by Enid Mallory
In winter, provisions for the army had to move by sleigh on the ice or sometimes on the lakeshore road.
Guillet, Pioneer Travel, 131 (Anna Jameson).
The enthusiasm of FitzGibbon was contagious, and his men felt the challenge even as they faced the cold. The grim-visaged beauty of this land was not lost on FitzGibbon. After 10 years in Canada he knew winter in its every mood, and its hard white beauty excited him. His affinity for the landscape and his quick commitment to memory of shorelines, contours, rivers, pathways, and roads were an important asset in the role he played in this war. Even in the white cauldron of wind on an open lake, Fitz always knew where he was.
When they reached Niagara, James stood on Queenston Heights, remembering the leader who had been like an older brother to him, a teacher, a hero, and a friend. It was some consolation to be on the Niagara frontier where Brock had died, and in a likely place for the next attack. Perhaps he could do something to reach the goal Isaac Brock had died for.
Fitz and his company were sent to the west shore of Lake Erie to guard Detroit against an American attack across the frozen lake. There had been trouble there on January 22, when the American Army of the west, under Generals Harrison and Winchester, attacked 40 kilometres south of Detroit on the River Raisin, in an attempt to take back Michigan. With his Native allies under Tecumseh, Colonel Procter had defeated them and taken 600 prisoners. Fitz probably met Tecumseh there, and it may have been from Tecumseh’s warriors that Fitz learned to admire and imitate Native skills in forest warfare.
In April, FitzGibbon and his men went back to Frenchman’s Creek on the Niagara River, six kilometres from Fort Erie. Winter there had been quiet, but there was news of a successful attack from Prescott on Ogdensburg, across the river, intended to stop the raiding parties that had continued since the attack on FitzGibbon’s convoy the previous fall. The Canadian attackers were led by Lieutenant-Colonel “Red” George Macdonnell, a relative of John Macdonell, Brock’s aide-de-camp who was slain at Queenston. His Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles fought with the tenacity that would distinguish them throughout the war.
The spring breakup had an ominous sound that year as the big question loomed: where would the Americans attack? They had their forces positioned in three places: Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain for an attack on Montreal; Sackets Harbor, Oswego, and Niagara for attacks on Kingston, York, and Fort George; and Fort Meigs on the Maumee River, where William Henry Harrison’s army was threatening the northwest.
FitzGibbon was too restless to wait for the larger action of the war. On April 6, he was scouting the river when the rays of the setting sun revealed movement on the American shore, and he saw a dugout boat move toward Strawberry Island. He and a sergeant jumped in a boat, paddled over, and “pounced on them as nose to nose, one was giving his friend a light from a cigar.” Then his sharp eyes saw a second dugout leave the American shore. He hid himself close to the landing to take them prisoners as well.
But larger action was afloat on Lake Ontario. Both sides knew that whoever controlled the supply routes could win the war. On the American side, General Dearborn had command from Lake Erie to Vermont. Based at Sackets Harbor at the east end of Lake Ontario was Commodore Isaac Chauncey, who was building a sizable fleet to control Lake Ontario.
The British were apparently in for trouble. Their ships were the Royal George, the Earl of Moira, the Sir Sidney Smith, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Prince Regent, as well as the Wolfe just coming off the stocks at Kingston. Another ship, the Sir Isaac Brock, was being built at York. But in the race for power the Americans were pulling ahead. Moreover, the British lacked officers. Sir James Yeo, who would dance a nautical ballet with Chauncey through 1813 and 1814, was on his way to the Canadas but he would not arrive in Kingston until May 15.
The American plan was to capture Kingston and most historians believe they had it right; from there they could cut the lifeline of military supply and destroy the ships in the harbour to take control of Lake Ontario. But the Americans changed their minds. Major-General Dearborn and Commodore Isaac Chauncey fooled themselves into thinking Kingston was too well guarded and opted instead to strike York. Chauncey saw a prize there that he couldn’t resist, the ship Isaac Brock, being built in the harbour. Capturing her would give Chauncey superior power over the British fleet.
On April 27, at seven in the morning, the American fleet under Chauncey attacked York. General Sheaffe himself was there, but his soldiers were at Fort George and along the Niagara frontier. At York he had 300 regular troops, 200 militia, and 100 Natives, as General Zebulon Pike began to land 1,700 troops west of old Fort Rouille. Another thousand seamen remained on board the 14 vessels that had 100 guns trained on Fort York. Sheaffe’s 700 regulars marched out of Fort York to meet the Americans on the lakeshore but soon fell back to their first battery, then their second. It was no use. They spiked the guns of the second battery and retreated into the fort.
The York Barracks looked like this in 1804. They would be rebuilt after the Americans attacked Toronto, April 27, 1813.
Guillet, Pioneer Settlements, 96 (Lieutenant Sempronius Stretton).
At the second battery, Pike paused while he sent a party ahead to discover if the British had cleared out. They were gone, making a rapid march toward Kingston. Only the militia remained. Suddenly, a dreadful explosion turned the world upside down as a powder magazine exploded. The true cause of the blast has never been discovered but 100 Canadians and 250 Americans were killed or wounded. General Pike was one of them.
On the death of General Pike, General Dearborn landed. By 4:00 p.m. the American flag flew over York. Angered at the carnage of the explosion, American soldiers burned and pillaged the helpless town, including about 60 houses. Before his retreat, Sheaffe had ordered the new ship on the stocks to be burned. One other ship, the Duke of Gloucester, remained to be captured by the invaders.
Sheaffe would be severely criticized for his retreat, although he had little choice; his men were outnumbered three to one, the fort lacked any large guns. But he probably could have been better prepared. There were guns at York for the new ship being built, which, if mounted on the fort, might have held off Chauncey’s ships.
Although he won the Battle of Queenston Heights and received a baronetcy from the British Parliament, Sheaffe would never become a hero in the Canadas. Too many soldiers, FitzGibbon among them, remembered Sheaffe’s harsh treatment of his men. Others resented the armistice he signed after Queenston Heights, when he might have swept across the river to take Fort Niagara. On May 26, Sir George Prevost wrote to Lord Bathurst that he wanted to remove Sheaffe from Upper Canada. “It is my intention to place the civil administration and military command of Upper Canada in the hands of Major-General De Rottenburg, and Major-General Sir R. Sheaffe will return to Lower Canada.”[2]
After the attack on York, everyone knew that Dearborn and Chauncey would waste little time before striking Fort George. In command of Lake Ontario, those two were riding a wave of confidence.
Chauncey sailed over to Fort Niagara to deposit Dearborn and his land force there on May 8, then sailed away to Sackets Harbor with his wounded and plunder from York. By May 25, Chauncey was back at Niagara, his guns firing on Fort George. Although General John Vincent had five 24-pounders from Fort Detroit, he was so short of powder that he could not answer Chauncey’s guns. Reports came in to Fort George that Dearborn had 6,000 land troops in Fort Niagara, poised for the moment of attack.
Vincent had 1,400 regular soldiers and little faith in the militiamen of the province. “With respect to the militia, it is with regret that I can neither report favorably of their numbers nor their willing co-operation.” He described them as “wavering and appalled by the specious force of the enemy’s resources.”[3]
Vincent was slow to understand the men. They were farmers and it was May, spring-planting time. Before the year was done, the British Army would be glad of every grain of wheat the men had tenaciously put in the ground th
at anxious spring. If Vincent thought they would stand by and give up their crops and their homes to Americans invaders, he was wrong. Soldier and settler alike were facing terrible odds, and they had no daring Isaac Brock to cheer them on. Their leader lay dead in the northeast bastion of Fort George and that knowledge sat heavy on their hearts. Nor would they find another like him throughout the war. Leaders would come and go on the Niagara frontier in 1813 and 1814, but often the impetus to win would come from below, from junior officers like James FitzGibbon, militiamen like William Hamilton Merritt, and women like Laura Secord.
Sir George Prevost
Sir George Prevost served in the British Army from a young age. In 1808, he was lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia and in 1811 was promoted to commander-in-chief of British North America. He was a cautious leader negotiating an armistice after Brock’s Detroit victory, which amazed and delighted the Americans.
He visited Upper Canada in May 1813 and led a failed attack on Sackets Harbor. In 1814, he planned an attack on Lake Champlain but the British naval force was driven back and the land force had to retreat.
Although considered a failure as a field commander he was praised for his work as commander-in-chief, for his organization and preparation for defence of the Canadas.
Vincent’s 1,400 men were divided into three divisions. Fitz was under Lieutenant-Colonel Harvey, who had command of the right, from Fort George to Brown’s Point. Vincent himself was at the centre in command of the fort. On the left, along Lake Ontario to Four Mile Creek, was Colonel Myers. Early on the morning of May 27, a thick fog on the lake shrouded the American ships as they landed 6,000 troops under Colonel Winfield Scott.
Within three hours the contest was decided. The British left wing, under Colonel Myers, had suffered severely from the troops landing and the fire from the ships. Fort George and the entire peninsula-plateau were caught in crossfire from the lake and the mouth of the river; the log buildings of the fort were on fire. At twelve o’clock, Major Glegg wrote a hasty note to Colonel William Claus at Fort George: “The General desires you will immediately evacuate the Fort and join him in the Queenston road.” The guns of Fort George were spiked, the ammunition destroyed, and the troops put in motion to march 29 kilometres across country to the house of John DeCew near the Beaver Dams.
The weary soldiers retreated in good order, the rearguard holding off the Americans now taking possession of the Niagara frontier. In the houses of Newark and Queenston, women and children clung together facing the terrible decision to abandon their homes or stay within enemy lines. The rearguard reached DeCew’s sometime during the night and were soon joined by Lieutenant-Colonel Bisshopp with all the troops from Chippawa to Fort Erie.
In the morning, Vincent found “all the militia of the country” flocking to him at DeCew’s. If the British Army was ready to retreat, the militia was not. William Hamilton Merritt, settled at the mouth of the Twelve Mile Creek near where St. Catharines is today, was 19 when war broke out and, as a militia dragoon, he committed himself to the cause. He and the rest of the militia expected that:
… we would give them battle and prevent their penetrating in the country. However, to our great surprise and annoyance, an order was issued for all the wagons to be impressed and the army to retreat to the Forty [Mile Creek]. As many of the militia as chose to follow might, the rest were at liberty to return to their respective families. I strongly suspected from the indifferent manner the militia were treated the upper part of the Province was to be abandoned, as did all the militia, consequently numbers went home…. [4]
At least one British soldier agreed with the militiamen who wanted to fight. FitzGibbon could not believe they were giving up the Niagara Peninsula. But Vincent, pushed by an advancing American Army, was moving all the way back to Burlington.
He had a strong position there, on the height of land at the end of Burlington Bay where Dundurn Castle stands today in the city of Hamilton. Facing the bay, and with the Desjardins Marsh behind, this isthmus of land, 30 metres above the water, was unassailable except across a narrow neck of land bristling with field guns. Legend has it that the Duke of Wellington, studying a map of Upper Canada, put his finger on Burlington Heights as the place he would choose to defend. Here, Vincent would try to hold the British Army together against the advancing enemy.
The Reverend John Strachan
John Strachan arrived in Upper Canada in 1799, and became a tutor in Kingston while he studied for a position in the Episcopalian church. He was ordained in 1803 and became rector of Cornwall, where he established the grammar school that would educate the sons of well-to-do loyalists. In 1811, he moved to York to be rector and chaplain of the garrison and, again, started a school.
When the American fleet attacked York and General Sheaffe moved his troops toward Kingston, leaving the militia in charge, Strachan took over, marching forth to meet the invaders. He hassled Commodore Chauncey and accused General Dearborn of stalling negotiations so his men could pillage and burn to town. He actually made the Americans return some of the stolen goods.
Strachan went on to become the first bishop of Toronto. He also served on the executive council and continued to educate the leaders of Upper Canada. He was a great organizer, absolutely convinced of his God-given mandate — to keep Canada British and hold off the forces of democracy, liberalism, and reform. If the Family Compact had a central core, Strachan was it.
But he did not want the militia there. It had been “like drawing their eye teeth” to call them out a month before, now he did not know how to get rid of them. Lieutenant Harvey, writing at Burlington to Major Titus G. Simons, commanding the Incorporated Militia, expressed admiration for the gallant conduct of the militia in the neighbourhood of Fort George but explained how Vincent felt they could best promote the cause:
It is not by joining us as a military body that your cause can at this moment be best advanced. When our reinforcements have all arrived and all other arrangements matured for repossessing ourselves of the country we have for the moment yielded, and for driving the invader far back into his own settlements, then will the gallant militia of Upper Canada be called upon to join and add inestimable strength in our ranks.[5]
But things would not happen quite that way. The soldiers were as eager to fight as the militia, and Lieutenant-Colonel John Harvey, working with men like James FitzGibbon, would do something about it. History could call their daring attack the Battle of Stoney Creek.
Chapter 6
The Battle of Stoney Creek
I wish some of your merchants would be enterprising enough to send us up supplies of shoes, shirts, stockings, &c, &c. Not one in 20 has an article more than what is on his person. Adieu.
— Lieutenant James FitzGibbon to the Reverend James Somerville of Montreal. Burlington Bay, June 7, 1813[1]
General Vincent’s army had worn out its shoes. On May 31, he wrote from Bazeley’s farmhouse, Head of the Lake, “We want everything — shoes, stockings, blankets, tents and shirts. I have wrote to York to forward me all they may have at that post.”[2]
Even worse, they lacked ammunition. There were 90 rounds remaining to each man, and with York fallen to the enemy and Chauncey’s fleet hovering like a bird of prey on Lake Ontario, there was little hope of getting more.
Vincent had his whole force of 1,600 men falling back to the Head of the Lake. By June 5, the American Army of about 2,500, including 250 cavalry and eight guns, under Generals Chandler and Winder, had reached Forty Mile Creek (now Grimsby). The British rearguard had been camping at Stoney Creek, near Lake Ontario, about 11 kilometres from Burlington Heights, and had to fall back with the main body on the Heights. Scouts brought the news to Vincent that the Americans were preparing to camp at Stoney Creek.
Sir John Harvey
John Harvey was the son of a clergyman who, like FitzGibbon, had to achieve promotion in the army through patronage, diligence, and talent rather than wealth, aristocratic connection, or military background. In J
une 1812, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and arrived in Canada to serve as adjutant general to General Vincent. No laggard, he crossed New Brunswick on snowshoes in the middle of winter to get to his work in Upper Canada.
The night attack at Stoney Creek, led by Harvey, secured his reputation in the army. His flexible, tolerant manner made him a favourite with those who served under him; FitzGibbon always spoke of him as a competent leader. His duties included organizing and working with both the militia and the Native tribes, as well as reconnaissance.
In his later career, he served as lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, of Nova Scotia, and of Newfoundland. In 1824, he was honoured with a knighthood.
History does not agree on who suggested a night attack to Colonel Harvey, or who spied out the American camp. Merritt said the suggestion was made by Cornet McKenney, one of his Dragoons, or by Mr. George, an ensign in the militia. FitzGibbon’s granddaughter, Agnes FitzGibbon, says that it was James FitzGibbon who did the spying. The incident is so in keeping with his madcap courage and the comic streak in this character that it is tempting to believe her.
She says that he volunteered to learn the exact position and disposition of the camp and that he did it by disguising himself as a settler and selling butter to the Americans. “There is no doubt whatever that he made himself very entertaining to the soldiers, to whom he sold all his butter, getting the best price for it.”