Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (118 page)

Robinson’s men have been on the march since five in the morning. It is now three o’clock. He suggests to Prevost that the staff do its best to get all possible information and if it cannot be procured before dark, to defer the attack until daybreak. Guides, he says, are essential; they must be obtained at any price.

Undoubtedly his mind goes back to Wellington’s crossing of the Bidassoa between Spain and France. There the Duke employed men disguised as fishermen to sound out the fords and the ground and to guide the attacking columns. But Prevost is no Wellington. It seems to Robinson that the high command is convinced that it is impossible to get reliable information and that it is simply wasting good money to try. Prevost is a penny-pincher; he has a secret service fund but withholds it from his generals.

It is clear now that no attempt will be made on the American redoubts until the following day. As Prevost camps his army on a ridge north of Plattsburgh, Robinson, the old campaigner, makes a personal reconnaissance of the village below: the scattered houses, perhaps eighty in number, four hotels, a few shops and public buildings; the river, spanned by two bridges, the planking of each removed by the retreating Americans; on the heights on the south side, three redoubts, two blockhouses, and, near the lake, a battery of big guns. He notes that the redoubts are not yet finished and that the guns are
en barbette
—not mounted. They can, he believes, easily be silenced during an assault.

He is an old hand at this, for he has been a soldier since the age of thirteen in Virginia, when he was commissioned an ensign at the outbreak of the American Revolution. At fifteen, he took a company into action at Horseneck. Since then his has been a life of action. Wounded three times—once fighting in America, twice in the Peninsular campaign—he is known as an officer of high and daring spirit, chosen to lead the advance in the successful assault on San Sebastian, mentioned several times in dispatches, noted for taking a village against a heavy artillery barrage without firing a shot. His lineage is distinguished, his family tree studded with clerics, jurists, and generals. John Beverley Robinson is his first cousin.

Robinson has urged that his assault force be called out and in position by first light, but dawn comes and no orders reach him. Sir George Prevost is having second thoughts.

Prevost is not Robinson’s kind of general. The qualities that have made him a good administrator in the defence of Canada—prudence, conciliation, sober second thoughts, a tendency to delay—now work against him. He is essentially a diplomat; circumspection is his hallmark. He prefers to slide around a problem rather than meet it head on. He cannot bring himself even to write a harsh letter. His reproofs to subordinates are so delicately phrased that they seem almost like praise.

At forty-seven, he is in the prime of his career, his body supple, his face not unhandsome, though his official portrait cannot disguise the worried, hesitant cast of his eyes. These have not been easy years for George Prevost. His conciliation of the French Canadians, however admirable, has made him unpopular with the Anglophone elite in Quebec, who feel he is coddling a defeated race. His strategy, dictated by Great Britain, has been to remain strictly on the defensive, husbanding his inadequate forces. For more than two years his instincts have been to hold fast, to let the enemy come to him, to seek delay by armistice, to avoid costly mistakes. In this he has been spectacularly successful. Except for two small enclaves at Amherstburg and Fort Erie (the latter soon to be abandoned) and some foraging parties trampling their way up and down the Thames
Valley, the Americans have failed to gain a foothold in Canada. The conquest of British North America is no closer to reality than it was in the summer of 1812. For this, Prevost can take much credit.

Now, however, events have taken an about-turn. For the first time, the Americans are outnumbered—and by the best troops in the world. An entire British division has penetrated deep into enemy territory. If Prevost is to succeed he must accommodate himself to a changed set of circumstances, put aside old habits, abandon the strategy of the previous twenty-seven months.

He cannot do it, cannot bring himself to launch an assault even against the weakly held entrenchments before him. The best American troops, four thousand in number, have already left to support Jacob Brown on the Niagara frontier—an incomprehensible decision by John Armstrong that galled their leader, Major-General Izard—but Prevost still hesitates. He remembers the three previous assaults on entrenched positions at Fort Meigs, Fort Stephenson, and Fort Erie, all abortive. The Americans, it seems, fight like demons behind their ditches and their abatis.

He cannot make up his mind. Robinson, fretting in his headquarters, receives an order to attend a meeting at six o’clock on the morning of the seventh. Before he can attend, it is countermanded. At eight, Sir George sends for him alone. He has decided that he cannot move on the Plattsburgh redoubts without the support of the fleet. It is just as well, for Robinson discovers, to his dismay, that in the midst of all this soul searching no one has thought to mount the British artillery to support the proposed assault.

At this point, a change comes over Sir George Prevost. In his impatience to bring the fleet down the lake at once, the sedulous diplomat becomes alarmingly shrill. Testy letters urging Captain Downie to get moving travel north by express rider. Prevost, who has been irritated by Sir James Yeo’s vacillations, no doubt believes that the navy on Lake Champlain is dawdling. But Downie cannot move until his biggest ship,
Confiance
, is fitted; nor can he be blamed, since he has been in command for only three days. Yet Prevost knows he must attack soon. The fall season is far advanced. The maples that
arch over the narrow roads are beginning to turn. Frost is in the air. The weather, which has halted every American advance into Canada, will soon be his enemy.

The notes to Downie grow more petulant, nettling the naval commander, forcing him to move before he is ready, goading him to fight on the enemy’s terms and on the enemy’s site, with a ship scarcely fitted and a crew yet untried.

MILTON, VERMONT, SEPTEMBER 7, 1814

In spite of his governor’s opposition to the war, Jonathan Blaisdell, a Milton house builder, has decided to answer the call of his country and cross the lake to Plattsburgh to help repulse the invading British. Vermonters are undergoing a change of heart now that the war has been carried to their doorstep. Farmers who once sat out the war in opposition to the Hawks in Washington are abandoning their fields, heading for the lake by the hundreds, climbing aboard any vessel that will transport them quickly to Plattsburgh.

Jonathan Blaisdell is so eager to get at the British that he and two companions decide to ride their horses across a low sandbar to the island of South Hero in the lake. From there they plan to catch a boat to Plattsburgh. They are almost drowned in the attempt and end up, soaking wet, at Fox’s Tavern on the Vermont shore.

More Vermonters crowd in, also intent on crossing. Two hours pass; the moon rises, encouraging another attempt. One hundred volunteers, strung out in a long line across the shallows, finally reach the island. The following day a sloop carries them to the scene of the action.

Until this week, Vermonters have cared so little about the war that they have not hesitated to continue the border smuggling that has been their livelihood—not just the usual livestock, cheese, fish, grain, tobacco, and potash but also the actual materials of war. Only the vigilance of Macdonough’s fleet has prevented the British from equipping
Confiance
with spars, masts, naval stores, and caulking towed up the lake as recently as July by resourceful Vermont entrepreneurs.

Prevost’s incursion has done what George Izard’s troops could not accomplish: it has turned the Vermonters into patriots and war hawks. Within three days, twenty-five hundred volunteers flock to the colours to be greeted personally by the new commander at Plattsburgh, Brigadier-General Alexander Macomb. In an inspired gesture, he pins an evergreen bough in the hat of their leader, Samuel Strong—a symbol of the zeal of his Green Mountain Boys.

Macomb has need of these citizen soldiers. Since the unexpected departure of Major-General Izard and his four thousand regulars, the safety of the fort has depended on fewer than three thousand troops of whom about half are effective soldiers, the remainder either sick or untrained. On a man-to-man basis, the British outnumber the Americans more than three to one, but even that ratio is deceptive. Prevost has the cream of Wellington’s army; Macomb’s best soldier is no better than Prevost’s worst.

The leading citizens of Plattsburgh have little faith in Macomb’s ragtag army. They want him to retire gracefully to spare a wanton sacrifice of lives. Macomb has no such intention. If worst comes to worst, he intends to blow up the town. Most of the inhabitants have already fled.

Prevost’s decision to wait for the fleet gives Macomb a week in which to strengthen his defences, gather reinforcements, and raise the morale of his small, largely untrained army. His three major redoubts are positioned in a triangle on the heights of a small peninsula that stretches like a fat thumb between the lake and the Saranac River. Each is protected by ditches, palisades, abatis.

Like Scott, Brown, and Izard, Macomb belongs to a younger generation of general officers, the new team thrown up by the war that will reshape the American army in the years to come. He is a chubby thirty-two, big chested, plump cheeked, blue eyed, bursting with health and good nature—the kind of man who will always seem younger than his years. The son of a Detroit fur merchant, raised in the shadow of an army camp, dandled on the knees of officers during his childhood, he is all soldier. Now he labours under extraordinary difficulties.

But Macomb intends to do his duty, and to that duty he brings an imaginative mind and a sensitive understanding of leadership. He is a strong believer in the military virtues of deception, intelligence, and morale. He may be short on manpower but he is long on acumen.

He makes it a point to issue arms and ammunition personally to the young volunteers crowding into the village, to address them in groups, thanking them for their
esprit
, and to advise them to act in small bands as partisans.

He goes out of his way to deceive Prevost. He never mounts a guard without parading all of his troops to give an impression of great numbers. He burns the buildings in front of the forts to clear the ground and reveal any potential assault force. In the glow of these fires, he marches platoons of reserves as if they were reinforcements. In spite of the rain he keeps a third of his regular force on the parapets each night.

Macomb is aware that spies are operating among his troops, passing as militia volunteers. He spreads the word that George Izard’s army is within hailing distance and that he now has ten thousand militia under his command with an additional ten thousand on the way, then watches with satisfaction as the bogus soldiers steal across the Saranac bridge at night, carrying the news to Prevost.

He intends to get the most out of his small force. Even the sick are put to work manning two six-pounders at the makeshift hospital on Crab Island. Meanwhile, Macomb gives instructions to mask the roads leading to the river by planting pine trees on them and covering the bare areas with leaves, at the same time opening the entrances to old, unused roads. By these methods, he hopes the advancing British may lose their way.

The British, however, are confident of victory. On the tenth, Prevost again calls Major-General Robinson to his quarters to advise him that the fleet will be up with the first fair wind and that he must keep his brigade at the ready to ford the river and attack the three American redoubts. Robinson has only one request: he
must
be at the fords by daybreak, not a second later. To this the Governor General agrees.

At Putnam Lawrence’s occupied house near the lake, a group of British officers are celebrating the morrow’s victory. Soldiers roll up casks and barrels, stand them on end, lay boards across to make a table. The casks are brimming with wine and Jamaica rum. The table is laid with linen, china, glass, silver. The British toast the capture of Plattsburgh and victory over the American fleet.

Plattsburgh, someone is heard to say, will make quite a nice breakfast in the morning.

CHAZY, LAKE CHAMPLAIN, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 10, 1814

Captain George Downie, commander of the British squadron, is irritated beyond measure by the persistent entreaties of Sir George Prevost. Since the British army reached Plattsburgh, the Governor General has been bombarding him with letters, each touchier than the last, urging him to move the fleet up the lake so that he can launch his assault on the American bastions.

“I need not dwell with you upon the Evils resulting to both services from delay,” Prevost wrote on September 9, adding that he has directed an officer of the Provincial Cavalry to remain at Downie’s headquarters until the fleet moves. Even though the fleet was not ready, Downie tried that very day to get under way, only to be forced back by adverse winds.

Now he holds a more insulting letter from Prevost. It seems to hint that Downie has been deceiving him about the weather:

I ascribe the disappointment I have experienced to the unfortunate change of wind, & shall rejoice to learn that my reasonable expectations have been frustrated by no other cause.

Reasonable expectations!
Prevost’s phrase stings Downie. All expectations have been unreasonable. He has been in charge of the
fleet for no more than a week, does not know the lake, does not know the men, is unfamiliar with the strategic situation. His flagship, the frigate
Confiance
, is scarcely in fighting trim. Twenty-five carpenters are still on board fitting her with belaying pins, cleats, breaching blocks. There has been no time to scrape the green planks of her decks free of oozing tar. The firing mechanisms for her long cannon have not arrived; her gunners will have to make do with carronade locks. She is still taking on newly arrived marines and soldiers: there has been no time for the officers to be able to recognize, much less know, the men who will serve under them.