Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (105 page)

Strachan, who has an ability to spot talent, took Robinson under his wing as a small boy, paid his tuition at his famous Cornwall school, invited him into his household, counselled him, and ever since has bombarded his protege with letters of advice, reproof, praise, caution. For most of his life, young Robinson has struggled to achieve the standards his foster father set for him. It has not been easy.

Like many others this sickly spring, he has been so ill that it has required an enormous effort to come from York to Ancaster to preside at the prosecution of the twenty-one men charged with high treason. Yet come he must, “for I shall enjoy very little rest or comfort until these prosecutions are ended.”

Strachan cannot resist telling him how to run the trial:

“Do not indulge yourself in asperity of expression against the Prisoners—a dignified statement of the magnitude of their crime will have more weight.… In addressing the jury appeal to their reason rather than their passion.… Much depends upon the success of the first trial, bring forward the greatest offender.

“In regard to your opposing Barristers. Be cool—neither harsh nor supercilious. Boldly demand authorities for random objections. This will frequently confound the objector.…

“Be not surprised at unexpected objections.… On such occasions you may assume a bolder tone—remind the court that the public have rights as well as their Prisoners, that if frivolous objections are allowed to defeat substantial justice Society cannot exist.…”

Whether or not Robinson has taken Strachan’s advice, he has been remarkably successful. Of seventeen persons tried, thirteen have been convicted. Four trials remain, but two will have to be held over until the fall, for the evidence arrived too late. The others proceed on the morrow.

Robinson has handled the cases without any Crown officers to assist him, with no one to share the responsibility of public prosecutor,
with the enemy in possession of part of the district in which the court sits. He has been meticulously correct, resisting all pressure for summary justice, some of which comes from the Administrator himself, for Drummond keeps importuning him to speed things up and to offer the wavering public some spine-stiffening examples of treason unmasked before the summer campaign gets under way.

Now Robinson, mulling over the records of the accused, decides that eight have no claim to mercy. The remainder, he suggests, might escape with something less than the maximum penalty, but “an unconditional free pardon should in no case be granted.” There are some extenuating circumstances, however.

There is, for instance, the confused case of Samuel and Stephen Hartwell, former Americans who returned to their native country immediately war was declared and were captured at Detroit as bona fide prisoners of war. Upper Canada is full of people not unlike the Hartwells—recent arrivals from the United States who do not yet think of themselves as British or Canadian, who have little interest (and even less say) in the government of the province, whose loyalties are tenuous if not non-existent, who have no desire to fight their former countrymen, and who may, indeed, feel that they are traitors if they do. Unlike the Hartwells, who made their personal loyalties clear at the outset and crossed back over the border, most of these rootless farmers sit tight, suppress their feelings, try to stay out of trouble. Technically the Hartwells are traitors, but Robinson is well aware of the problem and realizes that “from the former relations between the two countries many cases of such nice discrimination may arise.” That being the case, “perhaps from political motives even, it is best not to strain the law to its utmost rigor.…”

There is also the murky case of Jacob Overholzer, “an ignorant man from Fort Erie of considerable property and a good farmer … not a man of influence or enterprise [who] it is thought acted as he did from motives of personal enmity to the persons thus taken away who are not of themselves men of good character.” Ninety-six of Overholzer’s neighbours have signed a petition asking a pardon for this “unfortunate but honest old man,” whom they describe as
“peaceable, sober and industrious … and a good neighbour.” No other prisoner has received such an accolade.

Overholzer is a victim of circumstance, a model farmer and also a newly arrived American, a target for private grudges and public revenge by reason of the depredations of the enemy along the Niagara. After the burning of Newark some of his neighbours threatened to seize his land and burn his buildings. Three of his enemies stole his horses, harnesses, and household goods. When Overholzer complained to the authorities, the thieves turned on Overholzer, branding him as a traitor for his part in a recent American raid. This confused series of charges and countercharges might well have blown over had it not been for the temper of the times. The magistrate who heard the case originally dismissed the charges as nothing more than an example of unneighbourly spite. Now they have been dredged up again, and Overholzer’s defence is rejected.

Robinson leaves the matter of clemency to Drummond, but urges that one or two sentences be carried out as swiftly as possible, to awe the populace. The following Monday—June 20—the last two accused are found guilty. On Tuesday, the convicted men are brought from the temporary jail in the Union Mill, a building owned, ironically, by Abraham Markle, another traitor tried
in absentia
. Standing in the dock, with the public looking on, the fifteen farmers listen to the sentence in the form presented for centuries by the Common Law:

“That each of you are to be taken to the place from whence you came and from thence you are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, whence you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for you must be cut down while alive and your entrails taken out and burned before your faces, your head then to be cut off and your bodies divided into four quarters and your heads and quarters to be at the King’s disposal. And may God have mercy on your souls.”

Thomas Scott, the Chief Justice, hastens to assure Drummond that “in point of fact this sentence is never exactly executed; the executioner invariably taking care not to cut the body down until
the criminal is dead, but the sentence of the law is always pronounced.” He adds that “the impressions which those convictions have made on the public mind will be, so far as I can judge, striking and lasting.…”

It is Scott’s view, and Robinson’s, that only the worst of the traitors need be executed, perhaps one for each of the London and Niagara districts, “since example is the chief end of punishment and … the punishment of a few would have an equal, and I even think a more salutary effect in this province, than the punishment of many.”

Scott adds that “the very novelty and horror of the punishment of that crime will have a most powerful effect.…”

Upper Canada has always been a docile and law-abiding province. Scott, speaking for the ruling clique, wants to keep it that way. For beneath the placid surface can be discerned the ferment of American-style democracy and republicanism, the political philosophies of the enemy, fuelled by American victories on Lake Erie and the Thames. That must be stamped out ruthlessly.

Drummond mulls over Robinson’s and Scott’s advice, decides that the eight listed in Robinson’s letter shall die. At Burlington Heights, on July 20, the sentences are carried out after a fashion. A rude gallows with eight nooses awaits the victims, who are driven in two wagons to the scene. Once the nooses are adjusted, the wagons are driven off, leaving the prisoners to strangle. Their contortions are such that a heavy brace comes loose and falls, striking one of the dying men on the head and mercifully putting an end to his struggles. Later all eight heads are chopped off and publicly exhibited.

Of the remainder of the accused, one manages to escape. Three are eventually banished from Canada for life. But Garrett Neill, “an ignorant and inconsiderable man,” Isaac Pettit, who joined the rebels because he could not stand to be called a coward, and Jacob Overholzer, the victim of his neighbours’ rancour in this incendiary conflict, surrender to a different fate. Confined in the crowded and stinking military prison at Kingston, they contract a virulent form of typhus and succumb, one by one, to the disease three months after the war is over.

NINE
The Struggle for the Fur Country

May–September, 1814

The watershed of the Upper Mississippi, though technically American, is an economic no man’s land, where British traders operate easily. Guarding the entrance to this domain is Michilimackinac Island, ceded to the United States after the Revolution and captured by the British in July, 1812. For economic reasons as well as military, the Americans must recapture it. The lateness of the season prevented such an expedition following Harrison’s victory on the Thames in October, 1813. But there is no doubt that, when spring comes, the Americans will try again
.

MICHILIMACKINAC ISLAND, LAKE HURON, MAY 18, 1814

To the infinite relief of the half-starved British garrison, a long line of bateaux, laden with stores, provisions, weapons, and soldiers, arrives at this captured American fort after more than three weeks of battling the shrieking gales and grinding ice floes of the great inland sea. The new commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert McDouall of the Glengarry Fencibles, a Scot with eighteen years’ regular service,
steps ashore and takes command from Captain Richard Bullock of the 41st.
^*

The British are determined to hold this great lump of Precambrian schist, for if they lose it they lose control of the western fur trade. Every craft moving southwest toward Green Bay, or to the Wisconsin-Fox portage, or to the headwaters of the Mississippi-Missouri system must come within reach of its guns. Sir George Prevost, the Governor General, is well aware of its significance. As he explains in a letter to Lord Bathurst: “Its geographical position is admirable. Its influence extends and is felt amongst the Indian tribes at New Orleans and the Pacific Ocean; vast tracts of country look to it for protection and supplies, and it gives security to the great establishments of the Northwest and Hudson’s Bay Companies by supporting the Indians on the Mississippi.”

Prevost is convinced that Mackinac is the only barrier preventing American expansion westward to the Red River. If it falls, the enemy will monopolize the fur trade of the Northwest.

Washington’s first blunder of the war—some say the greatest—was the failure to alert the American commander at Michilimackinac that war had been declared. The subsequent British occupation inspired the northwestern tribes to join the British and led directly to the loss of Detroit. Now, with Detroit again in American hands and control of Lake Erie wrested from the British, this mini-Gibraltar is in peril.

All winter long, Captain Bullock has been doing his best to strengthen the fort. The garrison has survived only through careful rationing. The troops have been without meat since March, existing on local corn and fish. Now, on this bright May day, soldiers and civilians crowd to the shoreline to help unload the barrels and sacks of provisions.

Until this moment, the beleaguered Bullock had no idea whether the first boats to arrive after the spring breakup would fly the Stars
and Stripes or the Union Jack. But while the Americans dallied, McDouall dared. By crossing the lake at the moment of the breakup, he has beaten the enemy to the island and shortened the odds against its capture.

He is a courageous and resourceful officer, a former aide to Procter and a veteran of the midnight battle at Stoney Creek. He brings with him ninety members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, together with a party of shipwrights, twenty-one seamen, eleven gunners in charge of four field pieces, and twenty-nine large bateaux. The journey has been made from York through the snows along the old overland route to Nottawasaga Bay and then across the lake, the boats dodging between the grinding floes, the men half frozen on the oars. Yet McDouall has lost only one boat and managed to save its cargo and its crew.

A few days later a second reinforcement arrives—two hundred picked Indian warriors, mainly Sioux and Winnebago, led by the Red-Haired Man, the legendary Robert Dickson. McDouall has certainly heard of Dickson—who has not?—the most celebrated Indian leader in the Northwest, the most admired and the most mysterious. Like McDouall, he is a Scot, gigantic of frame and full of face, with a shock of flaming hair that has given him the Sioux cognomen of
Mascotopah
. No other white man commands the respect of the tribes as Dickson does; the contrast between him and some other leading members of the Indian Department is startling. Unlike Matthew Elliott (dead now of exhaustion and old age), he is highly literate. Unlike Thomas McKee, a hopeless drunkard, he is temperate. Unlike John Norton, who is jealous of his superiors and suspected by some of his followers, he commands the absolute loyalty, even love, of his people. Most of the others forsook their Indian women for white brides; not Dickson. He remains faithful to his Sioux wife. One cannot imagine Dickson standing by, as Elliott and the others did at Fort Miami, while the tribesmen attacked defenceless prisoners; he will not allow his people to kill or torture captives. No one in the department matches his reputation for humanity, courage, integrity, zeal.