Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (16 page)

Hull’s March to Detroit

Thus dispirited, the troops plunge through the pelting rain into the no man’s land of the Black Swamp, a labyrinth of deadfalls and ghostly trees behind whose trunks Tecumseh’s unseen spies keep watch. A fog of insects clogs the soldiers’ nostrils and bloats their faces; a gruel of mud and water rots their boots and swells their ankles. They cannot rest at day’s end until they hack out a log breastwork against Indian attack. Strung out for two miles day after day, the human serpent finally wriggles to a halt, blocked by rising water and unbridgeable streams. Hull camps his men in ankle-deep mud, builds a blockhouse, names it Fort Necessity, and there, from necessity, the sodden army waits until the floods ebb. Yet Hull is not cast down. He has more than two thousand rank and file under his command and believes his force superior to any that may oppose it.

Finally the troops move on to the head of navigation on a branch of the Maumee River (also known as the Miami of the Lakes). And here a letter catches up with Hull. It is from Eustis, the Secretary of War, urging him to advance with all possible haste to Detroit, there to await further orders. The letter is dated June 18, but it must have been penned on the morning of that day because it fails to include the one piece of information that is essential to prevent a major blunder: in the afternoon of June 18, the United States has officially declared war on Great Britain.

IN WASHINGTON, WHILE HULL’S
army trudges through the swamps of Ohio and Robert Dickson’s Indians head for St. Joseph’s
Island, Henry Clay and his War Hawks are in full cry. In their eyes, Augustus Foster will write, long after the fact, war is “as necessary to America as a duel is to a young naval officer to prevent his being bullied and elbowed in society.”

Spurred on by hawkish rhetoric, Washington has been playing a dangerous game of “I dare you” with Westminster. Most Republicans in the Twelfth Congress are opposed to war, but they do not balk at voting for increased military appropriations or an expanded militia. They are confident that Great Britain, faced with the threat of a nuisance war in North America and heavily committed to the struggle against Napoleonic France, will back down at the last moment, cancel the damaging Orders in Council, and abandon the maddening practice of impressment.

But the British do not back down, believing in their turn that the Americans are bluffing, a premise encouraged by Foster’s myopia. By the time this fact sinks in, those who have gone along with the War Hawks in Congress cannot in honour vote against what John C. Calhoun calls “the second struggle for our liberty.”

By midwinter, Clay and his followers had all but made up their minds that in the face of British intransigence, the only honourable course was war. Their strategy was to make retreat impossible, even for the most dovish Republicans. They will act as the catalyst that, in June, leads to declaration.

Unlike the aging veterans, pondering possible strategies for possible invasion, these are young, vigorous men between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-six, lawyers all, with an eloquence exceeded only by verbosity. They have been raised on tales of the Revolution told by elders who have forgotten much of the horror but remember all of the glory. They are men of the old frontier, from Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and the outer edges of New Hampshire and New York—the kind of men who believe in the need to avenge any insult, imagined or real, who know what it means to fight for the land, and who are convinced that the only good Indian is a dead one.

Tippecanoe has given them new impetus. In speech after fiery speech they use every device to convince their colleagues and the
country that war—or at least the threat of war—is both necessary and attractive: if Britain can be brought to her senses through an attack on Canada, America’s export trade will again flourish, the depression will end, the Indians will be put forever in their place, and the troublesome Canadian border will be done away with. These are debating points. The essence of the Hawks’ position is contained in the words of Felix Grundy, the young Tennessee criminal lawyer with the piercing blue eyes who cries that America must “by force redress the violated rights and honor of an injured and insulted people.”

There is more than an echo here of Tecumseh and the young braves who have deserted their own elders to follow him down the path of revenge and glory. The leaders of the two war parties are not dissimilar. Both are handsome men, tall and lithe, with flashing eyes and vibrant personalities. Both dress stylishly and with purpose: Clay shows his patriotism by wearing Kentucky homespun instead of British broadcloth; Tecumseh dresses in unadorned deerskin for similar reasons. Each is courageous, quick to take offence; Clay bears the scar of a duel on his thigh, the result of an acrimonious debate in the Kentucky legislature. In an age of oratory, these two who have never met and never will meet are the most eloquent of all. One white witness who heard Tecumseh at the Springfield, Ohio, council in 1806 declares that it was not until he heard Henry Clay speak that he felt he was again in the presence of an orator of the Shawnee’s rank. Each man is the acknowledged spokesman of his small group of followers, a group in each case whose influence is far out of proportion to its numbers. And both are convinced that war is the only solution to the slights and grievances which have angered and humiliated them. The British are to Clay what the Americans are to Tecumseh.

Like Tecumseh, Clay is a master of persuasion. In the fall, when the Congress met, few of its members had made up their minds. By June, the majority has become convinced that war is the only answer. John Smilie of Pennsylvania speaks for the formerly uncommitted when he declares: “If we now recede we shall be a reproach to all nations.” Inch by inch Smilie has been nudged into a hawkish position, voting a little grudgingly for the various military proposals that have pushed the nation closer to war, but believing almost to the end that commercial retaliation is the answer. James Madison, too, is prepared by spring to go along with war, even though, like his predecessor Jefferson, he has struggled against the idea of involvement in a European conflict. He is a small man, benign of temperament, soft-voiced, distant in his relationships, a scholar, modest and moderate, who owns a single black suit and once lost an election for refusing to supply free whiskey to the voters. His outward composure is sometimes mistaken for weakness; the Federalists think him a pawn of Henry Clay. He is not. Though he dislikes the idea of war, he too comes to believe that his country has no other course. Apart from other considerations, submission would badly damage the Republican Party. Party politics and party unity are important considerations. He is prepared to accept the results of a vote in Congress.

Ironically, during these same weeks the British are preparing to back down. Reports from America are conflicting; Augustus Foster, who is supposed to man their listening post in the capital, continues to believe that the Americans are bluffing; but the oratory in the war congress and Sir George Prevost’s warning from Quebec convinces many in Parliament that war is actually possible. Britain responds by dispatching three battalions of regulars to Canada and begins to consider the possibility of a repeal of the Orders in Council. By June, Foster too has changed his mind and reports that the Yankees mean what they say.

The British government, which has been bumbling along, holding a series of sedate hearings into the Orders in Council, now starts to move with uncharacteristic speed. Unfortunately, political affairs have been thrown into disarray by an unprecedented act, the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in the lobby of the House of Commons. It is June 16 before the formal motion to repeal the Orders is announced. The move comes too late. There is no Atlantic cable to alert the men of Washington. On June 18, the United States proclaims that a state of war exists between herself
and Great Britain. When the news reaches the War Mess on New Jersey Avenue, Calhoun flings his arms about Clay’s neck and the two, joined by their fellow Hawks, caper about the table in an approximation of a Shawnee war dance. But would Clay be so boisterous if he could foresee the tragedy that will be visited on his family in less than a year on the frozen banks of the River Raisin?

The news that America is at war brings a more mixed reaction across the nation. The tolling of church bells mingles with the firing of cannon and rockets; flags fly at half-mast while drums beat out the call for recruits; there are parades, cheers, hisses and boos, riots and illuminations depending on the mood of the people, which is divided on both regional and political lines. Five days later, the British motion to repeal the Orders becomes law and the chief reason for the conflict is removed.

At this point, General Hull’s army of twenty-two hundred men is in sight of Detroit and within striking distance of the lightly held British fort across the river at Amherstburg. If Hull can capture the fort and disperse his enemies, the route lies open to the capital at York on Toronto Bay. The object is to seize Canada, not necessarily as a permanent prize (although that is in the minds of some) but to hold her hostage to force concessions from the British. Canada, after all, is the only portion of the empire that is open to American attack. Only later in the war, when American defeats are supplanted by American victories, will Madison and his foreign secretary, James Monroe, consider clinging to the conquered nation as part of the Union.

It is a long-held and almost universal belief that Canada is entirely vulnerable, an easy prey to American attack. The campaign, it is thought, will last a few weeks only. The freshman War Hawk, Calhoun, has already declared that “in four weeks from the time that a declaration of war is heard on our frontier the whole of Upper and a part of Lower Canada will be in our possession.” Clay’s words to the Senate in 1810 are recalled: “… the conquest of Canada is in our power.…” Felix Grundy, Clay’s fellow boarder at the War Mess, declares: “We shall drive the British from our continent,”
and adds, charitably, that he is “willing to receive the Canadians as adopted brethren.”

The general optimism is reflected in the words of Jefferson himself, who writes to a friend at the outset of war that “upon the whole I have known no war entered into under more favourable circumstances … we … shall strip her [Great Britain] of all her possessions on this continent.” The Hawk press reflects these sentiments. In the words of the Kentucky
Gazette
, “Upper and Lower Canada to the very gates of Quebec will fall into the possession of the Yankees the moment the war is started, without much bloodshed, for almost the whole of Upper Canada and a great part of the Lower Province is inhabited by Americans.”

At first glance it
does
seem a mere matter of marching. The United States has ten times the military potential of Canada. Congress has authorized a regular force of thirty-five thousand men to serve for five years and undertaken a military call-up of one hundred thousand. But the country is so badly divided that by June only about four thousand regulars have been recruited, bringing the total force to ten thousand, almost half of them untrained recruits and only half available for service in the north. As for the militia, nobody can be sure how many are available or whether they can legally be forced to fight on foreign soil. Like the generals who lead them, few have experience of war.

Even at that, the American forces outnumber the British. In all of British North America there are only forty-five hundred troops, thinly distributed. In Upper Canada a mere fifteen hundred regulars are available to receive the main thrust of the American attack. But as in most wars, the events to follow will be determined not so much by the quality of the men as by the quality of the leadership. The Americans pin their hopes on Hull and Dearborn. Canada is more fortunate. She has Tecumseh, the Leaping Panther, and she also has that impulsive but consummate professional, Major-General Isaac Brock.

THREE
Michilimackinac