The Invasion of Canada (24 page)

For Lieutenant-Colonel Baynes the journey is salutary. He fails to see any military preparation but forms a strong opinion of the mood of the people, which he reports to Prevost:

“My appearance travelling thro’ the country in uniform excited very great curiosity and anxiety. The Inns where the coach stopt were instantly crowded with the curious and inquisitive. I did not hear a single individual express a wish but for the speedy accommodation of existing differences and deprecating the war, in several instances these statements were expressed in strong and violent language and on Major Clarke endeavouring to check it, it produced a contrary effect. The universal sentiment of this part of the country appears decidedly adverse to war. I experienced everywhere respect and attention.”

On the evening of August 8, Baynes reaches Albany and goes immediately to Dearborn’s headquarters at nearby Greenbush. The American commander receives him with great affability, says he personally wants an armistice on honourable terms, and admits that “the burden of command at his time of life was not a desirable charge.” Baynes finds him in good health but shrewdly concludes that he “does not appear to possess the energy of mind or activity of body requisite for the important station he fills.”

Baynes’s Journey to Albany

An agreement of sorts is quickly concluded. Dearborn explains that his instructions do not allow him to sign an armistice, but he can issue orders for a temporary cessation of hostilities. The two men agree that should Washington countermand this order, four days’ notice will be given before hostilities are resumed. Under this arrangement, the troops will act only on the defensive until a final decision is reached. To Dearborn, the procrastinator, this agreement has the great advantage of allowing him to recruit his forces and build up his supplies without fear of attack. “It is mutually understood that … no obstructions are to be attempted, on either side, to the passage of stores, to the frontier posts.”

And Hull, who is desperate for both supplies and men? Hull is not included, specifically at Dearborn’s request: “I could not include General Hull … he having received his orders directly from the department of war.”

Thus is concluded a kind of truce, in which both sides are allowed to prepare for battle without actually engaging in one.

These arrangements completed, Lieutenant-Colonel Baynes prepares to take his leave. There is a brief altercation over the use of
Indians in the war. Dearborn, in strong language, attacks the British for using native warriors, implying that the Americans are free from reproach in this area. Baynes retorts that Hull’s captured dispatches make it clear that he has been doing his best to persuade the Indians to fight for the Americans. That ends the argument. But Baynes has misread Hull’s intentions. At Madison’s insistence, the Americans use the Indians as scouts only. Hull’s efforts have been designed only to keep the Indians neutral.

With great difficulty, Baynes convinces Dearborn to allow him to return to Montreal by a different route along the eastern shores of Lake Champlain; it allows him to size up American strength and assess the mood of the New Englanders.

The little coach clip-clops its way through Vermont’s beguiling scenery, rattling down crooked clay roads and over rustic bridges, past stone mills perched above gurgling rivers, through neat, shaded villages hugging the sloping shoreline – a peaceful, pastoral land of farms, wayside inns, and the occasional classical courthouse, as yet untouched by battle. The war seems very far away and, Baynes notes, the people almost totally unprepared. The militia do not impress him.

“The men are independent in their habits and principles, their officers ignorant and totally uninformed in every thing relating to the possession of arms and possess no influence over the militia but in proportion as they court it by popular and familiar intercourse.” A few., he notes, are prepared to march on Montreal; the rest just want to go home. More than half of them are absent with or without leave, and nobody seems able to control them.

Recruiting for the regular army, he reports to Prevost, is proceeding very slowly, even though the term of service is only five years and the bounty pay for signing up very liberal:

“There appears to exist in the United States the greatest contempt and repugnance to the restraint and discipline of a military life and few gentlemen of respectability are willing to become officers but prefer the militia where they obtain high rank without serving.”

As the coach moves on along the maple-shaded roads, Baynes is subjected to a series of minor astonishments. He learns that one militia general is a farmer, another a sawmill keeper, a third a millwright. The coach pulls up at a tavern. Out comes the innkeeper to take the reins and water the horses. Baynes’s sense of military decorum is severely shaken when he discovers that this servitor is a colonel and second-in-command of the entire Vermont militia. The gap between
the British and the American attitudes toward their military is obviously wider than Baynes suspected, and he has more than a little trouble absorbing it. He concludes that of all the officers he has observed there is only one with any real military talent – the same commander at Burlington who vigorously opposed his presence in the United States.

As for the American people, they “have a very high and overrated opinion of their military prowess, conceiving it to be in their power to pillage Montreal and to march to Quebec whenever they think proper. The siege of the fortress alone they consider as a task of difficulty. From the actual state of the American forces assembled on Lake Champlain, I do not think there exists any intention of invading this part of the province.”

As Baynes moves back to Canada, Dearborn dispatches a note to Hull, dated August 9, explaining what has happened and suggesting that the General of the Army of the Northwest make his own decision as to whether he should join in the truce. (Hull has just withdrawn from his beachhead at Sandwich, but Dearborn has no knowledge of that.) Reinforcements are, of course, out of the question. “The removal of any troops from Niagara to Detroit, while the present agreement continues, would be improper and incompatible with the true interest of the agreement.”

Thus does Dearborn relieve himself of the responsibility of reinforcing Hull or of creating the promised diversion along the Niagara frontier that might prevent Brock from reinforcing Amherstburg. Communications being what they are, Hull cannot know this. And by the time Dearborn’s letter reaches him, it will not matter.

BROWNSTOWN, MICHIGAN TERRITORY, August 9, 1812. Thomas Verchères de Boucherville, the fur trader and Amherstburg storekeeper, is weary of waiting. On and off for four days he and his comrades have been on the alert on the American side of the river, expecting to surprise another of Hull’s armed escorts seeking to bring in the wagon train of supplies held up at the River Raisin. But the Americans do not come and finally Major Muir gives the order to embark for the Canadian shore.

The men are clambering into the boats when from the woods there issues a series of piercing cries. In a few minutes Tecumseh’s scouts
come bounding out of the thickets to report that a detachment of Long Knives has been spotted upriver “like the mosquitoes of the swamp in number.” This is no minor force of the kind that was routed a few days before; Hull has sent six hundred men including two hundred regulars, supported by cavalry and cannon. He is determined that this time the supply train will get through.

Muir puts into action a plan proposed by Tecumseh: his troops will march to a ravine near the Indian village of Maguaga, three miles upriver from Brownstown, and there lie in wait. Their orders are to charge with the bayonet as soon as the first volley of musket balls is fired. The Indians will conceal themselves in the corn fields on the right and the left, securing the flanks.

De Boucherville and his companions, having no uniforms, stick sprigs of basswood into their caps for identification and set out along the muddy track for Maguaga. Soon an odour, sickly sweet, assails their nostrils, and a horrifying spectacle comes into view at the turn of the trail – the batdefield of the previous week. De Boucherville shudders and is seized with revulsion as he sees displayed before him the corpses of the cavalrymen, already decomposed and impaled on stakes by Tecumseh’s men, who have left the cadavers in full view to terrify the Americans. Gnawed and mangled by crows and animals, the rotting bodies give off an indescribable stench.

At almost the same moment, James Dalliba, a young American artillery officer in Lieutenant-Colonel Miller’s advancing force, sees the bloated and scalped carcass of the luckless ranger captain, McCullough, lying beside the road under its covering of bark.

Marching with the British is an Amherstburg acquaintance of de Boucherville, young John Richardson, a member of the widespread Askin family (John, Senior, is his grandfather). Richardson, not yet turned sixteen, is a gentleman volunteer in the 41st and a future novelist – one of Canada’s first. He will never forget this silent march to Maguaga; thirty years later it remains vividly in his mind:

“No other sound than the measured step of the troops interrupted the solitude of the scene, rendered more imposing by the wild appearance: of the warriors, whose bodies, stained and painted in the most frightful manner for the occasion, glided by us with almost noiseless velocity … some painted white, some black, others half black, half red; half black, half white; all with their hair plastered in such a way as to resemble the bristling quills of the porcupine, with no other covering than a cloth around their loins, yet armed to the teeth with rifles,
tomahawks, war-clubs, spears, bows, arrows and scalping knives. Uttering no sound, intent only on reaching the enemy unperceived, they might have passed for the spectres of those wilds, the ruthless demons which War had unchained for the punishment and oppression of man.”

Screened by the forest, the two forces move blindly towards one another, neither side knowing when or where the clash will take place but all sensing that within minutes men will fall and some will die. Most have had no experience of battle; many have had no military training; save for Miller’s Tippecanoe veterans, few have fired a musket at a living human.

At Maguaga, the British and Canadians take up their position behind a low rise, each man hugging the ground as he would a friend. De Boucherville finds himself next to another acquaintance, Jean-Baptiste Bâby, whose family home at Sandwich has been seized by Hull. Nervous, he asks Bâby for a pinch of snuff “to keep me in countenance a little.” A moment later comes the sound of an enemy drum, the stroke wavering slightly as if the drummer, too, fears whatever lies ahead.

The British remain concealed, waiting for the signal. Suddenly an American officer, brilliant in blue and gold, riding a superb horse, his hat covered by a three-foot plume, appears on an eminence. A shot rings out; the American falls dead at his horse’s feet, and the battle is joined.

Confusion!
A melee of painted bodies, scarlet tunics, snorting horses, flying tomahawks, splintered foliage, black musket smoke. On the left, Tecumseh leads his men forward in an attempt to turn the American flank. Five hundred yards to the right, another group of Indians, trying a similar manoeuvre, is forced back. To the British volunteers all Indians look alike; they believe the retreating natives to be part of the advancing enemy and fire on them. Ally battles ally as the skirmish grows hotter.

“Take care, de Boucherville!” cries an officer on the left. “The Kentuckians are aiming at you.” Even as he speaks a ball strikes him in the head, and he falls into de Boucherville’s arms. “Well, old fellow,” thinks the volunteer to himself, “you came out of that all right.” But a moment later he is hit in the thigh by a musket ball.

Muir, the British commander, seeing an American taking deliberate aim at him, hastily raises his short rifle and lays it across the shoulders of a fellow officer, Lieutenant Charles Sutherland. Both
adversaries fire at the same time. The American drops dead; his rifle balll enters Sutherland’s cheek, comes out the back of his neck and passes through Muir’s shoulder. (Sutherland’s wound is not mortal, but he will shortly die of loss of blood as a result of brushing his teeth before it is properly healed.)