Patriotic Fire (4 page)

T
he American campaign of 1813 opened along the lines of the previous year, with attacks again planned along the Canadian border, except this time they were designed more to drive the British back into Canada than to actually conquer Canada itself, as had originally been intended.

Over the winter Madison replaced his incompetent secretary of war, William Eustis, with an even worse choice, New Yorker John Armstrong, a political waffler and intriguer who, during the Revolution, had conspired to oust George Washington and incite mutiny among the Continental Army by secretly authoring an infamous correspondence known as the Newburgh Letters. Armstrong liked no one in the present administration (including Madison), and no one liked him either. About the only thing that might be said in his favor was that, unlike his predecessor, who was a mere politician, Armstrong at least had some genuine military service under his belt. But as the months moved on it became apparent to almost everyone that John Armstrong had been a perfectly awful choice for the job.

By the time the ice thawed in the early spring of 1813, Tecumseh had persuaded British colonel Henry Procter, who had replaced the slain Brock, to attack a newly built American fortification near the western end of Lake Erie, south of Detroit near the Michigan border. Known as Fort Meigs (named after the then Ohio governor with the unusual name of Return J. Meigs), this edifice was defended by only 600 men under the command of General William Henry Harrison of Indiana, who had been fighting Tecumseh and his people for years, and who had recently been appointed to command the Western army after Hull’s debacle at Detroit.

The British laid siege to Fort Meigs on May 1, but so strongly was it built that little damage was done and even the flaming arrows shot by Indians did not affect it. Four days later a relief force of 1,200 ardent Kentuckians arrived and soon attacked Procter’s army. In their “ardor,” however, the Kentuckians got themselves cut up in a wild melee, and many of those captured were massacred by the Indians, who, not understanding the principles of siege warfare (or, for that matter, the European rules of military conduct), soon afterward disappeared into the forest with their collection of scalps and booty.*
 
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Not only that, but to illustrate that militia problems were not confined to the American army, the Canadian militia—comprising nearly half of Procter’s force—declared that it was planting time back home and returned to their farms. Procter then gave up and marched his men back north with some 600 Kentuckians as prisoners, leaving behind another 450 dead and wounded (not counting Indians), including about 100 of his own men.

Two months later Procter returned with a larger army consisting of 5,000 regulars, Canadian militia, and a large body of Indians, and on August 2 attacked Fort Stephenson, about thirty miles east of Fort Meigs. Here, however, he suffered a shocking reversal of fortune at the hands of the vengeful Kentuckians, who, in addition to blasting them with cannon fire, mowed down the British and Indians with their long rifles “like wheat in a hailstorm.” Complaining that this was “the severest fire I ever saw,” Procter called it quits and once again marched back north. Finally, things seemed to be looking up on the Northwest front.

A month later, his army now grown to 5,500 men with the arrival of another large contingent of Kentucky volunteers, Harrison determined not only to chase the bothersome Procter out of U.S. territory but, if possible, to destroy him. This he did on October 5, when he finally caught up with the British at Moraviantown, Canada, about five days’ march northeast of Detroit. Procter had formed up his lines between the Thames River and a swamp where he was determined to make a stand, counting on the discipline and massed firepower of his trained regulars and the ferocity of Tecumseh’s Indian tribes.

This proved to be a mistake, because the Americans mounted a surprise cavalry charge (with militia from Kentucky, made of sterner stuff than other U.S. militia) that broke Procter’s lines in less than five minutes and put the British in a deadly crossfire. Concluding that the battle was lost, those redcoats who could—including Procter*
 
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—fled down the road toward Moraviantown. This left Harrison’s army with only Tecumseh’s Indians to subdue, since they did not fight in lines like infantrymen but (more effectively) from behind bushes and shrubs on the edges of the forest. The mounted Kentuckians quickly plunged into these thickets, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting broke out, with Indian tomahawks against Kentucky hatchets.

During the melee the courageous Tecumseh was shot through the heart and killed, and his body later mutilated by soldiers bent on revenge, so they said, for Indian depredations going back two centuries or more. Accordingly, Tecumseh was skinned and pieces of his preserved hide were parceled out to the Kentucky troops, who took them home as relics for the edification of friends, sweethearts, wives, and children. With the death of this most charismatic of American Indians also died his dream of a great Indian Confederation—almost, that is, except for one final act in that drama, which was soon to be played out a thousand miles away in Alabama and would set the stage for the spectacular conclusion to the War of 1812.

If the war in the West finally seemed to be going well, back east it was only more of the same. To replace the hapless Dearborn, Secretary of War Armstrong had chosen a commander with even worse credentials and certainly fewer scruples. He was General James Wilkinson, whom the ever pithy Winfield Scott described as an “unprincipled imbecile”; his assignment, handed down by Amstrong’s War Department, would be yet another attempt to take Montreal.

Wilkinson’s very presence on the Canadian border belied his well-deserved reputation as a conniver and an incompetent. He had previously been commander of the Seventh Military District, headquartered at New Orleans, which encompassed the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama territories, as well as Tennessee and Arkansas. So inept and loathed was he that his own Louisiana troops refused to serve under him. Yet Armstrong’s idiotic solution to this thorny problem was to send Wilkinson north and put him in charge of the most difficult and important campaign of the war.

Not only was Wilkinson incompetent; it later turned out that he also had been a spy and traitor on the payroll of Spain, selling whatever secrets the United States had vis-à-vis that shaky Mediterranean kingdom. Furthermore, Wilkinson had been mixed up in the treasonous scheme by Aaron Burr, the former U.S. vice president then in disgrace for the duel that resulted in Alexander Hamilton’s death, in which Burr sought to detach the lower Mississippi Valley from the Union, kick the Spaniards out of Mexico, and form a new nation with himself as king, emperor, president, or what have you. Amid all these strange machinations, as historian Marquis James has pointed out, “for some time [Wilkinson] had been confronted with the necessity of deciding whom he could most profitably betray—the United States, Spain, or Aaron Burr.” In the end Wilkinson betrayed Burr, but not before waiting two weeks to do it so that he could extort $100,000 from the Spanish for revealing this supposedly valuable information. (In 1808 Wilkinson was court-martialed for his role in the affair but acquitted.) In any event, he was the man Armstrong put in charge of the new Montreal operation.

It started out badly, in part because Wilkinson didn’t want to attack in the first place. The operation was designed as a two-pronged affair, with his 7,500 men moving on Montreal from the west down the St. Lawrence River and another force, under General Wade Hampton (grandfather of Wade Hampton III, one of Robert E. Lee’s Civil War cavalry commanders), attacking from the south with an army of 4,500. Hampton went first, but no sooner had he crossed the border than he ran into a much smaller British force of Canadian militia, which should have been an easy obstacle to overcome. Yet when the Canadians commenced a great howling, firing, and blowing of horns, Hampton was fooled into thinking they were much superior to him in numbers and, after some minor skirmishing, he returned to the American side of the river, set his army into winter quarters, and refused to obey any further orders from Wilkinson, whom he found contemptible. For his part, Wilkinson ran into a British beehive just as he crossed into Canada. At Chrysler’s Farm another inferior British force drove Wilkinson’s army back into the United States, after inflicting casualties at a ratio of three to one. By this point, apparently due to illness, Wilkinson had become addicted to the then popular drug laudanum (an opiate) and had taken to babbling incoherently and singing to himself all the time, according to one of his generals.

By the following spring, after a wretched term in winter quarters during which many soldiers froze to death or died of disease, Wilkinson had pulled himself together enough for another go at it, though without the services of Hampton, who still refused to have anything to do with him. This time Wilkinson took 4,000 of his men toward Montreal, but as soon as they had cleared Lake Champlain and crossed over into Canada they encountered a small, squat blockhouse with fewer than 200 British soldiers inside. Wilkinson besieged it, but when the small cannons he brought up failed to dent the little fort’s stone walls, he reversed tracks and marched his army back to the United States, where he was relieved of command, this time for good.

T
here was, however, one military front upon which the United States
had
achieved success thus far in the war. This was at sea, which is almost astonishing since the British navy could count on one thousand ships in its war fleet while the pitiful American navy could muster only seven frigates, a handful of sloops of war, and a few gunboats. The problem for the British was that most of their navy was tied up fighting Napoleon’s ships, blockading the French coast, or attacking French-held colonies in the Caribbean. Even so, the British navy had a force in North American waters more than twice the size of the U.S. fleet. It is all the more remarkable that this inferior collection of American naval ships not only battled the great British navy to a standstill but, in doing so, their heroics produced a number of historically celebrated slogans and mottoes, such as “Don’t give up the ship,” which even today easily roll off the tongues of Americans.

In the closing months of the previous year, the few American frigates gave a very good account of themselves against the British navy. Frigates, though not nearly as large as ships of the line, were nevertheless formidible warships. Fairly typical of an American frigate of the day was the
Constitution,
a 204-foot-long, oak-sided three-master built in 1798. She could do more than thirteen knots (about fifteen miles per hour) under a full acre of sail, and at that rate travel about 350 miles in a twenty-four-hour period, providing the winds were perfect (which they usually weren’t). The
Constitution
carried a crew of 450, including 50 marines and 30 “cabin boys,” some as young as nine, who fought too.

In battle, the marines manned the “fighting tops”—wooden shooting platforms at various levels up the masts—from where they could bring a murderous rifle fire down on an enemy in close quarters.
Constitution
was armed with thirty-two twenty-four-pounder long guns with an effective range of twelve hundred yards, nearly three-quarters of a mile (most cannon in those days were identified by the weight of their projectile), twenty thirty-two-pounder short guns (with a range of four hundred yards), and two twenty-four-pounder “bow chasers” with a range of a thousand yards. She was not equipped with stern guns, on the assumption that she was there to fight, not to run.

On August 19, 1812, the
Constitution
encountered the British frigate HMS
Guerrière
two days out of Boston, and a sea fight ensued. Captained by Isaac Hull (nephew of the odious army general William Hull),
Constitution
opened fire first with a double-shotted broadside that seemed to cause
Guerrière
to leap out of the water. Within thirty minutes the British ship was dismasted, her hull torn to pieces, and many of her crew dead or dying. Being without masts from which to strike her colors, she fired a gun to leeward (recognized as a sign of maritime surrender), and, after removing the remainder of her crew, the sailors aboard
Constitution
watched
Guerrière
slip slowly beneath the waves.

So sturdy was the oak from which
Constitution
was planked that at one point during the battle a sailor watched a solid shot literally bounce off the ship, and exclaimed, “Her sides are made of iron!” The name stuck, and not long afterward
Constitution,
now nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” chased down another British frigate,
Java,
and gave her the same treatment.*
 
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Then, on the morning of October 12, the American frigate
United States
was spotted in the mid-Atlantic by the British frigate
Macedonian,
which immediately moved in for a fight. The
United States
—captained by Stephen Decatur, one of America’s foremost naval heroes—obliged. What the captain of
Macedonian
didn’t realize was that he was outgunned by the
United States
(fifty-four guns to forty-nine) and that the Americans were expert gunners, a fact he quickly learned, to his regret. Decatur luffed into the wind to slow the ship and unleashed a series of broadsides that cut away
Macedonian
’s rigging and much of her mastage.

More than a hundred solid shots penetrated the Britisher’s hull and more than a hundred sailors were killed or wounded—nearly a third of her crew.
Macedonian
struck her colors barely an hour and a half after the fight had begun and was taken as an American prize. A year and a half later, while conducting treaty negotiations, Decatur authored one of the aforementioned famous slogans that have found their way into the American lexicon: “My country, right or wrong.”*
 
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