Also by now Congress was led by a group headed by the redoubtable Henry Clay of Kentucky. These were the “war hawks,” who had an agenda of their own. They argued that because Britain was presently entangled on the European continent in the great war against Napoleonic France, she would be unable to send significant numbers of soldiers and ships to fight in America three thousand miles away. As the rationale went, the only troops the British were likely to employ would be those from her Canadian colony, which in turn would give the United States a perfect excuse to drive the British out of that vast territory and perhaps even to annex it to the new republic. Thus the war hawks were able to persuade Congress to authorize the recruitment of a standing army of 35,000 regulars plus a call for 50,000 volunteers, as well as the federalizing of 100,000 state militia.
This was a tremendous force on paper but a tall order in reality, since the American army at that time had barely been able to recruit 5,000 officers and men despite a bounty for enlistment of $31. Also in the months leading up to the declaration of war Congress authorized some $3 million for equipment, ordnance, and the building of fortifications to protect cities on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.* 5
When all these well-publicized measures failed to yield any concessions from the British Parliament, Congress produced a war bill that passed 79–49 in the House and 19–13 in the Senate—“the closest vote on any declaration of war in American history,” the historian Donald R. Hickey points out—which was signed into law by President Madison the following day, June 18. The panorama of what would become the War of 1812 had rolled forward on a tide of dark, irresistable forces: pride, greed, resentment, hauteur, insult, revenge, and some intangible notion that the Americans should be rid of the British once and for all. Yet now all the follies of the past three decades of isolationism, laxity, and unpreparedness would come home to roost.
At first the news of war with their old archenemy was greeted with enthusiasm by many Americans, but this did not last long. When the immensity of the undertaking began to sink in, a great many people started having second thoughts, which led to much domestic trouble. Especially distressed were the New England states, predominantly Federalist in their politics (and even pro-British, according to some), whose great seafaring trade would be seriously restricted (given that America had no navy to speak of) if not completely curtailed by a British blockade. Farmers began to realize that the crops—cotton, tobacco, sugar, grains, and wheat—they counted on for cash by selling them overseas would probably soon rot in barns or on wharves; men subject to the militia call worried that they would be snatched from their peaceful farms or jobs to fight seasoned British redcoats; even well-to-do women began to comprehend that the latest fashions from London or Paris would no longer be arriving. It was in this atmosphere that the malignancy of war was again perceived to be visited upon the American homeland.
Federalist newspapers quickly decried the declaration of war as a dangerous and unnecessary measure—“President Madison’s War,” it was called—that had put the country’s future in jeopardy by inviting battle with the most powerful nation on earth. All over New England, state legislatures condemned the declaration as hazardous folly for a country so unprepared as the fledgling United States. As the conversation heated, the cry of treason! rang out from both sides, and people were beaten and tarred and feathered; naturally, in some instances duels were fought. In Baltimore, then the country’s third-largest city, ferocious riots erupted when a mob of Democratic Republicans attacked a local Federalist paper. Shots were fired, people killed, homes and businesses burned. Violence swept the city amid looting and talk of hangings.
Into that fray stepped old Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—father of future Confederate commander Robert E. Lee—who had fallen on hard times since his exemplary service in the Revolutionary War and was in Baltimore trying to peddle his memoirs to raise cash. At the outbreak of violence the aristocratic Lee offered his service as mediator and was in return stoned by a mob, suffering severe injuries from which he later died. All in all, the War of 1812 had not gotten off on a good footing.
Nor did things go any better on the military front. By midsummer of 1812 the United States had organized three major army expeditions against Canada, hoping to drive the British out of that country for good. The operations were conducted at points running from just below the Canadian border along the line of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, westward to Niagara on Lake Ontario, and thence farther west to Detroit on Lake Erie. All failed miserably.
The Detroit fiasco was conducted by Michigan governor William Hull, a fifty-nine-year-old relic of the Revolutionary War, who led some 2,000 U.S. Army regulars in an attempt to occupy Fort Detroit, in Canada, and force the retreat of British forces in the region. After numerous mishaps—including a savage attack by Tecumseh’s Indians—Hull reached Fort Detroit, but, after an abortive foray a few miles farther north, there he remained, horrified by a fraudulent document the British commander had let fall into his hands. This ruse claimed that a great swarm of uncontrollable, hostile Indians was descending upon him, setting visions of a horrible massacre dancing in the American commander’s head.
Then a British army—not nearly as strong as Hull’s—arrived and laid siege to Fort Detroit, occasionally lobbing an artillery shell at it. As the weeks passed Hull succumbed to increasing attacks of anxiety and worried publicly about the fate of a number of settlers’ families who also occupied the fort. It was said that he could frequently be seen skulking between the buildings, his mouth stuffed with large twists of chewing tobacco, brown spittle staining his clothes and beard. In any event, on August 16, still fearful of an Indian massacre and without a word to anybody, the wretched Hull suddenly surrendered the fort and his whole army along with it. British officials paroled him* 6 a few weeks later, but when Hull returned to the United States he was arrested, tried by court-martial, convicted of cowardice and neglect of duty, and sentenced to death.* 7 Thus ended Operation Detroit.
Next was the operation against Niagara, designed to drive the British from the southern end of Lake Ontario. In the autumn of 1812 a force of 6,000 Americans led by an inexperienced political appointee, forty-eight-year-old militia general Stephen Van Rensselaer, encountered an army of British redcoats and Indians about one-third its strength on the opposite bank of the Niagara River. Van Rensselaer’s plan for an amphibious operation to cross the river and attack them was foiled when for some reason an American officer vanished downriver toward the falls in a boat carrying all the oars for the expedition, and was not heard from again. (Theories yet abound as to whether this officer was a traitor or somehow got swept up in the current and went over the falls.) On October 13, however, a second try was successful, and some 1,000 American soldiers landed on the British side of the river, driving back the redcoats and Indians and in the process killing their commander, the very talented English general Isaac Brock.
Here was a perfect opportunity for Van Rensselaer to seize the initiative, to bring his entire force into Canada and drive the British armies back on themselves, but it was not to be. The army Van Rensselaer commanded was made up in large part not of regulars but of militia who became fainthearted when they saw the dead and wounded soldiers being returned in boats from the site of the battle. With no apparent shame, they piously invoked a clause in their original enlistment contracts with their various states, claiming that as militia they were not authorized to fight outside U.S. territory. Thus the campaign failed entirely, and the remainder of the American soldiers who had at least clawed their way to the British side of the river were captured.
Van Rensselaer resigned and his command was given over to General Alexander Smyth, who did no better, and probably worse. Instead of attacking immediately, he cravenly took a vote of his officers on the question of assaulting the British-held Fort Erie just to the south; when they demurred, Smyth canceled operations and slunk back to his native Virginia (taking “back roads,” according to one historian), where he
was cashiered from the army. So concluded Operation Niagara.
Next came the assault against Montreal, which was planned as the prize pearl of U.S. military strategy. To lead this vital mission the secretary of war resurrected yet another Revolutionary War retread, Henry Dearborn, who himself had been secretary of war in the Jefferson administration. Old and fat at sixty-one, Dearborn was also agonizingly slow. He dithered away the summer fooling with coastal forts in New England and complaining to Washington that he couldn’t find enough troops for the invasion. Finally, in November, just before the Canadian winter set in, the War Department found it necessary to order the newly promoted major general to march his army north and strike at Montreal. With about 8,000 troops, Dearborn moved from Albany up to the shores of Lake Champlain and thence into Canada, where his army—or at least part of it, the militia again refusing to leave American soil—engaged in a desultory and unsatisfactory nighttime fight with a British force about half its size. After this puny effort Dearborn marched them back south again, his mission a failure and a disgrace. Ironically, Dearborn later sat on the court-martial board that sentenced the unfortunate General Hull to death for the Detroit fiasco.
The Federalist press naturally had a field day with all this bad news, especially in populous New England, where antiwar sentiments ran high and a movement was already afoot to end the fighting. Gloomy expressions were thrown about in the press: “degrading,” “dismal perfidy,” “ruin and death,” “abysmal misfortunes,” and the like—perhaps somewhat extreme, but in truth much of the criticism stuck. Results of the 1812 campaign along the Canadian border running from New York to Michigan had left the Americans with nothing to show but a cataract of inglorious defeats that rendered the British stronger than ever, not only still holding Canada but comfortably ensconced on United States soil. With that disgraceful situation to contemplate, the U.S. Army retired to winter quarters, praying for better fortunes in the spring of 1813.
The American campaign of 1813 opened along the lines of the previous year, with attacks again planned along the Canadian border, except this time they were designed more to drive the British back into Canada than to actually conquer Canada itself, as had originally been intended.
Over the winter Madison replaced his incompetent secretary of war, William Eustis, with an even worse choice, New Yorker John Armstrong, a political waffler and intriguer who, during the Revolution, had conspired to oust George Washington and incite mutiny among the Continental Army by secretly authoring an infamous correspondence known as the Newburgh Letters. Armstrong liked no one in the present administration (including Madison), and no one liked him either. About the only thing that might be said in his favor was that, unlike his predecessor, who was a mere politician, Armstrong at least had some genuine military service under his belt. But as the months moved on it became apparent to almost everyone that John Armstrong had been a perfectly awful choice for the job.
By the time the ice thawed in the early spring of 1813, Tecumseh had persuaded British colonel Henry Procter, who had replaced the slain Brock, to attack a newly built American fortification near the western end of Lake Erie, south of Detroit near the Michigan border. Known as Fort Meigs (named after the then Ohio governor with the unusual name of Return J. Meigs), this edifice was defended by only 600 men under the command of General William Henry Harrison of Indiana, who had been fighting Tecumseh and his people for years, and who had recently been appointed to command the Western army after Hull’s debacle at Detroit.
The British laid siege to Fort Meigs on May 1, but so strongly was it built that little damage was done and even the flaming arrows shot by Indians did not affect it. Four days later a relief force of 1,200 ardent Kentuckians arrived and soon attacked Procter’s army. In their “ardor,” however, the Kentuckians got themselves cut up in a wild melee, and many of those captured were massacred by the Indians, who, not understanding the principles of siege warfare (or, for that matter, the European rules of military conduct), soon afterward disappeared into the forest with their collection of scalps and booty.* 8 Not only that, but to illustrate that militia problems were not confined to the American army, the Canadian militia—comprising nearly half of Procter’s force—declared that it was planting time back home and returned to their farms. Procter then gave up and marched his men back north with some 600 Kentuckians as prisoners, leaving behind another 450 dead and wounded (not counting Indians), including about 100 of his own men.
Two months later Procter returned with a larger army consisting of 5,000 regulars, Canadian militia, and a large body of Indians, and on August 2 attacked Fort Stephenson, about thirty miles east of Fort Meigs. Here, however, he suffered a shocking reversal of fortune at the hands of the vengeful Kentuckians, who, in addition to blasting them with cannon fire, mowed down the British and Indians with their long rifles “like wheat in a hailstorm.” Complaining that this was “the severest fire I ever saw,” Procter called it quits and once again marched back north. Finally, things seemed to be looking up on the Northwest front.
A month later, his army now grown to 5,500 men with the arrival of another large contingent of Kentucky volunteers, Harrison determined not only to chase the bothersome Procter out of U.S. territory but, if possible, to destroy him. This he did on October 5, when he finally caught up with the British at Moraviantown, Canada, about five days’ march northeast of Detroit. Procter had formed up his lines between the Thames River and a swamp where he was determined to make a stand, counting on the discipline and massed firepower of his trained regulars and the ferocity of Tecumseh’s Indian tribes.
This proved to be a mistake, because the Americans mounted a surprise cavalry charge (with militia from Kentucky, made of sterner stuff than other U.S. militia) that broke Procter’s lines in less than five minutes and put the British in a deadly crossfire. Concluding that the battle was lost, those redcoats who could—including Procter* 9—fled down the road toward Moraviantown. This left Harrison’s army with only Tecumseh’s Indians to subdue, since they did not fight in lines like infantrymen but (more effectively) from behind bushes and shrubs on the edges of the forest. The mounted Kentuckians quickly plunged into these thickets, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting broke out, with Indian tomahawks against Kentucky hatchets.
During the melee the courageous Tecumseh was shot through the heart and killed, and his body later mutilated by soldiers bent on revenge, so they said, for Indian depredations going back two centuries or more. Accordingly, Tecumseh was skinned and pieces of his preserved hide were parceled out to the Kentucky troops, who took them home as relics for the edification of friends, sweethearts, wives, and children. With the death of this most charismatic of American Indians also died his dream of a great Indian Confederation—almost, that is, except for one final act in that drama, which was soon to be played out a thousand miles away in Alabama and would set the stage for the spectacular conclusion to the War of 1812.
If the war in the West finally seemed to be going well, back east it was only more of the same. To replace the hapless Dearborn, Secretary of War Armstrong had chosen a commander with even worse credentials and certainly fewer scruples. He was General James Wilkinson, whom the ever pithy Winfield Scott described as an “unprincipled imbecile”; his assignment, handed down by Amstrong’s War Department, would be yet another attempt to take Montreal.
Wilkinson’s very presence on the Canadian border belied his well-deserved reputation as a conniver and an incompetent. He had previously been commander of the Seventh Military District, headquartered at New Orleans, which encompassed the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama territories, as well as Tennessee and Arkansas. So inept and loathed was he that his own Louisiana troops refused to serve under him. Yet Armstrong’s idiotic solution to this thorny problem was to send Wilkinson north and put him in charge of the most difficult and important campaign of the war.
Not only was Wilkinson incompetent; it later turned out that he also had been a spy and traitor on the payroll
of Spain, selling whatever secrets the United States had vis-à-vis that shaky Mediterranean kingdom. Furthermore, Wilkinson had been mixed up in the treasonous scheme by Aaron Burr, the former U.S. vice president then in disgrace for the duel that resulted in Alexander Hamilton’s death, in which Burr sought to detach the lower Mississippi Valley from the Union, kick the Spaniards out of Mexico, and form a new nation with himself as king, emperor, president, or what have you. Amid all these strange machinations, as historian Marquis James has pointed out, “for some time [Wilkinson] had been confronted with the necessity of deciding whom he could most profitably betray—the United States, Spain, or Aaron Burr.” In the end Wilkinson betrayed Burr, but not before waiting two weeks to do it so that he could extort $100,000 from the Spanish for revealing this supposedly valuable information. (In 1808 Wilkinson was court-martialed for his role in the affair but acquitted.) In any event, he was the man Armstrong put in charge of the new Montreal operation.
It started out badly, in part because Wilkinson didn’t want to attack in the first place. The operation was designed as a two-pronged affair, with his 7,500 men moving on Montreal from the west down the St. Lawrence River and another force, under General Wade Hampton (grandfather of Wade Hampton III, one of Robert E. Lee’s Civil War cavalry commanders), attacking from the south with an army of 4,500. Hampton went first, but no sooner had he crossed the border than he ran into a much smaller British force of Canadian militia, which should have been an easy obstacle to overcome. Yet when the Canadians commenced a great howling, firing, and blowing of horns, Hampton was fooled into thinking they were much superior to him in numbers and, after some minor skirmishing, he returned to the American side of the river, set his army into winter quarters, and refused to obey any further orders from Wilkinson, whom he found contemptible. For his part, Wilkinson ran into a British beehive just as he crossed into Canada. At Chrysler’s Farm another inferior British force drove Wilkinson’s army back into the United States, after inflicting casualties at a ratio of three to one. By this point, apparently due to illness, Wilkinson had become addicted to the then popular drug laudanum (an opiate) and had taken to babbling incoherently and singing to himself all the time, according to one of his generals.