by Mark Zuehlke
Morrison realized the threat Swartwout posed the moment he appeared. Remain as he was and the battle would be lost. But the regulars were well trained and the battle being fought was one that allowed for parade-ground manoeuvres. He ordered the 89th to wheel a full 90 degrees to meet the threat. Officers and sergeants barked commands and each company in unison stepped crisply back from the fence, the man closest to the wood becoming a virtual pivot point, the rest moving like an opening door until they faced north rather than east. It all happened quickly. Suddenly a line of men in long scarlet coats massed before the advancing Americans where none had previously been. Then the British muskets fired and Swartwout’s advance collapsed, the soldiers reeling back across the field.
Meanwhile, two companies of the 49th charged from Pearson’s position toward the closest cannon. Momentarily checked by a cavalry countercharge, they soon drove the horsemen off and seized the gun. It was a few minutes past four, the battle two hours old. And the Americans abandoned the field. The Battle of Crysler’s Farm cost Morrison dearly: 22 dead, 148 wounded, 9 missing. But he had held the field, and strewn in the mud were the bodies of 102 Americans. Another 237 had been wounded. The British rounded up more than 100 prisoners.6
Downriver from Crysler’s farm Major General Wilkinson received Boyd’s report grimly. How could he continue toward Montreal after this? How could he not? The advance had gone well enough this day. They were positioned to shoot the Long Sault Rapids in the morning. But there was this defeat, and the sure knowledge that Morrison’s pursuit would continue. Through the night he brooded.
At dawn, the American boats easily shot the rapids. On the other side, Wilkinson learned of Hampton’s whereabouts. Earlier, Wilkinson, asserting his position as commander of the whole northern army, had imperiously ordered Hampton and his army to rendezvous with him at St. Regis, on the south bank of the St. Lawrence across from Cornwall. Having passed through the rapids, Wilkinson could easily reach St. Regis the following day. Hampton’s message was brief. Hampton would not come; his army was taking its winter quarters. Relief mixed with indignation at this blatant disobedience. Wilkinson’s breathless response, copied to Armstrong, sought to shift to Hampton blame for abandoning the Montreal offensive. Such lack of “resolution defeats the grand objects of the campaign in this quarter, which, before the receipt of your letter, were thought to be completely within our power, no suspicion being entertained that you would decline the junction directed.”7 Abandoning most of his boats, Wilkinson crossed the American border and established winter quarters at French Mills on the Salmon River. There would be no further American offensive action in 1813.
But there would be another defeat. On the Niagara Peninsula, Brig. Gen. George McClure’s New York militia were increasingly hard pressed by the little 8th Regiment detachment led by Col. John Murray. Less interested in fighting than looting, the militiamen who had not yet marched homeward were increasingly on edge. Murray’s men seemed to crop up anywhere at any time. McClure decided he had too few men to hold the Canadian side of the river, but he was loath to just hand everything back to the British. So on his own initiative—but claiming a letter from Armstrong had authorized him to destroy Niagara, if necessary—he decided to burn the peninsula’s main community. On December 10, he informed its inhabitants that their town was to be torched. Everyone was stunned. For the most part the townspeople, with a fort on either side of them, had meticulously striven to offend neither the British nor the Americans. It was obvious that they could easily be on one side of the front lines or another at almost any moment.
Niagara was a pleasant, prosperous town of more than 300 buildings. It was the peninsula’s commercial and government centre, with a public library and two churches. No appeal to reason could sway McClure’s resolve, but he also left the dirty work to Joseph Willcocks and his Canadian irregulars. While McClure abandoned Fort George in favour of Fort Niagara across the river, Willcocks’s men kindled fires among the houses. At least 130 buildings were destroyed and almost 400 hundred residents, mostly women and children, were “exposed to all the severities of deep snow and a frosty sky, almost in a state of nakedness,” as one shocked New York newspaper editor put it. “How many perished by the inclemency of the weather, it is, at present, impossible to ascertain.”
In Upper Canada news of Niagara’s burning caused immediate demands for reprisal. Colonel Murray was instructed to take Fort Niagara and exact revenge on the Americans. On the night of December 18, Murray led 500 men in a swift attack. With scaling ladders and axes the men climbed or hacked their way through the walls. Completely surprised, the Americans were quickly overwhelmed. At a cost of 6 killed and 5 wounded, Fort Niagara was taken. Only 20 Americans escaped. The remaining 422 officers and men were either killed or captured, but McClure escaped.
The capture of Fort Niagara failed to quell the Upper Canadian desire for vengeance. Buffalo, Black Rock, and Lewiston were all carried by British raiders and torched. In every case most of the inhabitants of these communities had fled before the soldiers arrived, and McClure’s militia made only a token attempt at defence. By year’s end the entire Niagara frontier on the American side was a scene of desolation. Everyone involved in the December fighting there noted that the war had taken on a new shape. Scalping was common, private property looted without regard to the hardship its loss might cause civilians, buildings similarly burned. There were fewer prisoners. Soldiers, militiamen, and Indians fought to the death. The manner in which the fighting of 1813 closed portended the way of the war in the year to follow.8
In Washington consternation greeted the failure of the campaign against Montreal. Presiding over the second session of the Thirteenth Congress, Henry Clay bemoaned that he had been “waiting to bear … the tidings of the reduction of Montreal. That event was wanted to enable the President to give to his message a finishing stroke, & why it was not permitted to him to announce it I confess has not been satisfactorily explained.”9 There was no end of unconvincing excuses offered by the principals involved. Secretary of War Armstrong and Generals Wilkinson and Hampton blamed each other, with Hampton hung out to dry by the others. His earlier resignation rendered Hampton almost powerless to fight back. Although Wilkinson’s competency was publicly questioned, he retained command. Both he and Armstrong guaranteed the next campaign would prove more successful.10
Lack of military success made an unpopular war more so, a fact reflected by the fall elections. While the Republicans won the lower houses in the state legislatures of Maryland and Vermont, the Federalists gained control of both senates. Vermont’s new governor, Martin Chittenden, recalled the state militia from Canadian frontier service, effectively removing it from the war.11
On the international front there was nothing to suggest that the British were inclined by events to seek negotiation. Over three days in October an allied Austrian, Russian, Prussian, and Swedish army of 320,000 had mauled Napoleon’s 185,000 troops near Leipzig in Saxony. The French lost 68,000 men and with them control of any lands east of the Rhine. Napoleon’s continental empire was torn asunder.
Tsar Alexander I had been in the field with his army during those fateful days, bent on bringing Napoleon down. So preoccupied, he gradually became less concerned with playing mediator. Inside his court, the influence of the mediation proposal’s architect, Count Rumyantsev, waned while that of competitor Count Vasilievich Nesselrode rose. The latter sought good relations with Britain and saw no coin to be gained from facilitating negotiations.
When Albert Gallatin and James Bayard concluded their long voyage by arriving at St. Petersburg on July 21, they had learned that the British government was “discouraging arbitration altogether.” Gallatin confided to his son James, the “English Government resent the offer of mediation.” He feared “the President was a little hasty in sending the mission.” On July 29, young Gallatin lamented: “Our position is a very embarrassing one. We plainly see we are not wanted.”12
Hoping to revive the med
iation offer and regain his status at court by doing so, Rumyantsev was at pains to make the newcomers feel welcome. At endless banquets they were fêted by high society and spent long days touring the city’s grand sights. Rendered ill by the local water, Bayard alternately gushed about all he saw and experienced or longed for home—mood dependent on the ebb and flow of bowels.
On August 1, Gallatin and Bayard met with Rumyantsev. Adams was not invited, an oversight that irritated him. He did not feel treated as a colleague in the negotiations. The British, the count told them, considered “the pretensions of the U[nited] States were of such a nature that the intervention of a third Power however friendly to both Parties must necessarily fail of a successful issue.” Impressment remained the irresolvable issue, but Rumyantsev still believed that mediation could bear fruit. After all, the Americans were here, empowered to negotiate, and there was nothing unequivocal about the British position. It was worth renewing the offer.13 Not knowing what other course to take, the Americans agreed.
Rumyantsev had not been honest. Lord Cathcart, Britain’s Russian minister, had emphatically rejected the proposal in a July 6 letter to Alexander.14 In conversation with the tsar, Cathcart added that cabinet had twice considered Russia’s mediation offer, unanimously rejecting it each time. There was no future in the proposal. But the count refused to give up, and to keep the Americans in the game he held back the fact that Cathcart had indicated that if they were willing to negotiate directly with a British peace commission then Viscount Castlereagh would approve this course.
Independently Gallatin had concluded that direct negotiation was the only path to peace. He wanted to go directly to London and ask Castlereagh to negotiate. Privately he opened a line of communication through Alexander Baring, the London banker who handled the U.S. government’s accounts in Europe (and viewed the fact that his nation was at war with a favoured client with dismay), to test the waters. Baring had tried earlier to get Castlereagh to accept Russia’s mediation offer, without success. Such a process, the foreign secretary declared, would enable America “to mix directly or indirectly her maritime interests with those of another state.”15
Knowing that Gallatin was considering either coming to England or returning to the United States, Baring argued that if America’s negotiators were “desirous of endeavouring, by mutual explanation and concession, to consult the security and apprehension of both countries,” such an approach would “find a corresponding disposition here” that led him to “anticipate every reasonable degree of success from the joint efforts of yourselves and those persons whom our government will be prepared to appoint to meet you.” Baring urged Gallatin “not to return to America without at least making an experiment in the manner most likely to lead to success.”16
Not dissuading Rumyantsev from further Russian overtures, Gallatin advanced the discussion with Castlereagh through Baring. While ostensibly the letters exchanged were purely private correspondence, the British banker’s thoughts seemed at times to come almost directly from Castlereagh’s hand. Gallatin’s were more formal, a result of being drafted in committee by the three Americans. The first hurdle Gallatin raised was that the three Americans were empowered by their government only to participate in mediation. Direct negotiation had not been authorized. For this reason alone mediation might be the best course.
While raising this problem with Baring, Gallatin began the laborious process of trying to get the commission’s powers expanded to include direct negotiation. Though it would be months before a response arrived from Washington, he set the wheels in motion for the president to expand their role by reporting Baring’s approach to Secretary of State James Monroe. If mediation was bluntly refused or accepted, he said, the envoys would either return home or enter into mediation. But what if the British response was ambiguous? “It is for the President to decide what should be done in that case,” Gallatin decided.17
Summer drained away into autumn and the fitful correspondence between Baring and Gallatin continued while no decision was forthcoming from London on the mediation proposal. In fact, Prime Minister Liverpool’s cabinet considered the renewed offer in mid-October and again rejected it. Baring hinted at the finality of this decision in an October 12 letter. This time the language of the letter sounded even more like Castlereagh. “We wish for peace. The pressure of the war upon our commerce and manufactures is over; they have ample relief in other quarters; and, indeed the dependence of the two countries on each other was, as it usually is, overrated. But the war has no object; it is expensive, and we want to carry our efforts elsewhere. Our desire of peace, therefore, cannot be doubted and you can rely on it.” A possible resolution to the maritime issue was proposed without setting out specifics, but if Gallatin considered the commissioners empowered to negotiate directly, Baring wrote, “I think you would soon complete the work of peace without the help or hindrance of any mediator.”18
That decided Gallatin. Summoning private secretary George Dallas on October 18, Gallatin told him to pack his bags and leave that very day for London. Once there he was to discreetly, through Baring and the Russian ambassador Count Lieven, determine whether either direct negotiation or mediation was remotely possible.
Gallatin wanted to go himself, but could not without the president’s blessing—something he hoped to attain once his letter to Monroe reached Washington. But the day after Dallas left St. Petersburg came news from Monroe that struck Gallatin like “a thunderclap. Letters from Washington; one announcing officially that the Senate had rejected father’s nomination as head of the Commission by one vote,” young James Gallatin scribbled in his diary.19 A distraught Rumyantsev begged Gallatin to remain in St. Petersburg. Surely the American Senate would reverse this inane decision. Gallatin considered rushing home to confront his political enemies, but confessed more to being “strongly impressed with the idea that he ought to resume the negotiations.”20Peace was what America needed most; was it not his duty to try to achieve that?
On the last day of October further bad news arrived in the form of Lord Walpole, the new British ambassador to Russia. Ignorant and coarse, Walpole told the Americans “he never heard from his government, he never wrote to them, he never read newspapers excepting articles about murders, could not bear to look at births or marriages, he never wore boots, never walked, hated music and dancing.”21 And, by the by, the cabinet had scotched any idea of mediation. They should not be further misled by Rumyantsev’s “intrigues.”
The count must have already known the news, for only the day before he had told Gallatin that once the American mission to St. Petersburg was closed it was his intention to retire from office. November 1 brought ice to the Neva River, precluding any chance of leaving Russia by sea. The weeks dragged by, snow lay thick upon the land, and no further news reached the Americans in St. Petersburg. Tsar Alexander seemed to have forgotten them, not notifying them whether the mediation offer was withdrawn or to be renewed. Gallatin finally decided there was no further point in waiting. On January 12, he informed Rumyantsev that he and Bayard were leaving St. Petersburg. Adams would remain, continuing to represent America in the Russian court.
Two weeks later the two envoys and their secretaries climbed into horse-drawn sledges and set out on a long journey to Amsterdam. There they would await word from Washington on whether to try negotiating directly with the British. The journey took two months. March 5 brought them to Amsterdam, where James Gallatin—having abandoned his diary entirely during the long trip—entered a single sentence. “After a terrible, cold, and weary journey we arrived here last night.”22
Part Four
QUEST FOR A JUST PEACE
NINETEEN
Destitute of Military Fire
JANUARY–JUNE 1814
The correspondence between Albert Gallatin and Alexander Baring encouraged Castlereagh to approach James Monroe with an offer of direct negotiations. His letter, written on November 4, 1813, was carried to America by the British schooner Bramble. After i
ts arrival under flag of truce at Annapolis on December 30, a courier galloped through the dark night and placed the message in Monroe’s hands just as the clock struck midnight.
“To avoid an unnecessary continuance of the calamities of war … I can assure you that the British government is willing to enter into discussion with the Government of America for the conciliatory adjustment of the differences subsisting between the two States, with an earnest desire on their part to bring them to a favourable issue, upon principles of perfect reciprocity, not inconsistent with the established maxims of public law, and with the maritime rights of the British empire,” Castlereagh wrote. He guaranteed for the American commissioners safe passage to wherever in Europe was agreed for the talks.1
While maintaining the impression that the United States remained determined to continue the war, Monroe and President James Madison leapt at the offer. On January 5, the secretary of state sent a reply back to London on Bramble. Although he regretted Britain’s refusal of mediation through Tsar Alexander, Monroe imagined that the Russian emperor would recognize that direct negotiation “affords the best prospect of attaining speedily what was the object of his interposition. I am accordingly instructed to make known to your lordship … that the President accedes to his proposition.” Madison suggested Gothenburg, Sweden, thinking the Swedish king would “readily acquiesce in the choice of a place for their pacific negotiations within his dominions.”2
Madison reported the news to Congress on January 7, 1814, and forwarded for Senate approval John Quincy Adams, James Bayard, Henry Clay, and Jonathan Russell as envoys. Under the mistaken impression that Albert Gallatin was somewhere on the high seas bound for home, Madison did not advance his name. Instead, Adams was proposed as the commission’s chairman. Gallatin was added to the list on February 8, but Adams retained the chair. Madison emphasized that Gallatin would not continue as secretary of the treasury. Mollified, the Senate endorsed his appointment the next day. The appointment of Adams and Bayard passed unopposed. Clay’s nomination alarmed Federalists, who thought the congressional Speaker too fervent in his desire to annex Canada, and that insistence on this point would defeat the negotiations. Bayard, however, was presented as sufficient counterweight to keep the commission balanced toward a spirit of compromise. Because Russell’s appointment was once again tied to his also being America’s minister to Sweden, it initially met Senate resistance. In the end, the Senate capitulated because the discussions were likely to occur in that country, making a diplomatic presence there necessary. Russell’s approval squeaked through.3