Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (103 page)

The popular feeling is entirely in favour of continuing the war. People talk of taking over the Great Lakes, pushing back the American border, dividing the Union by seducing New England back into the Imperial fold. The British now have a seasoned army sitting idle, which they cannot demobilize too quickly, as well as a superabundant naval force. The people are demanding “the chastisement of America,” and even though their political leaders are less eager to continue the war, “they will not, certainly, be disposed to make concessions, nor probably displeased at a failure of negotiations.” Impressment will never be repealed.

In spite of Clay’s earnest hope that he will shortly leave London for Gothenburg, Gallatin is determined to stay, hoping to open direct negotiations with the British leaders, especially Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary.

Indeed, it has become clear that the Swedish city is the wrong place for negotiations. The British much prefer a neutral town—in Holland, say—as close as possible to London, for it is obvious that the real negotiations will be in the hands of Lord Liverpool,
the Prime Minister, Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary, and Castlereagh. Whoever are chosen as plenipotentiaries will be little more than messenger boys for the trio of peers at Whitehall. Both Gallatin and Bayard are agreed on the need for a change of location.

Meanwhile Clay receives disturbing news from Crawford, the American ambassador in Paris, who tells him that unless America either excludes the whole question of impressment from the agenda, or at least agrees to postpone it, there is no chance for any peace negotiation. The matter, he points out delicately, has become largely academic: the European war is over; Britain has too many sailors, does not need to impress anyone.

There is more. The news of Wilkinson’s disgrace the previous November on the St. Lawrence has placed “all the continental powers under the direct influence of our enemy.” The posturing general has turned America’s potential friends against her.

The British are taking their own time naming envoys to the peace talks, which, it is finally decided, will be held at Ghent in Belgium. At last, on May 15, Christopher Hughes, secretary to the American mission, who has begged to go to London, learns unofficially who they are to be: Admiral Gambier, “a Mr. Golsby (or Goldburn),” and a Mr. Adams. They are, in short, nonentities, unknown to the Americans, equally unknown to the British public.

Admiral James Gambier, aged fifty-eight, is a blundering and sedentary flag officer with remarkably little sea experience (less than six years), known as much for his failures as for his successes, as well as for his piety and his narrow morality, which some call hypocrisy.

Henry Goulburn is so little known that Hughes, among others, gets his name wrong. He is an under-secretary for war and the colonies, a run-of-the-mill diplomat at thirty but more forceful than his two colleagues.

William Adams is an obscure Admiralty lawyer, placed on the commission because of his expertise in maritime law, on which much of the future negotiation is expected to hinge.

The choice of this threesome suggests two British attitudes. First, they hold the Americans in contempt. The United States has sent
a first-class team of plenipotentiaries to Europe; the British have responded with second-class negotiators. Second, as suspected, the real decisions will be made by Great Britain in Whitehall, not at Ghent. But the British, in their hauteur, have placed themselves at a disadvantage. Their choices are no match for five tough, high-powered Americans.

In Gothenburg, winter gives way to spring, but Henry Clay is in no mood to bask in the zephyrs of late May. With Russell still in Stockholm he is all alone, his sense of isolation aggravated by a lack of knowledge of the outside world. Two weeks have passed without news from England, and the last letter could scarcely have improved his temper—a burbling report from Hughes, the commission secretary, exclaiming over the beauty of the English lawns and gardens, the extraordinary size of the capital, and “the perfect state of cultivation” of the countryside. Clay does not need this kind of report from enemy territory; it is bad enough to be cooped up here in a foreign town whose very Englishness has given it the sobriquet of “Little London.”

Clay is eager now for peace, as he once was for war, but events are moving at a crawl. The boredom is driving him to distraction. He has no one to talk to, having dispatched his secretary to Amsterdam to intercept the latest news from Washington. Adams is somewhere in mid-Baltic among the ice floes, a fortnight overdue. Hughes remains in London, against Clay’s wishes, goggling over the estates of the aristocrats. Gallatin is there too, still trying to see the Tsar of Russia, who has thus far eluded him—still hoping to get the negotiations moving. Bayard has set out for Ghent but has got no farther than Paris. “Perhaps never was a joint mission so disjointed & scattered,” Russell remarks in a moody letter from Stockholm.

Clay will not soon find an outlet for his frustration. Two more months will slip by before the British and Americans finally meet face to face at the Hôtel d’Alcantara in Ghent. Meanwhile, the same spring that brings a bloom to the pasque flower in Sweden heralds a renewal of the war in Canada. Men are dying from musket fire and round shot, and the bloodiest battles still lie ahead.

WITH THE BRITISH FLEET, BLOCKADING SACKETS HARBOR, NEW YORK, MAY 24, 1814

Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond has come down from Kingston to board Commodore James Yeo’s spanking new flagship,
Prince Regent
. His purpose: to reconnoitre the Americans’ chief naval base and centre of operations. Yeo and his opposite number, the sleepy-eyed Chauncey—those two “heroes of defeat,” in Winfield Scott’s sardonic phrase—have both declined to fight a decisive battle. Theirs has been a war, instead, of carpenters and shipwrights. All winter long at Kingston and Sackets Harbor, hundreds of men have been hammering at vessels that will never fight, each one bigger and better armed than the last. Now Drummond intends to discover how far the American shipbuilding program has progressed and, if possible, to frustrate it.

He would dearly love to mount an all-out attack on Sackets Harbor, wreck the garrison, and destroy Chauncey’s partly built fleet. That would give the British undisputed control of Lake Ontario, where the fortunes of war have see-sawed over the past eighteen months. But the base is well fortified. Drummond needs at least eight hundred reinforcements to make the attempt. These the cautious governor general Sir George Prevost has denied him, fearing that it would denude Lower Canada of regular troops, leaving Montreal open to American capture.

Drummond arrives aboard
Prince Regent
to find Yeo lying in his cabin, prostrated by illness (as who is not in this war of invalids?). The following morning, May 25, the General sets off in a canoe to look over the harbour. He approaches within a mile and a half, peers through his glass, observes that Chauncey’s new vessels have their topgallants across and are ready to take to the lake except for the largest ship,
Superior
, which is not yet rigged.

Once this sixty-four-gun double-decker is launched, the two fleets will again be almost equal in firepower. All winter long the rival commanders have struggled to outbuild each other. When Chauncey learns that Yeo is constructing the largest ship ever to ply an inland lake—almost as large as Nelson’s
Victory
—he orders that his own flagship be increased in size. When Yeo, in reply, undertakes to build the largest ship in the world—
St. Lawrence
, a gigantic three-decker, mounting 120 guns—Chauncey makes plans to go him one better.

The road from Albany to Sackets is jammed with wagon trains hauling supplies for the new fleet. On Canada’s Atlantic coast, four sloops of war are laid up in order to supply seamen for the vessels being built at Kingston. Every skilled carpenter in Montreal has been rounded up to work on the British fleet. At Sackets Harbor, four hundred shipwrights are toiling in shifts. The cost on both sides is horrendous. The British have secretly hired two hundred ox teams from Vermont and New Hampshire to haul guns and cable to Kingston. It costs two thousand pounds to bring six thirty-two-pounders into the naval yard, a thousand pounds to haul in a single large cable from Sorel. Small wonder that the government’s bills in Upper Canada go unpaid.

Shortly after Drummond returns to
Prince Regent
, one of his spies confirms his assessment.
Superior
is still short of heavy guns, rigging, and cable, all held up at Oswego Falls because of the British blockade. As long as the fleet lurks outside the harbour, these essentials, which can be moved only by water, are denied to Chauncey: his biggest ship lies helpless and unarmed.

The American commander, however, has a plan to run the blockade using nineteen bateaux, which move at night, hide in small inlets by day. Drummond discovers the scheme, sends off a detachment of gunboats to capture the blockade runners. The Americans flee up a winding creek, the Big Sandy, and ambush their pursuers, killing, wounding, or capturing the entire British force. From this point the Americans haul their cannon, cable, and supplies sixteen miles overland to the shipyard. With the naval balance about to change again on the lake, Drummond and Yeo call off the blockade.

Will the enemy now attack Yeo before his great ship, still building at Kingston, is ready? Drummond does not believe they will—not until
their
great ship is ready. Even then, he suggests, they are unlikely to seek an encounter. He advises Yeo to stay on the defensive until
the mighty
St. Lawrence
is ready to sail. Then, perhaps, the British can venture out of Kingston harbour and destroy the American fleet. Drummond does not consider a more likely possibility—that Chauncey, discovering Yeo’s superiority, will commence construction of another ship to equal the odds, that Yeo will then follow suit, and that long after the war is over four more great vessels, all unfinished, never to be launched, will be on the ways at Kingston and Sackets Harbor, preparing to fight a battle that can never take place.

BUFFALO, NEW YORK, JUNE 4, 1814

Winfield Scott, newly promoted to brigadier-general, has been drilling his raw recruits unmercifully since March 24, preparing for an expected invasion of Canada. Now he draws up his brigade in a hollow square on the training ground to witness the execution of five men sentenced to be shot for desertion. The prisoners stand before them, dressed grotesquely in white robes—their winding sheets—with white caps on their heads and red targets over their hearts.

Five graves stand open before them. Beside each grave lies a coffin. Each of the condemned men is made to kneel between coffin and grave as the firing party approaches. For every prisoner there are twelve riflemen.

Officers load the weapons, return them to the firing party. The chaplain murmurs a short prayer. The white caps are pulled down over the eyes of the victims. As soon as the order is given, the guns explode and five men drop as one, some toppling into the open graves, others sprawling across their coffins. One struggles feebly. A sergeant approaches, aims the muzzle of his piece a yard from the victim’s head, blows him into eternity.

Suddenly a murmur ripples across the ranks as one of the corpses slowly rises to his knees and is helped to his feet.

“By God,” he says, “I thought I was dead!”

He has been judged too young to die. This is Brigadier-General Scott’s blunt method of telling him he has been reprieved by having his men fire blank cartridges.

The gesture is typical of Scott, a harsh disciplinarian and self-taught tactician who has, at last, been given the command he has sought for so long. Brevetted a brigadier-general in March, he is now, at twenty-eight, the youngest general officer in the American army and the symbol of a new attitude. The tired veterans of another war—Hampton, Wilkinson, Dearborn, and others—are out of the army. John Armstrong has all but scrapped the stale tradition of seniority. George Izard, aged thirty-eight, has been promoted; so has Eleazar Ripley, aged thirty-two. And Jacob Brown, at thirty-nine, is now major-general in command of the Northern Army. Amos Hall no longer leads the New York militia. His replacement is Henry Clay’s congressional crony and War Hawk, the ebullient Peter B. Porter.

In this new pantheon one name is unaccountably missing, that of William Henry Harrison, surely an able commander and, some believe, the best-qualified man to lead the new invasion. But Harrison has resigned. He cannot—
will
not—work under Armstrong, cannot abide the Secretary’s repeated interference in his command. Armstrong, on his part, has accepted Harrison’s resignation without demur. For the Secretary of War, William Henry Harrison is too independent.

The new head of the Northern Army, Jacob Brown, is an aggressive and imaginative commander but with little regular experience, and certainly no tactician. He remains at his headquarters at Sackets Harbor and leaves the training of the army to Winfield Scott at Buffalo. Scott is in his element. No more ambitious officer exists in the United States. For two years he has actively sought promotion, frustrated to the point of fury by the imbecilities—a typical Scott word—of the past two years. Compromised at Queenston Heights by a well-meaning but green commander, deserted by a craven militia, captured, and imprisoned by the British in the winter of 1812–13, held back during the attack on Fort George by the incompetence of Boyd, maddened by Wilkinson’s posturing on the St. Lawrence, he is finally on his own, able at last to put into practice those military theories that he has soaked up from his voluminous reading.

He may not know everything about war, but he acts as if he does. His fellow officers shrink from arguments on tactics or strategy, for Scott is able at a moment’s notice to clinch the debate by quoting an incontrovertible authority. His baggage wagon carries Scott’s considerable library—a variety of military works, biographies of the great soldiers of history, and the latest texts on drill and strategy imported from Europe. In future years, when Scott is the nation’s leading soldier, this will come to be known as “the Scott tradition.”