Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (14 page)

The Indians, in Brock’s assessment, will fight the Americans only if they are convinced the British are winning. If he can seize the island of Mackinac in the far west at the outset of the war, he believes the Indians will take heart. Some will undoubtedly help him attack Detroit (for Brock believes the best defence is offence), and if Detroit falls, more Indians will join the British—perhaps even the Mohawks of the Six Nations, who have been distressingly neutral. The main American invasion, Brock believes, will come at the Niagara border along the neck of land between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Anything else will be a diversion.

To put his domino theory into practice, at the outset Brock needs Indians to subdue by their presence, if not their arrows, the defenders of Michilimackinac. He expects the Red-Haired Man to supply them. The secret letter is deliberately couched in euphemisms, and even Brock’s immediate superior, the cautious Governor General Prevost, is not aware of it:

CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION TRANSMITTED TO MR. ROBERT DICKSON RESIDING WITH THE INDIANS NEAR THE MISSOURI

Sir,

As it is probable that war may result from the present
state of affairs
, it is very desirable to ascertain the degree of cooperation
that you and
your friends
might be able to furnish, in case of such an Emergency taking place. You will be pleased to report with all practicable expedition upon the following matters,

1st. The number of your friends, that might be depended upon.

2. Their disposition toward us.

3. Would they assemble, and march under your orders.

4. State the succours you require, and the most eligible mode, for their conveyance.

5. Can
Equipment
be procured in your
Country
.

6. An immediate direct communication with you, is very much wished for.

7. Can you point out in what manner, that object may be accomplished.

8. Send without loss of time a few
faithful
and
Confidential
Agents—Selected from
your friends
.

9. Will you individually approach the Detroit frontier next spring. If so, state time and place where
we
may meet.
Memo
. Avoid mentioning names, in your
written communications
.

Almost five months will pass before Brock receives an answer to this memorandum. And when on July 14, at Fort George at the mouth of the Niagara River, an Indian runner finally arrives with a reply from Robert Dickson, it will already be outdated by events. Long before that, the Red-Haired Man and his friends, anticipating Brock, will have departed for the British post at St. Joseph’s to prepare for the invasion of the unsuspecting island of Mackinac.

WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH
20, 1812. Spring has come to the capital after an unseasonably cold winter. It is, as one newspaper points out, excellent weather for campaigning; the roads are no longer rivers of mud and slush. Why are the troops not moving north?

At the British legation on Pennsylvania Avenue this bright afternoon, a young officer arrives with dispatches from the British
foreign secretary. They tell a familiar tale. In the face of French intransigence, the British government cannot—will not—repeal the Orders in Council that are at the heart of the dispute between the two nations. Lord Wellesley has felt that decision important enough to justify chartering a special ship to rush word of it across the Atlantic.

The Minister Plenipotentiary to America, who must now carry this news to the President, is the same Augustus John Foster who once swore he would not return to Washington for ten thousand pounds a year. Nevertheless, he is back, and no longer in a junior post. His absence from the London social scene since the spring of 1811 has lost him his intended—a priggish young woman named Annabella Milbanke, who will later conclude a loveless and disastrous marriage with Lord Byron. But how could any ambitious young diplomat refuse such a promotion?

How, for that matter, could His Majesty’s government have selected Foster to be its eyes, ears, and tongue at this most critical of times? To the clear indications of approaching war Foster’s eyes are uncommonly blind, his ears remarkably deaf, and, in his dispatches, his tongue lamentably silent. At thirty-three, with his round, boyish face, he is, to quote one politician, “a pretty young gentleman … better calculated for a ballroom or a drawing room, than for a foreign minister.”

He spends a good deal of time in ballrooms, drawing rooms, and at dinner tables, entertains as many as two hundred guests at a time and lavishly overspends his expense account (perhaps to counteract the impression conveyed by his juvenile looks, for which, as he complains to his mother, the new Duchess of Devonshire, he is “greatly abused”). He seems to know everybody, rubs shoulders with all the major participants in the dangerous game being played out in the capital this spring, yet manages to miss the significance of what he sees and hears. He dines with the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, whom he describes as “very warlike,” John C. Calhoun, the fiery young congressman from South Carolina, Peter B. Porter, the bellicose leader of the House committee on foreign relations, and
other members of the ginger group known as War Hawks, but he does not believe that war will come.

The War Hawks are only a handful, yet they effectively control Congress. Five of them room together in the same boarding house, predictably dubbed the War Mess. Clay is their leader, a brilliant, fervent orator who has been Speaker since the opening of the fall session. Poetically handsome, with fair, tousled hair and a quizzical smile, he is no disinterested chairman. He thinks nothing of leaving his neutral post and invading the floor of the House to speak, sometimes for hours. He has seen to it that his cronies chair the key committees, notably the naval committee and the foreign relations committee. The latter—Peter B. Porter’s committee—is packed with Clay supporters. Its majority report, brought down in November, 1811, was unequivocal. Since Britain would not budge on the two major issues threatening peace—the Orders in Council and impressment—therefore “we must now tamely submit and quietly submit or we must resist by those means which God has placed within our reach.” In short, a call to war.

At dinner with the President in the still unfinished Executive Mansion, Foster encounters another actor in the drama, the dashing Comte Edouard de Crillon, whose extraordinarily thick legs he cannot help remarking. The following day he invites the count to his own table where they discuss the count’s estate in Chile. It is all bunkum, as Foster will presently learn: there is no Chilean estate and no Comte de Crillon, either—only a charlatan named Soubiron, a master at masquerade. This imposter has attached himself to a handsome Irish rascal named John Henry, and the two are in the process of palming off a series of letters that Henry has written while in the pay of Sir James Craig, the former governor general of Canada. It develops that Henry, at his own suggestion, was sent by Craig in 1808 as a spy to Federalist New England to see if anyone within the opposition party there might help force a separation from the Union—in short, to seek and make contact with traitors. Henry, being remarkably unsuccessful, was paid a pittance, but the cunning Soubiron believes that copies of the letters, now more than three years old, are worth a minor fortune.

And so, to James Madison, they appear to be. The President is persuaded to squander the entire secret service fund of $50,000 for documents he believes will discomfit the Federalists, lay some of their leaders open to the charge of treason, and embarrass the British.

Madison’s coup backfires. Henry has named no names, mentioned no specifics. The President’s enemies quickly discover that the Irishman is not the reformed patriot he pretends to be and that the chief executive has looted the treasury for a batch of worthless paper. But the Henry affair, revealing yet another instance of British perfidy, helps to arouse further public feeling already inflamed by Tippecanoe and its aftermath, by a depression in the southwest brought on by the Orders in Council, and by continuing British high-handedness on the seas—more sailors impressed, more ships seized. “If this event does not produce a war, nothing will do so,” Augustus Foster comments after Madison tables the letters on March 9. But war does not come, and this helps shore up Federalist convictions (and Foster’s) that for all the Republicans’ warlike clamour, the government is bluffing, as it had been after the
Chesapeake
affair. Tragically, the congressional doves do not take the War Hawk movement seriously.

Nor does Foster. He is extraordinarily well informed, for he moves in the highest circles, dining regularly with congressmen, senators, and the President himself. He knows that William Hull, Governor of Michigan Territory, has come to town, hoping (Foster believes) to be made Secretary of War in place of the genial but ineffective incumbent, William Eustis. He knows that a former secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, is also in town, trying to decide whether or not to give up his sinecure as collector of customs in Boston and take over command of the expanding army. He must know that Hull, who is another of his dinner guests, is also pondering the offer of an army command in the northwest. The United States, in short, is acting like a nation preparing for war; the President himself, in Foster’s words, is “very warlike,” but there is no sense of urgency in the reports he sends to Whitehall. He prefers the company of the President’s warm-hearted and unwarlike wife, Dolley, who could
not attend his January ball marking the Queen’s birthday for political reasons but was forced to gaze on the preparations at a distance, from her bedroom window.

Preparations for war are the responsibility of a trio of old hands—all sixtyish—from the Revolution—Hull, Eustis, and Dearborn. Unlike Clay and his Hawks, these ex-soldiers, none of whom has had experience with staff command, can scarcely be said to be champing at the bit. Hull and Dearborn cannot even make up their minds whether to shoulder the responsibility of leadership. Eustis, a onetime surgeon’s assistant, is genial, courteous, and a staunch party man but generally held to be incompetent—an executive unable to divorce himself from detail. Congress has refused to create two assistant secretaries, and so the entire war department of the United States consists of Eustis and eight clerks.

Governor Hull has been invited to the capital to discuss the defence of the northwestern frontier. Brock’s assessment has been dead on: the Indians have dictated Washington’s strategy; with Tecumseh’s followers causing chaos in Indiana and Michigan territories, the United States has no option but to secure its western flank.

Washington believes in Hull. He has a reputation for sound judgement, personal courage, decisive command. During the Revolution he fought with distinction, survived nine battles, received the official thanks of Congress. One gets a fleeting picture of a gallant young field officer in his mid-twenties, rallying his troops on horseback at Bemis Heights, stemming a retreat in the face of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne’s regulars, or helping Mad Anthony Wayne carry the Stony Point fort at bayonet point (a bullet creasing his hat, another clipping his boot).

The President and the Secretary of War listen carefully to Hull’s advice. The Governor points out that the United States must secure Lake Erie by reinforcing the tiny fort at Detroit and building warships to command the water routes in order to allow the swift movement of men and supplies. Hull realizes that the Indians hold the key to defeat or victory. A formidable army at Detroit, denying the lake to British transport, can cut the Indians off from the British and
perhaps prevent a general uprising of the tribes. And without the Indians, he is convinced, “the British cannot hold Upper Canada.”

Eustis goes along with Hull’s plan only to discover that no American captain can be found who will take command on Lake Erie. Besides, it costs money to build ships, and Congress is niggardly with naval funds. Hull and Eustis, caught up in the war fever, persuade themselves that it will be enough to march a considerable force north to strengthen Detroit, cow the Indians into neutrality, and convince the British across the river that the natives are under control. Should war come, Detroit will be the springboard for an invasion that will drive the British out of all the country west of Niagara.

Hull declines the command of the army that will reinforce Detroit; he does not wish to give up his post as governor of Michigan Territory. A substitute is found in Colonel Jacob Kingsbury, an old frontier campaigner, aged fifty-seven, who first accepts but then backs out as the result of an attack of gout—an episode that hints at the paucity of leadership material in the American military establishment. Hull is hurriedly called for and told he can keep the governorship if he will accept a commission as brigadier-general in command of the Army of the Northwest.