Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (102 page)

Nonetheless, in his speech to the legislature Drummond is forthright. He knows what he wants. He wants one-third of each militia regiment embodied for up to twelve months’ military service. He wants the wretched provincial roads improved. He wants to continue the practice of banning all distillation of grain, for the province is teetering on the edge of starvation and every kernel of wheat, oats, and rye is needed for food. Most of all he is concerned about disaffection. The jail at York is bursting with prisoners accused of
treason and sedition. The population is heavily American—at best apathetic, at worst disloyal.

So Drummond demands stern measures: a denial of the right of
habeas corpus
in certain cases; the right to confiscate the property of convicted traitors; the right to enforce martial law when necessary. The legislature allows him the first two. When it denies him the third Drummond makes it very clear who is in charge. His executive council, which he dominates (it has been reduced to three members), hastily gives him the power he seeks. He expects the lower house to censure him for it, as it censured De Rottenburg, but without it he cannot impress provisions for his troops from the reluctant settlers. Democracy, such as it is in Upper Canada, goes out the window as Drummond shows his iron fist.

He feels shackled by lack of money. At Long Point and Port Dover, debts incurred by Brock eighteen months before have yet to be paid. In consequence, the settlers will not sell their produce to the army. Small debts cannot be discharged because neither coinage nor army bills are available in denominations under twenty-five pounds. If a merchant is owed twenty pounds, he collects nothing; if he is owed forty pounds, he loses fifteen. What money does come in is scarcely enough to pay off old debts. As a result, Drummond is forced to accept loans from York merchants to cover the spending.

There are further complications: Canadians, prejudiced against paper money, want gold because the Americans are flooding the country with forged bills. There is also the problem of compensation. Everybody from John Crysler on the St. Lawrence to Isaac Dolsen on the Thames is demanding relief for war damages. Early in March, with the legislature still in session, Drummond pays a flying visit to the Thames Valley and returns to report that the entire region has been drained of its resources. There is no house that does not have a claim for reparations. The mills have been burned, the houses looted, the livestock killed or dispersed. Drummond estimates that at least thirty thousand pounds will be needed just to pay existing obligations.

The troops are in a state of discontent over the lack of pay. Some have received nothing for six months. At Fort Niagara, the captured
stronghold on the American side of the river, Colonel Robert Young reports an increasing number of desertions among soldiers who are usually steady and well behaved. Pay is not the only problem. The men of Drummond’s old regiment, the King’s, are suffering so badly from ague and dysentery that the regiment’s medical officer recommends its immediate removal. By mid-March, Major-General Riall, Vincent’s replacement, reports that desertions have been increasing to an alarming degree from “that cursed Fort,” as he calls it.

Riall wants to reduce the garrison and decrease the area of the fort. But Drummond has no intention of abandoning his toehold on the American bank of the Niagara. When the invasion comes, the five or six hundred men hived in the fort can stand off at least ten times their number. The best Drummond can do is to replace the King’s with another regiment. Meanwhile, Riall must hold his thin line along the river, as Brock did before him, and be prepared to deploy at the moment the enemy’s invasion point is known.

As soon as the river and the lakes are open the British 103rd will reinforce Riall’s Centre Division (now called the Right). Drummond does not relay to Riall Prevost’s assessment of that regiment: “… men who [have] long lost sight of everything that is honest and honourable. Convicts taken from the hulks to be made soldiers—but who answer to no other purpose than that of bringing the profession into discredit and disrepute.…” Of all the corps last sent to Canada, Prevost believes the 103rd to be the worst. On a recent foray to destroy American stores and river craft, fifty-one of its members deserted to the enemy.

Drummond has no idea where the Americans will strike. Their movements, are, to say the least, confusing. The best part of an American division has moved from French Mills (Wilkinson’s winter quarters) to Sackets Harbor and then on toward the Niagara frontier, only to turn about and march back again. Drummond cannot know it, but this is the result of an ambiguous order sent by the Secretary of War and misinterpreted by Jacob Brown. Drummond determines to sit tight, maintain his main force at Burlington Heights, and when the American intentions are known,
march at the head of his army to reinforce Major-General Riall’s slender defence along the Niagara.

At the moment, the weather is his enemy. An unexpected mild spell in February has frustrated a daring and unconventional attack that Drummond planned against the American fleet, wintering at Put-in Bay. The plan called for seventeen hundred men to hack a road through the forest, seize Amherstburg, cross the Detroit River, and push on to attack the ships with bill hooks, hatchets, and muskets. But the ice is too soft and the expedition must be aborted. At the same time the weather along the Niagara is so bad, the snow so deep, that no progress can be made to strengthen “that cursed Fort.”

In mid-March, Drummond prorogues the legislature and returns to his headquarters at Kingston. One further problem continues to occupy him: he is convinced that some exemplary trials are needed “to overawe the spirit of disaffection in the province.” John Beverley Robinson, the youthful acting attorney general, is preparing abstracts against some thirty persons for high treason. Most have left the country, but there are eight or nine who he believes can be convicted. An additional twenty remain to be indicted. These will be civil trials. As Robinson points out, “Executions of traitors by military power would have comparatively little influence. The majority of people would consider them arbitrary acts of punishment.”

The accused traitors are Canadian civilians who joined groups of armed American raiders under Joseph Willcocks’s second-in-command, Mallory, during the guerrilla activity the previous November. Captured by the Oxford and Norfolk militia during two encounters at Port Dover and Chatham, they have been languishing in the York jail, waiting to be tried by a special commission.

Robinson is convinced that the trial must take place as close to the homes of the accused as possible—in the London district. He well knows that the settlers in that region are generally indifferent to the interests of the autocratic government at York (in which they have little real say) and, if not indifferent, are often actively pro-American. But now the war has come to their doorstep. Willcocks, Mallory, Markle have all conducted raids on their settlements,
robbing them of cattle and household goods, burning barns and homes, making prisoners of those neighbours who have joined the militia. The accused are known to them as men who actively supported the raiding parties. Some of the prospective jurors, in Robinson’s words, “voluntarily resorted to arms to subdue them.” Therefore it is fair to suppose that “men who risqued their lives in the apprehension of these traitors will be well satisfied to have them punished as they deserve.”

To all this Drummond assents. He is anxious to have the trials take place as swiftly and as publicly as possible. For the future security of the province, a number of unfortunate farmers are shortly to be brought before a jury of their peers at the Union Hotel in Ancaster (for the London district is held to be too close to the border) and, in accordance with the ancient law still on the statute books, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered if found guilty. Nothing else, the authorities are convinced, will serve to stiffen the spines of a wavering population.

GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN, APRIL 14, 1814

Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and his colleague, Jonathan Russell, the two newest members of what is now a five-man American peace commission, step off the gangplank of the U.S. corvette
John Adams
, which has brought them here from New York. Since the bay is choked with ice and the river frozen, they must travel twelve miles by sleigh to reach their lodgings in the heart of the town, where they confidently expect to meet the three other plenipotentiaries, now charged with dealing directly with the British—but on neutral ground.

But where
are
the others? Where are Adams, Bayard, and Gallatin, the original threesome who are to form part of the expanded commission? And where are the British negotiators? Nobody knows. Clay and Russell dispatch notes to Amsterdam and St. Petersburg informing the missing trio of their new appointment. A week passes before they learn that Bayard and Gallatin are in London. As for
Adams, he has not yet left the Russian capital, but long before the letter can reach him he will be off to Reval on the Gulf of Finland, waiting for the ice to shift in the Baltic. Men of goodwill on both sides have been murmuring about peace in North America for the best part of a year, but the possibility of any face-to-face negotiation seems as remote as ever.

The five wanderers have been chosen partly for their public stature, partly for their negotiating ability, partly for what they represent. Adams and Bayard are both known to be, in James Monroe’s words, “friendly to peace”—especially Bayard, a confirmed Federalist, whose party has always opposed the war. Russell and Clay are in the other camp, notably the silver-tongued Clay who, as leader of the War Hawks, helped goad the country into war in 1812. Monroe, the Secretary of State, has regional considerations also in mind. Thus Adams represents the Eastern states, Bayard the Middle, Clay the South and West, and Russell the commercial interests. As for Gallatin, as a former member of the Cabinet he stands as a buffer, the great conciliator between hawks and doves, eastern and western interests. For the negotiators must negotiate with each other as well as with the enemy.

Clay comes to Gothenburg reluctantly. He would much rather remain in Washington as Speaker, but he cannot in conscience resist this call to public service. America needs tough-minded men who will stand up to the nefarious British, and Clay is nothing if not tough-minded. It is possible to believe that without his persistence in the winter of 1811–12, the United States might not have gone to war.

His instructions and those of his colleagues are clear. The most important item on the future agenda is that of impressment. “This degrading practice must cease; our flag must protect the crew; or the United States cannot consider themselves an independent Nation.” The words are Monroe’s, but they might easily have sprung from Clay’s own lips in the months before war was declared. Impressment is what this brutal, frustrating, inconclusive war is all about—that and the British Orders in Council establishing a blockade on the high seas. Those Orders were repealed, not at the eleventh hour,
alas, but at the thirteenth, a tardiness on Britain’s part that frustrated any hope of peace. Now, however, Monroe and his president, James Madison, are insisting that the whole matter of blockades—their legality and illegality—be settled by formal treaty.

Third, but not least, is the question of Canada. Here the American government’s view has hardened. Canada—or at least part of it—must be ceded to the Union. Joint use of the Great Lakes will surely mean another war; it was in those common waters that the British gained control of the Indians with the resultant massacres: “The cupidity of the British Traders will admit of no control. The inevitable consequences of another war, and even of the present, if persevered in by the British Government, must be to sever those provinces by force from Great Britain. Their inhabitants themselves, will soon feel their strength, and assert their independence.”

Nothing can be settled, however, until the British appoint negotiators, and this has not been done. Clay is eager to get started, but events seem to be moving at the speed of treacle. He wants Gallatin and Bayard to get to Gothenburg as quickly as possible. What are they doing in the enemy capital, anyway? Yet neither man shows any sign of moving, while Russell, the former American chargé d’affaires in London, must go off to Stockholm to present his credentials as American ambassador to Sweden. Like Adams, he will hold two jobs at the same time.

So Clay frets, all alone, in Gothenburg. He is not used to sitting still, has none of John Quincy Adams’s cool patience. (That earnest diplomat is bettering himself in Reval waiting for the ice to break by working his way through the Duc de Sully’s interminable memoirs of life under Henry IV of France.) Clay, the hot-tempered Kentuckian, is used to getting his way, whether in a duel, a poker game, or on the floor of the House. Now, as he paces impatiently about his new lodgings—a lank, nervous figure, his long, bony face reflecting his frustration—he must know that events have overtaken him, “wonderful events … astonishing events,” to be sure, but events, nevertheless, that may have an adverse effect on the peace talks.

He is scarcely in Gothenburg a week before the news filters through that the Allies have seized Paris (on March 31), that Napoleon has abdicated, and that a new Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, is about to ascend the throne. Clay is bowled over by this dramatic and unexpected news. Napoleon, the master of Europe for more than a decade, humbled and shipped off to an obscure Mediterranean isle! Clay has anticipated peace, but
this
—this is like a revolution! No human sagacity could have foreseen it, he tells the American ambassador in Paris.

Bayard and Gallatin, who arrived in London in the midst of its delirium over Bonaparte’s downfall, report to Clay some of the new facts of life. As the bells peal and the rockets explode and the people cheer the end of twenty years of war, Gallatin explains that “the complete success obtained by this country in their European contest has excited the greatest popular exultation, and this has been attended with a strong expression of resentment against the United States.”