The Invasion of Canada (41 page)

Smyth is now in total charge of the Niagara campaign. Stephen Van Rensselaer has resigned in his favour. (He will run for governor in the spring, to be beaten by the craftier Tompkins.) His cousin Solomon is recovering from his wounds and dandling his new son on his lap; he will not fight again. Smyth, who never came face to face with either, reigns supreme.

On paper, the new commander’s qualifications seem suitable
enough. He is an Irishman whose father, a parish rector, brought him to Virginia at the age of ten. A member of his state’s bar, he has also been an elected representative in the lower house. As the colonel of a rifle regiment, he was ordered to Washington in 1811 “to prepare a system of discipline for the army.” Within eighteen days of the declaration of war he was promoted to inspector general and ordered to the Niagara frontier.

“I must not be defeated,” he declares on taking over from Van Rensselaer; and he enters into a flurry of boat building, for he intends, he says, to land more than four thousand men on the Canadian shore. This is bombast: more than half his force is in no condition to fight. The bulk of the regulars are raw recruits who have never fired a musket. The militia continue to desert – one hundred in a single night. Hundreds more clog the hospitals suffering from measles, dysentery, grippe. The cemetery behind the camp, where men are buried four to a grave, has expanded to two acres. The ill-clothed army has not yet been paid; two regular regiments and one militia company have already mutinied on this account; the captain of another volunteer company warns that his men will not cross the river until they receive pay and clothing allowances. The troops of Fort Niagara are starving for want of bread, and there is considerable doubt whether the eighteen hundred Pennsylvania volunteers due to arrive in mid-November will agree to fight on foreign soil.

Nonetheless, on November 9 the General announces that he will invade Canada in fifteen days. So loudly does he boast about his intentions that the British are well prepared for any attack; on November 17 they launch a heavy bombardment of Smyth’s headquarters at Black Rock, burning the east barrack, exploding the magazine, and destroying a quantity of the furs captured from
Caledonia
. Just as the Quartermaster General, Peter B. Porter, is sitting down to dinner, a twenty-four-pound cannonball crashes through the roof of his home, a disaster not calculated to improve a digestion already thrown out of kilter by Smyth’s bizarre and inconclusive orders. Another cannonade begins at dawn on the twenty-first opposite Fort Niagara. The British pour two thousand rounds of red-hot shot into the American fort, which replies in kind. Buildings burn; guns blow up; men die; nothing is settled.

On November 25, Smyth issues orders for the entire army to be ready to march “at a moment’s warning.” Two days later he musters forty-five hundred men at Black Rock for the impending invasion.

“Tell the brave men under your command not to be impatient,” he writes to Porter, who is in charge of the New York volunteers. “See what harm impatience did at Queenston. Let them be firm, and they will succeed.”

At three on the morning of the twenty-eighth, Smyth sends an advance force of some four hundred men across the river to destroy the bridge at Frenchman’s Creek (thus cutting British communications between Fort Erie and Chippawa) and to silence the battery upstream. The British are waiting. Boats are lost, destroyed, driven off. In the darkness there is confusion on both sides, with men mistaking enemies for friends and friends for enemies. In spite of this the Americans seize the battery and spike its guns while a second force reaches the bridge, only to discover that they have left their axes in the boats and cannot destroy it before the British counterattack. In the end some of the advance party are captured for lack of boats in which to escape. The remainder cross to the safety of the American camp with little accomplished.

An incredible spectacle greets the British next morning. Lining their own shore in increasing numbers, they watch the American attempt at embarkation as if it were a sideshow. Smyth himself does not appear but leaves the arrangements to his subordinates. The operation moves so ponderously that the afternoon shadows are lengthening before all the troops are in the boats. Some have been forced to sit in their craft for hours, shivering in the late November weather – a light snow is falling and the river is running with ice.

The only logical explanation for an action that defies logic is that Smyth is attempting to terrify the British into surrendering through what General Sheaffe calls “an ostentatious display” of his force. If so, it does not work. When Smyth sends a message across to Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Bisshopp, urging him to surrender to “spare the effusion of blood,” Bisshopp curtly declines.

Late in the afternoon, with the entire force prepared at last to cross the river, the General finally makes an official appearance and issues an amazing order. “Disembark and dine!” he cries. At this point the troops are on the edge of rebellion. Several, reduced to impotent fury, pointedly break their muskets.

Smyth returns to his paper war:

Smyth’s council of officers is aghast. Surely, with the British alerted, the General does not propose a daylight frontal assault from the identical embarkation point on a strongly fortified position! But Smyth declines to change his plans.

Next morning, however, the troops, who arrive at the navy yard promptly at eight, are sent into the nearby woods to build fires and keep warm. Smyth’s staff has managed overnight to knock some sense into their commander. The departure time is changed to three the following morning. The troops will not cross directly but will slip quietly down the river, hoping to avoid the enemy cannon, and will land above Chippawa, attack its garrison and, if successful, march through Queenston to Fort George.

In the dark hours of the following morning, the wet and exhausted men are once more herded down to the boats. As before, the embarkation proceeds in fits and starts; when dawn arrives the boats are still not fully loaded. Now Smyth discovers that instead of three thousand men he has fewer than fifteen hundred in the boats, many of these so ill they cannot stand a day’s march. The Pennsylvania volunteers have not even arrived on the ground; they are, it develops, perfectly prepared to fight on foreign soil but not under General Smyth. Other troops, lingering on the shore, sullenly refuse to embark.

Out in midstream, about a quarter of a mile from shore, Peter B. Porter has been waiting impatiently in a scout boat to lead the flotilla downriver to the invasion point. Hours pass. On the shore, the confusion grows. In his quarters, General Smyth is holding a council with his regular officers to which the militia commanders have not been
invited. At last a message is sent out to Porter: the troops are to disembark. The invasion of Canada is to be abandoned for the present. Smyth does not intend to stir until he has three thousand men fit for action. The regulars will go into winter quarters; the volunteers are dismissed to their homes.

This intelligence provokes a scene of the wildest fury. Officers break their swords in rage; ordinary soldiers batter their muskets to pieces against tree trunks. The mass of the militia runs amok, firing off their weapons in all directions, some shouting aloud in frustration, others cheering in delight. Some of the volunteers offer to fight under Porter, promising to capture Fort Erie if Smyth will give them four cannon. The embattled commander turns the request aside.

Roused to a passion, the troops try to murder their general. Musket balls whiz through his tent, almost killing an aide who has his belt and cap shot off. Smyth doubles his guard, moves his headquarters repeatedly to protect his life.

Porter is outraged by Smyth’s posturing. Some of the other officers are calling the General a traitor. Porter merely attacks him as a coward but puts that word into the public record in the Buffalo
Gazette
(which is forced, briefly, to cease publication, so great are the disturbances). A duel follows on Grand Island; shots are exchanged; both men’s marksmanship is lamentable; unmarked, they shake hands, but the bitterness continues.

Smyth is the object of intense execration. Governor Tompkins’s censure is blunt: “Believing that there was some courage and virtue left in the world, I did not, indeed could not, anticipate such a scene of gasconading and of subsequent imbecility and folly as Genl. Smith [
sic
] has exhibited. To compare the events of the recent campaign with those of the days of the Revolution, is almost enough to convince one, that the race of brave men and able commanders will before many years become extinct.”

Smyth’s career is finished. With his life in danger from both his officers and his men, he slips away to his home in Virginia where, within three months, the army drops him from its rolls.

Dearborn is aghast. He has sent four thousand troops to Niagara: how is it that not much more than a thousand were in a condition to cross the river? He himself has kept such a low profile that the firestorm of public disgust and fury with the losses of Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smyth sweeps past him. Yet as the senior commander he is as culpable as any, and so is his fellow physician, the myopic secretary of war Dr. Eustis.

At Lake Champlain Dearborn has the largest force of all under arms, including seven regular army regiments with supporting artillery and dragoons. But these have been infected by the same virus as the others. Dearborn’s overall strategy is to attack Montreal simultaneously with Smyth’s invasion on the Niagara. On November 8, he informs Eustis that he is about to join the army under General Bloomfield at Plattsburg to march on Lower Canada. An attack of rheumatism delays him. On November 19, when he finally arrives, he finds Bloomfield too ill to lead his troops. Illness, indeed, has all but incapacitated his army, a third of which is unfit for duty. An epidemic of measles has raged through the camps. A neglect of proper sanitary measures has reduced one regiment from nine hundred to two hundred able-bodied men. Typhus, accompanied by pneumonia, has killed two hundred at Burlington. Fifteen per cent of Dearborn’s entire force has died from one of these several afflictions.

Dearborn takes command of his depleted invasion force. Two separate and independent advance columns, numbering about 650 men, are dispatched north to surprise the British outposts at the border. They advance by different roads, run into one another in the dark, each mistaking the other for the enemy. A brisk skirmish follows until daylight, when, exhausted and dispirited by their error, they retreat with twenty casualties, a number that is shortly augmented by forty deaths from disease contracted during the expedition. Meanwhile Dearborn manages to get three thousand militia men as far as Rouse’s Point at the northern end of Lake Champlain. When two-thirds refuse to cross the border, Dearborn gives up, slinks back to Plattsburg, and returns to Albany as quietly as possible. The news of Smyth’s humiliation provides the final blow. Dearborn offers to surrender his command “to any gentleman whose talents and popularity will command the confidence of the Government and the country.” But it will be another six months before his government, and a new and more aggressive secretary of war, get around to relieving him.

G
EORGETOWN, KENTUCKY, August 16, 1812. Henry Clay is addressing two thousand eager Kentucky militiamen who have volunteered to march into Canada under the banner of William Henry Harrison to reinforce Hull’s Army of the Northwest. The dark eyes flash, the sonorous voice rolls over the raw troops as he exhorts them to victory. More than most Americans, Clay is telling them, they have a twofold responsibility – to uphold the honour of their state as well as that of their country:

“Kentuckians are famed for their bravery – you have the double character of Americans and Kentuckians to support!”

This is more than posturing. Kentucky is a world unto itself, as different from Maine and New York as Scotland from Spain. No frustrated general will need to prod the Kentuckians across the Canadian border; they will, if necessary, swim the Detroit River to get at the British. When, the previous May, the Governor called for volunteers to fill Kentucky’s quota of fifty-five hundred men, he found he had too many on his hands. Clay at the time wrote to the Secretary of State that he was almost alarmed at the enthusiasm displayed by his people.

Now, on the very day of Hull’s defeat, Clay fires up the troops, who confidently believe that the American forces are already half-way across Canada. And why not? Kentucky has been told only what it wants to hear. The newspaper stories from the frontier have been highly optimistic. Editors and orators have bolstered the state’s heroic image of itself. In these exhortations can be heard echoes of the Revolution. “Rise in the majesty of freedom,” the Governor, Charles
Scott, has pleaded; “regard as enemies the enemies of your country. Remember the Spirit of ’76.”