1812: The Navy's War (42 page)
In preparation for the attacks, Armstrong appointed new leaders for the northern army. In May, he promoted fifty-six-year-old Brigadier General James Wilkinson to major general, and after accepting General Dearborn’s resignation in July, Armstrong appointed Wilkinson to lead the assault on Kingston and Montreal. Wilkinson was given command of Military District 9, which included the Niagara region, Sackets Harbor, and Lake Champlain. His headquarters would be at Sackets Harbor. Armstrong had already appointed Major General Wade Hampton of South Carolina to lead the army gathering at Burlington, Vermont, on Lake Champlain. Hampton was expected to combine with Wilkinson in a joint attack on Montreal.
Choosing Wilkinson was, to say the least, baffling. What the inscrutable Armstrong was thinking is hard to imagine. Winfield Scott described Wilkinson as an “unprincipled imbecile,” a characterization that most army officers would have agreed with. Wilkinson had been the most controversial and hated figure in the service for many years; Armstrong certainly knew this. Their relationship went back to the Revolutionary War, when both were ambitious young men working under the even more ambitious—and duplicitous—General Horatio Gates, notorious for his efforts to undermine General Washington.
A tireless self-promoter, Wilkinson was the darling of many uninformed Republicans. In March 1813 he had attained notoriety by leading the successful occupation of the rest of West Florida, which included the Mobile area and ran to the Perdido River. He was military commander of Louisiana at the time. Before then, his career had been marked by abject failure and well-founded charges of corruption. An inveterate intriguer, he had been closely associated with Aaron Burr, until he turned on him and became the prosecution’s chief witness against him at Burr’s trial for treason in 1807. Although Burr was acquitted, President Jefferson, who hated Burr, was grateful to Wilkinson. Earlier, the general had been secretly in the pay of the Spanish government while a senior American officer, and that treasonous relationship persisted. Spain even gave him a pension of $2,000. Prior to his elevation by Armstrong, Wilkinson’s graft and incompetence in Louisiana had led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of his men. Both senators from Louisiana had demanded the secretary of war remove him.
The appointment of sixty-year-old Major General Wade Hampton was just as puzzling. In the later stages of the Revolutionary War, Hampton became a hero in South Carolina, serving under the famed guerrilla leaders Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. Afterward, he became a rich plantation owner with thousands of slaves and a powerful Republican, serving in Congress for a time. His hatred for Wilkinson was no secret. He made it clear to Armstrong that he would follow Wilkinson’s orders only if the forces at Sackets Harbor and those at Lake Champlain were joined in an attack on Montreal. Hampton’s inability to work with his superior—indeed, his loathing of him—should have disqualified him. His lack of combat experience as a general officer and addiction to hard liquor were further reasons. But Hampton’s shortcomings did not seem to matter to Armstrong.
The appointments of Wilkinson and Hampton were all the more mystifying when one considers the promising general officers that the army now had available who could have led the invasion, such as Brigadier Generals Jacob Brown and Ralph Izard or talented colonels like Winfield Scott, Alexander Macomb, Eleazer W. Ripley, Edmund P. Gaines, and Leonard Covington, whom Armstrong could have promoted. But once again Madison and his advisors, for reasons that remain obscure, selected elderly incompetents for vital positions.
Appearing in no hurry, Wilkinson reached Sackets Harbor on August 20 and held his first council of war six days later. Among those attending were General Jacob Brown, Wilkinson’s second in command, and Commodore Chauncey. Wilkinson’s orders were to attack Kingston and then Montreal, but he doubted that he could accomplish these objectives so late in the season. He preferred attacking in the Niagara area. Secretary Armstrong thought this was a sideshow, however, and quickly vetoed the idea. “You will make Kingston your primary object,” he wrote to Wilkinson, “and you may choose (as circumstances warrant), between a direct and indirect attack upon that post.” It was left to Wilkinson to construe what “direct” and “indirect” meant. He decided to interpret it as meaning a “strong feint” on Kingston before sending the army against Montreal, a city of 30,000.
General Brown was willing to do whatever Wilkinson wanted, but Chauncey was strongly in favor of attacking Kingston first. A mere feint would leave a substantial enemy force—including Yeo’s fleet—in Wilkinson’s rear when he attacked Montreal, placing Sackets Harbor in danger of assault from Kingston while the American forces were occupied in the St. Lawrence River. Nonetheless, even if his advice were ignored, Chauncey still intended to “afford the Army every facility of transport and protection” on its way to the St. Lawrence. But he refused to remain in the river and cooperate with Wilkinson. Chauncey felt that his primary duty was protecting Sackets Harbor, and he “deemed [it] unsafe to be in that river after the 1st of November, on account of the ice.” After talking at greater length with Wilkinson, however, Chauncey became convinced that Armstrong’s original plan was still intact and that Kingston was the general’s first objective.
Of course, Kingston would be a much easier target if Chauncey first destroyed Yeo’s warships. On August 29 he received word that Yeo’s fleet had exited Kingston and was abroad on Lake Ontario. Chauncey went looking for him. His fleet of eleven vessels had been substantially strengthened by the 16-gun schooner
Sylph
, which Henry Eckford had built at Sackets Harbor in just twenty-three days.
Sylph
, which Henry Eckford had built at Sackets Harbor in just twenty-three days.
On September 7 Chauncey discovered Yeo “close in with the Niagara River” and went after him with his heavy schooners in tow, which slowed him down considerably. Chauncey kept Yeo in sight, but he could not close with him. The British squadron remained just beyond his grasp. After days of fruitlessly chasing Yeo “round the lake day and night,” Chauncey managed to engage him from a distance on the eleventh of September off the Genesee River near present-day Rochester, New York. Chauncey had an advantage in long guns; Yeo had mostly carronades. Chauncey also had the weather gauge, but he failed to deliver a decisive blow, claiming that Yeo ran away from him and escaped after a running fight of over three hours. Yeo in his report maintained that “it was impossible to bring them to close action.” It seems that neither commodore wanted to hazard their precious fleets until they had an overwhelming advantage. Yeo escaped to the protection of Amherst Bay near Kingston, where the American fleet could not follow. Chauncey’s pilots did not have detailed knowledge of the bay’s deadly shoals.
On August 30, while Chauncey was chasing Yeo, Wilkinson left his command at Sackets Harbor in the hands of Jacob Brown and sailed to the Niagara area to acquire 3,500 additional troops from the army guarding Fort George and Fort Niagara. During the voyage Wilkinson became seriously ill, and he did not recover for a month. While he was away, Chauncey was again out after Yeo. They met on September 28 near Burlington Bay at the western end of Lake Ontario. After dueling at long range for three hours, Yeo broke off and raced for the protection of the batteries at Burlington Heights. Chauncey followed until gale force winds forced him to claw back to the protection of the Niagara River. Some vessels had been damaged on both sides, but there were few casualties. When the storm abated, Chauncey convoyed Wilkinson’s troops from Niagara to Sackets Harbor. While he was doing so, Yeo returned unnoticed to Kingston. On the fourth of October Chauncey was out again looking for Yeo when he spotted four British troop transports making for Kingston and captured them. Two of the prizes were the schooners he had lost earlier, the
Growler
and the
Julia
.
Growler
and the
Julia
.
When Wilkinson returned to Sackets Harbor the first week of October, he was still sick. To relieve his pain he took large doses of whiskey laced with laudanum. During the third week of October, while he was trying to recover his health and get an attack organized, snow began falling. The dreaded winter had begun.
On October 29 Chauncey visited Wilkinson at his headquarters on Grenadier Island, midway between Sackets Harbor and Kingston, where 7,000 troops were gathering for the attempt on Montreal. Chauncey had protected all the movements of the troops from Sackets Harbor to Grenadier Island, often in severe weather. Chauncey was “mortified,” as he told Secretary Jones, to hear for the first time that Wilkinson was not going to attack Kingston after all but would only make a feint and then proceed to Montreal.
Two days later, General Brown led an advance party to French Creek on the St. Lawrence, guarded by Chauncey’s vessels. On November 2 sloops and gunboats of the Royal Navy, under Captain William Howe Mulcaster, slipped out of Kingston, past Chauncey’s screen at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and attacked Brown, but he was well prepared and beat them off, forcing Mulcaster to return to Kingston.
The following day, November 1, Chauncey convoyed the rest of Wilkinson’s army to French Creek. Wilkinson, who was still sick, was the last to arrive.
On the fifth Brown led a flotilla of three hundred boats down the St. Lawrence toward Montreal. As he did, Yeo appeared with his fleet in the North Channel near the mouth of the river, while Chauncey and his fleet were in the South Channel. Wolfe Island separated them. Chauncey was anxious to engage the British fleet in a decisive action and made every effort to get at Yeo, who inexplicably retreated to Kingston.
Wilkinson now proceeded down the river, but Chauncey did not follow to protect his rear. Instead, he moved in stages back to Sackets Harbor. The commodore’s first priority was still protecting his fleet and base, not taking Montreal. By November 11 he had all his vessels safely tucked in for the winter at Sackets Harbor. “It is now blowing a heavy gale from the westward with snow,” he wrote to Secretary Jones, “and every appearance of the winter [has] set in.”
Wilkinson landed his men just above Ogdensburg on November 6, and during the night he ran the empty boats that had transported his troops safely past the guns of Fort Wellington in Prescott. From the American camp seven miles above Ogdensburg he wrote to General Hampton, ordering him to move his army to St. Regis (opposite Cornwall) by the ninth or tenth, when they would join together for the attack on Montreal. Wilkinson added that Hampton was to bring two or three months’ worth of supplies for the entire army. Wilkinson claimed his provisions would last only a few more weeks.
As far as Wilkinson knew, Hampton had a force of 4,000, whose principal object was to join him in attacking Montreal. He was aware that Hampton despised him and would not follow his orders if he could help it, which is why Wilkinson preferred to work through Armstrong, but the secretary, who was in upstate New York at the time, forced Wilkinson to communicate directly with Hampton. Armstrong’s unwillingness to coordinate the movements of the two armies at this stage probably meant that he had lost faith in the enterprise and did not want to be blamed for its failure. People in Washington wondered where the elusive secretary was exactly, what he was doing, and why he was not at the War Department. He did not return to Washington until December 24.
Wilkinson’s order surprised Hampton, who thought the attack on Montreal had been canceled because of the lateness of the season. Weeks earlier, a messenger from Sackets Harbor had arrived at Hampton’s headquarters with instructions from Armstrong to build winter quarters for 10,000 men. Hampton assumed that Armstrong had given up the plan to attack Montreal. Thus, even before Wilkinson had embarked on the St. Lawrence, Hampton had put aside coordinating an attack on Montreal. Prevost knew of Hampton’s withdrawal well before either Wilkinson or Armstrong did.
Wilkinson was unaware that back on October 26 Hampton had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of 1,300 French and English militiamen and a few Indians, commanded by Charles de Salaberry, a French-Canadian aristocrat of considerable experience, skill, and flair. At the time, Hampton had been trying to position himself for a junction with Wilkinson by traveling across the border toward Montreal via the Chateaguay River, which empties into the St. Lawrence just below the city. Secretary Armstrong knew of Hampton’s movements and approved them, but Wilkinson did not.
On that day in October, Hampton ran into de Salaberry at Allan’s Corners, near present-day Ormstown, Quebec, on the Chateaguay, fifty miles northeast of Cornwall and thirty-six miles southeast of Montreal. The subsequent fight became known as the Battle of Chateaguay, but it was hardly a battle. Hampton vastly overestimated the size of the enemy and withdrew before the fight was really joined. Embarrassed, discouraged, and confused, he retreated back across the border to Four Corners, New York, where he received Wilkinson’s command to join him. By then, Hampton was totally demoralized and had no intention of carrying out the order.
In his reply to Wilkinson, Hampton wrote that his army was in terrible condition, that supplies were nonexistent, and that he could not possibly form a junction with him at St. Regis. Instead, he told Wilkinson he intended to retreat all the way back to Plattsburgh for the winter.
ON NOVEMBER 8, as of yet unaware of Hampton’s situation, Wilkinson dispatched General Brown with 2,500 men to the Canadian side of the river with orders to clear enemy militia obstructing the road to Cornwall, seventy miles from Montreal. Brown met with weak resistance from Canadian militiamen and quickly dispatched them.
Meanwhile, a small force of about six hundred British regulars under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Morrison left Kingston on November 6 to trail Wilkinson and hang on his rear. Commander William Howe Mulcaster of the Royal Navy transported them. Ice on the St. Lawrence did not encumber his squadron of two schooners, seven gunboats, and numerous bateaux. Since Commodore Chauncey’s entire fleet was at Sackets Harbor, Mulcaster could traverse the St. Lawrence unimpeded. By the ninth Morrison was at Prescott, where two hundred fifty men from Fort Wellington reinforced him.
Other books
The Green Gauntlet by R. F. Delderfield
Sabbathman by Hurley, Graham
The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) by Katerina Martinez
The Midnight Swimmer by Edward Wilson
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Fired Up by Mary Connealy
Just One Wish by Janette Rallison
The Tide Watchers by Lisa Chaplin
When It Hooks You (It #1) by Nicki Elson