For Honour's Sake (19 page)

Once Castlereagh turned to farming he could remember his duties in London only with difficulty. Whenever he reluctantly returned to the city another crisis in Liverpool's continuing attempts to consolidate a strong cabinet always needed attention. So it was not until August 24 that he made time to receive Jonathan Russell, who came seeking an armistice. The forty-one-year-old diplomat from Rhode Island had trained as a lawyer but never practised, instead entering into a European trade venture soon after his graduation in 1791. His business often took him to Europe, and this background had prompted Madison to appoint him chargé d'affaires to Paris in 1810 and then to London the following year. The London posting had been one of frustration for Russell, instilling a deep distrust of the British, whom he believed capable of the most nefarious stratagems.

While waiting on Castlereagh, he had noted various alarming government responses to the declaration of war. “The government,” he wrote
James Monroe on August 4, “has laid an embargo on all our vessels in port and given orders to detain & bring in such as may be encountered at sea—excepting those which have licences [from Britain]. Reinforcements in troops are likewise ordered for Canada & the West Indies and an additional squadron under the command of Sir John B Wairen”—actually Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren, who was made commander-in-chief of the North American and West Indies stations—“for the American seas. These measures are professed here to be merely of a defensive & precautionary character & to enable this government to treat more advantageously for an adjustment with us. The vessels embargoed or detained will not be proceeded against for condemnation until it is certain that we persist in hostilities on our part after a knowledge of the revocation of the orders in council. I feel my situation here to be delicate & have thought it to be my duty to suspend the formal exercise of my functions but without asking for any passports to depart.”
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About the time he wrote Monroe, Russell received detailed instructions from the secretary of state proposing an armistice only if the orders were repealed, they were not replaced by any other form of blockade, impressment immediately ceased, and those sailors already pressed were returned. Russell was to “assure Britain that Congress would pass a law barring British seamen from serving aboard either the public or commercial vessels of the United States.”

That was the carrot. The stick Russell was to wield was that a protracted war would cause Britain irreversible losses in North America. Prosecution “of the War for one year, or even a few months,” Monroe wrote, “will present very serious obstacles on the part of the United States to an accommodation, which do not now exist…. Should our troops enter Canada you will perceive the effect which that measure cannot fail to have … on the public mind here, making it difficult to relinquish Territory which had been conquered.”
³
The threat was implicit. Either Liverpool's government agreed to immediate armistice or the Americans would conquer and keep Canada.

Castlereagh received the American diplomat with glacial formality and the meeting devolved into Russell presenting ultimatums that the foreign secretary roundly rejected. For a man ostensibly seeking an armistice,
Russell seemed intent on making enacting one all but impossible. First, he insisted, the declaration of war nullified revocation of the orders-in-council by the House of Commons. A new revoking motion would be required. Castlereagh dismissed this notion out of hand. Letting the matter slide, Russell demanded that impressment cease. Britain would never, Castlereagh retorted, “consent to suspend the exercise of a right upon which the naval strength of the empire mainly depends.” Russell failed to understand the “great sensibility and jealousy of the people of England on this subject … no administration could expect to remain in power that should consent to renounce the right of impressment, or to suspend the practice, without the certainty of an arrangement which should obviously be calculated most unequivocally to secure its objects.”
⁴
Castlereagh abruptly ended the meeting, asserting that the chargé d'affaires had no authority from Madison to legitimately negotiate on behalf of the American government.
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Shortly after this rebuff, Russell received fresh instructions from Monroe that softened the American position but still tied an armistice to ending impressment. He exchanged a flurry of notes with Castlereagh, who roundly rejected this link. Declaring the matter hopeless, Russell bitterly quit London in early September and sailed for America.
⁶

Again the inability of diplomats to conduct discussions that reflected realistic appraisals of events on the other side of the Atlantic frustrated any chance of an armistice. Russell had acted on the basis of instructions written before three American armies marched sluggishly toward Canada and well before Brig. Gen. William Hull crossed from Fort Detroit and occupied Sandwich. The declaration was only days old when Monroe set his instructions to paper, and he had been confident that the summer would yield a string of victories that would only strengthen the hand of the United States at the negotiating table. Revoking the orders-in-council and ceasing impressment would be the price Britain paid to regain its chunks of Canada. And perhaps those lands would not have to be returned at all. Perhaps Canada, or at least Upper Canada, could be retained in exchange for not kicking the British right off the continent.

Such had been the heady temper in Washington in those early days of the war, but by the time Russell acted on Monroe's instructions it was
painfully evident that the summer had brought the Americans nothing but disaster on the Canadian frontier.

By August, Hull had frittered away the initiative that had been his for the taking. Realizing the superior American force in Sandwich was not—after sitting still for almost a month—likely to march on Fort Malden, Col. Henry Procter, the garrison commander, launched offensive operations against the American side of the Detroit River. From native scouts, he knew that a relief column was carrying badly needed supplies from Urbana to Hull and that the American general had dispatched 150 Ohio militia and a few cavalrymen to help secure it from Indian attack. Procter sent 100 regulars from the 41st Regiment of Foot, a handful of Canadian militia, and two dozen warriors led by Tecumseh across to intercept Hull's men. On August 5, as the Ohio horsemen forded Brownstown Creek, Tecumseh ordered his warriors to open fire. The cavalry broke and fled back to Detroit, leaving the infantry to their fate. Scattering into the woods, most of the terrified militiamen managed to escape. But seventeen were killed. Another two were captured and tomahawked by Tecumseh's men in revenge for the death of one of their braves—the only casualty suffered by the British force.

This drubbing was the last straw for Hull. On the morning of August 8 he ordered Sandwich abandoned and withdrew his entire army behind the walls of Fort Detroit. The supply column commander, Capt. Henry Brush, meanwhile, had gone to ground about thirty-five miles from Detroit on the banks of the Raisin River and sent word that he could not get past the British at Brownstown without support. Brush had three hundred cattle and seventy packhorses each carrying two hundred pounds of flour, but too few men to both control these animals and fight through to Detroit.
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Convinced that the woods between Detroit and the Raisin River thronged with Indians and British soldiers, on August 9 Hull ordered Lt. Col. James Miller to take six hundred men—almost half of his effective troops—and break through to Brush. Miller's men blundered noisily into the woods, with no scouts probing ahead of their advance, and were quickly detected by Indian patrols who reported their presence
to Procter at Fort Malden. Procter sent 150 regulars and militia supported by a small group of warriors led by Tecumseh to ambush the Americans. On the way to the ambush site, the force gathered in an evergrowing number of warriors, so that the British commander, Capt. Adam Muir, had no idea how many were with him. Marching in the British ranks was a sixteen-year-old Canadian volunteer from Amherstburg, John Richardson.

“No other sound than the measured step of the troops interrupted the solitude of the scene,” he later wrote, “rendered more imposing by the wild appearance of the warriors, whose bodies, stained and painted in the most frightful manner for the occasion, glided by us with almost noiseless velocity … some painted white, some black, others half black, half red; half black, half white; all with their hair plastered in such a way as to resemble the bristling quills of the porcupine, with no other covering than a cloth around their loins, yet armed to the teeth with rifles, tomahawks, war-clubs, spears, bows, arrows and scalping knives. Uttering no sound, intent only on reaching the enemy unperceived, they might have passed for the spectres of those wilds, the ruthless demons which war had unchained for the punishment and oppression of man.”
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Sixteen miles from Detroit, Muir's force took cover behind a low rise facing a narrow river and hid until the Americans came within range. Then the British rose to form a fighting line that the militia attempted to mimic while Tecumseh's warriors sallied forth on either flank of Miller's advancing troops. Having never fought alongside Indians, Muir and the redcoats had no idea how to use their numbers to advantage. The battle quickly degenerated into chaos, with the Americans, British regulars, and militia exchanging volleys at point-blank range while the Indians poured fire in from behind the cover of trees. When one party of warriors was pushed back by an American charge, the British mistook them for enemy and ripped off a fusillade of musketry. Tecumseh's men replied in kind. The Americans meanwhile had broken out into a battle line and were able to use their superior numbers to bull across the river. Muir, who had taken a ball in the shoulder and another in the leg, ordered a retreat. The British were spared the deadly consequence of a full-scale rout, however, when Miller failed to attempt a pursuit.
The British took to their boats and paddled to safety. Muir counted 6 dead and 21 wounded with another 2 lost as prisoners. Tecumseh's losses were uncertain because, rather than returning to Fort Malden, many warriors scattered into the woods. The Americans claimed about one hundred Indians had been killed, but this was more than the number of warriors the British believed Tecumseh had brought to the field. Miller's losses were 18 killed and 64 wounded.

Although the way lay open for the Americans to join Brush at the Raisin River, Miller could not even persuade his troops to go back into the woods to retrieve their knapsacks. They huddled in the middle of a small clearing, spending a “tentless and foodless night in pouring rain.” With the dawn, Miller trailed back to Detroit.

Desperate for Brush's supplies, Hull sent another escort column of four hundred men under command of the militia officers, Colonels Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur, toward the Raisin River. Fed up with his timidity, these two men had been conspiring to arrest Hull and take over command, so he was glad to temporarily remove them from the fort. Cass and McArthur reached the Raisin River without incident, but discovered that Brush had decamped back to Urbana, destroying whatever supplies he had not taken with him. After briefly considering following Brush's example, the two men decided to rejoin the Detroit garrison. Leading their men back at a leisurely pace, neither bothered sending a messenger to inform Hull of what had transpired.
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Hull, meanwhile, was panicked by news that on August 13 Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock had arrived at Fort Malden with 50 regulars, 250 Canadian militia, and a six-pound cannon. The balance was beginning to tilt toward the British. Brock's arrival was greeted by Tecumseh's warriors firing off several musket volleys. After being introduced to Tecumseh, Brock quietly commented that the musket salutes were “really an unnecessary waste of ammunition when Detroit had to be captured.” Tecumseh turned to his warriors and said, “This is a man.” Of Tecumseh, Brock wrote, “a more sagacious or a more gallant Warrior does not I believe exist.”
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Three days later Brock crossed the Detroit River to the south of Fort Detroit with a force of 300 regulars and 400 militia supported by
30 artillerymen manning three six-pound and two three-pound cannon. Tecumseh brought to the field 600 warriors, ostensibly under the direction of Lt. Col. Matthew Elliott of the Indian Department. Brock realized that if these braves managed to get inside Fort Detroit a massacre was inevitable, for the British had scant control over them. Brock also was able to draw the brigs
Queen Charlotte
and
General Hunter
up the river so that the fort was within range of their eighteen-pound cannon. He then called upon Hull to surrender, playing on the old general's fear that, if Detroit was taken by storm, Brock could not restrain the Indians. Hull refused.

That evening the British shelled the fort and the next morning Brock's troops and Tecumseh's warriors advanced toward its walls. Before battle was joined, Hull hoisted a flag of truce. Terms were quickly arranged, whereby Hull surrendered not just the garrison but also the men out in the field with Cass and McArthur. Some 1,600 Ohio militiamen were paroled home and escorted by British regulars beyond range of Tecumseh's warriors, who had greeted the surrender amicably and posed no threat to the fort's inhabitants. Hull and 582 regular troops were marched off to prisoner-of-war camps near Quebec City. Brock was pleased to capture thirty-three cannon and 2,500 muskets, as his own armament supply was limited and these would help arm more Canadian militia. It was a bloodless victory that put the British in undisputed control of the frontier country.

The only two remaining American forts, Fort Dearborn and Fort Wayne, soon fell. At Fort Dearborn the garrison attempted to withdraw and were fallen upon by 400 local Potawatomi warriors, who now rose against the Americans, and about two-thirds of the fleeing men, women, and children were massacred. Fort Wayne was thereafter overrun by an Indian assault. By summer's end no significant American presence remained in the disputed frontier. Hull's army had not only been defeated, it had been annihilated.