Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (33 page)

No tongue shall blazon forth their fame—
The cheers that stir that sacred hill
Are but the promptings of the will
That conquered then, that conquers still
And generations shall thrill
At Brock’s remembered name
.

—Anon.

LEWISTON, NEW YORK, AUGUST
15, 1812; with the United States Army of the Centre.

Major John Lovett, who is more poet than soldier, leaps out of his quarters to the roar of musket fire on the heights above the Niagara River, flings himself onto his horse, and dashes off. The cries of his commanding officer, Major-General Stephen Van Rensselaer, echo behind him:
Come back! Come back!
But Lovett gallops on. Later, the General will tell him that he fully expected he was about to run away, never to be seen again; but this is mere badinage, for the two
are old friends. Lovett serves the American commander officially as military aide and secretary; he is also confidant, political ally, and something of a court jester—an antidote against the loneliness and burden of command. To Lovett, soldiering is a new experience, war is something of a lark, the sound of musketry exciting.

As the Major gallops for the cliffs, he realizes that two other riders are close behind him. Both are high-ranking officers. Lieutenant-Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer is the General’s aide-de-camp, kinsman, and friend. Brigadier-General William Wadsworth of the Upper New York State militia has been in charge of recruiting for the coming thrust against Queenston—a difficult and thankless task, given the mood of the region.

As they run their horses up the broken rock of the precipice (the worst terrain Lovett has ever known), the musket fire increases. They burst out of a copse into open land; a soldier runs up crying, “General, do ride into that hollow, for the balls fly dreadfully here!” but they gallop in, seeking to discover the cause of the gunfire. One of the guards posted on the cliff starts to explain just as a ball fans his face. He leaps behind a great oak, pulling his arms close in to his body to make himself invisible, and then, seeing the ludicrousness of his position, grins ruefully, causing Lovett to burst out laughing. General Wadsworth maintains a straight face and is careful to present his breast to the enemy at all times, for he does not intend, he says, “that a Wadsworth should be shot through the back.” A few minutes later the skirmish ends inconclusively. It has been caused, significantly, by the attempts of two Americans to desert to the Canadian side of the Niagara River by boat.

That evening, Lovett takes pains to write his friend and confidant, John Alexander of Albany, a breathless account of the incident “principally for the purpose of enabling you to meet the
lye
should any fool or scoundrel manufacture one, out of what little did actually take place.” He does not want it “conjured up as to another
Sackett’s Harbor Battle.”
Lies there have been and rumours aplenty, including one monstrous falsehood, heard during the army’s march north through Utica, that the American post at Sackets Harbor had
been attacked and blockaded by the British—a piece of fiction that caused the General to abandon his route to the Niagara River and march to the relief of the town, only to find that nothing untoward had taken place.

Now, Stephen Van Rensselaer has set up his headquarters at Lewiston, concentrating his forces here, directly across from the Canadian village of Queenston. This very day, Dr. Eustis, the Secretary of War, has sent an order to Van Rensselaer’s superior, General Dearborn, at Albany: “Considering the urgency of a diversion in favour of General Hull under the circumstances attending his situation, the President thinks it proper that not a moment should be lost in gaining possession of the British posts at Niagara and Kingston, or at least the former, and proceeding in co-operation with General Hull in securing Upper Canada.” Both Eustis and Dearborn cling to the fancy that Hull has been victorious in Upper Canada and that Fort Amherstburg has already fallen.

In Lewiston, General Van Rensselaer is under no such illusion, though he will not learn of Hull’s situation for several days. There is not much he can do to aid Hull. It is all very well for Eustis to talk of an attack on the Niagara frontier; it is quite a different matter to put his strategy into practice. The British control not only the far shore but also the Niagara River and the two lakes. Van Rensselaer has less than a thousand men to guard a front of thirty-six miles. One-third of his force is too ill to fight. None has been paid. His men lie in the open without tents or covering. Ammunition is low; there are scarcely ten rounds per soldier. There are no heavy ordnance, no gunners, no engineers, scarcely any medical supplies.

And even if, through some miracle of logistics, these deficiencies were rectified, it is questionable whether the state militia will agree to fight on foreign soil. On July 22, a humiliating incident at Ogdensburg made the General wary of his civilian soldiers. Across the St. Lawrence at Prescott lay a British gunboat. The General’s aide and cousin, Solomon, had planned a daring raid to capture her; he and 120 men would row silently upriver at three in the morning, cross to the Canadian shore, seize the wharf buildings, and attack
the ship simultaneously from land and water. At two, everything was in readiness; four hundred men were paraded and volunteers called for, but when only sixty-six agreed to go, the expedition had to be aborted.

If the troops are reluctant, their militia leaders, with the exception of Solomon Van Rensselaer, are inexperienced. Wadsworth, the militia general, knows so little of war that he has pleaded to be released from his assignment of assembling volunteers: “I confess myself ignorant of even the minor details of the duty you have assigned to me, and I am apprehensive that I may not only expose myself but my Government,” he tells the Governor of New York.

Stephen Van Rensselaer is himself a militiaman without campaign experience. When the crunch comes, colleagues in the regular forces will refuse to co-operate with him. The irony is that the General is totally and unequivocally opposed to a war that he now intends, as a matter of honour, to prosecute to the fullest—even at the risk of his own reputation. He is a leading Federalist politician, a candidate for governor with a strong following in New York State, and that is precisely why he is here at the head of a thousand men, very much against his will.

For his appointment he has his political rival to thank—the iron-jawed incumbent, Governor Daniel D. Tompkins, an able administrator and machine politician who is up for re-election the coming spring. As the Republican standard-bearer, Tompkins is as interested in getting his Federalist opponent out of the way as he is in prosecuting the war, and there is little doubt that Stephen Van Rensselaer will be a formidable rival.

He is the head of one of the first families in New York, and in his name one hears the ring of history. He is the eighth and last patroon of the feudal estate of Rensselaerwyck on the outskirts of Albany, a vast domain close to twelve hundred square miles in size and after almost two centuries still in the hands of the original family. A relic of the early Dutch immigration to America, the General is a Harvard graduate, a farmer, a millionaire, a philanthropist, and, more from a sense of duty than from ambition, a politician. He has served in
the state assembly, in the state senate, and as lieutenant-governor of New York. Though he is entitled to feudal tithes, he does not collect them. He is liberal enough to vote against his own class in favour of extending the suffrage. His military training and experience as a militia general are all but non-existent, but that does not bother Governor Tompkins. By appointing his rival to the command of the army on the state’s northern frontier he has everything to gain and nothing to lose—except, possibly, the war.

Politically, it is a masterstroke. Stephen Van Rensselaer can scarcely refuse the post; if he does he will be discredited in the eyes of the voters. If he accepts, he ends Federalist opposition to the war in New York State. If he blunders, he will undoubtedly be relieved of his command, and that will work against him in the political contest to come. If he performs brilliantly he will not be able to relinquish command and so will pose no political threat.

He accepts—but under one condition: he insists that his cousin Solomon be his aide-de-camp. For Solomon, in the words of his friend Lovett, “is all formed for war.” Unlike the General, with his pert and amiable Dutch features, the Lieutenant-Colonel looks like a soldier—“the handsomest officer I ever beheld,” in the words of a contemporary. The son of a Revolutionary general, ensign at seventeen, he fought with distinction under Wayne at Fallen Timbers. (Though seriously wounded, he took command of his shattered force and for his gallantry was promoted to major.) For most of the intervening years since leaving the regular army at the century’s turn he has been adjutant-general for the state of New York. Now thirty-eight, he is ten years younger than his commanding officer.

The two cousins with Lovett form a close triumvirate—“our little family,” Lovett calls it. They can rely on no other counsel than their own, for their politics render them suspect, especially to such fire-breathing War Hawks as Peter B. Porter, chairman of the House committee on foreign relations, who has been appointed quartermaster general for the state of New York. (Porter and his brother are themselves in the contracting and provisioning business and thus in a position to profit from supplying the army, but no one worries
about that; the phrase “conflict of interest” has yet to enter the language.) In Albany, Governor Tompkins and General Dearborn show no great eagerness to assist the beleaguered force along the Niagara. Solomon, for one, is convinced that his political enemies are deliberately trying to sabotage him.

Lovett is determined to keep a careful record of everything that happens (or does not happen)—“the history of every occurrence that can possibly be tortured into a lie”—in the event of later distortions or misunderstandings. He does so in a series of breathless letters to his friend John Alexander, scribbling away at night, even though exhausted from his unaccustomed soldiering. He has neither stamina nor time to scrawl out a sentence to his wife, Nancy; that duty he leaves to his friend: “Tell my good wife, I have not another moment to write, that I am neither homesick, crop-sick, war sick, nor sick of my Wife,” he writes. And again: “Don’t let my wife get alarmed” and “Don’t forget my Wife and Children, nor suffer them to be lonely. Keep their spirits up” and so on. It does not seem to occur to Lovett that the best way to keep up the family spirits might be to send off a letter in his own hand. But then Mrs. Lovett, herself a general’s daughter, prefers to relay her own messages to her husband through their chosen intermediary, Alexander.

To Alexander, Lovett pours out his own pessimism and despair, which he shares with his two friends, the Van Rensselaer cousins. The war, to him, is foolish:

“If any man wants to see folly triumphant, let him come here, let him view friends by friends stretched for hundreds of miles on these two shores, all loving and beloved; all desirous of harmony; all wounded by being coerced, by a hand unseen, to cut throats. The People must awaken, they will wake from such destructive lethargy and stupor.…

“What might not the good spirit of this great People effect, if properly directed. History while recording our folly, will dress her pages in mourning, the showers of Posterity’s tears will fall in vain; for the sponge of time can never wipe this blot from the American Name.…”

And yet, when the men under his friends’ command refuse to leave the boundaries of the state to attack the British gunboat on the opposite shore, he is “mortified almost to death.” For John Lovett is torn by conflicting emotions. He hates the idea of the war but badly wants to win it. He adjures his friend Alexander not to breathe a word about the defections of the militia lest the news cause further defections. He worries about Hull, hoping against hope that he can hold out, but expecting the worst. His despair over the outbreak of war is accompanied by a despair over his general’s inability to strike a decisive blow against the enemy. To him, this war is “the Ominous Gathering of folly and madness,” yet he deplores the lack of two thousand disciplined troops who, he has been told, are necessary for a successful attack on Fort George, the British post at the Niagara’s mouth.

He is a lawyer by profession, a
bon vivant
by inclination, a satirical poet, a dinner wit, an amateur politician. He is good with juries, bad with law, for he cannot abide long hours spent with dusty tomes in murky libraries. He is restless, always seeking something new, changing employment frequently. It is doubtful, however, that he ever expected to become a soldier.

“I am not a soldier,” he tells his friend the General when he seeks to employ him. To which Stephen Van Rensselaer replies, “It is not your
sword
, but your
pen
I want.”

Now, in spite of himself, in spite of his hatred of war and bloodshed, in spite of his aching back and his head cold, in spite of long hours spent in the saddle and damp days on the hard ground, he discovers that he is actually enjoying the experience. It is for him a kind of testing, and his letters bubble with the novelty of it all.

“If flying through air, water, mud, brush, over hills, dales, meadows, swamps, on wheels or horseback, and getting a man’s ears gnawed off with mosquitoes and gallinippers make a
Soldier
, then I have seen service for—one week,” he boasts. And he revels in the tale of how he and his two friends, shipwrecked in a thunderstorm near Sackets Harbor, sought refuge in an abandoned house where he went to sleep in a large Dutch oven, aided by a sergeant of the guard who
laid him on a large board and pushed him into its mouth “like a pig on a wooden shovel.”

He worships the Van Rensselaer cousins (after all he is employed as a propagandist):