Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (104 page)

In Scott, the army has found a remarkable commander. He is a little pompous and more than a little vain but has reason to be both. He has studied Greek, Latin, and French, rhetoric, metaphysics, mathematics, political economy, philosophy, and law. He is an omnivorous reader: Plutarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Adam Smith, John Locke. He rides well, holds his liquor, plays chess, knows how to keep a conversation going. He is also a gourmet who believes that a knowledge of good food and its preparation is one of the accomplishments of a gentleman and a soldier—a view not lost on the army cooks.

He is also pugnacious. As a boy of thirteen he defended his Quaker schoolteacher from a drunken brawler, knocking the man down with a single blow. A furrowed skull is evidence of a successful duel. In his full-dress uniform, the long-legged Scott—a towering six-foot-five—cuts a handsome figure and knows it. When he received his first uniform—a sartorial symphony of blue and gold, scarlet and white—he strutted for two hours before two full-length mirrors, admiring himself.

He is a man of colossal ego, superbly confident of his own abilities, which, happily for him, are considerable. Here at Buffalo his military library comes into its own. Since the government has not provided him with a text on infantry tactics, Scott has dug into his baggage to discover a dog-eared copy of the French regulations issued by Napoleon and has made it his military Bible. Since March he has been acting as a drill sergeant, beginning with the officers, teaching them to march in column and line, to wheel and deploy, to load and fire their muskets with some degree of efficiency, to charge with fixed bayonets.

For three months, ten hours a day, Scott drills his men, allowing nothing to interrupt him except darkness or rain. Once the officers are schooled, the lower ranks are put to work. In the morning, the corporals drill their squads. At eleven, the captains take over. At one the entire brigade, complete with officers and musicians, turns out for four more hours. To Jarvis Hanks the drummer boy, who has come overland from French Mills with his comrades, Winfield Scott is “the most thorough disciplinarian I ever saw.”

There has been some grumbling and a flurry of desertions. But now with four corpses lying on the drill ground and a fifth prisoner fainting dead away from the shock of his resurrection, there will be no more. Indeed, officers and men alike are gaining a new respect for themselves, as well as for their commander, who now finds them “healthy, sober, cheerful and docile.” Scott has left nothing to chance. A stickler for cleanliness, he has borne down so hard on sanitary conditions that the army has lost only two men from illness.

The camp is secure. Scott has organized night patrols, guards, sentinels, outposts. He insists on civility, etiquette, and courtesy and lays down rules to enforce “these indispensable outworks of subordination.” Woe to the soldier who forgets to salute a junior lieutenant! Woe to the officer who fails to return the salute.

He also has at his command an intelligence arm—a small force of spies, which he personally directs. They are mainly Americans with friends living north of the border, or disaffected Canadians who can come and go fairly freely. Scott’s practice is to throw them out to the rear of the British right flank as far as Burlington Heights and even to York. The spies hide in the homes of sympathizers who visit the British posts to find out for them what Scott wants to know.

Scott has at least one captive traitor in the British midst, an anonymous captain in one of the regular regiments who has volunteered to pass along military secrets. “I hold him,” Scott tells Armstrong in his florid fashion, “by one of the strongest cords that bind the human heart—a sentiment of steady and determined revenge. I know his private history.”

Thus, the new brigadier is able to inform the War Department in Washington of the exact British strength at York, Lake Simcoe, Burlington Heights, Fort George, Fort Niagara, Queenston, Chippawa, and Fort Erie. He has details of new fortifications, emplacements, blockhouses, supply depots. He knows the topography of the Niagara peninsula, the distance between communities, the state of the roads, the best places to effect a landing. In short, he is preparing for the next invasion of Canada, carefully and methodically. His men, in his own words, “sigh for orders to beat up the enemy’s quarters.”

Some, however, have carried the beating up too far in the smash-and-grab raids launched by the Americans along the shoreline of Lake Erie. Abraham Markle, the man who directs Scott’s spies to the homes of dissident Canadians, is not above settling old scores—and therein lies danger. Markle is a crony of Joseph Willcocks, an officer in the Canadian Volunteers, a former member of the Upper Canadian legislature who defected about the same time as his fellow turncoat. He is responsible for urging that the homes of old Revolutionary Tories in the Long Point area be destroyed. On May 16, he guided a raiding party across the lake, ostensibly to destroy public property. Instead, it burned every house, barn, and private building between Port Dover and Turkey Point—an act of revenge, for their owners were among those who burned Buffalo the previous December.

That is too much for Scott. The last thing he wants is a continuation of the tit-for-tat incendiary war that flared up the previous winter. He calls a court of inquiry which disavows the act, but it is too late. Sir George Prevost is outraged; he has already indicated that as far as the British are concerned, vengeance for the destruction of Newark ended with the burning of Buffalo. Now he asks the navy, patrolling the eastern seaboard, to act to deter further American raids. Vice-Admiral Alexander Cochrane is happy to co-operate. He issues an order to “destroy and lay waste such towns and districts as you may find assailable.…” The firing of private property becomes official British policy. It will not be tempered until Washington itself is in flames.

FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY, JUNE 6, 1814

It is late evening. From the open window of the dining room in Weisinger’s Tavern on the outskirts of town comes the sound of revelry and hoarse voices raised in song. What is this? “Rule Britannia”? “God Save the King”? It is too much for the crowd of Southerners gathered below the open windows. They surge forward, maddened by the foreign voices, and try to rush the stairs, only to be halted by Dan Weisinger himself, a man of substance and authority who has been selling claret to the revellers at thirty dollars a case and has no intention of losing their custom.

The celebrants are prisoners of war. The captured officers from Barclay’s fleet are here as are those of the 41st taken at the Battle of the Thames. The group includes the young gentleman volunteer from Amherstburg, John Richardson, now a tall seventeen-year-old.

After eight months in captivity, things have eased. No longer fettered in stifling prisons, Richardson and his comrades are on parole, dressed in the grey cotton blouses affected by Kentucky riflemen. A Frankfort banker has guaranteed their bills so that they are able this night to celebrate the birthday of the mad old king, George III, in a style to which, as officers of His Majesty, they have become accustomed.

For John Richardson it has been a remarkable experience, thanks largely to the American connections of his maternal grandfather, the Canadian fur trader John Askin, Sr., who is the father-in-law of Elijah Brush, the American commander of the militia at Detroit. For many a family living along the international border this is a civil war in more than one sense, for the Brush family has been remarkably civil to their enemy kinsman.

In Chillicothe, another member of the family, Henry Brush, took Richardson under his wing, supplied him with a private apartment, regular meals, and a horse. As Richardson put it, “no individual in the character of a prisoner of war had less reason to inveigh against his destiny.”

Now he is in Frankfort with the others. The news of Napoleon’s defeat has put a new complexion on the war. Lodged in the town’s principal hotel, they are paid the regulation three shillings a day—more than sufficient for their board, which includes three hearty meals and all the whiskey they can drink.

In the garden, taking their daily constitutional, the British have been objects of an intense if hostile interest by the long-limbed Kentuckians who come to stare and gibe, surprised to discover that their enemies are white and not like the Indians, as they have been taught to believe. When the prisoners reply to the Kentuckians’ jeers in kind, young Richardson records the odd comments, delivered “in their usual nasal drawling tone.”

Tarnation if these Britishers don’t treat us as if we were their prisoners than they ours
.

Roar me up a sapling if they aren’t mighty saucy
.
By Christ, I’ve the swiftest horse, the truest rifle, and the prettiest sister in the whole state of Kentucky, but I’d give ’em all to have one long shot
.

This zoo-like atmosphere is soon dissipated as the government puts the prisoners on parole and tells them they can leave for Canada if they can pay their way. The field officers depart; the others remain, enjoying the run of the town.

Most Kentuckians cannot forget that some of these men were present at the River Raisin and again at Fort Meigs, when the Indians had their way with wounded prisoners. Yet there are others, perhaps with stronger reasons to be bitter, who have long since forgiven and forgotten. One of these is George Madison, the American major who surrendered to Procter at the Raisin. Another is Madison’s friend Betsey Hickman, daughter of the disgraced General Hull and widow of Captain Paschal Hickman who, after his capture at Frenchtown, was tomahawked by the Potawatomi and allowed to choke to death in his own blood.

Major Madison cannot forget that the British in Lower Canada treated him well. He determines to return the compliment and helps arrange parole for the officers. As for Betsey Hickman, she has known Richardson since he was a small boy, for the Hulls of Detroit and the Askins of Amherstburg were old friends and neighbours before the war. As far as she is concerned, such friendships cannot be shattered by politics, and so John Richardson becomes a regular guest in her home.

He is more than a little in love with the buxom Betsey, even though she has three teenaged daughters not much younger than himself. In spite of the tragedies of the previous eighteen months—her father sentenced to be shot, her husband cruelly slaughtered—she retains her beauty and her good humour. She is both rich and desirable. When a tall, husky Kentuckian named James starts to pay her court, Richardson seethes. In the younger man’s mind, James is “a man of vulgar bearing and appearance … evidently little used to the decorum necessary to be preserved in the society of females.” When James goes so far as to smoke a cigar in the presence of ladies, Richardson cannot resist a comment on his bad manners. James glares at him, leaves the room, and from then on appears to avoid the youth.

Meanwhile, word has arrived of a prisoner exchange. Richardson hurries to the Hickman home to murmur his goodbyes, then, late at night, heads back to his quarters only to find the malevolent James barring his path.

“You have escaped me once,” says James (or so the future novelist and playwright will recall it), “but I’ll take good care you don’t again.”

A stiletto flashes. A hand grips Richardson by the collar. He wriggles free, dashes off, hears a shrill whistle from behind as a group of James’s friends leap from their hiding place in pursuit. Fear spurs him on—up a slope, over a garden wall, down a pathway, through a stubborn gate, home to the tavern.

Next day Richardson loses no time in recounting the story to the Hickman family, whereupon, to his immense satisfaction, the spirited Betsey announces that James will never again darken her door. It is as well Richardson is leaving, for James is armed, but a paroled prisoner is allowed neither weapons nor a lock on his door.

Off goes Richardson next morning with his fellow officers, each attired in a light Kentucky frock fastened by a red Morocco belt
with a silver buckle. They mount their horses and follow their escort through the streets, heading north toward Canada with the blessings of George Madison and a knot of friends ringing in their ears and the scowls of the rest of the populace engraved on their memories. Richardson half expects another ambush or perhaps a single shot from a long Kentucky rifle; as the company trots along he examines every tree lest it hide an enemy. There is nothing.

John Richardson’s war is over, but his life is just beginning. The events of these crowded teenage years will become grist for the literary mill he is constructing; and the people he has encountered—Tecumseh, Betsey, George Madison’s daughter Agatha, even the ill-humoured James—will, in thin fictional disguises, achieve an immortality of sorts in the literary works that flow from his pen.

ANCASTER, UPPER CANADA, JUNE 18, 1814

John Beverley Robinson, acting attorney general for the province, veteran of Queenston Heights, leading member of the ruling aristocracy, ward and disciple of the Reverend Dr. John Strachan, is penning a careful letter in his slanting copperplate to General Drummond, via his aide, Captain Robert Loring.

He weighs his words carefully, for, as a result of what he writes, some men will die gruesomely while others will live. At the Union Hotel on the main street of this little village, the trials for high treason, soon to be known (a little unfairly) as the Bloody Assizes, are coming to an end. It is Robinson’s task to sum up the evidence for Drummond and to indicate which of the guilty men should be executed and which, if any, should be reprieved.

A handsome, personable young man with delicate, almost feminine features, at the age of twenty-three he carries the burden of justice in Upper Canada on his shoulders. (The solicitor general, D’Arcy Boulton, captured en route to England, now languishes in a French jail.) He is not without experience of the world. He has seen men die, including his predecessor, John Macdonell, Brock’s stricken aide, who was also the senior partner in the law firm to which Robinson
was articled. He owes his present position to John Strachan and to Mr. Justice William Dummer Powell, one of the three senior jurists who have been taking the treason cases here in rotation.