Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (71 page)

The American command now falls to the cavalry officer, Colonel James Burn, whose troops have been placed too far in the rear to be effective during the attack. Burn and his horsemen roar down on the British, cut through the lines, and open fire, only to find that they are shooting at their comrades in the 16th Infantry, who, with their commander lost, are wandering about firing at one another. Friend and foe are now intertangled, both sides taking prisoners, neither knowing how the battle is going. General Vincent himself, knocked from his horse and separated from the British staff, is lost somewhere in the woods, stumbling about in the wrong direction.

Each force leaves the field believing the other victorious. Heavily outnumbered from the start, with a quarter of his force killed, wounded, or captured, Harvey decides to withdraw without Vincent, before the Americans can recover from their confusion. He takes with him three captured cannon, a brass howitzer, two American generals, and more than one hundred prisoners.

The Americans are also preparing to flee, as William Hamilton Merritt, the leader of the volunteer dragoons, discovers when he rides back to the field shortly after dawn, seeking the missing Vincent. An armed sentry at the Gage farmhouse orders him to halt, but the resourceful horseman decides on a bluff, raps out a query.

“Who placed you there?” Merritt barks.

The sentry, seeing the blue coat of a dragoon, takes him for one of his own officers. Before he can catch his breath, Merritt makes him a prisoner, then, using the same subterfuge, captures a second sentry.

He cannot find Vincent, but he is able to report that the Americans are in a panic, destroying everything that cannot be removed—provisions, carriages, arms, blankets. In their haste, they do not even stop to bury their dead but are gone before noon, littering the road with a stream of discarded baggage and the occasional corpse.

The British return to the Stoney Creek battlefield that afternoon to find guns, stores, and baggage still scattered about the field among the litter of the dead. Some of the American tents are still standing. Vincent turns up at last, exhausted, half-famished, his sword, hat, and horse all missing. Lost in the woods, convinced that his army had been annihilated, he has blundered about for seven miles, expecting at any moment to be captured. This embarrassing footnote to the action has no part in the report that Harvey makes to Sir George Prevost. Nor does the signal contribution of Billy Green, who will for the remainder of his eighty-four years be known locally as Billy Green, the Scout.

The American retreat continues. From Fort George, Dearborn orders Major-General Morgan Lewis, his deputy commander, to make haste to Stoney Creek to attack the British. Lewis, who allowed the British to slip out of his grasp during the capture of Fort George, postpones the advance for half a day—because of a rainstorm! The old politician is not held in great esteem by his fellows. Peter B. Porter, Congressman, War Hawk, and Quartermaster General of New York, comments that Lewis “could not go sixteen miles to fight the enemy, not because his force was too small, but because he had not waggons to carry tents and camp kettles for his army.” Porter claims that Lewis’s own baggage moves “in two stately wagons—one drawn by two, the other by four horses, carrying the various furniture of a Secretary of State’s office, a lady’s dressing chamber, an alderman’s dining room and the contents of a grocer’s shop.”

All this ponderous accoutrement is now threatened as the British fleet under Sir James Yeo appears outside the mouth of the Niagara, apparently threatening Fort George. Dearborn, whose physical condition is aggravated by mental stress, nervously dispatches a series of
notes urging Lewis to send back all his dragoons and eight hundred foot-soldiers to defend the fort.

Yeo moves his vessels up to Forty Mile Creek, where the Americans are camped. Lewis, who has just arrived on the scene, resolves to retire at once, abandoning his supplies in such haste that the occupying British seize 600 tents, 200 camp kettles, 140 barrels of flour, 150 stands of arms, and a baggage train of twenty boats for which the Americans have neglected to supply an escort.

Within three days of the Battle of Stoney Creek, the situation along the Niagara frontier has been reversed. The Americans had been in full possession of the peninsula, outnumbering the British defenders at least three to one. The command at Montreal was prepared to evacuate most of the province, to sacrifice the militia and pull back the regulars to Kingston. But as the result of a single unequal contest, hastily planned at the last minute and fought in absolute darkness by confused and disorganized men, the invaders have lost control. On June 9, they burn Fort Erie and evacuate all the defence posts along the Niagara River, retiring in a body behind the log palisades of Fort George. Except for a few brief forays, it will be their prison until winter forces them across the river to American soil.

NEAR BEAVER DAMS, UPPER CANADA, JUNE 21, 1813

Lieutenant James FitzGibbon and his Bloody Boys are hot in pursuit of Dr. Cyrenius Chapin, an American surgeon from Buffalo whose band of mounted volunteers has been plundering the homes of Canadian settlers along the Niagara River. Leaving his men hidden near Lundy’s Lane, FitzGibbon moves up the road seeking information about Chapin’s movements. Ahead he spots a fluttering handkerchief: Mrs. James Kerby, wife of a local militia captain, is trying to get his attention. She runs to him, urges him to flee: Chapin has just passed through at the head of two hundred men.

But FitzGibbon does not retire. Up ahead he has spotted an enemy dragoon’s horse hitched to a post in front of Deffield’s Inn. He rides up, dismounts, bursts into the inn. An American rifleman
covers him, but FitzGibbon, who is wearing a grey-green fustian overall covering his uniform as a disguise, clasps him by the hand, claims an old acquaintance, and having thus thrown the enemy off guard, seizes his rifle barrel and orders him to surrender. The man refuses, clings to his weapon, tries to fire it while his comrade levels his own piece at FitzGibbon. FitzGibbon turns about and, keeping the first rifle clamped in his right hand, catches the other’s with his left and forces it down until it points at his comrade. Now FitzGibbon exercises his great strength to drag both men out of the tavern, all three swearing and calling on one another to surrender.

Up runs Mrs. Kerby, begging and threatening. Up scampers a small boy who throws rocks at the Americans. The trio continues to struggle until one of the dragoons manages to pull FitzGibbon’s sword from its sheath with his left hand. He is about to thrust it into his opponent’s chest when Mrs. Deffield, the tavernkeeper’s wife, who has been standing in the doorway all this time, a small child in her arms, kicks the weapon out of his hand. As he stoops to recover it, she drops the infant, wrenches the sword away from the American, and runs off.

FitzGibbon throws one of his assailants against the steps and disarms him. The other is attacked by Deffield, the tavernkeeper, who knocks the flint out of his weapon, rendering it useless. FitzGibbon mounts his horse and, driving his two prisoners before him, makes his escape two minutes before Chapin’s main force arrives.

The incident adds to FitzGibbon’s reputation as a bold and enterprising guerrilla leader. The Niagara peninsula at this moment is a no man’s land, the populace split between those loyal to the British cause and others who flock to the American side. It is not always possible to distinguish between friend and foe in this heterogeneous society of old soldiers, English and Scots immigrants, fervent Loyalists, and rootless new arrivals from America. Old feuds and personal grudges play their own role in the growing schism that sets family against family and alarms the high command.

The two most notorious defectors are Joseph Willcocks, a disgruntled newspaper editor and member of the House of Assembly,
and his colleague, Benajah Mallory. The pair are in the act of forming a body of mounted “Canadian Volunteers” to aid the Americans and terrify the Loyalists. Willcocks has some grudges to settle.

For much of the populace the best policy is to lie low and try to keep out of trouble. There are some, however, who are prepared to risk their lives to harass the Americans. It is FitzGibbon’s task to aid these partisans—to keep the enemy off balance and penned up in Fort George by a series of ambuscades and skirmishes. With Harvey’s blessing he has organized some fifty volunteers from the 49th, provided them with grey-green coveralls as disguises, and trained them in guerrilla warfare. They gallop about the frontier, never sleeping in the same place twice, signalling each other by means of cow bells, which excite no suspicion in this pastoral lowland. They call themselves the Bloody Boys.

FitzGibbon—the man who entered the American camp at Stoney Creek disguised as a butter pedlar—is the perfect leader for such a force. He is a popular officer, unconventional, immensely strong and lithe. The semi-literate son of an Irish cottager, he entered the service too poor to advance himself by the successive purchase of rank. But he was fortunate that Isaac Brock was his commanding officer, for he was Brock’s kind of soldier. Fiercely ambitious, almost entirely self-educated, an omnivorous reader in spite of his meagre schooling, FitzGibbon soon came to Brock’s attention. Under Brock, he learned grammar, spelling, manners. His patron lent him books, corrected his pronunciation. FitzGibbon can never forget the day when, as adjutant taking dictation from his commander, he mispronounced the word “ascertain” and felt so ashamed that he immediately purchased a spelling book, a dictionary, and a grammar. The three volumes made him so amazed at his own ignorance that he determined to better himself. The orderly room, he has remarked more than once, was his high school, the mess room his university.

He learned also, under Brock, how to handle men. He treats them “as a lady would her piano—that is put them in tune (good humour) before I played upon them.” As a result, his men have such faith in
him that, as one of them puts it, “if he had told any one of them to jump into the river, he would have obeyed.”

On June 22 FitzGibbon, having narrowly escaped Cyrenius Chapin’s marauders, takes his men to the two-storey stone house owned by a militia captain, John De Cew, not far from Beaver Dams on Twelve Mile Creek, about seventeen miles from Fort George.

The De Cew house, which FitzGibbon has appropriated as headquarters, forms the apex of a triangle of defence that the British have thrown out to contain Fort George. At the left base of the triangle, seven miles away at the mouth of Twelve Mile Creek, Major Peter De Haren is stationed with three companies of regulars. At the right base, farther up the lake on the heights above Twenty Mile Creek, Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Bisshopp is posted with a small brigade of light infantry. William Hamilton Merritt’s Provincial Dragoons, FitzGibbon’s Bloody Boys, John Norton’s Mohawks, and Captain Dominique Ducharme’s band of Caughnawaga Indians patrol the intervening countryside, forcing back the American pickets and harassing the enemy’s own marauders.

It is all very romantic—men on horseback, often in disguise, riding through the night, cutting and thrusting, taking prisoners, making hairbreadth escapes. For those whose homes are plundered and whose menfolk are wounded or killed it is also tragic, but by European standards it is not war. At the very moment when FitzGibbon is struggling with Chapin’s dragoons, the Duke of Wellington is hurling 87,000 men against Napoleon’s brother Joseph, King of Naples, on the Spanish plain of Vitoria. Wellington’s victory costs him five thousand casualties; the French lose eight thousand and are driven back across the Pyrenees. Napoleon’s cause is clearly doomed, though not finished, and a wild bacchanalia ensues that makes the looting and burning on the Niagara peninsula seem like very small potatoes indeed.

The following evening, just after sunset, while Wellington’s army is recovering from its victory orgy in far-off Spain, a slight and delicate little Loyalist woman in a gingham dress stained with mud makes her appearance at the De Cew house to announce that she has an
important message for FitzGibbon. She is Mrs. James Secord, aged thirty-eight, mother of five, wife of a militiaman badly wounded at Queenston Heights. She tells FitzGibbon that she has heard from Americans in Queenston that an attack is being planned on the De Cew headquarters the following day. To carry her warning, she has made her way on foot through the dreaded Black Swamp that lies between Queenston and De Cew’s, staying clear of the main roads in order to avoid capture. She is exhausted but game, triumphant after her long journey, which has apparently taken her, at some risk, through the camp of the Caughnawagas.

Laura Secord’s adventure, which is destined to become an imperishable Canadian legend, causes FitzGibbon to alert Norton’s Mohawks and to keep men posted all night to warn of impending attack. None comes. Is her story, then, a fabrication? Scarcely. She is the daughter of a Loyalist family; her husband is still crippled from wounds inflicted by American soldiers. She has not struggled nineteen miles in the boiling sun from Queenston, through St. Davids and across a treacherous morass on a whim.

In all her long life, Laura Secord will tell her story many times, embellishing it here and there, muddying it more than a little. The Prince of Wales himself will hear of it. Others will add to it: a cow will become part of the legend.

Laura’s story will be used to underline the growing myth that the War of 1812 was won by true-blue Canadians—in this case a brave Loyalist housewife who single-handedly saved the British Army from defeat. It dovetails neatly with John Strachan’s own conviction that the Canadian militia, and not the British regulars or the Indians, were the real heroes.

But one mystery remains: Laura will never make clear exactly how she heard the rumour of an impending attack on the afternoon or evening of June 21. On this detail she is vague and contradictory, telling FitzGibbon that her husband learned of it from an American officer; telling her granddaughter, years later, that she herself overheard it from enemy soldiers who forced her to give them dinner in Queenston.