Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (97 page)

The American advance has left a legacy of bitterness. Dr. William “Tiger” Dunlop, an assistant surgeon with the 89th, working with the wounded of both armies in the various farmhouses that do duty as makeshift hospitals, discovers that he cannot trust some of the Loyalist farmers near the stricken Americans, so great is their hatred of the enemy.

Fortunately, this brief explosion in their midst marks the last military excursion down the great river. For John Crysler and his neighbours, the war is over. In spite of James Wilkinson’s hollow boast that the attack on Montreal is merely suspended and not abandoned, the St. Lawrence Valley will never again shiver to the crash of alien musketry.

SEVEN
The Niagara in Flames

November–December, 1813

With the news of Procter’s defeat on the Thames, General Vincent hastily moves his Centre Division back to Burlington Heights, leaving the Niagara peninsula a no man’s land. The Americans, hived in Fort George, cannot break out except for brief forays against the surrounding countryside. The regulars have departed to join Wilkinson. William Henry Harrison and his men have come and gone. The new American commander, Brigadier-General George McClure, a New York militia officer, is planning to move up the peninsula with his citizen soldiers in an attempt to dislodge Vincent’s army
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SHIPMAN’S CORNERS (ST. CATHARINES), UPPER CANADA, NOVEMBER 28, 1813

Captain William Hamilton Merritt and two of his Provincial Dragoons, their uniforms concealed by long greatcoats, lurk by a bridge over Twelve Mile Creek, spying out the countryside. Disloyalty is rife; traitors abound. Joseph Willcocks, the Canadian
turncoat, is an hour away, riding at the head of an armed troop of former Canadians on one of his nightly attacks against his one-time neighbours. To young Captain Merritt’s bitter disappointment, he has just missed tangling with him.

Two dissident Canadians mistake the three dragoons for members of the invading army. From them, Merritt learns that the Americans are marching out of Fort George, heading for Burlington Heights, and that their advance post is already at Shipman’s.

Merritt is forty miles from the nearest British post. If the Americans discover his presence he will certainly be captured—and there are enough enemy sympathizers about to spread the news. These are confusing times. Villages change hands, often overnight. Pickets, advance parties, mounted marauders from both sides gallop about seeking each other and often confusing themselves, for it is not always possible to tell friend from foe: men from both sides speak the same language; not everyone wears a uniform, and some who do so, like Merritt and his men, are disguised.

The three dragoons retire slowly through the night until they reach the Runchey farmhouse at Twenty Mile Creek. Here they run directly into two enemy horsemen, and an odd little charade takes place. Merritt, posing as an American, affects a Yankee accent. The Americans, seeing through the deception, pretend to be British. A scuffle follows and shots are fired, just as two more horsemen ride up.

These are also Merritt’s men—his sergeant-major and his cornet, Amos McKenney, both hot on the trail of another traitor—but Merritt does not recognize them in the dark, and an incredible mixup ensues. Merritt shoots off McKenney’s cap, believing him to be an American. McKenney’s horse, startled by the shot, lurches and throws him to the ground. Merritt’s own horse is exhausted from the night ride, and so the young captain leaps into the empty saddle and dashes away. Only when he reaches headquarters at Dundas and recognizes the bridle does he realize, with a sinking heart, that he may have shot his best friend and comrade.

McKenney is not dead, only unhorsed and stunned. He lights out for the woods, spends the rest of the night stumbling through the undergrowth, trying to keep away from the enemy whom he can hear crashing through the bushes, hot on his trail. When dawn arrives, the “enemy” turns out to be his own sergeant-major, who has also spent the night fleeing from an unseen adversary—who turns out to be McKenney. The embarrassed pair make their way back to Dundas, to the relief of their crestfallen commander.

The Niagara Frontier, December, 1813

At twenty, William Hamilton Merritt is that inevitable product of war—a young-old man. He has already had more than a year of almost uninterrupted warfare—a mounted guerrilla veteran of a dozen skirmishes, hair-breadth escapes, shoot-outs, midnight rides, sleepless nights, sudden forays, hurried retreats. He is well educated, having studied the classics under John Burns, the Presbyterian minister at Newark, and mathematics and surveying under Richard Cockrel, the noted Ancaster schoolmaster—learning that will stand him in good stead in the future when he builds the first Welland Canal. At sixteen, Merritt operated a two-hundred acre farm and a general store. At nineteen, his commercial ambitions were interrupted by
the war. He served in his father’s Niagara Light Dragoons until the unit was disbanded in the spring of 1813. From that point on, as far as Merritt was concerned, it was somebody else’s war. But General Vincent had other ideas. Here was a man who knew every back road, lane, and creek bed in the Niagara peninsula and—equally important—was conversant with the loyalties of every settler. Who better to raise and lead a troop of fifty Provincial Dragoons? Since that time, Merritt has been in the thick of it.

Since October, all his energies have been funnelled into a single purpose: he desperately wants to capture the traitor Willcocks, who briefly kidnapped his father. The elder Merritt is now safely returned to Shipman’s, the rest of the family scattered about the peninsula. Young Merritt cannot understand why the British do not drive the Americans back across the Niagara River. What is the army about, he keeps asking himself. Why doesn’t Vincent go on the attack? Have our great men given up the idea of regaining the country?

He is still puzzling over this lack of initiative at a party on November 29 when a midnight order calls on him to move at once with his dragoons to Forty Mile Creek. He is to join Colonel John Murray, the army’s inspecting field officer, who is close on the trail of the treasonous Willcocks. “King Joe,” as Merritt sardonically calls him, is reported to be in the vicinity with 250 men, but when Merritt’s troop arrives after an all-night ride, they have already slipped away.

By this time Brigadier-General George McClure’s main army of sixteen hundred New York militia has reached Shipman’s. Willcocks, acting as his advance scout, somehow manages to inflate Murray’s light force into an army. He warns McClure that two or three thousand British troops are on their way to meet the American threat.

Does McClure believe this nonsense, or is he merely seeking a way out? His bravado is well known, his bravery held in lower esteem. “Your general will lead you to victory and share the dangers with you,” he told his brigade in September. Now, on the strength of a rumour, he is prepared to fold up and retire.

He calls the usual council of war. His officers tell him what he wants to hear: it would be madness to go on. And so it would, for
the British, having beaten Wilkinson, are now able to rush regular troops back to Upper Canada and, with a new commanding general, Gordon Drummond, in charge, to go immediately on the offensive.

The morning after the council, McClure counts his men to discover that six hundred—one-third of his army—have not waited for their December 9 discharge but have simply deserted. In a panic, he realizes that he has left Fort George almost defenceless. Seizing some cattle and flour from the settlers, he makes a hasty withdrawal.

Now the eager Murray asks Vincent’s permission to move forward but is told he cannot take his main body past Forty Mile Creek or his outposts past Twelve Mile Creek. Vincent, it appears, is no more anxious to tangle with McClure than the American is with him. His health has failed him and he is about to be replaced.

Merritt worries about his father. On December 8 he persuades the commander of Murray’s advance picket to let him go on to Shipman’s to round up any suspicious characters who may be helping the Americans. His real purpose is to bring his father to safety. That done he returns to Forty Mile Creek where he receives a stiff dressing-down from Colonel Murray for disobeying orders. But a moment later Murray himself disobeys instructions. When Merritt reports a rumour that McClure has threatened to lay waste the countryside if the British dare advance, Murray agrees to move his entire force forward to Twenty Mile Creek, in direct contravention of Vincent’s orders. To Merritt, this is not far enough; he fears for the safety of the community at Shipman’s.

He returns to Twelve Mile Creek and publicly assembles all the available militia, a ruse that convinces McClure’s scouts that the greater part of Vincent’s Centre Division has already reached that spot.

Merritt has had little sleep for three nights. At two on the morning of December 10, having just bedded down in a nearby farmhouse, he is dispatched on another errand—to ride immediately to Beaver Dams to prevent a cache of flour from falling into American hands. When he returns to Shipman’s, the exhausted dragoon is surprised to discover that Colonel Murray has moved forward. Orders or no orders, the aggressive Murray is determined to march on Fort
George this very night. The town of Newark is in flames, burned by the Americans: every house, every barn, every shop, every public building. It is a bad business; but Merritt cannot help a moment of inward elation, for it means that the Americans are leaving Canada.

NEWARK, UPPER CANADA, DECEMBER 10, 1813

Snow. Snow falling in a curtain of heavy flakes. Snow blowing in the teeth of a bitter east wind off the lake. Snow lying calf deep in the streets, whirling in eddies around log buildings, creeping under doors, piling in drifts at the base of snake fences. Snow clogging the brims of top hats, crusting mufflers, whitening horses’ manes, smothering the neat gardens of summer. No day, this, to be out in the storm; better to crouch by hearth or kitchen stove, making peepholes in the frosted windows from which to view the white world from behind the security of solid walls. But not on this day, for there is no security in Newark. Before darkness falls there will be few walls standing in this doomed village.

On Queen Street, in Joseph McCarthy’s store, a violent quarrel is in progress. The American commander, George McClure, is hotly defending his decision to burn the town against the vehement protests of Dr. Cyrenius Chapin, the partisan leader from Buffalo.

McClure is in a near panic. Armstrong has ignored his repeated request for reinforcements. Harrison and his veterans are gone. With the threat to Montreal at an end, the British can again turn their attention and their troops to the Niagara country. Fort George is virtually defenceless, for all of McClure’s militia, having reached the end of their period of enlistment, have recrossed the river in a body and are dispersing to their homes. Threats, bribes, entreaties have not persuaded them to stay. Indeed, they have been in a state of near mutiny on learning that they will not receive their pay before demobilization. McClure has gone to the extreme of offering an extra two dollars a month to any man who will remain. To his chagrin and disgust, dozens take the money, then desert.

To hold the captured British fort—the only American foothold
on the peninsula—McClure has some seventy regulars plus Joseph Willcocks’s small corps of about one hundred Canadian Volunteers. Merritt’s hoax has convinced the General that the entire British army is on its way from Twelve Mile Creek. Willcocks has just lost five men, one of whom has been handed over to the Indians—an act that strikes terror into the hearts of others. A council of war has speedily concluded that the fort must be abandoned and destroyed before the British arrive.

McClure attempts to justify the decision to burn the town by brandishing a letter from Armstrong, written the previous October:

Understanding that the defense of the post committed to your charge may render it proper to destroy the town of Newark, you are hereby directed to apprise its inhabitants of this circumstance, and invite them to remove themselves and their effects to some place of greater safety.