The Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  Early in August a caucus of influential Kentucky politicians, including Scott, the retiring governor, Isaac Shelby, the governor-elect, and several of the War Hawks, agrees to appoint Harrison a brevet (honorary) major-general in the Kentucky militia. He accepts command of two regiments of infantry and one of mounted rifles (under Clay’s young congressional colleague, Richard M. Johnson) which have already left to join General Winchester in Cincinnati. But Clay wants more. Harrison outranks Winchester, but Winchester is a regular army man. It is important that there be no ambiguity about who is in charge. Once more he puts pressure on James Monroe, the Secretary of State, rising to heights of hyperbole, which, even for Henry Clay, are more than a little florid:

  “If you will carry your recollection back to the Age of the Crusades and of some of the most distinguished leaders of those expeditions, you will have a picture of the enthusiasm existing in this country for the expedition to Canada and for Harrison as the commander.”

  Up to this point, James Monroe has fancied himself for the post of commander-in-chief of the Army of the Northwest. The cabinet, in fact, has been seriously considering his appointment. But now, with Clay and his cronies in full cry, the Secretary’s military ambitions are dashed. The pressure is too great. Harrison it will be.

  AS THE CABINET vacillates over the choice of a commander for the new northwest army, Harrison marches to Cincinnati at the head of his troops. He is convinced that he can persuade Winchester to allow him to take command of all the forces for the relief of Detroit. On August 26, he receives the dreadful news of Hull’s surrender. Two days later, he reaches Winchester’s camp at Cincinnati and immediately assumes command of all the Kentucky militia, leaving Winchester in charge of the regulars. Stiff little notes pass between the generals’ tents. Harrison insists that he, as a major-general, outranks Winchester. Winchester objects, points out that Harrison is only a political appointee, but when Harrison persists, Winchester at last gives in: Harrison can assume command under his own responsibility. Winchester returns to Lexington to continue recruiting.

  The new commander has some twenty-one hundred men at Cincinnati; an equal number are on their way to join him. They inspire mixed feelings. The Kentuckians, in his opinion “are perhaps the best materials for forming an army the world has produced. But no equal number of men was ever collected who knew so little of military discipline.” It is a shrewd assessment.

  He has neither time nor personnel to instruct his raw recruits in the art of soldiering. He is, in fact, short of almost everything – of food, clothing, equipment, weapons, ammunition, flints, swords. His only ordnance piece is an ancient cast-iron four-pounder. Autumn is fast approaching with its chilling rain and sleet. He must hack new roads through forest and swamp, build blockhouses and magazines, all the time watched and harassed by the Indians on his flank.

  And he must move immediately, for word has come that the British and the Indians are planning an attack on Fort Wayne, the forward outpost on the Maumee. Three hundred Indians are laying siege to the fort, a British column is moving south, houses have been burned, crops and livestock destroyed. The commander, James Rhea, has some eighty men with whom to withstand the siege but is himself nervous and frequently drunk. Harrison’s first task is to relieve the fort.

  That same day he dispatches all his available troops on that mission. He joins them at Dayton on September I. Here are more cheers for Harrison and a salute of cannon, marred only by the tragic incompetence of the gunners. During the salute one man is seriously wounded, another has both hands blown off. And here Harrison receives a blow of a different kind: the government has officially confirmed his commission, but only as brigadier-general. Winchester now outranks him.

  He does not give up. In another letter to Washington, he subtly advances his cause: “The backwoodsmen are a singular people.… From their affection and an attachment everything may be expected but I will venture to say that they never did nor never will perform anything brilliant under a stranger.”

  The message, though self-serving, is undoubtedly true. Winchester is unpopular largely because he is a stranger. Harrison is a known hero. All along his route of march, volunteers have flocked to his banner. At Piqua, en route to Fort Wayne, he makes from the tailboard of a camp wagon one of those tough little stump speeches for which he is famous. He is planning a forced march on half-rations, and some of the Ohio militia are hesitating. To them Harrison declares that “if there is any man under my command who lacks the patriotism to rush to the rescue, he, by paying back the money received from the government, shall receive a discharge. I do not wish to command such.…” Only one man makes this choice. His comrades are given a permit to escort him part of the way home. They hoist him onto a rail and with a crowd following duck him several times in the river.

  Harrison, at the head of three thousand men, reaches Fort Wayne on September 12. The fort is relieved without a shot being fired though not entirely bloodlessly, since during the march one man has been shot and killed in error by one of the guards. The bodies of two sentinels, killed by the Indians and buried within the palisade, are disinterred and brought out to be buried with full military honours. The troops, many of whom have never seen a dead man, stand by in awe. William Northcutt, a young dragoon in Captain William Garrard’s company of “Bourbon Blues” (made up of men from Bourbon County, Kentucky, all uniformed in blue broadcloth), cannot help shedding tears as the corpses are brought out through the gate, even though the men are complete strangers. But before his term of service is over, Northcutt becomes so hardened that he could, if necessary, sleep on a corpse, and it occurs to him as the war grows nastier that “the man that thinks about dying in a Battle is not fit to be there and will do no good for his country.…”

  Harrison is determined to crush all Indian resistance. Columns of cavalry fan out to destroy all Indian villages within sixty miles. The ailing Colonel John Scott insists on leading the attack on the Elkhart River in Indiana Territory, though his officers urge him not to go. But he mounts his horse, crying out: “As long as I am able to mount you, none but myself shall lead my regiment.…” It is the death of him. Exhausted, after a protracted march of three days and nights, he is scarcely able to return to camp. Shortly afterwards he is carried home in a litter where, the second day after arrival, he expires.

  Harrison’s policy of search and destroy makes no distinction between neutral and hostile tribes. His intention is to turn the frontier country into a wasteland, denying both food and shelter to the natives. Mounted columns, one led by Harrison himself, burn several hundred houses, ravage the corn fields, destroy crops of beans, pumpkins, potatoes, and melons, ransack the graves and scatter the bones. The Potawatomi and Miami flee to British protection at Brownstown and Amherstburg and wait for revenge.

  On September 18, General Winchester arrives at Fort Wayne to take: command of the Army of the Northwest. The troops are in an ugly mood. They do not wish to be commanded by a regular officer, fearing perhaps (without much evidence) that Winchester will be a greater disciplinarian than Harrison.

  Winchester’s ordeal has only begun. As he moves slowly north, the Kentuckians under his command refuse his orders, torment him with pranks and practical jokes, and are generally obstreperous. He cannot even visit the latrine without suffering some indignity. At one camp, they skin a porcupine and place the skin on a pole over the latrine pit; the General applies his buttocks to the hide with painful results. At another, they employ a trick that must go back to Caesar’s army: sawing a pole partially through so that it fails to support the General’s weight at a critical moment. The next morning, William Northcutt of the Bourbon Blues, passing Winchester’s tent, notes with amusement the General’s uniform, drying out, high on a pole.

  What has Winchester done to deserve this? His only crime is to be less popular than Harrison. He does suffer by comparison, for Harrison at forty is vigorous, decisive, totally confident, while Winchester, at sixty, is inclined to fussiness, a littl
e ponderous, and not entirely sure of himself. (He did not have to relinquish command to Harrison during that first encounter at Cincinnati.) Like Hull, he appears to the young recruits to be older than his years (Northcutt thinks him at least seventy)–a plump, greying figure who has to be helped to mount and dismount his horse. Worst of all, Winchester fears his own troops and places a bodyguard around his quarters day and night.

  Like so many others, he is a leftover from another war, his reputation resting on the exploits of his youth – on those memorable years in the mid-seventies when America struggled for her independence and young James Winchester, at twenty-four, was promoted in the field for his gallantry, wounded in action, captured, exchanged, recaptured and exchanged again to fight as a captain at York town. All that is long behind him, as are his years as an Indian fighter in North Carolina. Honours he has had: brigadier-general in the North Carolina militia; Speaker of the state senate of Tennessee; master of a vast Tennessee estate, surmounted by the great stone mansion known as Cragfont; father of fourteen children, four of them born out of wedlock but rendered legitimate by a tardy marriage. A kindly, sedentary man, fond of rich, easy living, known for his humanity. But no Harrison.

  He lacks Harrison’s style, has not Harrison’s way with men, cannot bring himself to mingle with the troops in Harrison’s easy, offhand manner. It is impossible to think of Winchester, dressed in a simple hunting shirt, making a stump speech to the Kentucky volunteers; it is equally impossible to believe that anyone would saw through a log in Harrison’s latrine.

  The murmurings against Winchester are not confined to the men. A group of officers, led by Henry Clay’s congressional colleague Captain Sam McKee, is drawing up a petition, apparently with Harrison’s blessing, urging that the command be taken from Winchester. The rebels get cold feet, temporize, delay, and are relieved at last of the charge of mutiny by a war department order authorizing Harrison to assume command of the Army of the Northwest.

  OLD FORT DEFIANCE, OHIO, October 2, 1812. It is close to midnight when William Henry Harrison, accompanied by a strong escort, gallops into camp, summoned by a frantic note from General Winchester warning that a combined force of British redcoats and Indians is marching south. Winchester’s intelligence is accurate but out of date. The British, believing themselves outnumbered, have already withdrawn.

  Now Harrison breaks the news that he is in full command of the new Army of the Northwest, charged with the task of subduing the Indians in his path, relieving Detroit, and invading Canada. Winchester is crestfallen. Convinced that Harrison has secretly connived against him, he seriously considers resigning, then thinks better of it and decides to hang on until Fort Amherstburg is captured. Harrison determines to mollify him by giving him command of the army’s left flank and naming in his honour the new fort being built not far from the ruins of the old: Fort Winchester.

  The troops are unaware of Harrison’s presence. Half starved, inadequately clothed, they have lost the will to fight. A delegation of Kentucky officers wakes Harrison to warn him that one regiment intends to quit and go home. All attempts to dissuade them have been met with insults.

  Early the next morning, Harrison acts. He orders Winchester to beat the alarm instead of the customary drum roll for reveille. The Kentuckians pour out of their tents, form a hollow square, and, as Winchester introduces them to their new commander, holler their enthusiasm.

  Harrison knows exactly what to say. He tells them they can go home if they wish to, “but if my fellow soldiers from Kentucky, so famed for patriotism, refuse to bear the hardships incident to war … where shall I look for men who will go with me?”

  Cheers and shouts greet these words and continue as the General reveals that two hundred wagons loaded with biscuit, flour, and bacon are on their way; some supplies, indeed, have already arrived. This kills all talk of desertion. One Kentuckian writes home that “Harrison, with a look, can awe and convince … where some would be refractory … All are afraid and unwilling to meet with his censure.”

  Harrison has been given authority to requisition funds and supplies, to protect the northwestern frontier, and after retaking Detroit to penetrate Upper Canada “as far as the force under your command will in your judgment justify.” For this purpose he expects to have ten thousand troops.

  His strategy is to move the army to the foot of the Rapids of the Maumee in three columns. Winchester, protecting his left flank, will march from the new fort along the route of the Maumee. A central force of twelve hundred men will follow Hull’s road to the same rendezvous. The right division, under Harrison himself, is proceeding from Wooster, Ohio, by way of the Upper Sandusky.

  Harrison’s Three-Column Drive to the Maumee Rapids

  But Winchester is pinned down at the newly constructed fort that bears his name. He dare not move without supplies, and the promised supplies are not forthcoming. Harrison has ordered Brigadier-General Edward Tupper’s mounted brigade to dash to the foot of the Rapids of the Maumee to harvest several hundred acres of corn for the famished troops. But the scalping of a ranger not two hundred yards from the camp has the men in such a panic that only a handful will follow. The mission is abandoned.

  On October 8, the day after Tupper’s fiasco, Frederick Jacob of the 17th Regiment is caught asleep at his post, and Winchester, faced with growing insubordination, decides to make an example of him. A court martial sentences Jacob to be shot. The following morning Winchester’s entire force, reduced now to eighteen hundred, forms a hollow square to witness the execution. Drums roll, the chaplain prays, the prisoner is led to the post, blindfolded, made to kneel. The troops fall silent, waiting for the volley. Then, at the last instant, a reprieve arrives. The General has judged the wretched guard “not to be of sound mind,” a verdict which if unjustified at the outset may well be applicable in the days following the ordeal.

  There are other punishments: “riding the wooden horse,” in which the offender is placed astride a bent sapling and subjected to a series of tossings and joltings to the great amusement of the troops, or a dozen well-laid blows on the bare posterior with a wooden paddle bored full of holes to help break the skin. In spite of these salutary examples, the army is murmuring its discontent over the continued lack of supplies. Rations remain short, Harrison’s promises to the contrary. There is little flour, almost no salt, and the beef – what there is of it – is deplorable.

  Disdaining strict orders, men wander out of camp and waste their ammunition in search of game, many barefoot, their clothes in rags. They sleep on frozen ground, some without blankets. More than two hundred are sick at one time. By November, three or four die each day from typhus. Civilian contractors reap a harvest; the price of hogs goes sky high while clothing ordered for the troops comes in sizes so small it seems to have been designed for small boys. Materials are shoddy, delays calculated. One contractor’s profit, it is said, amounts to $ 100,000.

  Nothing seems to be going right. In late September, the new governor of Kentucky, Isaac Shelby, has ordered two thousand mounted thirty-day volunteers – “the most respectable citizens that perhaps were ever embodied from this or any other State in the Union” – to march under Major-General Samuel Hopkins, one of Clay’s congressional War Hawks, against the Indians of Indiana and Illinois territories. Shelby does not wait for war department authorization or equipment. The men, whipped to a high pitch of enthusiasm, bring their own arms and blankets. The quota of volunteers is exceeded; twelve hundred disappointed Kentuckians have to be sent home.

  The euphoria does not last. By October 14, after two hard weeks in the saddle, the volunteers are dispirited. They cannot find any Indians, their rations dwindle away, they become hopelessly lost. At this point, their unseen quarry fires the tall prairie grass, threatening all with a painful death.

  Hopkins’s choice is retreat or mutiny, a situation that leaves the Governor aghast. What has happened to Kentucky’s élan? “… the flower of Kentucky are now returning home deeply mortified by the
disappointment.” On mature consideration, Shelby decides to put the blame on “secret plotting.”

  There is worse to come. A note of uncertainty begins to creep into Harrison’s dispatches to Washington: “If the fall should be very dry, I will retake Detroit before the winter sets in; but if we should have much rain, it will be necessary to wait at the Rapids until the Margin of the Lake is sufficiently frozen to bear the army and its baggage.”

  “The one bright ray amid the gloom of incompetency” (to quote John Gibson, acting governor of Illinois Territory) is the news of Captain Zachary Taylor’s successful defence of Fort Harrison – a desperate struggle in which a handful of soldiers and civilians, many of them ill, withstood repeated attacks by Miami and Wea warriors until relief arrived. It is the first land victory for the United States, and it wins for Taylor the first brevet commission ever awarded by the U.S. government. Nor will the moment of glory be forgotten. One day, Brevet Major Taylor will become twelfth president of the United States.

  The news from the Niagara frontier banishes this brief euphoria. Another army defeated! A third bogged down. By October 22, Harrison finds he can no longer set a firm date for the attack on Detroit. There are no supplies of any kind in Michigan Territory; the farms along the Raisin have been ravaged. He will require one million rations at the Rapids of the Maumee before he can start a campaign; but the fall rains have already begun and he cannot move his supplies, let alone his artillery. By early November, the roads are in desperate condition and horses, attempting to struggle through morass and swamp, are dying by the hundreds.

  The army switches to flatboats, but just as these are launched the temperature falls and the boats are frozen fast along the Sandusky, Au Glaize, and St. Mary’s rivers. By early December, Harrison despairs of reaching the rapids at all and makes plans to shelter his force in huts on the Au Glaize. He suggests that Shelby prepare the public for a postponement in the campaign by disbanding all the volunteer troops except those needed for guard and escort duty. But Washington will have none of it. The Union has suffered two mortifying failures at Detroit and Queenston; it will not accept a third.