The American Invasion of Canada

by Pierre Berton

  Chrystie’s boat has lost an oarlock and is drifting helplessly downstream while one of his officers attempts to hold an oar in place. None of these regulars is familiar with the river; all are dependent upon a pilot to guide them. But as they come under musket fire from the Canadian bank the pilot, groaning in terror, turns about and makes for the American side. Chrystie, wounded in the hand by grape-shot, struggles with him to no avail. The boat lands several hundred yards below the embarkation point, to which Chrystie and the others must return on foot.

  In Solomon Van Rensselaer’s later opinion, this is the turning point of the battle. Chrystie’s return and the heavy fire from the opposite shore “damped the hitherto irrepressible ardor of the militia.” The very men who the previous day were so eager to do battle-hoping, perhaps, that a quick victory would allow them to return to their homes-now remember that they are not required to fight on foreign soil. One militia major suddenly loses his zest for combat and discovers that he is too ill to lead his detachment across the river.

  At the embarkation point, Chrystie finds chaos. No one, apparently, has been put in charge of directing the boats or the boatmen, most of whom have forsaken their duty. Some are already returning without orders or permission, landing wherever convenient, leaving the boats where they touch the shore. Others are leaping into bateaux on their own, crossing over, then abandoning the craft to drift downriver. Many are swiftly taken prisoner by the British. Charles Askin, lying abed in the Hamilton house suffering from boils, hears that some of the militia have cheerfully given themselves up in the belief that they will be allowed to go home as the militia captured at Detroit were. When told they will be taken to Quebec, they are distressed. Askin believes that had they known of this very few would have put a foot on the Canadian shore.

  As Chrystie struggles to collect the missing bateaux, his fellow commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Fenwick, in charge of the second assault wave, arrives only to learn that he cannot cross for lack of boats. Exposed to a spray of grape-and canister-shot, Fenwick herds his men back into the shelter of the ravine until he manages to secure enough craft to move the second wave out onto the river. The crossing is a disaster. Lieutenant John Ball of the 49th directs the fire of one of his little three-pounders, known as “grasshoppers,” against the bateaux. One is knocked out of the water with a loss of fifteen men. Three others, holding some eighty men, drift into a hollow just below the Hamilton house. All are slaughtered or taken prisoner, Fenwick among them. Terribly wounded in the eye, the right side, and the thigh, he counts nine additional bullet holes in his cloak.

  None of the regular commanders has yet been able to cross the narrow Niagara. On the opposite shore under the sheltering bank, Solomon Van Rensselaer, growing weaker from his wounds, is attempting to rally his followers, still pinned down by the cannon fire from the gun in the redan and the muskets of Captain Dennis’s small force on the bank above. Captain John E. Wool, a young officer of the 13th Infantry approaches with a plan. Unless something is done, and done quickly, he says, all will be prisoners. The key to victory or defeat is the gun in the redan. It must be seized. Its capture could signal a turning point in the battle that would relieve the attackers while the fire could be redirected, with dreadful effect, among the defenders. But how can it be silenced? A frontal attack is out of the question, a flanking attack impossible, for the heights are known to be unscalable from the river side. Or are they? Young Captain Wool has heard of a fisherman’s path upriver leading to the heights above the gun emplacement. He believes he can bring an attacking force up the slopes and now asks Solomon Van Rensselaer’s permission to attempt the feat.

  Wool is twenty-three, a lithe, light youth of little experience but considerable ambition. One day he will be a general The fact that he has been shot through the buttocks does not dampen his enthusiasm. With his bleeding commander’s permission, he sets off with sixty men and officers, moving undetected through a screen of bushes below the river bank. Solomon Van Rensselaer’s last order to him is to shoot the first man in the company who tries to turn tail. Then, as Wool departs, the Colonel slumps to the ground among a pile of dead and wounded, a borrowed greatcoat concealing the seriousness of his injuries from his wet and shivering force. Shortly afterwards he is evacuated.

  The Battle of Queenston Heights

  Captain Wool, meanwhile, finds the path and gazes up at the heights rising almost vertically more than three hundred feet above him. Creased by gullies, blocked by projecting ledges of shale and sandstone, tangled with shrubs, vines, trees and roots clinging to the clefts, they look forbidding, but the Americans manage to claw their way to the crest.

  Wool, buttocks smarting from his embarrassing wound, looks about. An empty plateau, bordered by maples and basswood, stretches before him. But where are the British? Their shelters are deserted. Below, to his right, half-hidden by a screen of yellowing foliage, he sees a flash of scarlet, realizes that the gun in the redan is guarded by the merest handful of regulars. Brock, who is a great reader of military history, must surely have studied Wolfe’s famous secret ascent to the Plains of Abraham, yet, like the vanquished Montcalm, he has been assured that the heights are safe. He has brought his men down to reinforce the village, an error that will cost him dear. Wool’s men, gazing down at the red-coated figures manning the big gun, cannot fail to see the tall officer with the cocked hat in their midst. It is the General himself. A few minutes later, when all are assembled, their young commander gives the order to charge.

  •

  AT FORT GEORGE, Brock has awakened in the dark to the distant booming of cannon. What is happening? Is it a feint near Queenston or a major attack? He is inclined to the former possibility, for he has anticipated Van Rensselaer’s original strategy and does not know of Smyth’s obstinacy. Brock is up in an instant, dressed, and on his grey horse Alfred, dashing out the main gate, waiting for no one, not even his two aides, who are themselves hurriedly pulling on their boots. Later someone will spread a story about Brock stopping for a stirrup cup of coffee from the hands of Sophia Shaw, a general’s daughter, said to be his fiancee. It is not convincing. On this dark morning, with the wind gusting sleet into his face and the southern sky lit by flashes of cannon, he will stop for nobody.

  As he hurries through the mud toward Queenston, he encounters young Samuel Jarvis, a subaltern in his favourite militia unit, the York Volunteers. Jarvis, galloping so fast in the opposite direction that he cannot stop in time, finally reins his horse, wheels about, tells his general that the enemy has landed in force at the main Queenston dock. Jarvis’s mission ought not to be necessary because of Brock’s system of signal fires, but in the heat of battle nobody has remembered to light them.

  Brock gallops on in the pre-dawn murk, past harvested grain fields, soft meadows, luxuriant orchards, the trees still heavy with fruit. The York Volunteers, stationed at Brown’s Point, are already moving toward Queenston. Brock dashes past, waving them on. A few minutes later his two aides also gallop by. John Beverley Robinson, marching with his company, recognizes John Macdonell, Brock’s provincial aide and his own senior in the York legal firm to which the young volunteer is articled. Brock has reason to be proud of the York militia, who answered his call to arms with alacrity, accompanied him on the embarkation to Amherstburg, were present at Detroit’s downfall, and are now here on the Niagara frontier after six hundred miles of travel by boat and on foot.

  A few minutes after Brock passes, Robinson and his comrades encounter groups of American prisoners staggering toward Fort George under guard. The road is lined with groaning men suffering from wounds of all descriptions, some, unable to walk, crawling toward nearby farmhouses, seeking shelter. It is the first time that these volunteers have actually witnessed the grisly by-products of battle, and the sight sickens them. But it also convinces them, wrongly, that the engagement is all but over.

  Dawn is breaking, a few red streaks tinting the sullen storm clouds, a fog rising from the hissing river as Brock, sp
attered with mud from boots to collar, gallops through Queenston to the cheers of the men of his old regiment, the 49th. The village consists of about twenty scattered houses separated by orchards, small gardens, stone walls, snake fences. Above hangs the brooding escarpment, the margin of a prehistoric glacial lake. Brock does not slacken his pace but spurs Alfred up the incline to the redan, where eight gunners are sweating over their eighteen-pounder.

  From this vantage point the General has an overview of the engagement. The panorama of Niagara stretches out below him-one of the world’s natural wonders now half-obscured by black musket and cannon smoke. Directly below he can see Captain Dennis’s small force pinning down the Americans crouching under the riverbank at the landing dock. Enemy shells are pouring into the village from John Lovett’s battery on the Lewiston heights, but Dennis is holding. A company of light infantry occupies the crest directly above the redan. Unable to see Wool’s men scaling the cliffs, Brock orders it down to reinforce Dennis. Across the swirling river, at the rear of the village of Lewiston, the General glimpses battalion upon battalion of American troops in reserve. On the American shore several regiments are preparing to embark. At last Brock realizes that this is no feint.

  He instantly dispatches messages to Fort George and to Chippawa to the south asking for reinforcements. Some of the shells from the eighteen-pounder in the redan are exploding short of their target, and Brock tells one of the gunners to use a longer fuse. As he does so, the General hears a ragged cheer from the unguarded crest above and, looking up, sees Wool’s men charging down upon him, bayonets glittering in the wan light of dawn. He and the gunners have time for one swift action: they hammer a ramrod into the touchhole of the eighteen-pounder and break it off, thus effectively spiking it. Then, leading Alfred by the neck reins, for he has no time to remount, the Commander-in-Chief and Administrator of Upper Canada scuttles ingloriously down the hillside with his men.

  In an instant the odds have changed. Until Wool’s surprise attack, the British were in charge of the battle. Dennis had taken one hundred and fifty prisoners; the gun in the redan was playing havoc with the enemy; Brock’s forces controlled the heights. Now Dennis is retreating through the village and Wool’s band is being reinforced by a steady stream of Americans.

  Brock takes shelter at the far end of the town in the garden of the Hamilton house. It would be prudent, perhaps, to wait for the reinforcements, but Brock is not prudent, not used to waiting. As he conceives it, hesitation will lose him the battle: once the Americans consolidate their position in the village and on the heights they will be almost impossible to dislodge.

  It is this that spurs him to renewed action-the conviction that he must counterattack while the enemy is still off balance, before more Americans can cross the river and scale the heights. For Brock believes that whoever controls the heights controls Upper Canada: they dominate the river, could turn it into an American waterway; they cover the road to Fort Erie; possession of the high ground and the village will slice the thin British forces in two, give the Americans warm winter quarters, allow them to build up their invading army for the spring campaign. If the heights are lost the province is lost.

  He has managed to rally some two hundred men from the 49th and the militia. “Follow me, boys,” he cries, as he wheels his horse back toward the foot of the ridge. He reaches a stone wall, takes cover behind it, dismounts. “Take a breath, boys,” he says; “you will need it in a few moments.” They give him a cheer for that.

  He has stripped the village of its defenders, including Captain Dennis, bleeding from several wounds but still on his feet. He sends some men under Captain John Williams in a flanking movement to attack Wool’s left. Then he vaults the stone fence and, leading Alfred by the bridle, heads up the slope at a fast pace, intent on re-taking the gun in the redan.

  His men, struggling to keep up, slide and stumble on a slippery footing of wet leaves. Above him, through the trees, Wool’s men can be seen reinforcing the gun emplacement. There is a confused skirmish; the battle seesaws; the Americans are driven almost to the lip of the precipice. Someone starts to wave a white handkerchief. Wool tears it away, orders a charge. The British are beaten back, and later some will remember Brock’s cry, “This is the first time I have ever seen the 49th turn their backs!”

  The sun, emerging briefly from the clouds, glistens on the crimson maples, on the Persian carpet of yellow leaves, on the epaulettes of the tall general, sword in hand, rallying his men for a final charge. It makes a gallant spectacle: the Saviour of Upper Canada, brilliant in his scarlet coat, buttons gleaming, plumed hat marking him unmistakably as a leader, a gap opening up between him and his gasping followers.

  Does he realize that he is a target? No doubt he does-he has already been shot in the hand-but that is a matter of indifference. Leaders in Brock’s army are supposed to lead. The spectacle of England’s greatest hero, Horatio Nelson, standing boldly on deck in full dress uniform, is still green in British memory. The parallels are worthy of notice. The two heroes share similar strengths and flaws: disdain for the enemy, courage, vanity, ambition, tactical brilliance, innovative minds, impetuosity. Both have the common touch, are loved by their men, whom they, in turn, admire, and are idealized by the citizens of the countries they are called upon to protect. And both, by their actions, are marked for spectacular death. They seem, indeed, to court it. Brock’s nemesis steps out from behind a clump of bushes and when the General is thirty paces from him draws a bead with his long border rifle and buries a bullet in his chest, the hole equidistant from the two rows of gilt buttons on the crimson tunic. George Jarvis, a fifteen-year-old gentleman volunteer in the 49th, rushes over. “Are you much hurt, sir?” he asks. There is no answer, for Brock is dead. A grisly spectacle follows as a cannonball slices another soldier in two and the severed corpse falls upon the stricken commander.

  The gallant charge has been futile. Brock’s men retreat down the hill, carrying their general’s body, finding shelter at last under the stone wall of the Hamilton garden at the far end of the village. Here they are joined by the two companies of York Volunteers, whom Brock passed on his gallop to Queenston. These men, arriving on the dead run, catch their breath as American cannon fire pours down upon them from the artillery post on the opposite heights. A cannon-ball slices off one man’s leg, skips on, cripples another in the calf. Then, led by young John Macdonell, the dead general’s aide, the augmented force makes one more attempt to recapture the heights.

  Impulsively, Macdonell decides to follow Brock’s example. Possessed of a brilliant legal mind-he was prosecuting criminal cases at sixteen and has been acting attorney-general of the province for a year-he has little experience in soldiering. Quick of temper and a little arrogant, he reveres his dead commander and, in the words of his fellow aide Major Glegg, determines “to accompany him to the regions of eternal bliss.” Macdonell calls for a second frontal attack on the redan. Seventy volunteers follow him up the heights to join the remainder of the 49th under Captain John Williams taking cover in the woods. Together, Williams and Macdonell form up their men and prepare to attack.

  “Charge them home and they cannot stand you!” cries Williams. The men of the 49th, shouting “Revenge the General!” (for he was their general), sweep forward. Wool, reinforced by several hundred more men, is waiting for them, his followers concealed behind logs and bushes.

  As Macdonell on horseback waves his men on, his steed, struck by a musket ball, rears and wheels about. Another ball strikes Macdonell in the back, and he tumbles to the ground, fatally wounded. Williams, on the right flank, also falls, half scalped by a bullet. As Captain Cameron rushes forward to assist his fallen colonel, a ball strikes him in the elbow and he too drops. Macdonell, in terrible pain, crawls toward his closest friend. Lieutenant Archibald McLean of the York Volunteers, crying, “Help me!” McLean attempts to lead him away and is hit by a ball in the thigh. Dismayed by these losses, the men fall back, bringing their wounded with them. Den
nis is bleeding from five wounds. Williams, horribly mangled, survives, but Macdonell is doomed.

  Everything that Brock feared has’ happened. The Americans occupy both the village and the. heights and are sending over reinforcements, now that they have unopposed possession of the river. The British have retreated again to the outskirts of the village. All of their big guns, except for one at Vrooman’s Point, have been silenced. At ten o’clock on this dark October morning. Upper Canada lies in peril.

  •

  AT THIS POINT, all General Van Rensselaer’s forces should be across the river, but so many of his boats have been destroyed or abandoned that he is hard put to reinforce his bridgehead. He has no more than a thousand men on the Canadian side, and of these two hundred are useless. Stunned by their first experience of warfare, the militiamen cower beneath the bank; no power, it seems, no exhortation to glory or country, no threat of punishment can move them.

  The General crosses at noon with his captain of engineers, whose job it is to help the troops on the heights. Unfortunately all the entrenching tools have been left at Lewiston; conditions are such that they will never arrive. The General sends the touchy Winfield Scott to the top of the ridge to take over from the wounded Wool, then prepares to return to the American shore. As he does so, a rabble of militiamen leaps into the boat with him.