The Invasion of Canada (14 page)

On May 25, Hull parades his troops in the company of Governor Meigs of Ohio, a capable politician with the singular Christian name “Return.” The volunteers are an unruly lot, noisy, insubordinate, untrained. Hull is appalled. Their arms are unfit for use; the leather covering the cartridge boxes is rotten; many of the men have no blankets and clothing. No armourers have been provided to repair the weapons, no means have been adopted to furnish the missing clothing, no public stores of arms or supplies exist, and the powder in the magazines is useless. Since the triumph of the Revolution, America has not contemplated an offensive war, or even a defensive one.

For these men, dressed in homespun, armed when armed at all with tomahawks and hunting knives, Hull has prepared the same kind of ringing speech, with its echoes of Tippecanoe, that is being heard in the Twelfth Congress:

“On marching through a wilderness memorable for savage barbarity you will remember the causes by which that barbarity has been heretofore excited. In viewing the ground stained with the blood of your fellow citizens, it will be impossible to suppress the feelings of indignation. Passing by the ruins of a fortress erected in our territory by a foreign nation in times of profound peace, and for the express purpose of exciting the savages to hostility, and supplying them with
the means of conducting a barbarous war, must remind you of that system of oppression and injustice which that nation has continually practised, and which the spirit of an indignant people can no longer endure.”

Hull and his staff set off to review the troops, a fife and drum corps leading the way. The sound of the drums frightens the pony ridden by one of Hull’s staff; it turns about, dashes off in the wrong direction. A second, ridden by Hull’s son and aide, Abraham, follows. Soon the General finds his own mount out of control. It gallops after the others, tossing its rider about unmercifully. Encumbered by his ceremonial sword, Hull cannot control the horse; his feet slip out of the stirrups, he loses his balance, his hat flies off, and he is forced to cling to the animal’s mane in a most unsoldierly fashion until it slows to a walk. At last the staff regroups, confers, decides not to pass down the ranks in review but rather to have the troops march past. It is not a propitious beginning.

The volunteers have been formed into three regiments. Jeffersonian democracy, which abhors anything resembling a caste system, decrees that they elect their own officers, an arrangement that reinforces Great Britain’s contempt for America’s amateur army. McArthur is voted colonel of the 1st Regiment of Ohio Volunteers, and it is remarked that he “looks more like a go-ahead soldier than any of his brother officers.” A go-ahead soldier on the Ohio frontier, especially an elected one, differs markedly from a go-ahead soldier in Wellington’s army. To a later English visitor, McArthur is “dirty and butcher-like, very unlike a soldier in appearance, seeming half-savage and dressed like a backwoodsman; generally considered being only fit for hard knocks and Indian warfare” (which is, of course, exactly the kind of contest that is facing him).

In the volunteer army, officers must act like politicians. More often than not they
are
politicians. McArthur has been a member of the Ohio legislature. The 2nd Regiment of Ohio Volunteers elects a former mayor of Cincinnati, James Findlay, as its colonel. The 3rd votes for Lewis Cass, a stocky, coarse-featured lawyer of flaming ambition who is U.S. marshal for the state. Almost from the outset Hull has his troubles with these three. Cass has little use for him. “Instead of having an able energetic commander, we have a weak old man,” he writes to a friend. Hull, on his part, is contemptuous of the militia, whom he found unreliable during the Revolution. Imagine
electing
officers to command!

“Elected officers,” he believes, “can never be calculated upon as great disciplinarians. In every station the elected will be unwilling to incur the displeasure of the electors; indeed he will often be found to court their favour by a familiarity and condescension which are totally incompatible with military discipline. The man that votes his officer his commission, instead of being implicitly obedient, as every soldier ought to be, will be disposed to question and consider the propriety of the officer’s conduct before he acts.…”

Another problem faces Hull. The three militia commanders are full colonels. But James Miller, who will lead the regulars, is only a half-colonel. When Miller protests the injustice of this – if anything, he should outrank the amateurs – Cass, Findlay, and McArthur threaten to quit and disband their regiments unless their rank is maintained. There is nothing that Hull or his superiors in Washington can do about this small-boy petulance. The militia colonels continue to outrank Miller.

The army starts the march north on June 1. A few days later at the frontier community of Urbana, the last outpost of civilization, Hull’s suspicions about the militia are reinforced. From this point to Detroit the troops face two hundred miles of wilderness with no pathway, not even an Indian trail to follow. The volunteers turn ugly. They had been promised an advance of fifty dollars each for a year’s clothing but have received only sixteen. One unpopular officer is ridden out of camp on a rail, and when the orders come to march, scores refuse to move. Into camp, at this impasse, marches Miller’s 4th Infantry Regiment of regulars. These veterans of Tippecanoe prod the wavering volunteers into action, and the troops move out, with McArthur’s regiment in the lead, hacking a way through jungle and forest. The following day, three mutinous ringleaders are court-martialled and sentenced to have their heads half shaved and their hands tied and to be marched round the lines with the label “Tory” between their shoulders – a punishment the prisoners consider worse than the death-sentence.

Hull’s force is as much a mob as an army. The volunteers mock the General’s son Abraham, who, mounted upon a spirited horse, in full uniform and blind drunk, toppled into the Mad River in front of the entire assembly.

“Who got drunk and fell in the Mad River?” somebody calls from the ranks, to which a distant companion answers, “Captain Hull!” and a third echoes, “That’s true!”

Hull’s March to detroit

The jests are needed, for the rain falls incessantly. The newly built road becomes a swamp; wagons are mired and have to be hoisted out by brute strength. The troops keep up their spirits on corn liquor supplied by friendly settlers.

Then, at the brand-new blockhouse on the Scioto named Fort McArthur, a bizarre episode dries up the supply of moonshine. A guard named Peter Vassar lies slumped under a tree, befuddled by drink. He hears a sudden noise, seizes his musket, makes sure it is charged, takes deliberate aim, and shoots another sentry, Joseph England, through the left breast, just missing his heart. Vassar is court-martialled and given a grotesque sentence: both ears are cropped and each cheek branded with the letter M. McArthur issues an order restraining settlers from selling liquor to his men without his written permission. The ban does not extend to his officers.

Thus dispirited, the troops plunge through the pelting rain into the no man’s land of the Black Swamp, a labyrinth of deadfalls and ghostly trees behind whose trunks Tecumseh’s unseen spies keep watch. A fog of insects clogs the soldiers’ nostrils and bloats their faces; a gruel of mud and water rots their boots and swells their
ankles. They cannot rest at day’s end until they hack out a log breastwork against Indian attack. Strung out for two miles day after day, the human serpent finally wriggles to a halt, blocked by rising water and unbridgeable streams. Hull camps his men in ankle-deep mud, builds a blockhouse, names it Fort Necessity, and there, from necessity, the sodden army waits until the floods ebb. Yet Hull is not cast down. He has more than two thousand rank and file under his command and believes his force superior to any that may oppose it.

Finally the troops move on to the head of navigation on a branch of the Maumee River (also known as the Miami of the Lakes). And here a letter catches up with Hull. It is from Eustis, the Secretary of War, urging him to advance with all possible haste to Detroit, there to await further orders. The letter is dated June 18, but it must have been penned on the morning of that day because it fails to include the one piece of information that is essential to prevent a major blunder: in the afternoon of June 18, the United States has officially declared war on Great Britain.

IN WASHINGTON, while Hull’s army trudges through the swamps of Ohio and Robert Dickson’s Indians head for St. Joseph’s Island, Henry Clay and his War Hawks are in full cry. In their eyes, Augustus Foster will write, long after the fact, war is “as necessary to America as a duel is to a young naval officer to prevent his being bullied and elbowed in society.”

Spurred on by hawkish rhetoric, Washington has been playing a dangerous game of “I dare you” with Westminster. Most Republicans in the Twelfth Congress are opposed to war, but they do not balk at voting for increased military appropriations or an expanded militia. They are confident that Great Britain, faced with the threat of a nuisance war in North America and heavily committed to the struggle against Napoleonic France, will back down at the last moment, cancel the damaging Orders in Council, and abandon the maddening practice of impressment.

But the British do not back down, believing in their turn that the Americans are bluffing, a premise encouraged by Foster’s myopia. By the time this fact sinks in, those who have gone along with the War Hawks in Congress cannot in honour vote against what John C. Calhoun calls “the second struggle for our liberty.”

By midwinter, Clay and his followers had all but made up their minds that in the face of British intransigence, the only honourable course was war. Their strategy was to make retreat impossible, even for the most dovish Republicans. They will act as the catalyst that, in June, leads to declaration.

Unlike the aging veterans, pondering possible strategies for possible invasion, these are young, vigorous men between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-six, lawyers all, with an eloquence exceeded only by verbosity. They have been raised on tales of the Revolution told by elders who have forgotten much of the horror but remember all of the glory. They are men of the old frontier, from Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and the outer edges of New Hampshire and New York – the kind of men who believe in the need to avenge any insult, imagined or real, who know what it means to fight for the land, and who are convinced that the only good Indian is a dead one.

Tippecanoe has given them new impetus. In speech after fiery speech they use every device to convince their colleagues and the country that war – or at least the threat of war – is both necessary and attractive: if Britain can be brought to her senses through an attack on Canada, America’s export trade will again flourish, the depression will end, the Indians will be put forever in their place, and the troublesome Canadian border will be done away with. These are debating points. The essence of the Hawks’ position is contained in the words of Felix Grundy, the young Tennessee criminal lawyer with the piercing blue eyes who cries that America must “by force redress the violated rights and honor of an injured and insulted people.”

There is more than an echo here of Tecumseh and the young braves who have deserted their own elders to follow him down the path of revenge and glory. The leaders of the two war parties are not dissimilar. Both are handsome men, tall and lithe, with flashing eyes and vibrant personalities. Both dress stylishly and with purpose: Clay shows his patriotism by wearing Kentucky homespun instead of British broadcloth; Tecumseh dresses in unadorned deerskin for similar reasons. Each is courageous, quick to take offence; Clay bears the scar of a duel on his thigh, the result of an acrimonious debate in the Kentucky legislature. In an age of oratory, these two who have never met and never will meet are the most eloquent of all. One white witness who heard Tecumseh at the Springfield, Ohio, council in 1806 declares that it was not until he heard Henry Clay speak that he felt he was again in the presence of an orator of the Shawnee’s rank. Each
man is the acknowledged spokesman of his small group of followers, a group in each case whose influence is far out of proportion to its numbers. And both are convinced that war is the only solution to the slights and grievances which have angered and humiliated them. The British are to Clay what the Americans are to Tecumseh.