Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (63 page)

Thomas Jefferson’s thoughtless phrase left a sour taste in the mouths of those who had survived the triple disasters of Detroit, Queenston Heights, and Frenchtown. These prisoners of war were the only Americans left in Canada when the campaign begun in 1812 ended in massacre at Frenchtown in the wilderness of Michigan territory.

Three armies captured!
Outbluffed in August by the British general Isaac Brock, the Americans at Detroit gave up without firing a shot, their commander doomed to face a court martial for cowardice. At Queenston, in October, Canada lost her hero-general but won a resounding victory when the New York militia refused to cross the river or hid in the underbrush waiting to surrender. And at Frenchtown, in January, on the frozen banks of the River Raisin, when the flower of Kentucky fell to the scalping knives of the Potawatomi, the remnants of another army were herded across the border to captivity.

Now it was too cold to fight, especially for those southerners who marched blithely north in their thin linsey-woolsey blouses, expecting to be home before the leaves deserted the maples. In Europe, the remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée on its winter retreat from Moscow continued to skirmish with Cossack guerrillas, but on the Canadian border the combatants simply sat it out. Except for Frenchtown, campaigns ended in December not to resume until spring.

In the defence of British North America, the weather was as important an ally as the Indians and the British regulars, who bore the brunt of the fighting. The invaders could not move until the ice left the lakes. A forward thrust late in the season could mean, if not disaster, at least stalemate. No American was prepared to sit out the winter on hostile ground in hastily built huts or thin tents. Even on friendly soil, conditions were such that officers deserted their own troops.

This was a wilderness war, much of it fought in such isolation that the combatants had no idea of events in the outer world. On the western flank in the first months of 1813, the soldiers and fur traders who formed the militia would have had no clear picture of the war in Europe: the decimation of the Grande Armée in its retreat from Moscow; the defection of Prussia from the Napoleonic cause; the resurgence of an anti-French coalition, which was already signalling the downfall of Bonaparte. In wintertime, the news could take four months or longer to reach the captured bastion of Michilimackinac Island at the western end of Lake Huron.

There were further anomalies. The War of 1812 was not the only war in which both sides spoke the same language, but it was one of the few in which tens of thousands on both sides violently opposed it, sat it out, or maintained both friendly and commercial relations with the so-called enemy. The absence of a language barrier made desertion attractive, espionage easy, subterfuge possible. In the dark it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Spies and planted decoys crossed and re-crossed the border with information for opposing generals, some of it authentic, some of it intended to deceive.

The Atlantic provinces took little part in the war, having made a pact with their American neighbours to continue business as usual. The New England states, especially Vermont and Massachusetts, were so opposed to “Mr. Madison’s war” that they refused to send troops or lend money to the government. In 1814, they even considered secession.

Thousands of state militia, especially those from New York and Pennsylvania, thought so little of the conflict that they stood on their constitutional rights and refused to cross the border at crucial moments during the campaign. America’s Founding Fathers had never contemplated an offensive war; the state militia, in the law’s strictest interpretation, could be used only in the defence of the Union.

In Upper Canada, where three out of five settlers were recent arrivals from the United States, there was at best apathy, at worst treason. The Loyalists, who made up a fifth of the population, were keen to fight, as were the sons of British immigrants, army officers, upper-class merchants, and civil servants. But the farmers, desperate to harvest their crops, scorned by the ruling elite, virtually disenfranchised by the colonial autocracy, felt no such compunction. Much of the despair felt at the beginning of the conflict had been wiped out by Brock’s successes. But most yeomen (as they were officially called) simply wanted to be left alone.

If propinquity encouraged understanding, distance exaggerated differences. Kentucky was hawkish from the beginning, but by February, 1813, its zeal had turned to rage. Henry Procter, the victor at Frenchtown on the River Raisin, had recrossed the Detroit River hurriedly, expecting a counter-attack and leaving his wounded prisoners, Kentuckians all, to the savagery of his Indian allies. The resultant massacre brought the state to the boiling point.
“Remember the Raisin!”
became a recruiting cry. Few of the new soldiers, thirsting for revenge, knew what a Canadian looked like. Many lumped them with the Indians. As for the Canadians, they thought of Kentuckians as wild beasts.

Although President Madison had disavowed any territorial ambitions at the war’s outset, most Kentuckians and not a few others saw the invasion of Canada as a war of conquest. That was not the war’s original purpose. America only wanted to teach the British a lesson by attacking their North American colonies. The Napoleonic war had strained British-American relations to the breaking point. Determined to throttle Bonaparte, Great Britain thought nothing of enforcing her blockade of European ports by stopping and searching American ships in mid-ocean. Desperately short of seamen, she insisted that every man born an Englishman must serve as one. By impressing from U.S. ships any sailor she considered British—and at cannon point if necessary—she succeeded in enraging all Americans.

“Honour” was a word much used in 1812. The British were still treating the United States as a colony. The Americans, in honour, could not accept that. The British, in honour, could not back down. The War of 1812 was to be called, with some truth, the Second War of Independence. Britain finally gave in on the matter of the blockade, but the news did not reach Washington before war was declared. By then it was too late; the war fever, once whipped up, would not subside. Madison announced that hostilities would continue as long as the British insisted on impressing seamen from American vessels. “Impressment” became a war cry. The Americans, Madison insisted, would
never
give in on impressment. Nor would Great Britain, mistress of the seas. Honour would not allow it.

Because the United States could not carry the war to the heart of Britain, she did the next best thing and attacked Canada. And so this war for maritime rights was fought mainly on land and on fresh water by men who were largely untrained and often reluctant, led by officers who were often incompetent and usually myopic.

As the campaign of 1813 approached, the American regular forces outnumbered the British seventeen thousand to seven thousand. This was illusory; many of the so-called regulars in the U.S. armies were untrained recruits. In addition, the British had an additional force of at least two thousand Indians at Detroit and on the Niagara frontier, the best and most constant under the command of the brilliant Shawnee war chief, Tecumseh. The Americans had not, as yet, used Indians in battle.

Both sides could also call upon large reserves of citizen soldiers—the militia, always an uncertain factor in battle. The American militia draftees and volunteers were generally called up for short terms—as little as sixty days, as much as a year. With the exception of the Kentuckians, most refused to continue in service beyond their designated term.

In Canada, the Sedentary Militia, largely untrained and incompetent, was available as an auxiliary arm in time of crisis. All fit males between eighteen and sixty were obliged to serve in it when circumstances required. The Incorporated Militia of Upper Canada consisted of volunteers serving for the duration and made up of young men attracted by patriotism, a sense of adventure, or the bounty of eight dollars paid to every man on enlistment. In Lower Canada, a similar body, the Select Embodied Militia, composed of
men from eighteen to twenty-five, was drawn by lot to serve for a maximum of two years. These were paid and trained as regulars. There were, in addition, regular units recruited in Canada such as the Glengarry Light Infantry (or Fencibles) and the Provincial Corps of Light Infantry, better known as Canadian Voltigeurs. When properly trained, these men fought as bravely and as efficiently as the British regulars. At Châteauguay they stood off an entire American army, unaided.

At the senior levels, on both sides of the border, there was extraordinary incompetence. Many of the British regular officers were Wellington’s cast-offs, who had reached their rank through the indefensible practice of purchasing promotion. In British military eyes, the Canadian war had a low priority. As a British Army surgeon, William “Tiger” Dunlop observed, “any man whom The Duke deemed unfit for the Peninsula was considered quite good enough for the Canadian market.”

As for the American army, at the start of the war Winfield Scott, a future commanding general, remembered that “the old officers had, very generally, sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking.” Regimental leaders were chosen for their political influence.

Federalists, who opposed the government, were excluded from command and “the selection from those communities consisted mostly of coarse and ignorant men,” while in others, educated men were passed over in favour of “swaggerers, dependants, decayed gentlemen … utterly unfit for any military purpose whatever.” Although some of the worst of these choices had been put out to pasture after the disasters of 1812 and eight new brigadier-generals created, Scott’s blunt critique still held true in 1813.

To a visitor from another milieu, the European style of battle transferred to Canada must have seemed incongruous, even comic. Such a one was the celebrated Sauk chief, Black Hawk, who was contemptuous of the white man’s mode of fighting. As he explained it to his astonished comrades: “Instead of stealing upon each other and taking every advantage to
kill the enemy
and
save our own people
,
as we do (which, with us, is considered good policy in a war chief), they march out, in open daylight, and fight regardless of the number of warriors they may lose.” The observant Black Hawk then gave a witty account of the self-serving dispatches and General Orders that opposing commanders used to justify their blunders and make defeat seem like victory:

After the battle is over, they retire to feast and drink wine, as if nothing had happened; after which, they make a
statement in writing
of what they have done—
each party claiming the victory!
and neither giving an account of half the number that have been killed on their own side. They all fought like braves, but would not do to
lead a war party
with us.… Those chiefs would do to
paddle
a canoe, but not
steer
it.…

The regular troops on both sides were trained to fight the kind of European set-piece battle that raised Black Hawk’s eyebrows. In 1812, parade-ground drill and army tactics were identical. The basic infantry weapon was the awkward, muzzle-loading Brown Bess musket, a notoriously inaccurate weapon scarcely able to hit a barn door at one hundred feet—and not meant to. The little one-ounce ball, wobbling down the unrifled barrel, could fly off in any direction. This did not matter, for the soldier did not aim his musket; he pointed it in the direction of the enemy line, fired it only when ordered. The effect of several hundred men, marching in line, shoulders touching, each firing in unison, reloading, and advancing behind a spray of shot—the file closers filling the gaps as soon as a man dropped—could disconcert all but the best-trained troops. The noise alone was terrifying, for the musket’s roar makes the crack of a modern rifle sound like a popgun. And, in those days before smokeless powder, the battlefield was obscured by thick greyish white clouds shortly after the first volleys were loosed.

A well-trained soldier could fire off five rounds in a minute if on his own, or two or three a minute if firing in unison—a singular tribute to the persistence of the drill sergeants, for the loading of the Brown Bess was an awkward business, although the army drill manual reduced it to eighteen swift, economical motions. The weapon was fired when the firelock struck the flint, in the fashion of a modern cigarette lighter. (The larger locks on heavy cannon worked on the identical principle.) In practice, since the musket was a short-range weapon, an advancing line rarely fired more than two or three volleys; after that the bayonet was used—the British, especially, considered it the basic infantry weapon. The rifle was slower firing but more accurate and probably more effective in bush warfare.

The regulars who fought in line were not the neat-looking soldiers of the war paintings. Their uniforms were patched, tattered, sometimes hanging in shreds. Some had no uniforms. The phrase “literally naked” appears again and again in the official correspondence of both armies from commanders complaining that their men have neither shoes, tunics, nor pantaloons. Sanitation was primitive, sickness widespread. Men sometimes went a year without being paid, and hundreds deserted for that reason alone.

In battle after battle, the combatants on both sides were at least half drunk. Physicians believed that a daily issue of spirits was essential to the good health of the troops who, in spite of it, suffered and often died from measles, malaria, typhus, typhoid, influenza, and a variety of diseases that went under the vague collective names of “ague” or “lake fever.” The British were given a daily glass of strong Jamaica rum. The Americans were fed a quarter-pint of raw whiskey. Many a teenaged farm boy got his first taste of spirits in the army, and many were corrupted by it. An era of drunkenness, which led to the temperance movement in mid-century, was surely a legacy of the war. Much of the looting in the wake of battle was initiated by men seeking hard liquor.