The Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  “There can be no armistice,” he declares; “our negotiation is at an end. General Van Rensselaer will take the responsibility on himself to prevent your detaching troops from this district.”

  The British officers leap to their feet. Sheaffe grips the hilt of his sword.

  “Sir,” says he, “you take high ground!”

  Solomon Van Rensselaer also rises to his feet, gripping his sword. “I do, sir, and will maintain it.” Turns to Sheaffe and speaks directly: “You do not dare detach the troops.”

  Silence. The General paces the room. Finally: “Be seated and excuse me.” Withdraws with his aides. Returns after a few minutes: “Sir, from amicable considerations, I grant you the use of the waters.”

  It is a prodigious miscalculation, but it is Prevost’s as much as Sheaffe’s. The British general has his orders from his cautious and over-optimistic superior. Brock, contemplating an all-out offensive across the Niagara River, is still in the dark at Detroit.

  The truce, which officially begins on August 20, can be cancelled by either side on four days’ notice. It ends on September 8 after President Madison informs Dearborn that the United States has no intention of ending the war unless the British also revoke their practice of impressing American sailors. By that time Van Rensselaer’s army has been reinforced from Oswego with six regiments of regulars, five of militia, a battalion of riflemen, several batteries of heavy cannon and, in Brock’s rueful words, “a prodigious quantity of Pork and Flower.” As Lovett puts it, “we worked John Bull in the little Armistice treaty and got more than we expected.” Not only has Lewiston been reinforced, but the balance of power on Lake Ontario has also been tilted. General Van Rensselaer, taking advantage of the truce, has shot off an express to Ogdensburg on the St. Lawrence to dispatch nine vessels to Sackets Harbor, a move that will aid the American naval commander, Captain Isaac Chauncey, in his attack on the Upper Canadian capital of York the following year.

  In spite of his diplomatic coup, Solomon Van Rensselaer is not a happy man. Somehow, at the height of the negotiations with the British, he has managed to hold a secret and astonishing conversation with Sheaffe’s brigade major, Evans, in which he has confided to his enemy his own disillusionment with the government at Washington, his hope that the war will speedily end, and his belief that the majority of Americans are opposed to any conflict. Solomon feels himself the plaything of remorseless fate – surrounded by political enemies, forced into a war he cannot condone, nudged towards a battle he feels he cannot win, separated from a loving wife whose protracted silence dismays him, and, worst of all, crushed by the memory of a family tragedy that he cannot wipe from his mind.

  The vision of a sunlit clover lot near the family farm at Bethlehem, New York, is never far from his thoughts: his six-year-old son, Van Vechten, romps in the field with an older brother. Suddenly a musket shot rings out; the boy drops, shot through the ear, his brain a pulp. The senseless tragedy is the work of an escaped lunatic, and there is nothing anybody can do. Even revenge is futile, and Solomon Van Rensselaer is not a vengeful man. Again and again in his dreams and nightmares, he sees himself picking up the small bleeding corpse and struggling back across the field to his white-faced wife, Harriet.

  It is she who worries him. The incident occurred on May 29, not long before he was forced to leave his family to take up arms. Why has she not written? Has the tragedy deranged her? Since leaving home he has sent her at least a dozen letters but has received no answer. “Why under the Heavens is the reason you do not write me?” he asks on August 21. Silence. A fortnight later he asks a political friend in Albany to tell him the truth: “The recollection of that late overwhelming event at home, I fear has been too much for her” No doubt it has. But what he apparently does not know, and will not know until the affair at Queenston is over, is that Harriet is in the final stages of pregnancy and about to present him with a new son.

  His unhappy state of mind is further agitated by his political opponents, “who even pursue me to this quarter of the Globe.” The chief of these is Henry Clay’s supporter Peter B. Porter, who, in Solomon’s opinion, has with some Republican friends been causing “confusion and distrust among the Troops on this Frontier to answer party purposes against the Commander.” The Lieutenant-Colonel blames Porter, as quartermaster general of the army, for “speculating and attending to mischief and his private affairs” when the army is in such want of supplies. The camp is short of surgical instruments, lint, bandages, hospital stores.

  In Solomon’s view, Porter is “an abominable scoundrel.” He makes so little attempt to hide that opinion that Porter eventually challenges him to a duel. Solomon chooses Lovett as his second, but when his cousin, the General, hears of the affair he threatens to court-martial both antagonists. Their job, he points out, is to fight the British, not each other. Yet this quarrel reveals only the tip of an iceberg of dissension, which in the end will force the Van Rensselaers into rash action. For after the truce ends on September 8, Porter and his hawkish friends begin to whisper that the General is a coward and a traitor who does not really want to attack the heights of Queenston.

  WITH ISAAC BROCK, aboard the schooner Chippewa, Lake Ontario, August 23, 1812.

  Euphoric after his capture of Detroit, the General is hastening back to his capital at York when a provincial schooner, Lady Prevost, approaches and fires a seventeen-gun salute. The ceremony over, her commander comes aboard and presents Brock with a dispatch – his first intimation of the armistice that Prevost and Dearborn have concluded on the Niagara frontier.

  The General’s elation dissolves. He is stunned, mortified, disillusioned. He had planned to continue the relentless momentum of his victory, to roll up the entire New York frontier from Buffalo to Sackets Harbor, to hammer at the Americans while they were still off balance and poorly supplied. Now his hands are tied by Prevost, and he cannot conceal his bitterness. He does not share his superior’s optimism that the armistice is the first step towards a permanent cessation of hostilities. He is convinced that the sharp Yankees are buying time to reinforce their own position, that John Bull has been gulled by Brother Jonathan.

  What he desires most of all is a quick victory, one that will allow him to leave the stifling colonial atmosphere of the Canadas and return to Europe to serve under Wellington and to visit with his several brothers, to whom he writes regularly. Indeed, on the very day of Detroit’s fall, while plagued by a score of problems, he has managed to send them a brief dispatch: “Rejoice at my good fortune, and join me in prayers to Heaven,” adding, somewhat cryptically, “Let me hear that you are all united and happy.”

  For there has been a family falling out, which disturbs him mightily. It springs from the collapse of the banking firm of which his brother William was senior partner, a financial blow that has all but beggared the family, including the General himself. Years before, his brother advanced him three thousand pounds with which to purchase his commission in the 49th. William Brock, who has no close relatives except his brothers, had no intention that the money should be paid back; nonetheless, it remains on the books of the bankrupt firm as a debt, and the assignees are clamouring for it, even threatening legal action. Brock has pledged his entire civil salary as governor of Upper Canada – one thousand pounds a year – to pay off the debt (“Depend on my exercising the utmost economy.… Did it depend on myself, how willingly would I live on bread and water”). Typically, he is less concerned about this loss than about the estrangement between William Brock and his brother Irving, also connected with the firm.

  On September 3, after stopping at York en route to Kingston (he is never still in these last days), he finds time aboard ship to write a longer letter, making use of the example of his recent victory to heal the family rift: “Let me know, my dearest brothers, that you are all again united. The want of union was nearly losing this province, without even a struggle, and be assured that it operates in the same degree in regard to families.”

  In spite of
the depressing news of Prevost’s armistice, he cannot conceal his ecstasy over the bloodless victory at Detroit. He knows he has taken a desperate gamble, but “the state of the province admitted of nothing but desperate remedies.” He is irked that his enemies should attribute his success to blind luck. He believes in careful preparation, not luck. His victory has proceeded from “a cool calculation of pours and contres” and it is his alone, for he crossed the river against the advice of the more conservative Procter, who now commands at Detroit, and other advisers. “I have,” he exults, “exceeded beyond expectation.”

  The best news is that as general he will receive the largest share of the Detroit prize money. The value of captured articles is now reckoned at between thirty and forty thousand pounds and may go higher. He does not want it for himself, but if it will enable him to contribute to the comfort and happiness of his nearly destitute family, he will “esteem it my highest reward.” At the moment of victory, “when I returned Heaven thanks for my amazing success, I thought of you all; you appeared to me happy – your late sorrows forgotten; and I felt as if you acknowledged that the many benefits, which for a series of years I received from you, were not unworthily bestowed.”

  His brothers will, he believes, be able to see the colours of the U.S. 4th Regiment, which he expects his aide, Major Glegg, will bring to England. He doubts, however, that his fellow countrymen will hold the trophy in much esteem. “Nothing is prized,” he writes acidly, “that is not acquired with blood.”

  In Canada he is a national hero, and he knows it. The plaudits pour in. The Chief Justice of Lower Canada hastens to send his congratulations “in common with every other subject of his majesty in British North America.” General Alexander Maitland, the honorary colonel of the 49th, dispatches a gushing note from across the Atlantic, which Brock never receives. His old friend Justice William Dummer Powell cannot contain himself: “There is something so fabulous in the report of a handful of troops supported by a few raw militia leaving their strong post to invade an enemy of double numbers in his own fortress, and making them all prisoners without the loss of a man, that … it seems to me the people of England will be incredulous …” He can hardly wait to get the news in person from Brock when he reaches Kingston.

  Brock himself is a little stunned by the adulation. He has received so many letters hailing his victory that he begins “to attach to it more importance than I was at first inclined.” If the English take the same view as the Canadians, then “I cannot fail of meeting reward, and escaping the horror of being placed high on a shelf, never to be taken down.”

  He reaches Kingston on September 4, to be greeted by an artillery salute and a formal address of congratulation from the populace. As he has done at York a few days before, he replies with tact, praising the York and Lincoln regiments of militia, now at Queenston, whose presence, he declares (stretching the truth more than a little), induced him to undertake the expedition that brought about the fall of Detroit.

  He praises everybody – citizens, soldiers, magistrates, officers, militia – for he intends to squeeze every possible advantage out of his victory, uniting Canadians against the invader. The change in attitude is startling; he notes privately that “the militia have been inspired … the disaffected are silenced.” People are calling him the Saviour of Upper Canada. It is an accurate title, and in more ways than one, for he has saved the province not only from the Americans but also from itself.

  He cannot rest. Back he goes across the lake to Fort George on the Niagara to study the situation along the frontier. Lieutenant-Colonel Baynes has already written to him of his meeting with Dearborn, describing the mood at Albany where the Americans are convinced that the British are weak and their own resources superior, exaggerations that are both “absurd and extravagant.” But Baynes has urged Prevost to send more reinforcements to Niagara, so that if matters come to a head the British force will be superior.

  Brock reaches Fort George on September 6, chagrined to discover how heavily the Americans have been reinforced during the armistice, due to end in two days. He expects an immediate attack. “The enemy will either turn my left flank which he may easily accomplish during a calm night or attempt to force his way across under cover of his Artillery.” He sends at once to Procter at Amherstburg and Lieutenant-Colonel John Vincent at Kingston asking for more troops.

  There is one bright spot, the result again of the victory at Detroit: three hundred Mohawk Indians are on the ground and another two hundred on their way under the controversial John Norton of the Indian Department. Born a Scotsman, now an adopted Mohawk chief, Norton sees himself the successor of the great Joseph Brant and the arch-rival of William Claus, his superior in the service.

  Brock has mixed feelings about Norton’s followers, who have cast aside their neutrality only as a result of British victories. Any form of neutrality is, to Brock, little short of treason. He cannot forgive the Mohawk, cannot understand why they would not wish to fight for the British, cannot grasp the truth – that the quarrel is not really theirs, that its outcome cannot help them. Now, he notes, “they appear ashamed of themselves, and promise to whipe [sic] away the disgrace into which they have fallen by their late conduct.” It is doubtful whether the Indians feel any sense of disgrace; they have simply been following a foreign policy of their own, which is to reap the benefits of fighting on the winning side.

  Brock is a little dubious of their value: “They may serve to intimidate; otherwise expect no essential service from this degenerate race.” Has he forgotten so quickly that the great value of the Indians at Michilimackinac and Detroit was not to fight but to terrify? In his account to Prevost of the capture of Detroit, he has mentioned both Elliott and McKee by name but not Tecumseh, without whose presence the state of affairs on the Canadian frontier might easily have been reversed. For Tecumseh and the Indians are also the Saviours of Upper Canada.

  But Brock urgently needs to bolster the loyalty of the Indians on the western frontier in Michigan Territory, which the British hold. That loyalty has been badly shaken by Sir George Prevost’s armistice; the natives, who have been suspicious of British intentions since the gates of the fort were closed to them after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, are growing uneasy again. Brock has ordered Procter to dispatch a force to invest Fort Wayne on the Maumee – the kind of aggressive move that is totally opposed to Prevost’s wishes and intentions. He explains to Prevost that he has done this with the hope of preserving the lives of the garrison from an Indian massacre. This humanitarian motive is overshadowed by a more realistic if cynical objective. Brock wants to preserve the Indians’ allegiance, to keep the native warriors active and at the same time demonstrate an aggressive policy on the part of the British against the Long Knives. If Tecumseh’s followers desert him “the consequences must be fatal,” and to preserve their loyalty he has pledged his word that England will enter into no negotiation with the United States in which the interest of the Indians is not consulted. He reminds Prevost of this and Prevost reminds Whitehall. The Governor General, who seems to believe that peace is just around the corner, revives the old British dream of an Indian buffer state – a kind of native no man’s-land – separating British North America from the Union to the south.

  But Prevost still believes that the path to peace lies in being as inoffensive as possible with the enemy. He wants to evacuate Detroit and indeed all of Michigan Territory – a possibility that appalls Brock, for hie knows that it would cause the Indians to desert the British cause and make terms with the Americans. “I cannot conceive of a connexion so likely to lead to more awful consequences,” he tells Prevost.

  The Governor General backs down, but relations between the two men are becoming increasingly strained. Brock is prepared to attack across the Niagara River, is, in fact, eager to attack, convinced that he can sweep the Americans from the frontier and make himself master of Upper New York State, even though “my success would be transient” But Prevost has him shackled. Even after
the armistice ends on September 8 Sir George clings to the wistful fancy that the Americans will come to terms if only the British do nothing to annoy them. This is fatuous. American honour has been sullied, and nothing will satisfy it but blood. It is psychologically impossible for the Americans to break off the war after the ignominy of Detroit. Thus far the only bright spot in America’s abysmal war effort has been the defeat and desitruction of the British frigate Guerrière by the Constitution off the Grand Banks on August 19. This naval encounter by two isolated ships will have little effect on the outcome of the war, but it does buoy up America’s flagging spirits and makes a national hero of the Constitution’s commander, Isaac Hull, at the very moment when his uncle William has become a national scapegoat.

  Sir George makes one telling point in his instructions to his frustrated general: since the British are not interested in waging a campaign of conquest against the United States but only in containing the war with as little fuss as possible while battling their real enemy, Napoleon, it surely makes sense to let the enemy take the offensive “having ascertained by experience, our ability in the Canadas to resist the attack of a tumultuary force.”

  There is a growing testiness in Prevost’s correspondence with Brock – more than a hint that he is prepared, if necessary, to write off the Niagara frontier. Sir George berates Brock obliquely for weakening the line of communication along the St. Lawrence between Cornwall and Kingston: by moving troops from those points to Niagara he has encouraged predatory raids by the enemy. Between the lines can be seen Prevost’s fear of giving his impetuous subordinate too many troops lest he make an overt move that will upset the fine balance with which Prevost still hopes to conciliate the Americans.