For Honour's Sake (33 page)

Typically, Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn had claimed illness and turned command over to his brigadiers John Boyd, William Winder, and John Chandler. That was the order by which they were to take their respective brigades ashore in lifts—more than 4,000 troops. But the initial landing was led by Dearborn's adjutant general, the recently exchanged Col. Winfield Scott, who had been taken prisoner at Queenston Heights. Scott was at the head of a detachment of New York riflemen commanded by Capt. Benjamin Forsyth, sharpshooters clad in green uniforms.

The Americans landed east of the mouth of Two Mile Creek, about 1,000 yards west of Niagara. As they spilled from the boats and clambered up a steep bank, the Glengarrians met them with bayonets and musket shot. Narrowly dodging a bayonet thrust, Scott tumbled into the water. But others gained the high ground and pushed the light troops back, forcing them in on the lines of the reinforcing King's Regiment of Foot commanded by Maj. James Ogilvie.

Behind Scott's riflemen Boyd's brigade landed and spread out into fighting formation—too many for the British to repel. Vincent ordered a fighting withdrawal to delay the American advance long enough to spike the guns and destroy the ammunition stores. After three hours of intense fighting, Vincent's men retreated toward Queenston. They left behind 52 dead and another 300 wounded or missing. The Americans had taken Fort George at a cost of just 150 casualties. Vincent gave up the Niagara Peninsula, withdrawing to Burlington Heights at the head of Lake Ontario from where he could threaten their control of the region.

The Americans had achieved a major victory, but Dearborn failed to exploit it by reboarding Chauncey's ships and getting behind Vincent to force a battle that would eliminate the British army. Instead he allowed it to escape and remain a threat.
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Poor weather contributed to Dearborn's lack of initiative. Heavy rain and weak winds left Chauncey's sailors bedraggled and becalmed. Then, two days after the capture of Fort George, Chauncey received the news that Sackets Harbor was under attack, his precious base in jeopardy and even more the still-under-construction
General Pike.
Chauncey raised sails, deployed the sweeps and made best speed toward home, abandoning Dearborn's army.

Surprisingly, the attack on Sackets Harbor was Sir George Prevost's work. On May 25, hearing of the cannonade fired against Fort George, he decided on a diversionary attack of his own. With 800 men, he and Commodore Sir James Yeo sailed from Kingston. Prevost hoped to destroy the dockyard and the corvette under construction. Bedevilled by light winds, Yeo's ships did not near the fort until just before nightfall, so Prevost decided to delay landing until morning. Yeo, who had combined operations experience, argued that keeping soldiers in the holds through the night would wear them out more than landing them immediately. The element of surprise the British now enjoyed would also be lost, giving the Americans time to call up their militia. Blithely dismissing Yeo's concerns, the governor took to his bed.

Come morning, Yeo's prediction proved out as tired, dispirited British troops were met by a force of about 500 militiamen. Although the Americans were easily pushed back, every inch of ground was still contested,
slowing the advance. Yeo, meanwhile, was prevented by an offshore breeze from bringing his ships into position to shell the dockyard. After three hours of hot fighting, Prevost ordered a retreat while declaring the enemy beaten. He seized three captured six-pound guns and 154 prisoners. The redcoats fell back unwillingly, bearing off 154 wounded and leaving 47 dead and 16 men missing. “Tired, hungry, wet and thirsty, highly mystified and looking very sheepish at one another,” the veteran troops believed they could have won the day under a bolder commander.
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The attack on Sackets Harbor achieved nothing in real currency, but it succeeded in one sense by the panic it instilled in Chauncey's mind. On June 11, he wrote to Secretary of the Navy William Jones that he had been “prepared to proceed in quest of the enemy, but upon mature reflection, I determined to remain in this place and preserve the new ship at all hazards.” Suddenly Yeo was master of Lake Ontario. At least until Chauncey mustered his resolve and ventured forth.
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Unable to move men by ship, Dearborn ordered his army to pursue Vincent marching along the shore of Lake Ontario while he remained in Fort George. Refusing to relinquish command despite increasingly failing health, he sent Chandler and Winder forward with about 3,500 men and no clear instructions as to which man was in charge. Both were political appointees—Chandler a congressman who had been a blacksmith and then a tavernkeeper, Winder a Baltimore lawyer.
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Despite inarguable superiority of force, the two officers advanced gingerly, with cavalry well ahead, stopping at the slightest threat to conduct lengthy reconnaissance. Pausing at Forty Mile Creek, about two-thirds of the way between Fort George and Burlington Heights, they dallied to establish a supply depot to support the next stage of the advance. Then the Americans advanced another fifteen miles to Stoney Creek, encamping there on June 5.

Vincent's scouts kept him well informed of the American progress. When nineteen-year-old militia scout Billy Green found his brother-in-law hiding from the Americans who had tried to take him prisoner, the fugitive revealed the enemy's password. Green rushed this information to Vincent. Meanwhile, Lt. Col. John Harvey had been creeping about the edges of the American camp, finding it haphazardly placed and
poorly guarded. Not cooperating with each other, Winder and Chandler had failed to tie their lines together. Men were strewn everywhere, companies setting up and lighting cooking fires wherever they liked. Harvey urged Vincent to attack at once.

At about 11:30 that night, Harvey returned with 700 men. Armed with the password, they closed on and bayoneted the first sentries. Then they formed a line and charged. The Americans sitting around fires recovered quickly, snatching up guns to meet the attack. Charge thrown into chaos, the British troops broke formation and became entangled with the Americans.

Chandler and Winder lost control over their men, as did Harvey. Vincent, who had accompanied the attack, got turned around in the dense woods and only reappeared at his headquarters the next morning, having lost horse and hat. Chandler kept yelling, “Where is the Line? Where is the Line?” until he was silenced by a British soldier from a twenty-man unit commanded by Maj. Charles Plenderleath of the 49th Regiment. The general was taken prisoner. Sgt. Alexander Fraser of the same unit came face to face with Winder, and when the general raised his pistol, calmly advised: “If you stir, Sir, you die.” Winder lowered his gun. Plenderleath and his intrepid band bagged not only two generals but also five field officers and captains and more than 100 troops. Although the British suffered more casualties than the Americans—214 to 168, including the prisoners—by morning they held the field.
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Command of the Americans devolved to cavalry officer Col. James Burn, who later informed Dearborn that he had been “at a loss what steps to pursue in the unpleasant dilemma, occasioned by the capture of our Generals, finding the ammunition of the troops nearly expended.” A hasty council of war produced the inevitable result. The American officers agreed to retire briskly to Forty Mile Creek. There they remained until the afternoon of June 7, when Yeo showed up and subjected them to a heavy naval bombardment that sent the column scuttling back to Fort George. Dearborn, thoroughly alarmed, ordered Fort Erie—which had been taken without a shot fired—burned and abandoned. He then drew his entire army in behind the dubious walls of Fort George and prepared to meet a siege.
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Believing he faced at least 6,000 Americans at Fort George, Vincent could do little to exploit this unexpected failure of will. A consequent lull ensued that Prevost put to good use by reorganizing his command. Maj. Gen. Roger Sheaffe's ignominious abandonment of York garnered no thanks from the inhabitants of Upper Canada, so the governor sent him packing to Montreal and brought in Maj. Gen. Francis de Rottenburg. The fifty-six-year-old baron had been born in Danzig and seen service in both the French and Polish armies before joining the British army in 1794. After several postings in various corners of the empire, he was promoted major general in 1810, sent to Canada, and had since held various commands in Lower Canada.
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Cautious but competent, de Rottenburg kept his emotions and temper on such a short rein that he seemed unshakably calm no matter the crisis. No Brock, he was a commander who would husband his resources but not shy from giving battle.

Dearborn, meanwhile, finally admitted to ill health and handed off to his surviving senior officer, Brig. Gen. John Boyd. With Canadian irregulars and Indians roaming at will throughout the peninsula and routinely sniping at American foraging parties, Boyd decided some offensive action was needed. He also wanted to prove his worth as an officer and assuage American pride after the humiliation of Stoney Creek. On the road leading from Queenston to St. Davids, near a place known as Beaver Dams, the British had established a small outpost. Its commander, Lt. James FitzGibbon, was headquartered in a stone house. To the northeast, a gathering of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians was camped, and it was from here that the raiding warriors operated. Sending the redcoats off and then sorting out the Indians seemed easy enough to Boyd, a former soldier of fortune who had served in India and pretended to have great experience in handling troops. Winfield Scott distrusted the man's competency, thinking him more bully than soldier, but being subordinate held his peace.
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The operation seemed straightforward, the kind of punitive strike frontier American soldiers had conducted for decades. Boyd assigned the job to Lt. Col. Charles Boerstler of the 14th United States Infantry, who sallied forth with a mixed cavalry and infantry force of 700 men and two field guns.

What followed was the kind of comic farce that had signified American performances during 1812. It also gave birth to a Canadian legend forever wrapped in mystery and the subject of countless debates regarding its credence.

On June 23, Boerstler set out, guided by a freebooter partisan from Buffalo named Cyrenius Chapin—who claimed to be a doctor—and his irregulars whom the regular soldiers disparaged as the “Forty Thieves.” The American column slogged through the heaviest summer rains in twenty-five years, Boerstler increasingly disenchanted by his guide's blundering about in such a manner that it was evident he little recognized any of the country through which they passed. In addition to the unwieldy cannon trains, the soldiers dragged along wagons brimming with supplies as if on a protracted campaign rather than a hit-and-run mission. Wading through a miasma of mud, the column managed only eight miles the first day before stopping about midnight at Queenston. Boerstler commandeered a house and ordered its residents to serve dinner. The Americans were still about the same distance again from their objective and Boerstler issued instructions that come morning the force would bring the enemy to battle.

How then to explain, just before dawn on June 22, a day before Boerstler's arrival, the departure by a Queenston housewife and mother of five on a mission to warn FitzGibbon that the Americans were marching on his position? Thirty-five years old, Laura Secord could give FitzGibbon no other details. Despite this paucity of information, the lieutenant credited it sufficiently to warn the Indians and put his small garrison on alert.

Consequently, when the Americans started up the road to the Niagara Escarpment, the British, Indians, and Canadian militia lay in ambush at Beaver Dams. Boerstler and his men faced tough going, worse than the previous day's advance. Men slipped and slid in the mud that greased the road.

At nine o'clock that morning 300 Caughnawaga struck the rear of the column and were soon joined by 100 Mohawks. Disoriented by the dense woods lining the road, the Americans fired at shadows more than the fleeting Indians. After three hours of this harassment they were
totally demoralized and would surrender but for fear of being massacred. That was when FitzGibbon and fifty redcoats materialized out of the woods. By his own account the British had not yet fired a single shot. But the Caughnawaga and Mohawk had “beat the American detachment into a state of terror, and the only share I claim is taking advantage of a favourable moment to offer them protection from the tomahawk and the scalping knife.”
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FitzGibbon engaged Boerstler long enough in negotiations through various blustering proclamations to enable Maj. Peter DeHaren to hasten in from Twelve Mile Creek with three companies of regulars to enforce the lieutenant's claims that between the Indians and redcoats they could easily butcher the Americans. Sufficiently cowed, Boerstler surrendered. The American militiamen with the column were paroled, but 462 officers and men of the regular army were made prisoners and all the supplies and the cannon they had lugged with them were captured. Although in the confusion Boerstler managed to slip away, he was damned as a coward by the Americans despite his claims that the men were so exhausted that further fighting would have been futile.

Beaver Dams was truly an Indian victory for which they were barely thanked by the British despite suffering about 15 killed and 25 wounded. It was also the final straw for the Americans on the Niagara Peninsula. After this debacle Dearborn simply hunkered down in Fort George, waiting for inevitable attack. But, rather than the British coming for the old general that everyone now disdained with the nickname Granny, there came instead a short note from Secretary of War John Armstrong. “I have the President's orders to express to you his decision that you retire from … command … until your health be re-established, and until further orders.”
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Despite her making little of it herself, Laura Secord's trek was soon enlarged into myth, and she became a Canadian hero of the war even as it remained unclear how she came about her knowledge. Over the years Secord provided contradictory and vague details. By one account her husband had overheard an American officer discussing the planned operation. But where he was at the time was never clarified. At other times the story was that she heard it personally from
enemy soldiers while forced to serve them dinner. Who were these men? Certainly not Boerstler, as some accounts would claim, for he had not yet led the column out of Fort George. Perhaps, however, they were some of Chapin's scurrilous characters. Just as probable, Secord picked up nothing more than a rumour—for rumours flowed like water over Niagara Falls in this region because almost everyone knew someone or was related to someone on the other side of the border—and decided it warranted bearing to the nearest British officer.
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