Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (76 page)

A rumour has spread through the American lines that Major-General Procter has promised Tecumseh all of Michigan Territory and Harrison’s head as well, should the British be victorious at Fort Meigs. More than any other enemy leader, Tecumseh is both feared and admired by the Americans. Harrison has no intention of responding to his taunt.

He will not sleep this long night until he has made a full tour of the camp to make certain every man is at his post. His adjutant of
the day, who will accompany him, is one Ohio militiaman he can trust—a wiry, twenty-six-year-old draftee named Alexander Bourne. Bourne does not need to be here, one hundred miles from civilization, drenched by the chill rain, living in a muddy cave, preyed on by hostile Indians. The law allows substitutes, and Bourne could easily have afforded to pay a neighbour ninety dollars to serve six months in his place. But, in spite of the pleading of his friends, Bourne refused. Not all of his fellow militiamen were as steadfast. In the first draft of three men from his unit, Bourne’s name was seventeenth on the roll. He was taken anyway because the first fourteen ran off to the woods and were hidden by cronies. Now he is an instant officer, promoted of necessity from private to lieutenant because the company sergeant is so drunk he cannot call the roll.

Bourne’s first task this night is to inform Major Alexander that he is duty field officer. He finds him drinking brandy in an officers’ marquee, protesting he is unfit for duty. Bourne takes him by the arm, and the two stumble through the lines, the Major lamenting his situation, the adjutant doing his best to cheer him up. The General, it develops, is far too occupied to notice the Major’s state. Off they all go on their rounds, General and staff, the drunk and the sober, tumbling into ditches, sometimes two or three on top of one another as the British round shot hurtles harmlessly into the river bank below. It is the first time that Bourne, or indeed Harrison himself, has been exposed to the British artillery fire, but Bourne is not dismayed. He and his comrades are determined now to defend the fort to the last, for they are convinced that surrender will mean massacre at the Indians’ hands.

As for Harrison, he can only hope that Brigadier-General Green Clay’s reinforcements are within striking distance of his besieged garrison.

FORT MEIGS, OHIO, MAY 1, 1813

The artillery barrage, which the British believe will shatter Harrison’s strong point, begins at 11
A.M
., but before the red flag goes up
signalling the first shot, Major-General Procter and his gunners are faced with a frustrating spectacle. Suddenly, as if pulled by an invisible cord, the masking line of tents goes down revealing an immense shield of earth that screens every tent, horse, and man. Behind it, the men lie in trenches and caves hollowed out in the earthen bulwark, awaiting the inevitable.

The first ball has no sooner sped across the river and buried itself in the mud than Harrison turns to his acting quartermaster, a twenty-two-year-old named William Christie.

“Sir,” says the General, “go and nail a banner on every battery, where they shall wave as long as the enemy is in view.” Christie hurries off to obey.

The British seem to have unlimited ammunition—huge twenty-four-pound balls of solid pig iron, smaller shot weighing twelve pounds, and bombs—heavy iron shells full of black powder, fused to explode directly above the heads of the defenders, spewing jagged bits of shrapnel in all directions.

They are crack shots, these British gunners. John Richardson, a gentleman volunteer with the British 41st, and, at the age of sixteen, a veteran of two previous battles, notes that the big cannon are aimed as accurately as rifles. As a member of the covering party protecting one battery, he asks the bombardier’s permission to charge and point one of the pieces and experiences a sense of delight and power to see the ball land exactly where it is aimed.

But although the British send more than 250 missiles crashing into the fort, these do little damage, most burying themselves in the clay of the traverse, now rendered mushy by the incessant rain. Only a handful of men are wounded and only one killed.

Because Harrison is short of ammunition, his own gunners cannot afford the British extravagance. They have 360 shot only for their eighteen-pound cannon, about the same number for their twelves. As the British are also firing twelve-pound balls into the camp, the Major-General sees no reason why these cannot be returned. He offers a gill of whiskey to every man who delivers an enemy ball to the magazine keeper. Before the siege is over, more than one thousand
gills have gone down the throats of the resourceful soldiers. To them, it is a happy substitute for water, which is difficult to come by. The well being dug behind the traverse is not finished, and the men are reduced to scooping up the muddy contents of rainwater pools.

The cannonade lasts until eleven at night, commences with redoubled fury the following dawn. In the next two days the British pour close to one thousand shot into the fort. One militia man, acting on his own, stands on the embankment, warning his comrades of every shot, becoming so skilful that he can predict exactly where each will fall. As he watches the smoke erupt from a British muzzle he calls out “bomb” or “shot,” adding a phrase to indicate its destination—a blockhouse, the main battery, the commissary. His friends urge him to take cover, but he refuses until one shot defies his calculations. The smoke from the cannon has moved neither to right nor to left; he cannot gauge the target. He stands motionless, perplexed, silent, until the great ball strikes him full in the chest, tearing him apart.

Now the British gunners concentrate their fire on the magazine. It has been moved out of the traverse for fear that an exploding bomb may fire it and is now within a small blockhouse, which must be covered with earth for full protection.

“Boys,” says an officer, “who will volunteer to cover the magazine?”

Nobody moves. The British are hurling red-hot cannonballs, which hiss sickeningly as they sink into the mud, sending up clouds of acrid smoke; one would be enough to blow up the building. Finally a few men hesitantly step forward. The gunners have not yet got the range. Perhaps if they move quickly they can get the job done.

They no sooner reach the blockhouse than a cannonball slices off one man’s head. Like men possessed the survivors fling earth on top of the building. Then, to their horror, a bomb falls on the roof, lodges on a brace, spins about like a top. All but one throw themselves face down into the mud, expecting to be blown to pieces. The holdout reasons that since death is inevitable if the bomb bursts, he might as well take a chance. He seizes a boat hook, pulls the sputtering missile to the ground, and jerks the fuse from its socket. His comrades rise and complete their job.

Not far away, Lieutenant Alexander Bourne and a fatigue party of Ohio militia men are struggling to complete an entrenchment. Red-hot cannonballs, aimed at the magazine, whiz past the work party, boiling up the mud until the soldiers can stand it no longer. Bourne reports to Eleazer Wood that he cannot keep his men at this dangerous work. The engineer gives him an unlimited order on the commissary for whiskey, telling him to issue it every half-hour and make the men drink it until they become insensible to fear—but not so drunk, he warns, that they cannot complete the job. Thus fortified, the men reel about, drunkenly curse the British, and ply their shovels until the task is finished.

Bourne, the patriot, is a man fascinated by human nature, and here, during the heat of the barrage, he has an opportunity to examine it under stress. As the cannon thunder and the ground shakes and the rain pelts down he notes examples of indifference, courage, fool-hardiness, and cowardice—the four human characteristics that are intensified by war.

One man, he observes, a saddler from Philadelphia named Isaac Burkelon, seems totally insensible to fear. He is that oddity found in every army, the man who volunteers for everything—having for a price replaced a wealthy Chillicothe citizen in the draft. Bourne comes out of his blockhouse one morning to find a huge bombshell hurtling toward him. He calls to Burkelon to lie down, but the saddler refuses to muddy his clothes. When the bomb bursts four feet away, hurling him to the ground and covering him with filth, he rises, shakes himself, and laughs as if he had just indulged in a bit of spirited horseplay.

Another in Bourne’s company, a sixty-year-old German named Bolenstein, watches another bomb fall outside the blockhouse. It strikes a stump, bounces off it, skips across the ground. Nothing will do but that Bolenstein should go after it, like a youth chasing a football. In vain Bourne calls him to come back; he is already outside the enclosure, and the sentinels, who are under orders to shoot any man who leaves without permission, are cocking their guns and shouting warnings. Bolenstein tells them to fire away—he means to
retrieve the bomb and pull out the fuse. Fortunately it fizzles out, and he returns, laughing, with his prize.

By contrast, Bourne’s quartermaster, Sutton, is a coward, so afraid of death that he can neither eat nor sleep. He crouches behind a pile of flour barrels, and while his comrades stand laughing at him, a twenty-four-pound ball crashes through the floor above his head, throwing staves and hoops in every direction and covering him with flour. He jumps up, hurls himself into a wet ditch, screaming “Oh Lord! Oh Lord!” to emerge plastered with paste.

To protect themselves from the bombshells, the men dig holes behind the traverse, covering each with a plank on top of which they shovel a protective mantle of earth. At the warning cry “Bomb!” each runs for his mole hole; but as the rain continues and the hollows fill with water they are forced back into the tents to emerge, half-awake, at each warning cry until, exhausted and indifferent to danger, they ignore the alarms, determined not to be disturbed, as one puts it, “if ten thousand bombs burst around them.”

By May 3, four British batteries are hammering the fort. Frustrated by Captain Wood’s earthen wall, Procter that night sends a force across the river to establish another. These cannon and mortars, hidden in a thicket only 250 yards from the fort, catch the defenders in a brief crossfire. But Wood has already anticipated the move and a new traverse, hastily thrown up at right angles to the old one, renders the fire ineffective.

The following day—the fourth of the siege—the British fire slackens as if the heart had gone out of the gunners. The defenders, in spite of their exhaustion, are in the habit of waving their hats and giving three cheers whenever the guns are silent, receiving each time an echoing yell from Tecumseh’s followers in the woods. Now, as the cheering dies, a white flag is seen. Captain Peter Latouche Chambers of the 41st arrives under its protection to ask for a parley with Harrison on behalf of his commander.

Says Chambers: “General Procter has directed me to demand the surrender of this post. He wishes to spare the effusion of blood.”

To which Harrison responds with some warmth: “The demand
under the present circumstances, is an extraordinary one. As General Procter did not send me a summons to surrender on his first arrival, I had supposed that he believed me determined to do my duty. His present message indicates an opinion of me that I am at a loss to account for.”

Generals, in this war, may fire cannon at one another, but insults are odious. Captain Chambers hastens to correct any impression of incivility:

“General Procter could never think of saying anything to wound your feelings, sir. The character of General Harrison, as an officer, is well known. General Procter’s force is very respectable, and there is with him a larger body of Indians than has ever before been embodied.”

There it is: the veiled threat that if the fort is taken, the Indians cannot be prevented from massacring the survivors. The threat worked at Michilimackinac early in the war and it worked again at Detroit, when Isaac Brock and Tecumseh terrified William Hull into surrendering not only an army but also most of Michigan. It does not work with Harrison.

“Assure the General,” Harrison responds in his stilted fashion, “that he will never have this post surrendered to him upon any terms. Should it fall into his hands, it will be in a manner calculated to do him more honor, and to give him larger claims upon the gratitude of his government, than any capitulation could possibly do.”

In short, Harrison is prepared to fight to the last man. He does not like Procter and in this chilly exchange makes little attempt to hide his disdain for the man who every American believes (and with truth) abandoned defenceless and wounded Kentucky troops to the hatchets of the Potawatomi after the battle of the River Raisin in January.

Nonetheless he knows his situation is critical. The fort cannot hold out forever. Once its ammunition is gone, Harrison’s men will be at the mercy of an immeasurably stronger and better-trained army of seasoned British regulars and enraged natives.

Midnight comes. The bombardment ceases. Men sleep exhausted in their muddy shelters. And then, out of the blackness comes Captain
William Oliver, Harrison’s emissary. He has slipped through the Indian lines, guarded by fifteen dragoons, all virtually invisible on this foggy, moonless night.

Captain Oliver brings heartening news: General Clay and his reinforcements are only two hours away. Harrison realizes he must act at once. He knows that the bulk of the British force is two miles downriver at the old British Fort Miami, that most of Tecumseh’s Indians are on the right bank, investing his position. This means that the big guns across the river, harassing his stockade, are lightly manned.

He forms his plan swiftly: he will strike simultaneous blows on both sides of the river. Part of Clay’s advancing force will spike the guns on the opposite shore. The remainder will attack the Indians on the near bank. Once the battle is joined, the Americans will burst out of the fort, attack the British battery in their rear, and defeat the British and Indians on the American-held side of the river.

The plan depends on surprise, discipline, and perfect timing. Harrison is only too well aware that Clay’s Kentuckians are green, having seen no more than thirty days’ service. Nonetheless, it is a gamble he must take. He dispatches his aide, Captain Hamilton, and a subaltern under cover of the black night to carry his orders to General Clay.