instance, the inhabitants of Nantucket Island met on July 23, 1814, to draft a petition to Admiral Cochrane to allow them to import food and fuel from the mainland during the following winter, pleading that without such an arrangement they could face starvation. In their petition, they stated that they had been “universally opposed” to the war.9