by Conrad Black
In early 1810, prominent congressmen put through a measure authorizing the president to ban all trade with Britain or France if the other had relaxed its offensive measures. (These were the only players, as France controlled all Europe as far east as Russia and Britain controlled all the oceans and seas.) The French foreign minister, the Duke of Cadore,* informed the American minister in Paris, John Armstrong, that France was ending its trade blockade, and Madison, undaunted by the fiasco with the British the year before, announced on November 2, 1810, that all restraints on trade with France had been removed and an absolute embargo would be reimposed on Britain. (This was nonsense in itself, as the British could intercept all shipping between France and the United States if they so wished.) Britain then completely blockaded New York as a port, redoubled the impressment of American sailors, and let it be known that the French foreign minister had swindled the American government. France did not, in fact, end the American trade exclusion at all, as became clear in the ensuing months.
Astonishingly, Madison had made no effort to regroup the well-trained and equipped army of twenty thousand that Washington and Adams had maintained as a threat to Canada and a restraint on Britain’s tendency to exploit its mastery of the seas. Neither Jefferson nor Madison, highly intelligent men and statesmen though they both were, seemed to grasp the missing element in their failed plans. It was on August 4, 1812, that Jefferson wrote that taking Canada was “a mere matter of marching.”27 This would have been true if there had been sufficient numbers of trained and armed personnel to make the march. There were not. Neither Jefferson nor Madison had played a significant military role in the Revolutionary War or had any idea of how to conduct a war. On November 5, 1811, Madison publicly accused the British of “hostile inflexibility in trampling on rights which no independent nation can relinquish,” and on April 1, 1812, he asked Congress for a complete embargo for sixty days, and was empowered three days later to call up one hundred thousand militiamen for up to six months. (The Americans still had the idea that a citizens’ untrained force could leave home for six months and settle any serious dispute.)
By this time, in one of the most fateful decisions in the history of Europe, Napoleon had determined to resolve differences with Russia by invading that country. His mighty Grand Army of more than five hundred thousand, about half of them French, invaded Russia, starting on June 24, and the world was little preoccupied with the cavils of America. Britain had been, in fact, on the verge of finally easing its policy on American shipping when, on May 11, 1812, for the only time in British history, the prime minister (Spencer Percival) was assassinated, by a madman. The delay, as Lord Liverpool was installed as Percival’s successor, held up the repeal of the obnoxious trade and search and impressment decrees until June 23. On June 18, Congress had passed the declaration of war Madison requested on June 1, with more than a third of the congress, including most senators and congressmen from New England, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, voting against. Madison had violated the first rule of taking a democracy to war: the requirement of massive public support for the costs and sacrifices to be endured.
Canada, by contrast, had the benefit of having at the head of both the civil and military government a prescient and courageous soldier-statesman, General Isaac Brock, who had foreseen war and been preparing for it for six years. Born in 1769 (the same year as Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington), Brock served with distinction in the Netherlands and was ordered to Canada in 1802 as a regimental commander. He was principally occupied at first with subduing a mutiny, following which seven of his men were executed, and in 1806 he became the army commander for all of Canada. Brock strengthened the fortifications at Quebec and created a naval force on the eastern Great Lakes that gave the British superiority on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. In 1811, he was promoted major general and civil administrator for Upper Canada as well. He declined his long-sought home leave because he feared that war was imminent. He emphasized intensive training of the militia, strengthened Upper Canada’s fortifications, and engaged personally in detailed contingency planning with the leaders of the native people, especially Tecumseh, with whom he established a warm rapport. Brock learned of the outbreak of war before some of the American frontier units did, and managed a post-outbreak sneak attack on an almost slumbering garrison at Fort Mackinac (on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron) with a mixed force of militiamen, fur traders, natives, and a few British regulars, on July 17. This emboldened Upper Canada and the neighbouring native people.
When Revolutionary War commander William Hull attacked across the St. Clair River from Detroit to what is now Windsor, Brock was able to disregard the over-cautious orders of the theatre commander, General Sir George Prevost, who wished to cling to the defence. Brock coordinated strategy with Tecumseh and, although outnumbered two to one by Hull, intimidated the American commander by dressing his militia in worn-out British uniforms and marching them about while returning them out of sight to their original stepping-off point so they could again strut across the landscape, creating the impression of a much larger and better trained force than he really had: a classic ruse de guerre. He had Tecumseh’s forces utter blood-curdling ululations of lethal intent and sent into Hull a message saying, “It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond my control the moment the contest commences.”28 Hull was afraid that his daughter and grandson, in the fort at Detroit, would be massacred, and after a day’s artillery barrage he abruptly surrendered on August 16. His fears were somewhat validated by the seizure of Fort Dearborn (Chicago) by Tecumseh’s allies on August 15 and the gruesome murder of the entire garrison. Hull’s entire force of two thousand was taken into captivity and he was court-martialled and sentenced to death for cowardice, though, in deference to his Revolutionary War record, the sentence was commuted to a dishonourable discharge.
The balance of the American campaign plan for 1812 were the other usual attacks along Lake Champlain to Montreal and the penetration at Niagara and around Lake Ontario to seize York (Toronto), as in the Seven Years and Revolutionary Wars, although the British had demonstrated more than fifty years before that the only way to subdue Canada was to advance up the St. Lawrence and stage an amphibious assault on Quebec. (And, as was recounted in Chapter 1, this was rebuffed twice before, by Champlain and by Frontenac, and, given the naval balance of forces, was completely out of the question now.) Next off was the attack at Niagara, led by political appointee and reserve general Stephen van Rensselaer, whose attempt to cross the Niagara River on October 13 led to the Battle of Queenston Heights. Brock quickly arrived at the crossing site and led his men, as was his custom, in counterattack. He repulsed the American force but was mortally wounded, his last words allegedly being “Push on, brave York Volunteers!” Although Brock’s replacement, Colonel John Macdonell, was killed an hour later as he pressed home the attack on the Americans, reinforcements arrived and the action ended in an entire British and Canadian victory, facilitated by the decision, adopted in mid-battle, by many of the New York reservists that they had no obligation to put themselves in harm’s way outside the borders of New York State. Van Rensselaer was sacked and replaced by General Alexander Smyth, whose half-hearted effort to recross the Niagara on November 28 was easily routed. He too was sacked, and the third initiative, north to Montreal on the well-travelled route past Ticonderoga (Carillon), was led by General Henry Dearborn. But his troops, also reservists, found the virtue of their defensive vocation within New York as timely and persuasive as had van Rensselaer’s charges, and they refused to enter Quebec. Dearborn returned to Plattsburgh without having fired a shot, and joined the senior ranks of fired commanders. Madison also fired the war secretary, William Eustis, and replaced him with the former minister to France, John Armstrong. (It was following Queenston Heights that Laura Secord, 1775–1868, learned of an imminent attack by American invaders and walked twenty m
iles through the night to warn the British Army, contributing to the victory of the defenders at the Battle of Beaver Dams. Her service went unrecognized until the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, travelling in Canada in 1860, learned of it and personally awarded her a pension at the age of eighty-five. She has since become celebrated by a popular brand of chocolate confections.)
The Americans did rather better in single combat at sea, but they couldn’t really challenge the British navy when it appeared in strength. Madison, though a former secretary of state who might have been expected to have a better sense of the correlation of forces, had the chargé he maintained in London, despite the state of war between the two countries, ask the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, if Britain would negotiate peace on the basis of an end to impressment of American sailors, the end of the blockade of American ports, and the payment of compensation for damage to American shipping and shore facilities. Castlereagh declined to open discussions on any such basis.
It had been an utterly ludicrous opening to Madison’s righteous war, but he was re-elected in November over DeWitt Clinton, the nephew of his former vice president (who had died in office). The younger Clinton began an honourable American tradition of the party out of office in wartime, presenting a responsible anti-war candidate. Despite the catastrophic start to the war, and the terrible divisions with which the war began and which it had already exacerbated, Madison won, with 128 electoral votes to 89, although Clinton carried all the states from the Canadian border to Pennsylvania except Vermont. The South, the West, and Pennsylvania put the president across.
* * *
The world balance of power had changed while the series of fiascos unfolded on the American-Canadian border: Napoleon lost most of his army in Russia, and although he defeated the Russians in direct combat, even on his retreat when he was heavily outnumbered, and the ancient Russian capital of Moscow had been burned to the ground, Napoleon’s allies deserted him, and the mighty French exertions would no longer be adequate. Napoleon’s military genius perhaps reached its highest point as he fought his way out of Russia against more numerous and surrounding armies accustomed to winter war, but his vastly extended empire could not sustain such a blow. The hour of Britain was opening; that of France ending. In one of the demiurgic emperor’s many lapidary utterances, Napoleon said, with a shrug as he departed Moscow and began the famous retreat after the Russians burned their capital under him, “From the sublime to the ridiculous is a single step.” There was nothing sublime about the War of 1812, but it had begun well for the British and Canadians – though Brock was a grievous loss who would not be fully replaced – and there had been almost no evidence of disaffection from the recent American arrivals in Upper Canada and the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
Brock had had two thousand British troops and almost as many Canadian regulars, particularly the Glengarry Highlanders and Colonel Charles de Salaberry’s Lower Canada Voltigeurs. There began what would be the almost unbroken Canadian tradition of avoiding conscription but soliciting volunteers and quickly assimilating them into the regular forces. This separated the loyal from the indifferent. The Americans, including Hull in his briefly rampant state at Detroit before his surrender, claimed to be liberating their separated countrymen from the British tyranny (that they had voluntarily sought), and they did gain a small number of recruits, but most of the recent arrivals from the United States just kept their heads down and stuck with their peacetime occupations until the outcome was clear. The British did not blockade the New England ports or New York through 1813, in order to encourage American objectors to the war. The American privateers did some damage to British commercial shipping in the Caribbean and the North Sea and forced the British merchantmen into convoys; and, conversely, the British wrought havoc all along the Atlantic coast with raiding parties.
The performance of the United States in 1813 was a considerable improvement, and the war settled into a race between the Americans shaping up into a serious national military effort and the British getting clear of the fading Napoleonic menace and into a position to apply irresistible force against their former countrymen across the sea. A group of Kentuckians led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and leader of the so-called war hawks, Henry Clay, recruited General (of militia) William Henry Harrison, the alleged victor of Tippecanoe, as head of the Kentucky militia, and Madison confirmed him as a general in the regular army. At the head of a mixed force of ten thousand, Harrison was entrusted with the mission to retake Detroit and invade Upper Canada. He regained Detroit but was defeated by the British and Canadians at Frenchtown and took a thousand casualties. He persevered and was successful at Fort Meigs (on the Maumee River in Ohio) in May and Fort Stephenson (Fremont, Ohio) in August. In September, Tecumseh was killed by Colonel Richard Johnson at the Battle of Moraviantown (near present-day Chatham, Ontario). (Johnson would be elected vice president in 1836 on the slogan “Rumpsey, dumpsey, who killed Tecumseh?” and Harrison would make it all the way to the White House in 1840 on the inflated memory of Tippecanoe.) In October, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry scored a heavy naval victory on Fort Erie, fighting with trained sailors against hastily recruited Canadian sailors. He sent to Harrison the famous message “We have met the enemy and he is ours.” (Perry’s flagship, the Lawrence, was named after the captain of the Chesapeake, a frigate that engaged in an unsuccessful gunnery duel with the British Shannon a few months before in which Lawrence’s last words were “Don’t give up the ship!” which became the motto of the United States Navy.)
The Americans also did markedly better at the Niagara crossing point than had van Rensselaer the year before. General Dearborn and Colonel Winfield Scott (who would become one of the most durable and competent commanders in American military history over the next fifty-five years) successfully crossed the river, wheeled eastward, and occupied York (Toronto), burning down the buildings of the Legislative Assembly and the governor’s residence (against Dearborn’s orders). It was a contested operation and the Americans took significant casualties, including the western explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, after whom Pike’s Peak in Colorado is named. This was a stinging defeat for the British and Canadians, but Dearborn was inexplicably replaced by one of the egregious scoundrels of American history, General James Wilkinson. Wilkinson had allegedly joined the famous Conway Cabal conspiracy against Washington after the Battle of Saratoga, had been fired as clothier general of the U.S. Army for his involvement in a system of corrupt kickbacks, had been accused of conspiring with former vice president Aaron Burr in the events that led to Burr’s famous prosecution for treason, and Madison had just unsuccessfully attempted to court-martial him. He had been released from custody on Christmas Day 1811, and was now to attack along the St. Lawrence eastward to Montreal while General Wade Hampton approached north beside Lake Champlain to converge with him on that frequent but rarely attained target Montreal. The British and Canadians had fifteen thousand defenders well dug in at Montreal and their perimeter forces defeated Hampton at Chateauguay. Wilkinson’s advance units were defeated by a smaller force at Crysler’s Farm on July 13 and 14, west of Montreal.
Both American forces withdrew and neither got within fifty miles of their target. The British and Canadians pushed the Americans back out of Upper Canada at Niagara, and after the Americans burned a village near Niagara Falls and retreated across the river, their pursuers seized Fort Niagara, killing, wounding, or capturing more than five hundred Americans. In the last days of 1813, the Indian allies of the Anglo-Canadians, with their presumed approval, burned down Buffalo, New York.
It had become a nasty little war, but after nearly two years, Canada was holding, and the likelihood of British reinforcements was sharply rising as the very long sequence of revolutionary and Napoleonic wars seemed to be entering its final phase, with Britain and Russia as the winning powers. Napoleon suffered his first defeat, after scores of victories over all comers, in the Battle of Nations at Leipzig, where the c
ombined Russian, Prussian, Austrian, and Swedish armies outnumbered him three to two and more than five hundred thousand men were engaged. He continued his westward retreat to the Rhine as the British, under Wellington, pushed his peninsular army out of Spain after eight years of fierce combat.
Czar Alexander I had always favoured America and ignored Napoleon’s blockade in respect of it. Now that he was in close alliance with the British, he offered America’s able minister to Russia, John Quincy Adams (son of the former president and himself a future holder of that office), his good offices as mediator of the War of 1812, and Adams gratefully accepted. Castlereagh could not brush off the czar as he had Madison the year before, and while he declined mediation, he sent the secretary of state, James Monroe, an offer of direct negotiations in November 1813. He had had secret negotiations in mind, but Madison sought congressional approval for such talks, to alleviate some of the opposition to the war, and sent an eminent delegation (including Adams, Clay, and the able treasury secretary Albert Gallatin) to talks with the British at Ghent, in what is now Belgium. The Americans outranked their British analogues, but Napoleon abdicated in April 1814 and removed to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean, and Castlereagh and Wellington joined the immense Congress of Vienna, where they were the principal co-protagonists in the reordering of much of the world, with the Austrian foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich (who would be known in the coming decades as the “coachman of Europe”); the cunning secretary of state of the Holy See, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi; and the ineffable survivor and schemer French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, back now with the Bourbons, as he had been many years before, prior to his dalliances with the First Republic, the Directory, the Consulate, and Napoleon’s empire, and his service still had decades to run (with whomever ruled). Talleyrand accomplished the remarkable feat of convincing the British, Austrians, Russians, and Prussians that France was an ally against and victim of the stateless mountebank Napoleon (whom he had served with great assiduity as foreign minister for ten years). The British always wanted as many great powers in Europe as possible, the better to balance the scales, and the Austrian emperor was loyal to his French Bourbon in-laws. (Marie Antoinette was the current emperor’s aunt.) America was not invited, and the affairs of the Americas were not official subjects of discussion, but there was extensive talk of sending Wellington with his large and battle-hardened army to Canada, where the Royal Navy could certainly transport them easily.