Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (22 page)

SANDWICH, UPPER CANADA
, July 23, 1812; with General Hull’s Army of the Northwest.

“Why does the army dally?” Robert Lucas asks rhetorically, as he scratches away in his diary. “Why do they not make the Stroke on Maldon [Amherstburg] at once, had proper energy been used, we might have been in Maldon now, we are tampering with them untill they will be able to drive us back across the river.…”

Why indeed? Hull’s troops are eager to maintain some momentum, have been since the day of the landing when it was expected Hull would sweep down the river to attack the British fort at Amherstburg—a place name that has a sinister connotation for western Americans who have suffered at the hands of the Indians. For this has been the headquarters of Elliott, McKee and Girty, whom the frontiersmen believe were behind the raids on white settlements in the Northwest.

Like his fellow volunteers, Lucas wants to get on with it. Once Fort Amherstburg’s guns are silenced, the way to Upper Canada lies wide open. The only other British forts on the western frontier are at the other end of Lake Erie and along the Niagara River. A second American army has been dispatched to attack these strong points. Its task is to cause a diversion, pin down the defending British and prevent reinforcements from reaching Fort Amherstburg.

To Lucas, speed is essential. Amherstburg must be attacked and taken before Brock can divert more men to its defence. Lucas is used to swift, flexible movements, for he has been acting as a scout for Hull. In the General’s mixed bag of raw recruits, untrained civilians, professional commanders, and elected leaders, he is a hybrid—general, captain, and private soldier rolled into one. The anomaly springs out of his country’s awkward military philosophy, which disdains the idea of a standing army and relies on volunteers for the nation’s defence. Lucas had been for some time a brigadier-general in the Ohio state militia. Eager to serve in the regular army, he applied in April for a captain’s commission. A few days later, before it came through, McArthur ordered him to transmit from his brigade a proportion of the twelve hundred men required from the
state in the coming war. What to do? Lucas, thirsty for action, set an example to his men by enrolling as a private in a volunteer company. To add to the confusion, the men elected his younger brother John as their captain.

Now, at Sandwich, Lucas vents his disgust in his diary:
Why does the army dally?
Hull is not short of supplies, for he has sent McArthur foraging up the Thames, raiding the farms, the barns, and the fields for food and equipment. McArthur and his men, moving without blankets or provisions, living off the land, penetrate sixty miles into the heart of Upper Canada: a land of stump and snake fences; of cabins and shanties of basswood and cedar; of Dutch lofts and clay ovens; of grist mills, fanning mills, and windmills; of chicken hutches, corn cribs, hog pens, and cattle sheds; of pickled pork and pigeon pie and fresh milk kept cool in underground sheds; of oxen hitched in tandem, furrowing the glistening fields, and raw-boned men in homespun linsey-woolsey scything the tawny harvest of midsummer. The raiding party leaves a trail of devastation in its wake, returning in five days with two hundred barrels of flour, four hundred blankets, and wagons loaded with whiskey, salt, cloth, guns, ammunition, household goods, tools—even boats. Grain fields are destroyed, homes ransacked, orchards levelled, corn trampled, fences burned or shattered—actions that enrage the settlers and help to turn them against their former compatriots.

John McGregor, a trader and merchant who has removed his goods to Matthew Dolsen’s house and mill on the Thames for safety, loses everything—flour, merchandise, grain, livestock, and boats—and almost loses his life. He and Dolsen are forced to flee when it is learned that McArthur intends to shoot them on sight in the belief that they are rousing the Indians and militia to resistance.

Farmers and townspeople are beggared by the raiders. Jean-Baptiste Beniteau’s orchard of sixty fruit trees is destroyed, his fences and pickets reduced to ashes. His neighbour, Jean-Baptiste Ginac, is looted of all his livestock, pork, flour, oats, and corn. Another Jean-Baptiste—Fourneaux—loses 480 bushels of grain, all his cider, as well as his winter’s wood supply and furniture. A fourth,
Jean-Baptiste Boismier, a fur trader, sees his entire fortune of 620 skins together with his livestock, tools, utensils, and harvested corn go to the enemy.

Hull’s men make no allowance for old friends. Lieutenant-Colonel François Bâby, whose house has become Hull’s headquarters, has tried to save some of his chattels by hauling them off to Jean-Baptiste Goyeau’s home, three miles distant. But Hull dispatches a party of dragoons with six wagons who remove everything at gunpoint, then, emboldened by conquest, slice up one of Bâby’s finest coats with their sabres. Bâby’s loss is staggering; he reckons it at 2,678 pounds sterling.

Another raiding party ransacks the estate of the Earl of Selkirk at Baldoon on Lake St. Clair, seizing a thousand pounds’ worth of booty, from pewter plates to pitchforks, including the greatest prize of all, more than nine hundred prize Merino sheep, which are ferried across the river to Fort Detroit along with the aged Scot who is their shepherd.

McArthur brushes all complaints aside with the promise that everything will eventually be paid for because, he says, Hull has such a footing in Canada that the British will never be able to drive him out.

And so it appears. At Fort Amherstburg the situation is deteriorating. Militia service works real hardship on those families who depend upon the able-bodied for their livelihood. Hundreds desert. Those who remain loyal—men like Robert Pike of Port Dover or John Williams on the Thames—have no one to harvest their wheat and so lose it all to rot. St. George, the commander at the fort, feels himself obliged to release the oldest and least efficient to return to their farms. Others slip away. On July 8, St. George counts 850 militiamen under his command. A week later the number has dropped to 471. “I expect that in two or three days we shall have very few of them at the post,” Matthew Elliott informs his superior, adding that there is no ammunition left in the Indian stores “and, if more Indians come, I really do not know how to act.” St. George expects an attack almost hourly, but it does not come. In Robert Lucas’s rueful belief,
Hull’s dallying has given the British hope. “Our conduct has at least incouraged them much,” he notes.

One of the keenest soldiers in Hull’s army, Lucas has managed to see more action than most of his followers. As a ranger and scout he has always been in the vanguard of the main army, often in danger. He is one of those natural soldiers, found in every army, who thrive on action. When Hull’s boats crossed over to Sandwich, Lucas arranged to switch companies temporarily in order to be one of the first to set foot on Canadian soil because he “could not endure to be behind.”

On July 16, Lucas volunteers again: Colonels Cass and Miller are ordered to reconnoitre enemy country up to the River aux Canards, a deep but sluggish stream that winds through the marshes three miles above Amherstburg. Lucas immediately offers to go along. This war will help to make his reputation; one day he will be governor of Ohio and later of Iowa Territory.

Colonel Cass is as eager for glory and for action as Lucas. The bridge at the Canard is held by a detachment of British regulars and Indians—the same Menominee dispatched to Amherstburg from the Wisconsin country the previous month by Robert Dickson. Cass resolves to ford the river upstream and attack in a flanking movement while Miller pins down the sentries. Again Lucas and the rangers are in the vanguard.

Faced with an attack on their rear, the British retire. Cass cannot pursue, for a tributary stream blocks the way. But the British sentries—John Dean and James Hancock of the 41st—stubbornly hold their ground and become the first soldiers to shed their blood on Canadian soil in the War of 1812. Dean, one arm broken by a musket ball, fights on with his bayonet until he is knocked to the ground and disarmed. Hancock, bleeding from at least two wounds, unable to support himself, continues to fight on his knees until he is captured. He dies that night and is scalped by one of the Indians, who sells the trophy to the British—“a good trick for an Indian to make the British Gov. pay for their own Soldiers Scalps,” comments Robert Lucas.

This is the first time the Americans have come up against British regulars, that tough, stubborn, hard-drinking, somewhat unimaginative breed whom Wellington has called, not without affection, “the scum of the earth.” America, nurtured on the ideal of a free-wheeling grassroots democracy, scorns the British professional as a semi-robot and mercenary, wedded to no political ideal. It is true, certainly, that many a British working man joins for the money: the handsome bounties offered those who transfer from the militia, the prospect of a substantial prize after a successful engagement. But there are other reasons. Wellington believes, not without considerable evidence, that “they have all enlisted for drink.” Yet drink is only a symptom; like enlistment, it is a form of escape from the appallingly drab conditions of the British lower classes. The army is composed of men fleeing from a variety of bedevilments—brutal taskmasters, nagging wives, pregnant girl friends, intolerable parents, constables and judges, or simple boredom. Black-sheep sons of well-born families (“gentlemen rankers”) rub shoulders with footpads, pickpockets, roustabouts, poachers, smugglers, or plain, resolute English labouring men hungry for adventure in a far-off land, even if that be nothing more glamorous than garrison duty with the 41st in the backwater of Amherstburg.

Wellington’s scum are actually in a minority. It is estimated that in a battalion of some three or four hundred men, perhaps fifty are rogues—drunkards, stragglers, potential deserters. A harsh system of discipline keeps them in line. In the summer of 1812, for instance, the 103rd Regiment in Quebec holds thirty-seven courts martial and sentences thirty-one men to a total of 5,725 lashes, of which at least 1,589 are actually laid on the bare back, the others being remitted. (One unfortunate is lashed three hundred times.) But it is the parade-ground drill, hammered into the rankers’ subconscious, that trains the men to act automatically—to stand fast as the enemy advances, to hold their fire until ordered, to discharge their muskets in a single shattering volley without flinching, even as the cavalry sweeps down upon the square or hostile bayonets attempt to break the scarlet line. The wounded Dean, now a prisoner of war, and the
dying Hancock are products of this system. It simply does not occur to them to desert their posts.

The Americans now hold the bridge that can lead the army to Amherstburg. It appears to Cass and Miller that the entire force should immediately move up to within striking distance of its objective. But Hull dithers. He is going by the book, planning a careful set-piece siege of the British fort. That he will not undertake until his heavy artillery is ready. The fort might be taken by an infantry assault, but the slaughter would be appalling; and that the former divinity student cannot abide. The bridge is abandoned.

He has other concerns. What is happening on the Niagara frontier? It is essential that an American army be in place along that river. Otherwise there is nothing to stop the British from deploying all their resources against him. Eustis and Dearborn have promised a diversion on the Niagara to support his invasion, but communications are such that the General has no way of knowing whether this has been done.

A closer problem torments him. He is certain that Colonel Cass is trying to pressure him for reasons of personal ambition. He feels his authority slipping away; his officers’ complaints are beginning to destroy his influence. He calls council after council to try to quell their impatience; it only erodes his command. “They seem to have thought,” he will later argue, “that when a council of war was called, it was to be governed by the laws of a town meeting.”

He is determined not to advance until there is “an absolute certainty of success.” How long will it take to prepare the cannon? Two days? Two weeks? After each meeting, the time stretches. Hull fears defeat. Defeat will mean starvation for the troops and, worse, devastation by the Indians. The militia fear the Indians. At the bridge over the Canard and also at Turkey Creek and Petite Coté, where desultory skirmishing continues almost daily, Dickson’s Menominee and Tecumseh’s followers terrify the raw recruits. One regular officer writes to the New York
Gazette:

“Had it not been for the dastardly conduct of the drafted Ohio militia who composed one half of the party and who took to their
heels when they evidently had the advantage, the whole of the Indians would have been killed or taken. The officers endeavoured to rally them and said they would be fired at by their own party if they did not stand. They replied that they would rather be killed by them than by the damned Indians.”

There is savagery on both sides. The first Indian scalp is taken by Captain William McCullough of the Rangers, who describes in a letter to his wife how he tore it from the corpse’s head with his teeth.

Word of these skirmishes reaches William K. Beall and his fellow prisoners aboard the
Thames
, docked at Amherstburg. It fuels their hope for speedy deliverance. On the night of the encounter at the Canard bridge, Beall learns that Hull’s army is camped within reach. Glorious news! But instead of seeing American soldiers marching into town he is greeted by a more macabre spectacle: Thomas McKee of the Indian Department (the perennial drunkard whom Elliott has replaced) arrives at the head of about fifty Indians, all naked except for their breech cloths. McKee, who is also dressed as a native, halts opposite the gaping prisoners and hoists a fresh scalp, fastened to a long pole, which he shakes exultantly, all the time taunting the prisoners with savage cries.

For this spectacle, “which would have chilled the frigid blood of a Laplander or … crimsoned the tawny cheek of an unrelenting Turk,” Beall abuses everything British, from the King on down. His fury is misplaced, for the scalp is undoubtedly that of the unfortunate British sentry Hancock.