Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (62 page)

George Izard
, Major-General; operated on Lake Champlain and Niagara frontier, 1814.

Thomas Jesup
, Major, 19th Infantry, at Chippawa and Lundy’s Lane.

Richard Johnson
, Congressman; Colonel, Kentucky regiment of mounted rifles, Battle of the Thames, 1813.

Morgan Lewis
, Major-General, Niagara frontier, succeeding Zebulon Pike as Dearborn’s second-in-command to June 1813; second-in-command to James Wilkinson, autumn, 1813.

George McClure
, Brigadier-General, New York Militia; commander at Fort George, late autumn, 1813.

Thomas Macdonough
, Commodore, naval forces, Lake Champlain, 1814.

Alexander Macomb
, Brigadier-General; commander of army at Plattsburgh, September, 1814.

James Madison
, President, 1809–17.

Benajah Mallory
, Major, Canadian Volunteers; former member Upper Canadian legislature; traitor. Succeeded Joseph Willcocks in command.

Abraham Markle
, Major, Canadian Volunteers; former member Upper Canadian legislature; traitor.

James Monroe
, Secretary of State, 1811–15. Replaced John Armstrong as Secretary of War, autumn, 1814.

Oliver Hazard Perry
, Commodore, naval forces, Lake Erie, 1813.

Zebulon Montgomery Pike
, Brigadier-General; second-in-command to Dearborn at York, 1813.

Peter Buell Porter
, Congressman; Quartermaster General, later Major-General, New York Militia, Niagara frontier, 1813–14.

Eleazar Ripley
, Brigadier-General under Jacob Brown, Niagara frontier, 1814.

Jonathan Russell
, American ambassador to Sweden; commissioner at Ghent peace talks, 1814.

Winfield Scott
, Colonel and Adjutant-General, Niagara frontier, 1813;

Brigadier-General under Jacob Brown, Niagara frontier, 1814.

Tobias Stansbury
, Brigadier-General; commander of Maryland Militia, Bladensburg, August, 1814.

James Wilkinson
, Major-General; commander, Army of the North, 1813, succeeding General Dearborn.

Joseph Willcocks
, Lieutenant-Colonel, Canadian Volunteers; former member Upper Canadian legislature; traitor.

William Winder
, Brigadier-General; captured at Stoney Creek, 1813; commander of Washington defences, 1814.

Eleazer Wood
, Captain, Engineers, siege of Fort Meigs, 1813; Colonel and aide to Jacob Brown, Niagara frontier, 1814.

PREVIEW
New Brunswick Goes to War

MADAWASKA RIVER, LOWER CANADA, MARCH 5, 1813

The cold has become unbearable. The temperature stands at twenty-seven below, Fahrenheit. A northeaster, sweeping down the frozen expanse of Lake Temiscouata, cuts like a scythe through the greatcoats of the soldiers, bent double in the teeth of the gale. The snow is frozen hard as sand. Only the squeak of the toboggans, the rasp of the snowshoes, and the whine of the wind breaks the white silence. It has been like this for the best part of a fortnight, ever since the regiment left Saint John, and it is growing worse
.

The light company of the 104th—the New Brunswick Regiment—shuffles forward, single file, following the winding course of the Madawaska. This is the rearguard, the last of six companies, each spread out a day apart, trudging through the Canadian winter toward Lower Canada to help resist the next American invasion. In this silent, hostile forest there is no sign of settlement, no tinkle of sleighbells, no welcoming pillar of smoke—only the sullen pines, half crushed beneath their burden of snow. Even the birds are silent; it is too cold for song
.

Lieutenant John Le Couteur gasps forward on his snowshoes, the wind cutting off his breath. In spite of layers of flannel and fur, the cold seems
to reach to the very core of his body. He is temporarily in charge, for his captain has taken a party on ahead to prepare huts and firewood. Perhaps there will be shelter at the day’s end, but Le Couteur remembers the previous evening when the men’s hands were so numb they could scarcely work, let alone singe a piece of salt pork over a sputtering flame
.

As he leads his squad around a bend in the river, he is alarmed to see that the forward elements have stopped, causing the centre and rear to bunch up. In this weather it is death to halt. He steps out of the line, flounders through the deep snow beside the track, and moves up the column, noting that every man he passes is rubbing snow into frostbitten cheeks. His own nose is frozen, but he cannot attend to that. He must get Private Reuben Rogers onto a toboggan and under a pile of blankets: the soldier’s entire body is an ulcerated mass from frostbite, as if he had been plunged into a vat of boiling water. That done, he gets the column moving again
.

It is slow going. Le Couteur knows that the men in the lead suffer most and must be replaced every four or five minutes if they are to survive. By the time the company reaches the huddle of huts, 90 men out of 105 are suffering from frostbite. The roughly constructed quarters are overcrowded—jammed with shivering troops because the company ahead has been forced back across the lake by the gale. That night Le Couteur finds it impossible to keep warm. One man who tries gets too close to the fire and burns his feet
.

The next morning, both companies set off across the Grand Portage between Lake Temiscouata and Rivière du Loup (leaving poor Rogers behind with a corporal). They force their way through a spectral landscape—burned country, where the skeleton pines rise out of the twelve-foot drifts like ghosts. Here are weary hills to climb and dangerous, ice-sheathed slopes down which to manoeuvre runaway toboggans. Sleep that night is not possible, for a high wind turns the pine thatch on one hut to tinder dryness. When it catches fire, officers and men turn out, thigh deep in the snow, freezing their feet as they struggle to put out the flames
.

After these adversities, all that follows is anticlimax. As the men trudge off, dragging their toboggans, Le Couteur realizes with a sense of relief that the wilderness is almost behind them. Presently he hears the music of distant sleighbells breaking the interminable silence. A horse
and cutter appears, loaded with rum and provisions from the commissariat in Quebec. The village of St. André is not far off, and here the men from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—sons of Loyalists and British soldiers—view for the first time the great sweep of the St. Lawrence. A road of beaten snow leads upriver to the capital; on this hard surface it is not difficult to march twenty miles in a day
.

A fortnight later, the entire regiment is in Quebec City, basking in the praise of the Governor General. But the march is not over. Now the New Brunswickers set off for Montreal with Le Couteur pushing on ahead to report their speedy arrival to Major-General Francis De Rottenburg. Are the troops in good wind? the General asks. In excellent wind, replies the proud lieutenant. Then, says the General, they can push on another two hundred miles to Kingston
.

“They think we are like the children of Israel,” one of the soldiers cries when he hears that news. “We must march forty years before we halt!”

On they go, sweating now in the spring sun, wading to their hips in icy freshets, but never faltering until, on April 12, an extraordinary spectacle greets them. The town of Kingston lies before them and beyond, a familiar sight to any Maritimer: the masts and spars of tall ships
.

“The sea! The sea!” the men cry out. “The ships! The ships!”

A flood of sensations overcomes Le Couteur: astonishment … delight … wonder. Here is an entire squadron of warships frozen on the bosom of the lake! He had not expected to find men-of-war so far inland
.

The date is April 12. In just fifty-two days, close to six hundred troops have marched more than seven hundred miles, most of it on snowshoes, under the worst possible conditions without losing a man (for the frostbitten Private Rogers is about to rejoin his company). This remarkable trek has helped to tip the scales of war. Directly across the lake, at Sackets Harbor, an American army, poised to invade Canada, waits for the ice to break. Its target was Kingston. But now, with reinforcements pouring in—their numbers blown out of all proportion by rumour—that target has been changed. The Americans will attack York instead. The lifeline that links the two Canadas will not be severed
.

OVERVIEW
The All-Canadian War

THE BORDER WAR OF
1812 was a singular conflict. Geography, climate, weather, language, and propinquity combined to make it distinctively Canadian. It was a seasonal war: campaigns were timed with one eye on the calendar, the other on the thermometer. It was a stop-and-go war: seeding and harvest often took priority over siege and attack. It was a neighbours’ war (but no less vicious for that): men fought their own kin; others refused to fight; trade between enemies was frowned on but never successfully suppressed. It was a pinch-penny war: in 1813, the Americans actually tried to run it on a budget of $1,480,000 a month—a parsimony that greatly frustrated the campaign of that year. It was a long-distance war, fought on a thousand-mile front from the Upper Mississippi to Lake Champlain; yet the total number of combatants never exceeded the combined casualties in the greatest of the Napoleonic battles. Finally, it was an incendiary war in which private homes as well as public buildings and military fortifications went up in flames, fuelling a desire for revenge that transcended strategy and politics.

It was also the last war fought on Canadian soil. By the end of the first campaign in January, 1813, Canada had successfully resisted all attempts at invasion. As a result, the morale of the United States was at its lowest ebb. The government of James Madison, which had hurled its armies at the Canadian border to chastise Great Britain for her arrogance on the high seas, had learned that the conquest of British North America was not, after all, “a mere matter of marching.”