Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (15 page)

Finally, Hull agrees. He is to raise an army of twelve hundred volunteers from the Ohio militia (as Brock has predicted) to be augmented by some four hundred regular troops. With this force he is to cut a road through forest and swamp for two hundred miles from Urbana, Ohio, to Detroit and thus secure the frontier.

Henry Dearborn, after cautiously weighing the lifetime post of customs collector against the less secure appointment of Commander-in-Chief of the American Army, finally settles on the latter and is commissioned major-general. He, too, has a plan. If war comes, the main army will attack Montreal by the historic Champlain water route, thus cutting off all of Upper Canada from reinforcements and supplies. At the same time, three columns will strike at Canada from the border points of Detroit, Niagara, and Sackets Harbor. The attack from Detroit will take care of the Indians. The other two, from opposite ends of Lake Ontario, will serve to slice up the upper province,
knocking out the major British fortresses at Niagara and Kingston. Dearborn’s headquarters will be at Albany, the nerve centre from which roads veer off to the three eastern invasion points. (Detroit is so remote that Dearborn treats it as a separate command.)

On paper all of this makes sense, but it depends on inspired leadership, swift communications, careful timing, well-trained troops, an efficient war department, and a united, enthusiastic nation. None of these conditions exists.

Dearborn leaves the capital early in April for Boston, where he expects, with misplaced optimism, to raise his citizen army. Given the New England governors’ violent opposition to war, it is a forlorn hope. Hull, who departs for the Ohio frontier, will have better luck.

In the capital, the war fever grows in the face of British stubbornness. On April 15, Augustus Foster attends a great dinner given by the New Orleans deputies to mark Louisiana’s entry into the Union. He is in the best possible position to assess the temper of the Congress, for most of its members are present along with the cabinet. Foster finds himself sandwiched between—of all people—the two leading War Hawks. Henry Clay, on one side, is as militant as ever. The twenty-six-year-old John Calhoun, on the other, is “a man resolved,” his tone cool and decided. It all seems very curious to Foster. He decides that a great many people are afraid of being laughed at if they don’t fight and thus arrives, quite unconsciously, at the nub of the matter.

Far to the north, in Quebec City, the new governor general of Canada, Sir George Prevost, has no illusions about the future. He warns the British government that he shortly expects a declaration of war from Madison. Foster cannot yet see it. To him, it is merely “a curious state of things.” The party grows too noisy for him, and presently he takes his leave, repairing to the Executive Mansion, there to enjoy the more peaceful company of the engaging Dolley Madison.

DAYTON, OHIO
, April 6, 1812. Duncan McArthur, one of Wayne’s old frontier scouts, now General of the Ohio militia, that “enterprising, hardy race” of which Brock has written, is haranguing his citizen soldiers.

“Fellow citizens and soldiers,” cries McArthur, “the period has arrived when the country again calls its heroes to arms …!” Who, he asks, will not volunteer to fight against perfidious England—“that proud and tyrannical nation, whose injustice prior to 1776, aroused the indignation of our fathers to manly resistance?”

“Their souls could no longer endure slavery,” says McArthur. “The HEAVEN protected patriots of Columbia obliged the mighty armies of the tyrant to surrender to American valor.…”

He warms to his subject, sneers at Britain’s “conquered and degraded troops,” gibes at “the haughty spirit of that proud and unprincipled nation,” calls for vengeance, justice, victory.

What is going on? Is the country in a state of war? The eager volunteers, harking to their leader’s braggadocio, must surely believe that the United States and Britain are at each other’s throats. Yet war has not been declared. Few Englishmen believe it likely nor does the majority of Americans. Nonetheless, the call has gone out from Washington for volunteers, and Ohio has been asked to fill its quota. For Duncan McArthur, the original war—the War of Independence—has never ended.

“Could the shades of the departed heroes of the revolution who purchased our freedom with their blood, descend from the valiant mansions of peace, would they not call aloud to arms?” he asks. “And where is that friend to his country who would not obey that call?”

Where indeed? McArthur is preaching to the converted. By May, Ohio’s quota of twelve hundred volunteers will be over-subscribed. Sixteen hundred militiamen answer the call. These will form the undisciplined core of the Army of the Northwest, which Brigadier-General William Hull, Governor of Michigan, will lead to Detroit.

The new general joins his troops at Dayton, Ohio, after a journey that has left him weak from cold and fever. In spite of his reputation he is a flabby old soldier, tired of war, hesitant of command, suspicious
of the militia who he knows are untrained and suspects are untrustworthy. He has asked for three thousand men; Washington finally allows him two thousand. He does not really want to be a general, but he is determined to save his people from the Indians. A Massachusetts man, he has been Governor of Michigan for seven years and now feels he knows it intimately—every trail, every settlement, every white man, woman, and child, and much of the Canadian border country. He is convinced that the Indians, goaded by the British, are particularly hostile to the Michigan settlers. He sees himself as their protector, their father-figure, and he looks like a stereotype father in a popular illustration, the features distinguished if fleshy, the shock of hair dead white. (He is only fifty-eight, but some of his men believe him closer to seventy.) He chews tobacco unceasingly, a habit that muddies the illusion, especially when he is nervous and his jaws work overtime. There is a soft streak in Hull, no asset in a frontier campaign. As a young man he studied for the ministry, only to give it up for the law, but something of the divinity student remains.

On May 25, Hull parades his troops in the company of Governor Meigs of Ohio, a capable politician with the singular Christian name “Return.” The volunteers are an unruly lot, noisy, insubordinate, untrained. Hull is appalled. Their arms are unfit for use; the leather covering the cartridge boxes is rotten; many of the men have no blankets and clothing. No armourers have been provided to repair the weapons, no means have been adopted to furnish the missing clothing, no public stores of arms or supplies exist, and the powder in the magazines is useless. Since the triumph of the Revolution, America has not contemplated an offensive war, or even a defensive one.

For these men, dressed in homespun, armed when armed at all with tomahawks and hunting knives, Hull has prepared the same kind of ringing speech, with its echoes of Tippecanoe, that is being heard in the Twelfth Congress:

“On marching through a wilderness memorable for savage barbarity you will remember the causes by which that barbarity has been heretofore excited. In viewing the ground stained with the blood of your fellow citizens, it will be impossible to suppress the
feelings of indignation. Passing by the ruins of a fortress erected in our territory by a foreign nation in times of profound peace, and for the express purpose of exciting the savages to hostility, and supplying them with the means of conducting a barbarous war, must remind you of that system of oppression and injustice which that nation has continually practised, and which the spirit of an indignant people can no longer endure.”

Hull and his staff set off to review the troops, a fife and drum corps leading the way. The sound of the drums frightens the pony ridden by one of Hull’s staff; it turns about, dashes off in the wrong direction. A second, ridden by Hull’s son and aide, Abraham, follows. Soon the General finds his own mount out of control. It gallops after the others, tossing its rider about unmercifully. Encumbered by his ceremonial sword, Hull cannot control the horse; his feet slip out of the stirrups, he loses his balance, his hat flies off, and he is forced to cling to the animal’s mane in a most unsoldierly fashion until it slows to a walk. At last the staff regroups, confers, decides not to pass down the ranks in review but rather to have the troops march past. It is not a propitious beginning.

The volunteers have been formed into three regiments. Jeffersonian democracy, which abhors anything resembling a caste system, decrees that they elect their own officers, an arrangement that reinforces Great Britain’s contempt for America’s amateur army. McArthur is voted colonel of the 1st Regiment of Ohio Volunteers, and it is remarked that he “looks more like a go-ahead soldier than any of his brother officers.” A go-ahead soldier on the Ohio frontier, especially an elected one, differs markedly from a go-ahead soldier in Wellington’s army. To a later English visitor, McArthur is “dirty and butcher-like, very unlike a soldier in appearance, seeming half-savage and dressed like a backwoodsman; generally considered being only fit for hard knocks and Indian warfare” (which is, of course, exactly the kind of contest that is facing him).

In the volunteer army, officers must act like politicians. More often than not they
are
politicians. McArthur has been a member of the Ohio legislature. The 2nd Regiment of Ohio Volunteers elects
a former mayor of Cincinnati, James Findlay, as its colonel. The 3rd votes for Lewis Cass, a stocky, coarse-featured lawyer of flaming ambition who is U.S. marshal for the state. Almost from the outset Hull has his troubles with these three. Cass has little use for him. “Instead of having an able energetic commander, we have a weak old man,” he writes to a friend. Hull, on his part, is contemptuous of the militia, whom he found unreliable during the Revolution. Imagine
electing
officers to command!

“Elected officers,” he believes, “can never be calculated upon as great disciplinarians. In every station the elected will be unwilling to incur the displeasure of the electors; indeed he will often be found to court their favour by a familiarity and condescension which are totally incompatible with military discipline. The man that votes his officer his commission, instead of being implicitly obedient, as every soldier ought to be, will be disposed to question and consider the propriety of the officer’s conduct before he acts.…”

Another problem faces Hull. The three militia commanders are full colonels. But James Miller, who will lead the regulars, is only a half-colonel. When Miller protests the injustice of this—if anything, he should outrank the amateurs—Cass, Findlay, and McArthur threaten to quit and disband their regiments unless their rank is maintained. There is nothing that Hull or his superiors in Washington can do about this small-boy petulance. The militia colonels continue to outrank Miller.

The army starts the march north on June 1. A few days later at the frontier community of Urbana, the last outpost of civilization, Hull’s suspicions about the militia are reinforced. From this point to Detroit the troops face two hundred miles of wilderness with no pathway, not even an Indian trail to follow. The volunteers turn ugly. They had been promised an advance of fifty dollars each for a year’s clothing but have received only sixteen. One unpopular officer is ridden out of camp on a rail, and when the orders come to march, scores refuse to move. Into camp, at this impasse, marches Miller’s 4th Infantry Regiment of regulars. These veterans of Tippecanoe prod the wavering volunteers into action, and the troops move out,
with McArthur’s regiment in the lead, hacking a way through jungle and forest. The following day, three mutinous ringleaders are court-martialled and sentenced to have their heads half shaved and their hands tied and to be marched round the lines with the label “Tory” between their shoulders—a punishment the prisoners consider worse than the death-sentence.

Hull’s force is as much a mob as an army. The volunteers mock the General’s son Abraham, who, mounted upon a spirited horse, in full uniform and blind drunk, toppled into the Mad River in front of the entire assembly.

“Who got drunk and fell in the Mad River?” somebody calls from the ranks, to which a distant companion answers, “Captain Hull!” and a third echoes, “That’s true!”

The jests are needed, for the rain falls incessantly. The newly built road becomes a swamp; wagons are mired and have to be hoisted out by brute strength. The troops keep up their spirits on corn liquor supplied by friendly settlers.

Then, at the brand-new blockhouse on the Scioto named Fort McArthur, a bizarre episode dries up the supply of moonshine. A
guard named Peter Vassar lies slumped under a tree, befuddled by drink. He hears a sudden noise, seizes his musket, makes sure it is charged, takes deliberate aim, and shoots another sentry, Joseph England, through the left breast, just missing his heart. Vassar is court-martialled and given a grotesque sentence: both ears are cropped and each cheek branded with the letter M. McArthur issues an order restraining settlers from selling liquor to his men without his written permission. The ban does not extend to his officers.