Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (100 page)

“Henry, you’ve fought against the British: you must run. They’ll take you prisoner. I am a woman; they’ll not harm me.”

The town is in a state of anarchy. People are fleeing in every direction, some heading up Seneca Street toward the Indian reservation, others galloping up Main toward Williamsville or Batavia, more moving up the beach toward Pratt’s Ferry at the river and on to Hamburg.

An ox team lurches by, pulling a sled crammed with wounded soldiers; another, loaded with household goods, carries a settler’s family and three exhausted women who have begged a ride; a ragged party of militia straggles through town, still carrying the muskets they have never fired. Friendly Seneca Indians clip-clop past on ponies, their women up behind, babes in arms. Children are lost and found again. One woman, holding her baby, tumbles off her horse into a bed of quicksand and is hauled out at the last moment. A farmer from Hamburg arrives with a load of cheese, grasps what is happening, dumps his wagon and loads it with refugees.

Families are separated. Job Hoysington’s wife, unable to wait any longer for her husband (already dead), sets out on foot with her six children, turns two of them over to a passing rider, and does not locate them for weeks; they are found in two separate counties, miles apart. Few save anything of value, and those who try are often thwarted. One silversmith throws his stock into a pillowcase; he hands it to a stranger who offers to save it but is never seen again.

Some stay to fight. One group, led by one of Oliver Hazard Perry’s naval gunners, rushes to the river where the
Chippawa
, late of Perry’s fleet, is wintering. They seize an old twelve-pound cannon and trundle it up Main Street to the corner of Niagara. There they
see the British advancing—a long line of brilliantly uniformed men, bayonets gleaming in the morning sunlight.

The cannon speaks, without much effect. It is so badly overloaded by the eager civilians that on the third shot it bounds off the carriage.

Dr. Cyrenius Chapin is convinced that further resistance is useless. He determines to surrender the town to the British.

“Don’t fire that gun,” says Chapin.

Robert Kane, a mason by trade, doesn’t want to give up.

“I
will
fire it,” says Kane. “I will cleave any man who touches it.”

Seth Grosvenor runs up to the St. John cottage looking for help to hoist the heavy gun back on its carriage. But every able man has gone.

Grosvenor is in tears.

“If I had help,” he says, “I could drive the British back.”

At this moment, Mrs. St. John sees a group of men on horseback coming from Court Street. She runs out into the road as the leading rider draws rein.

“For mercy sake’s do turn back and help Mr. Grosvenor manage that cannon and defend the town,” she cries, “and let General Hall go; he must be an awful coward.”

The rider raises his hat but trots on with the others. Somebody tells Mrs. St. John that she has been talking to the General himself. Well, she retorts, if she had known that she would have had more to say.

Suddenly the Bemis wagon, with the St. John children hanging on for dear life, flies past. At North Street they found the way blocked by oncoming Indians—friendly Senecas pursued by British tribesmen. With bullets whizzing around his head, Asaph Bemis managed to turn the cart around and now, as he rattles down Main Street, calls to his mother-in-law that he must take the lakeshore road but will be back for the rest of the family as quickly as possible.

As the wagon passes the head of Niagara Street, young Martha St. John looks out and catches a confused glimpse of the British army drawn up on Niagara Square and a man on horseback facing them holding a white flag over one shoulder. It is 10
A.M
. The man
is Cyrenius Chapin, who has tied the flag to his cane. The British accept his surrender but later repudiate it because Chapin has no official standing in the community. He is made prisoner once more, being placed under heavy guard because of his previous escape. He has already sent his two daughters, aged eleven and nine, out of town on foot to try to reach his farm at Hamburg, ten miles away. He has no idea where they are now.

Down the street at Pomeroy’s Bakery some famished militiamen are gobbling up Pomeroy’s bread when the cry comes, “Run, boys, run!” Looking north, they see a long line of Indians trotting down Washington Street in single file. Gripping the bread in one hand and their muskets in the other, they flee the village.

Several Indians and their women are in the St. John house, looking for plunder. Next door, Mrs. St. John sees an Indian pulling down the curtains from Mrs. Lovejoy’s windows. Her spirited neighbour grapples with the invader.

“Don’t risk your life for property,” cries Mrs. St. John.

But Mrs. Lovejoy replies, “When my property goes, my life shall go with it.”

Each witness to the grisly scene that follows will remember it from a slightly different focus. Mrs. Lovejoy struggles with the Indian over—what? A silk shawl? The blankets? The curtains? One thing is clear to Mrs. St. John, watching in dismay through her window: she sees her neighbour strike at the Indian with a carving knife; she sees him raise his hatchet; she sees the hatchet fall. But she does not dare enter the house to determine Sally Lovejoy’s fate.

A British colonel rides up.

“Why are you not away?” he asks, crossly.

She replies that she has nowhere to go but the snow, asks protection for her house. He sends her to Major-General Riall, who gives her his own interpreter as a guard.

Now, from the corner of Main and Seneca comes a crackle of flames, a whiff of wood smoke. An officer and a squad of men are moving from house to house, torches in hand. Soon the Lovejoy home is fired. Mrs. St. John and her two remaining daughters, Maria
and Sarah, with the help of Pettigrew, the hired man, go into the house, take out the body of Mrs. Lovejoy, and lay it on a pile of boards beside a fence. Then they manage to extinguish the fire. At night, with the help of old Judge Walden, the women carry the corpse back into the house and place it on the cords of the bedstead. Later, some of the villagers return to visit the home and are moved to tears by the spectacle of Sally Lovejoy, clad in her black silk dress, her long, ebony hair reaching through the cords to the floor.

Meanwhile, the Bemis family and the six younger St. John children have reached Pratt’s Ferry to find a long queue waiting to cross the river. Men, women, children, soldiers, oxen, horses, wagons of every description from great timber haulers to tiny go-carts scarcely big enough for a baby mill about at the water’s edge.

Suddenly, Martha St. John hears a loud groan from the multitude and, turning, sees tall pillars of brown smoke billowing above the treetops. As the refugees realize that their homes are being destroyed, a sound of wailing and sobbing, mingled with women’s shrieks, ripples across the crowd.

The Bemises are among the last to get across the river; after nineteen trips, James Johnson, the ferryman, gives up and follows the others in their flight. The family’s destination is a tavern at the little community of Willink. Three miles before they can reach it, the wagon breaks down. The three St. John sisters, Margaret, Parnell, and Martha, decide to trudge on through the deep snow, leaving the Bemis couple and the four younger children to spend the night in the cart. As they pick their way along the strange road their nerves are shaken by a weird spectacle: wads of burning matter from Buffalo, born on the wind, hurtle over their heads like meteors.

It is past dawn when, numb with cold, they finally reach the tavern. In a large room in front of a log fire they recognize their neighbours. Here are the two Chapin girls, who have walked ten miles from Buffalo through the snow. And here is the family of Samuel Pratt, whose wife, Sophia, seeing Martha blue with cold, takes the girl in her arms by the fire and rubs her frostbitten fingers. There is breakfast for all, for the resourceful Mrs. Pratt was in the
act of baking bread when the alarm sounded; she stuffed the dough into a pillowcase and brought it with her.

Shortly afterwards the rest of the St. John family arrives, carried by the two horses, having spent a ghastly night in the cold.

In the days that follow, the widow St. John struggles to save her cottage. The British are determined to burn every house in Buffalo as well as all public buildings, army stores, and—this is the official reason for the attack—four schooners from Perry’s fleet, which are stranded for the winter at the river’s mouth.

The morning after the attack, the St. John barn goes up in flames.

“They say I must burn your barn,” cries old Pettigrew, the hired man, wiping his eyes.

“Oh well,” says Mrs. St. John, “it cannot be helped.” He takes a burning brand from the hearth and sets it on fire.

They cannot save the big house, which is her livelihood. When the British first fire it, she and her daughters struggle to extinguish the flames with pails of water from the well. But the respite is brief.

In vain Mrs. St. John exclaims that the British, by burning the hotel, are destroying her income.

“We have left you one roof, and that is more than the Americans left for our widows when they came over,” she is reminded. The St. John hotel goes up in flames, as does the Lovejoy home next door, corpse and all; thus are the Canadians avenged for the burning of Newark.

The flames of Buffalo die down, but this is not the end. Fire breeds fire, revenge seeds more revenge. Before this war is ended, more homes will be put to the torch on both sides of the border, from the humblest cottage to the executive mansion of the President himself.

The British depart, keeping a garrison in Fort Niagara. The people of Buffalo trickle home to the blackened ruins of their village. The St. John children are shocked at the spectacle before them: all that is left of their big house are the cellar walls, two chimneys, and the front step. The frontier from Buffalo through Black Rock to Eighteen Mile Creek is a blackened smear. The British have destroyed 333 buildings. In Buffalo only three are still standing—the jail and the blacksmith shop, which would not burn, and the little cottage on Main Street, just twenty-two feet square, that the widow St. John, through the force of her will, managed, against all odds, to preserve.

EIGHT
Marking Time

January to June, 1814

With the burning of Buffalo, the campaign of 1813 ends. It is again too cold to fight. Since the war began, only a few square miles of territory have changed hands: the British hold Michilimackinac Island; the Americans occupy Amherstburg. Both sides change their high commands and prepare for another invasion, neither knowing where it will come. On Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain the rival navies engage in a new shipbuilding contest, constructing the world’s largest lake vessels. And in St. Petersburg, Russia, three American diplomats try vainly to negotiate for peace with the British, with the Tsar as mediator
.

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, JANUARY 6, 1814

The Russian Christmas. It is bitterly cold; the Fahrenheit thermometer shows twenty-five below. A skin of ice glitters on the colossal bronze statue of Peter the Great; a crust of snow sheaths the cornice of the church of St. Catherine; a frieze of icicles droops from the carved façades of the Hermitage and the Winter Palace. On the gravelled promenades, the snow squeaks beneath the runners of the one-horse sleighs that dart along the frigid banks of the Neva.

It is eleven o’clock. Above the great colonnade of the new church of Our Lady of Kazan—perhaps the most magnificent building in the city—the bells are ringing for a
Te Deum
to mark the recent successes of the Allies over Napoleon. Just one year ago, all Europe was opposed to Russia; now all Europe is with her in the holy crusade against the French. Wellington is through the Pyrenees and into France—and the Iberian peninsula is lost to Bonaparte. Blücher and Bernadotte have stopped him at Leipzig. The Continental system is smashed, the Empire crumbling.

Within the great church, dwarfed by the lofty domes, the gigantic columns, the gargantuan icons, a thin congregation listens to a proclamation from the Tsar, read by a chamberlain. The Russian Emperor is absent at army headquarters in Frankfurt, but the Empress is here, of course, and several grand dukes and at least one grand duchess. The diplomatic corps, however, is poorly represented. Thus the three Americans present, in their blue and gold uniforms (newly designed for such occasions), are more than usually conspicuous and more than usually uncomfortable. The church doors are continually opening and shutting, and after two hours of hymns, prayers, and chanting, they are thoroughly chilled.

The trio’s discomfort is more than physical. Two are fed up with Russia, and each is fed up with the others’ company. They are supposed to be treating for peace through the good offices of the Emperor Alexander, but now, with Napoleon approaching final defeat, peace with England seems nearly as distant as the Emperor himself. For almost six months they have waited for some official word: will the British agree to accept Alexander as a mediator in the dispute with their former colony? They are fairly certain that the answer is No, but it has not come officially; so they remain, diplomatic prisoners, shackled to a chill environment by the constraints of protocol.