Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (74 page)

Several assure him that they will lose their own lives rather than see him taken. They carry him down to the boats on the dead run, but before they reach them, he is hit by a second ball in the right wrist. Other members of the rescue party drop around him as he is hoisted into a boat overloaded with escaping soldiers. As the oarsmen pull away, the Americans pour a deadly fire into the little flotilla. Twenty-seven British are killed or wounded, among them Sloan’s drinking companion, Sergeant Kelly, who will not recover. And Bisshopp is struck for a third time, high up in the right arm.

His physical wounds are not serious; his mental sufferings are. He cannot forgive himself for the loss of his men, cannot accept the idea that a single soldier should be shot while trying to rescue him. The surgeon who attends him has no fears for his recovery, yet Bisshopp daily grows worse, even when his commanding general, Francis De Rottenburg, pays him a visit and tries to ease his conscience. All he can talk about as his condition worsens is the loss of his men, until one evening, still blaming himself for the tragedy, he expires “without a struggle, nay, without a groan.”

YORK, UPPER CANADA, JULY 31, 1813

Panic! Square sails on the lake … white jibs … red stripes and blue stars flying from the sterns. With the half-charred
General Pike
finally launched at Sackets Harbor, the naval balance on Lake Ontario has changed again. The Americans are back in force on this humid midsummer morning—at least a dozen vessels standing for the harbour.

By the time the leading vessels anchor off the garrison, the town is all but emptied of men. William Allan, merchant and militia major, leads the exodus, the memory of his earlier imprisonment still seared into his mind. It is true that he and the others have given their parole, but they do not trust the Americans. Along the Niagara frontier other paroled militia officers have been bundled up and taken across the border to captivity on foreign soil. Allan is taking no chances.

He reaches the Playter farmhouse on north Yonge Street. With the help of the two Playter brothers, Allan conceals a boatload of five thousand cartridges and another crammed with baggage in a marsh near the Don River. He himself moves north and hides out in the woods.

Through the silent streets of the empty town, two men make their way to the garrison. Grant Powell has elected to stay and so, of course, has the Reverend Dr. Strachan. (Who would dare imprison
him?)
They reach the garrison about two o’clock and wait developments.

They watch the largest vessels come to anchor at three. The wind is so light that the schooners, trailing behind, must use their sweeps. At four, they see the boats put off. Two hundred and fifty men land without opposition. All available British troops have retired to defend Burlington Heights.

White flag in hand, Strachan tackles the first officer to reach the shore and demands to be taken to the Commodore. Chauncey, with Winfield Scott at his elbow, is cordial enough. Indeed, he expresses regret at the theft of books from the library the previous April, says he has made a search of the fleet for the books, has found several and
will return them. Strachan demands to know his intentions, points out that the present inhabitants are only women and children. Does he mean to destroy the community? If so, will he allow the removal of these non-combatants?

Chauncey reassures him: no looting is contemplated, only the seizure of the public stores and the burning of all fortifications. The major purpose of the expedition is retaliation for British attacks on the far side of the lake, especially a recent hit-and-run assault on the little community of Sodus. He does not say it, but the real reason for the expedition, surely, is the need to do
something
. Cooped up in Sackets Harbor and Fort George, denied a naval confrontation by the elusive James Yeo, stalemated in their attempts to seize the Niagara peninsula, the Americans need to simulate action.

Chauncey asks where the public stores are located. Strachan and Powell will not tell him. It does not matter, because Chauncey already knows or soon finds out—knows the state of York’s defences, knows the position of the army on Burlington Heights, knows every single transaction that has taken place in York. As he remarks later to Strachan, he “never heard of any place that contained half the Number of persons, Publickly known & avowadly to be Enemys to the Government & Country to be allowed to remain at rest.…”

Chauncey knows that some of the public stores are secreted in William Allan’s store and that Allan himself, a militia officer under parole, has been collecting and sending information to the British army and aiding in the forwarding of troops. Winfield Scott offers a five-hundred-dollar reward for Allan’s capture and sends his men to break into the store. They seize everything, break open several officers’ trunks, give away the contents, and burn a large quantity of hemp. Others open the jail and release all the prisoners. When Strachan attempts to protest to Winfield Scott, the American colonel brushes him off, declares he’ll seize all the provisions he can find.

In this he has the aid and comfort of a group of disaffected Canadians. John Lyon, one of the ringleaders, brings his wagon down Yonge Street to help the Americans move the captured flour to the boats. His crony Calvin Wood, jailed for sedition, is one of
those released from the York jail. Wood and several others go aboard the American ships to give the enemy information; in gratitude, his newfound friends present him with seven barrels of flour.

From these informants Chauncey learns that boatloads of arms, baggage, and ammunition have been hauled up the Don River. It is late in the evening; a half-hearted attempt to storm Burlington Heights has been called off; the fleet is about to leave. Now, however, the Commodore postpones his departure. The following morning the troops disembark, and three armed boats move up the Don seeking the hidden supplies. But Ely Playter and his brother have already squirreled most of them away, and the searchers return disappointed.

The troops evacuate the town, burn the barracks, blockhouses, and all other buildings at Gibraltar Point, and return to the ships, which weigh anchor the following dawn and set sail for Sackets Harbor. Again, unaccountably, the Americans have declined to occupy the capital and cut the line between Kingston and the British forces on the Niagara.

The town breathes more freely. Though the inhabitants do not know it, this is the last time a hostile flotilla will anchor in Toronto Bay. The new centre of action is on Lake Erie, more than two hundred miles to the southwest. Even as Chauncey’s fleet sails out of the harbour, a mixed force of British regulars, Canadian militia, and Indians is launching a bloody attack on Fort Stephenson, the American outpost on Sandusky Bay. Farther along the shoreline to the east, Oliver Hazard Perry is about to give his adversary the slip, manoeuvre his brand new fleet out of its prison at Presque Isle, and challenge British naval authority on the lake.

The war has passed York by, but its effects will linger on, long after hostilities end. John Lyon, Calvin Wood, and a clutch of other dissidents will soon find themselves in jail. Charges of sedition, taunts of treason, will be thrown at any who, by deed, word, or even gesture, appeared to espouse the American cause. It will no longer be prudent to praise the American way of life, as Timothy Wheeler, among others, has done in the hearing of his neighbours, or even to attack “the old Tories,” as Edward Phillips has done.

A “committee of information” is about to come into being to take depositions from all loyal subjects who wish to inform on their neighbours. Its members are men of impeccable loyalty and substance: the core of the future Family Compact—Strachan, Allan, Thomas Ridout, and the acting attorney general’s brother, Captain Peter Robinson, whose name will one day be immortalized by the town of Peterborough. The acting attorney general, John Beverley Robinson, cannot participate in person since the committee’s actions, strictly speaking, are illegal. But he is with them in spirit, for “the country must not be lost by a too scrupulous attention to forms.” In Upper Canada, during an emergency, individual civil liberties are not a matter of pressing concern. Individualism, after all, is an American concept, “liberty” a Yankee word.

THREE
The Northwest Campaign: 1
The Siege of Fort Meigs

April 12–May 8, 1813

While the British Centre Division prepares to defend the Niagara peninsula, the Right Division, with Indian help, plans to attack the American base at Fort Meigs on the Maumee River, near the west end of Lake Erie. The time is propitious. The British, who have captured most of Michigan Territory, control the lake. Most of the American defenders are leaving the garrison, their term of service at an end. If Fort Meigs falls, the American left wing will collapse and the land north of the Ohio is likely to revert to the Indians who fight on the British side under the Shawnee war chief, Tecumseh
.

FORT MEIGS, OHIO, APRIL 12, 1813

Major-General William Henry Harrison, commander of the American Army of the Northwest, returning to his headquarters here on
the swirling Maumee, looks up at his fortified camp and senses that something is not quite right.

The eight-acre stockade, one hundred feet above the river, is encircled by a fence of fifteen-foot pickets driven deep into the ground for permanence. Permanence? What are those gaps in the fence line? Why are the eight blockhouses unfinished? The British are only a few miles away at Amherstburg across the Detroit River. Hostile Indians are already lurking among the oaks and beeches. Has nothing been done in his absence?

Very little, it seems. Harrison, drumming up reinforcements in the wilderness, left the strengthening of the fort in charge of a brigadier-general of the Virginia militia—Joel B. Leftwich. But Leftwich is not to be found, has in fact taken off with all his men, their six months’ tour of duty having ended the previous week. This “phlegmatic, stupid old granny,” as a captain of the engineers calls him, stopped all work on the defences, announcing that he could not make the militia do anything—and therefore they might as well stay in their tents out of the mud and the water. Instead of improving the works, they have been permitted to burn the timber intended for the blockhouses and to pull up the pickets for fuel.

The quality of the militiamen assigned to Harrison does not inspire much confidence. Some of the senior officers cannot read or write; many more cannot spell. The reports of the general officers often read like the contents of a six-year-old’s exercise book. Harrison, the scholar who reads Latin and Greek, is dismayed to discover that one field officer who has been given a day to fill out a form is unable to manage the task. Few know anything about military customs, drill or discipline. Two Ohio captains after two months in the service still labour under the belief that sergeants of the regular army outrank them; while serving as officers of the guard they meekly ask the NCO’s permission to go to dinner!

All this must gall Harrison, the one-time governor of Indiana whose passion is military history. But his brooding features do not betray it. His is an ascetic’s face, aquiline, stretched long like
pull-toffee. The hollow cheeks, the thin nose, the sombre eyes give him a mediaeval look that masks his feelings.

At the moment he is frustrated over the orders of the new Secretary of War, John Armstrong, who has forbidden him to go on the attack until the ships that the naval commander, Oliver Hazard Perry, is building can control Lake Erie. Harrison is used to having his own way, has enjoyed carte blanche until this month. Now he is being hedged in, ordered to economize. Governor Isaac Shelby of Kentucky is itching to raise fifteen thousand troops to help Harrison avenge last January’s massacre at Frenchtown, but Armstrong demurs. The government, he declares, can afford to spend only $1,400,000 a month on this war. Harrison is allotted twenty thousand.

Economy or not, Harrison has been forced to bribe some of the six-month men to hang on at Fort Meigs until reinforcements arrive. He has about twelve hundred troops in camp but only 850 are fit for duty—half of them untrained—against an estimated three thousand British, Canadians, and Indians.

Dismayed by the lack of public spirit among the militia, he has overstepped his authority and urged Governor Shelby to send him an additional fifteen hundred Kentuckians. Shelby, invoking a new Kentucky law, complies at once, and even now these men are on the march down the Maumee Valley. But will they arrive in time? Harrison has offered a bonus of seven dollars a month to any man who will offer to remain on duty until the new recruits appear. Two
hundred Pennsylvanians agree to stay for fifteen days. The Kentucky troops in camp are hawkish: if the General will lead them against the men who massacred their fellow soldiers at Frenchtown they will follow him without any bribe.