The War of 1812

by Donald R Hickey

  The Fall of Mackinac and Surrender of Detroit

  Hull received further bad news at the end of July. The tiny American outpost on the island of Mackinac between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan had surrendered to a large enemy force.92 Hull was convinced that this “opened the Northern hive of Indians, and they were swarming down in every direction.”93 Accordingly, he decided to withdraw across the river to Detroit, giving up his plan to attack Fort Amherstburg. “This fatal and unaccountable step,” said one of his officers, “dispirited the troops” and “left to the tender mercy of the enemy the miserable Canadians, who had joined us.”94 Hull suggested that it might be prudent to retreat all the way to Ohio, but his militia officers told him the entire army would melt away if he did.95

  By this time Hull’s men were openly questioning his leadership. “He is a coward,” said one, “and will not risque his person.”96 The militia officers were so alarmed that they considered removing Hull from command, but they gave up the plan when Colonel Miller, the ranking regular army officer, refused to be a party to the mutiny and take command.97 Hull made one last effort to break through to Ohio by dispatching 400 picked men under the command of colonels Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur. This force advanced further than the others but was unable to find the Ohio encampment. By this time Hull’s position had become so desperate that he sent an urgent message recalling the troops. But the men had lost all confidence in their general and elected to remain in the wilderness.98

  Meanwhile, the British had made good use of the reprieve that Hull had given them. General Brock had recently arrived with reinforcements, bringing British strength (counting regulars, militia, and Indians) to about 2,000.99 This was considerably larger than the army that Hull now had at Detroit. Moreover, the contents of a mail bag captured from Van Horne’s force informed Brock of the condition of the American army. “I got possession of the letters my antagonist addressed to the secretary of war,” said Brock, “and also of the sentiments which hundreds of his army uttered to their friends. Confidence in the general was gone, and evident despondency prevailed throughout.”100

  Major General Isaac Brock (1769–1812) was a gifted military leader who knew how to inspire his men, cultivate Indian allies, and make good use of intelligence to wage psychological warfare. He achieved public acclaim in Canada and Great Britain for his victory at Detroit in August 1812, but less than two months later he was dead on the battlefield of Queenston Heights. Today he is celebrated as a Canadian national hero. (Library and Archives of Canada)

  Crossing the river, Brock brought his cannons to bear on Fort Detroit and mounted a siege. In demanding the surrender of the fort, Brock played on Hull’s fear of the Indians. “It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination,” he said, “but you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops, will be beyond controul the moment the contest commences.”101 With many civilians in the fort (including members of his own family), Hull was terrified at the prospect of an Indian massacre. “My God!” he exclaimed to a subordinate. “What shall I do with these women and children.”102

  Facing a siege and the possibility of a massacre, Hull became increasingly despondent. He started keeping to himself, and when he did speak to others his voice often faltered. He took to stuffing huge quids of chewing tobacco into his mouth, apparently oblivious of the spittle that was running down his face and soiling his beard and clothes. He also began crouching in the fort, evidently spooked by incoming artillery shells.103 Finally, on August 16, 1812, he dispatched a white flag to the British to ask for terms. Shortly thereafter, he surrendered the fort as well as his entire army, including the detachment in the wilderness. “Not an officer was consulted,” said Captain Robert Lucas. “Even the women was indignant at the Shameful degradation of the Americ[an] character.”104

  When Hull later returned to the United States on parole, he was court-martialed. Initially he told the British that lack of powder had forced him to surrender, but Brock’s men found huge quantities of munitions in the fort, including more than 5,000 pounds of powder.105 Later—and with more justice—Hull accused Dearborn of failing to make an adequate demonstration further East, which allowed the British to concentrate their forces in the West.106 Unimpressed by this logic, the court—which was headed by Dearborn—convicted Hull of cowardice and neglect of duty. The court sentenced Hull to death but recommended mercy because of his “revolutionary services, and his advanced age.” The president approved this verdict and remitted the punishment.107 Hull and his heirs spent the next thirty-five years trying to vindicate his actions.108

  Fort Dearborn Massacre

  Several days before surrendering, Hull had ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn in Chicago on the grounds that the fall of Mackinac had rendered its defense untenable. The fort was held by about sixty-five regulars and militia under the command of Captain Nathan Heald. Some two dozen civilians were also present. The fort was well stocked, the nearby Potawatomi Indians were known to be unfriendly, and almost everyone was opposed to evacuation. Nevertheless, Heald was determined to obey his orders. To pacify the Indians, Heald promised to give them the public property in his possession, but he withheld the arms and liquor, which infuriated them. The Americans marched out of the fort on August 15, and shortly thereafter some 500 Indians, mainly Potawatomis under the leadership of Blackbird, attacked, killing most of the whites after surrender terms had been arranged. Captain William Wells met with an especially grisly fate. A “white Indian” who had been captured as a boy and raised by the Miamis, Wells had returned to Kentucky society as an adult and worked as an interpreter and Indian agent. The Indians beheaded him, carved out his heart, and ate it raw.109

  The fall of Mackinac, Detroit, and Chicago exposed the entire Northwest to enemy attack. The effect of these losses, said the Pittsburgh Mercury, was to lay open “to the ravages of the merciless foe the whole extent of our western frontier.”110 The one bright spot in the campaign was that three posts—Fort Wayne and Fort Harrison (in Indiana Territory) and Fort Madison (in present-day Iowa)—held out against Indian attacks in September. Captain Zachary Taylor, who later became president, offered a particularly spirited defense of Fort Harrison.111 Otherwise, people in the West had little to cheer about. Thrown into a panic by the prospect of Indian depredations, westerners bombarded the federal government with pleas for protection.112

  Harrison Takes Command

  Government officials were anxious to meet these demands and to reestablish American control over the Northwest. According to Eustis, the president was determined “to regain the ground that has been lost by the Surrender of Detroit & the army under General Hull, and to prosecute with increased Vigor the important objects of the Campaign.”113 The administration wanted to assign the western command to Brigadier General James Winchester, a regular army officer of modest talents, rather than to the local favorite, William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory and the hero of Tippecanoe. But Kentucky leaders took matters into their own hands by making Harrison a major general in the militia (even though he was not a citizen of the state) and giving him command of the local troops. Congressman Richard M. Johnson and other westerners pressured the administration until Harrison was put in charge of the whole theater of operations.114

  Harrison spent the fall of 1812 building a huge army that soaked up federal money and supplies at an alarming rate. The War Department ordered one contractor to supply one million additional rations to the army, and the price of provisions throughout the West soared.115 Rumor had it that Harrison’s agents paid $50 to $60 a barrel for flour—a charge vigorously denied by the administration paper in Washington.116 Nevertheless, Harrison conceded that “the Expenses of this Army will greatly exceed the calculations of the Government.”117 Although the administration was alarmed by the mounting costs, the spending worked like a tonic on the western economy and helped keep the war popular despite the military setbacks.

 
Harrison’s intention was to sweep hostile Indians from the region and then retake Detroit, but the onset of winter forced him to postpone any major campaign.118 He did, however, send out raiding parties to destroy Indian villages and provisions, and these expeditions were largely successful. Of special note was a campaign against the Miamis in Indiana Territory. Harrison’s troops defeated the Miamis in the Battle of the Mississinewa River in mid-December and burned their villages. Harrsion’s campaign against the Indians made the whole region safer but far from secure.119

  The Battle of Frenchtown and River Raisin Massacre

  Before ordering his troops into winter quarters, Harrison dispatched a force under Brigadier General Winchester to the rapids of the Maumee River. Following his own counsel, Winchester decided to send a large detachment to the Raisin River in order to protect American settlers at Frenchtown (now Monroe, Michigan). The American force, about 700 strong, drove off a small British force on January 18, and Winchester soon arrived with more troops, bringing his strength to around 1,000 men. On January 22, Colonel Henry Procter arrived from Fort Amherstburg with 1,200 soldiers and Indians and counterattacked. Winchester’s men were badly placed, and after considerable carnage, he was captured and persuaded to surrender his army. Some 900 Americans were killed, missing, or captured in the Battle of Frenchtown, while the British and their Indian allies lost around 200.

  Fearing that Harrison was near with a large army, Procter hastened to Fort Amherstburg with most of his prisoners, leaving the wounded behind. The next day Indians, many of whom were probably drunk, killed at least thirty of the prisoners. “The savages were suffered to commit every depredation upon our wounded,” reported a group of American officers; “many were tomahawked, and many were burned alive in the houses.”120 This massacre was not soon forgotten, and “Remember the Raisin” became a rallying cry throughout the Northwest.121

  After a season of campaigning, the nation had little show for the blood and treasure expended in the West. Sizeable armies had been lost at Detroit and Frenchtown, and the British and their Indian allies were in the ascendant throughout the region.

  Campaign on the Niagara

  The campaign in the East did not go much better. The War Department let Governor Daniel D. Tompkins of New York select a local man to direct operations on the Niagara front. Tompkins chose Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer, a forty-seven-year-old rich and powerful Federalist known as “the last of the patroons.” Van Rensselaer was a militia officer with little military experience and relied for expert advice on his kinsman and aide, Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer, who had taken part in the Indian wars of the 1790s and for many years had served as adjutant general of New York. The elder Van Rensselaer shared his command in western New York with a regular army officer, Brigadier General Alexander Smyth. A political appointee who had received his commission when the army was expanded in 1808, Smyth had published a pamphlet on field maneuvers but was without practical experience. Vain and pompous, he was unwilling to place himself (and his 1,600 regulars) under Van Rensselaer’s command despite explicit orders from the War Department to do so.122

  By October 1812, 6,400 American troops faced perhaps 2,300 British and Indians across the Niagara River. General Van Rensselaer’s plan was to seize Queenston Heights on the British side, while Smyth attacked Fort George six miles to the north. But Smyth, reluctant to take orders from a militia officer, remained aloof and uncooperative. Even without Smyth’s troops, Van Rensselaer still had a decided advantage over the British, and such was his fear of public criticism if he remained inactive that he decided to attack Queenston anyway.123

  The Battle of Queenston Heights

  Van Rensselaer planned to send troops across the river on October 11, but this scheme had to be abandoned when a boat carrying most of the oars disappeared. Two days later, another attempt was made. Despite a strong current, an advance guard of some 300 men—mostly regulars—managed to get across the river. The commanding officer, Solomon Van Rensselaer, was wounded several times in the assault, and his men found themselves pinned down at the river by British troops occupying the heights nearby. Captain John E. Wool took charge of the American force and, learning of an unguarded fisherman’s path that led to the heights, marched his men to the top. There the Americans drove off a British force and took command of the heights. Major General Brock, who had returned from the West to take charge of the British defenses, was killed in a futile bid to retake the heights, and soon there were about 600 Americans in place, now under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott.124

  At this point Stephen Van Rensselaer ordered the militia on the American side to cross over to reinforce Scott. But the militia, most of whom were “violent democrats” from New York, were disheartened by the Indian war whoops they heard from the British side and the sight of the dead and wounded who were ferried back to the United States.125 Following the example of their Ohio counterparts in the West, they refused to leave American territory. “To my utter astonishment,” Van Rensselaer reported, “I found that at the very moment when compleate victory was in our hands, the Ardor of the unengaged Troops had entirely subsided. . . . I rode in all directions.—urged men by every Consideration to pass over, but in vain.”126

  Without reinforcements, Scott’s troops were lost. At first pinned down by a band of Grand River Iroquois led by the Mohawk leader John Norton, they soon faced a large British force led by Major General Roger Sheaffe. Although Sheaffe botched the deployment of his troops, his noncommissioned officers got the men straightened out, and they overwhelmed the Americans. Some Americans were driven from the heights, and the rest, Scott included, surrendered. In all, around 250 Americans were killed or wounded and 925 (which included some of the wounded) were captured. The British lost 125 killed, wounded, or captured, and their Indian allies five killed and an unknown number (including Norton) wounded.127 Local Republicans—never reconciled to General Van Rensselaer’s command—blamed him for the defeat, claiming that he had secretly given the British advance warning of the attack.128

  After this disaster, Van Rensselaer, who had shown little talent for managing a campaign, asked to be relieved of his duties, and the War Department, unaware of Smyth’s shortcomings, gave him the command. Smyth planned to attack Fort Erie at the south end of the Niagara River, but “Van Bladder” or “Alexander the Great” (as his men called him) wasted his time composing bombastic proclamations that even the British found laughable.129 Sounding more like a postman than a soldier, he told his troops: “Neither rain, snow or frost will prevent the embarkation.”130 Although a preliminary assault in late November destroyed the enemy’s outlying positions at Fort Erie, the primary attack was given up when Smyth’s officers voted it down, partly because most of the Pennsylvania militia refused to cross the border.131

  Major John Norton (1770–1830?), a Scottish-Cherokee mixed-blood who served as a Mohawk leader during the War of 1812, played a central role in keeping the Grand River Iroquois loyal to Great Britain. He also fought in almost every major engagement on the Niagara frontier. (Portrait by Mary Ann Knight. Library and Archives of Canada)

  The abandonment of the attack on Fort Erie brought the fighting on the Niagara front to an end. The only thing gained was the death of Brock, a military genius whose loss the Quebec Gazette called “a public calamity.”132 As for Smyth, he was bitterly assailed by the New York militia, some of whom even took potshots at him. One soldier called him “a traitor, a tory and a d-----d coward,” and Peter B. Porter used similar language, which led to a bloodless duel.133 Shortly thereafter Smyth left for Virginia, and without the courtesy of an investigation, he was dropped from the rolls of the army in a reorganization mandated by Congress.134

  Campaign in the East

  The third and most important thrust in the campaign was supposed to be against Montreal. To head this operation, the administration selected sixty-one-year-old Major General Henry Dearborn, a Revolutionary War veteran who had been Jefferson’s
secretary of war. Dearborn—known to his troops as “Granny”—had grown fat with prosperity and was no better suited for his command than Hull, Van Rensselaer, or Smyth.135 He was supposed to coordinate his attack with the one on the Niagara front in order to take the pressure off Hull in the West. But enlistments were slow, and most of the available troops had been sent to other fronts. Hence, he remained in New England to recruit men and prepare coastal defenses, which enabled Brock to concentrate his forces in the West and thus bring about Hull’s defeat.136

  Such was Dearborn’s dilatoriness, and such was the administration’s need for a victory, that the War Department finally ordered him to proceed with the attack on Montreal. “Go to Albany or the Lake [Champlain]!” Eustis told him. “The troops shall come to you as fast as the season will admit, and the blow must be struck. Congress must not meet without a victory to announce to them.”137 Dearborn had no taste for a field command, and to conduct operations he planned to rely on Brigadier General Joseph Bloomfield (a political appointee who was the governor of New Jersey). But when Bloomfield became ill, Dearborn had to take charge.

  It was not until November that Dearborn’s army, 3,500 regulars and 2,500 militia, marched from Plattsburgh to the Canadian frontier. Colonel Zebulon Pike secured permission to lead a detachment of 500 men into Canada to search for a band of Indians thought to be nearby, but, unable to find them, he decided to attack a British blockhouse on the Lacolle River. The skirmish that followed on November 20, known as the first Battle of Lacolle Mill, was inconclusive, and in the confusion and darkness the Americans fired on each other. By the time Pike had returned to camp, Dearborn realized that most of his militia, standing on their supposed right to serve only in American territory, would not cross the border. With this Dearborn decided to call off the campaign and march back to Plattsburgh.138 A contemporary later described his failure as a “miscarriage, without even [the] heroism of disaster.”139