Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (86 page)

And so, as the news of the great victory spreads, as bonfires flare and triumphant salvos echo across the Union, as public dinners, toasts, orations, songs, and poems trumpet the country’s triumph, the seeds of a bitter controversy begin to sprout.

Elliott cannot let the matter die. For the next thirty years the Battle of Lake Erie will be fought again and again, with affidavits, courts of inquiry, books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, even pistols. By 1818, Perry’s own good nature evaporates; he calls Elliott “mean and despicable,” retracts his letter when Elliott challenges him to a duel. Perry responds by demanding Elliott’s court martial (a request that is pigeon-holed by the President). A hasty court of inquiry settles nothing, and even Perry’s unfortunate death of yellow fever in 1819 does not still the verbal war. Elliott persists in his unflagging campaign for exoneration. In 1839, when James Fenimore Cooper enters the fray with a book that tends to support Elliott, Perry’s friends rush again to his defence, and the literary battle goes on. Nor does it die until the last of the participants have gone to their final rest to join those others who, in the bloom of youth, bloodied the raw new decks of the two fleets that tore at each other on a cloudless September afternoon in 1813.

FIVE
The Northwest Campaign: 3
Retreat on the Thames

September 14–October 5, 1813

With Barclay’s defeat, Erie becomes an American lake. Because Perry can cruise these waters with impunity, landing troops anywhere, the British cannot hope to hold the territory captured in 1812. Detroit must be evacuated; Amherstburg, on the Canadian side, is threatened. The British have two choices: to meet the coming invasion at the water’s edge (always supposing they know where it will come), or retire at once to a defensive position up the valley of the Thames, keeping the army intact and stretching the American lines of supply. The British command favours retreat; the Indians want to stay and fight
.

FORT AMHERSTBURG, UPPER CANADA, SEPTEMBER 14, 1813

Tecumseh is in a violent passion. He has just come over from Bois Blanc Island in the Detroit River, where he and his followers are camped, to find that the fort is being dismantled. What is going on?

It looks very much as if Procter is planning to retreat; but Procter has been remarkably evasive with the Indians. On the day after the naval battle he actually pretended that Barclay had won.

“My fleet has whipped the Americans,” he told the tribesmen, “but the vessels being much injured have gone into Put-in Bay to refit, and will be here in a few days.”

Tecumseh, who is no fool, resents being treated as one. He does not care for Procter. The two have been at loggerheads since Brock’s death, a year ago. Brock, in Tecumseh’s view, was a
man;
Procter is fit only to wear petticoats. Now the British general fears to face his Shawnee ally with the truth.

Disillusion is gnawing at Tecumseh. Since 1808 he has been the supreme optimist, perfectly convinced that, aided by the compelling new religion of his mystic brother the Prophet, he can somehow weld all the warring and quarrelsome tribes into a mighty confederacy. He is in this war not to help the British but to help his people hold on to their hunting grounds and to their traditional life style. But the war has gone sour, and confederation is not as easy as it once seemed. He cannot convince the southern tribes to join him. And there is more than a suspicion that the young braves who still recognize his leadership are as interested in plunder and ransom money as they are in his grand design.

He is a curious mixture, this muscular Shawnee with the golden skin and hazel eyes who has renounced all pleasures of the flesh to funnel his energies toward a single goal. It is the future that concerns him; but now that future is clouded, and Tecumseh is close to despair. He has already considered withdrawing from the contest, has told his followers, the Shawnee, Wyandot, and Ottawa tribesmen, that the King has broken his promise to them. The British pledged that there would be plenty of white men to fight with the Indians. Where are they?

“The number,” says Tecumseh, “is not now greater than at the commencement of the war; and we are treated by them like the dogs of snipe hunters; we are always sent ahead to
start the game;
it is better that we should return to our country and let the Americans come on and fight the British.”

Tecumseh’s own people agree. Oddly, it has been Robert Dickson’s followers, the Sioux, and their one-time enemies the Chippewa, who have persuaded him to remain. But Dickson has gone off on one of his endless and often mysterious peregrinations through the wilderness to the west.

Now, with the fort being dismantled, Tecumseh has further evidence of Procter’s distrust. Determined to abandon the British, he goes off in a fury to the home of Matthew Elliott, the Indian Department supervisor at Amherstburg. Ever since the Revolution, Elliott has been friend and crony to the Indians and especially to the Shawnee. At times, indeed, this ageing Irishman seems more Indian than Tecumseh. He fights alongside the Indians, daubed with ochre, has clubbed men to death with a tomahawk and watched others die at the stake—the ritual torture that Tecumseh abhors and prohibits. As events have proved, at both Frenchtown and Fort Meigs, he is less concerned about sparing the lives of prisoners than is Tecumseh. As a result he is, next to Procter, the man whom Harrison’s Kentuckians hate most.

Elliott cringes under Tecumseh’s fury. The Shawnee warns him that if Procter retreats, his followers will in a public ceremony bring out the great wampum belt, symbolic of British-Indian friendship, and cut it in two as an indication of eternal separation. The Prophet himself has decreed it. Worse, the Indians will fall on Procter’s army, which they outnumber three to one, and cut it to pieces. Elliott himself will not escape the tomahawk.

For retreat is not in Tecumseh’s make-up; he believes only in attack. The larger concerns of British strategy in this war are beyond him; his one goal is to kill as many of the enemy as possible. He has been fighting white Americans since the age of fifteen, when he battled the Kentucky volunteers. At sixteen, he was ambushing boats on the Ohio, at twenty-two serving as a raider and scout against the U.S. Army. He was one of the first warriors to break through the American lines at the Wabash during one of the most ignominious routs in American history when, in 1791, Major-General Arthur St. Clair lost half his army to a combined Indian
attack. The following year Tecumseh answered the call of his elder brother to fight in the Cherokee war, and when his brother was killed became band leader in his stead, going north again to take part in the disastrous Battle of Fallen Timbers on the Maumee, where Major-General Anthony Wayne’s three thousand men shattered Blue Jacket’s band of fourteen hundred. On that black August day in 1794 Tecumseh, his musket jammed, did his best to rally his followers, waving a useless weapon as they scattered before the American bayonets.

Tecumseh believes in sudden attack: dalliance, even when justified, frustrates him; retreat is unthinkable. When Perry’s fleet first appeared outside Amherstburg he could not understand why Barclay did not go out at once to face it.

“Why do you not go out and meet the Americans?” he taunted Procter. “See yonder, they are waiting for you and daring you to meet them; you must and shall send out your fleet and fight them.”

Since those bloody days on the Wabash and Maumee, facing St. Clair and Wayne, Tecumseh has used another weapon—his golden voice—to frustrate William Henry Harrison’s hunger for Indian lands. Now Harrison, the former governor of Indiana, who did his best to buy up the hunting grounds along the Wabash for a pittance, has Lake Erie to himself. He can land anywhere; and he has a score to settle with Tecumseh, who frustrated his land grab. Tecumseh, too, has a score to settle with Harrison, who destroyed the capital of his confederacy on the Tippecanoe. He cannot wait to get at the General; and he will use the weapon of his oratory to rally his people and blackmail the British into standing fast.

The following morning, he summons his followers from Bois Blanc Island. They squat in their hundreds on the fort’s parade ground as Tecumseh strides over to a large stone on the river bank. It is here that announcements of importance are made and here that Tecumseh, the greatest of the native orators—some say the greatest orator of his day—makes the last speech of his life.

It is to Procter, standing nearby with a group of his officers, that Tecumseh, speaking through an interpreter, addresses his words.

First, his suspicions, born of long experience, going back to the peace that followed the Revolution:

“In that war our father was thrown on his back by the Americans. He then took the Americans by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid that our father will do so again.…”

Then, after a reference to British promises to feed the Indian families while the braves fought, a brief apology for the failure at Fort Meigs: “It is hard to fight people who live like ground hogs.”

Then:

“Father, listen. Our fleet has gone out, we know they have fought. We have heard the great guns, but know nothing of what has happened to our father with one arm. Our ships have gone one way and we are much astonished to see our father tying up everything and preparing to run the other, without letting his red children know what his intentions are. You always told us to remain here and take care of our land.… You always told us you would never draw your foot off British ground. But now, Father, we see that you are drawing back, and we are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must compare our father’s conduct to a fat animal that carries its tail upon its back. But when affrighted, it drops it between its legs and runs off.…”

Tecumseh urges Procter to stay and fight any attempt at invasion. If he is defeated, he himself will remain on the British side and retreat with the troops. If Procter will not fight, then the Indians will:

“Father, you have got the arms and ammunition.… If you have any idea of going away, give them to us.… Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit; we are determined to defend our land; and if it is his will, we wish to leave our bones upon it.”

As always, Tecumseh’s eloquence has its effect. Some of his people leap up, prepared to attack the British immediately if their leader gives the word. But Tecumseh is placated when Procter promises to hold a council with the tribesmen on September 18.

Procter faces serious problems. The fort is defenceless, having been stripped of its cannon to arm the new ship,
Detroit
. One-third
of his troops have been lost to him as a result of Perry’s victory. He is out of provisions and must call on Major-General Vincent’s Centre Division to send him supplies overland, since the water route is now denied him by the victorious Americans. Harrison not only has a formidable attack force but he also has the means to convey it, unchallenged, to Canada. Procter’s own men are battle weary, half famished, and despondent over the loss of the fleet.

He does not have the charisma to rally his followers—none of Brock’s easy way with men, or Harrison’s. He is in his fiftieth year, a competent enough soldier, unprepossessing in features, and not very imaginative. There is a heaviness about him; his face is fleshy, his body tends to the obese—“one of the meanest looking men I ever saw,” in the not unbiased description of an American colonel, William Stanley Hatch. When Brock remarked that the 41st was “badly officered” he undoubtedly meant men like Procter; yet he also must have thought Procter the best of the lot, for he put him in command at Amherstburg and confirmed him as his deputy after the capture of Detroit.

Procter suffers from three deficiencies: he is indecisive, he is secretive, and he tends to panic. When Brock wanted to cross the Detroit River and capture William Hull’s stronghold in a single bold, incisive thrust, Procter was against it. When Procter’s own army crept up on the sleeping Kentuckians at the River Raisin, Procter hesitated again, preferred to follow the book, wasted precious minutes bringing up his six-pounders instead of charging the palisade at once and taking the enemy by surprise. When he was finally convinced of the fleet’s loss on September 13, he held a secret meeting with his engineering officer, his storekeeper, and his chief gunner, ordered the dismantling of the fort and the dispatching of stores and artillery to the mouth of the Thames. But he did not tell his second-in-command, Lieutenant-Colonel Augustus Warburton, who is understandably piqued at being left in the dark. When Warburton protests, Procter curtly tells him he has a perfect right to give secret orders. A right, certainly; but it is an axiom of war that subordinates should be kept informed.

There are good reasons for Procter to withdraw from Fort Amherstburg. Harrison has total mobility. Perry’s fleet can now land his troops anywhere along Erie’s north shore to outflank the British and take them from the rear. But if Procter moves up the Thames Valley he can stretch Harrison’s line of supply and buy time to prepare a strong defensive position. The bulk of the American force is made up of militia men who have signed up for six months. If past experience means anything, Harrison will have difficulty keeping them after their term is up, especially with the Canadian winter coming on.