Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (7 page)

He has always been a little out of place. He might have made a good doctor, but his medical studies were cut short by a fall in the family fortunes. In the army, where young officers were drinking themselves into early graves, the temperate ensign buried himself in his books. He will not let himself be seen out of control, through drink or through any other vice, for he has the Harrison name to uphold: his father was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

He was a good soldier—he might, someone once said, have been another Washington. He fought with the “mad general,” Anthony Wayne, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the epic victory over the Indians that won twenty-five thousand square miles of territory for the white men. Now, a soldier no more but with a soldier’s bearing and a soldier’s outlook, he is, at thirty-nine, a rising politician, living like an aristocrat in the backwoods in his vast brick mansion—the first in the territory—on the outskirts of Vincennes. He calls it Grouseland; with its hand-carved mantels and doors, its four great chimneys, its thirteen rooms and its circular staircase, it has made him proud but property poor.

His problems are only beginning. He has heard from Billy Wells, the Indian commissioner and interpreter at Fort Wayne, that eighty Indians under the Prophet’s leadership have gathered at Greenville. Wells, an old frontiersman married to the sister of Little Turtle, the Miami chief, sends a messenger to Greenville to deal with the Prophet and ask him and his supporters to come to Fort Wayne for a parley. The answer is given, not by the Prophet but by his elder brother, a handsome war chief with flashing hazel eyes. It is astonishingly blunt:

“Go back and tell Captain Wells that my fire is kindled on the spot appointed by the Great Spirit above, and if he has anything to communicate to me,
he
must come
here;
and I will expect him in six days from this time.”

This is not the way Indians talk to white men. This is the way white men talk to Indians. For the first time an Indian has sent back a message that is stinging in its style and insulting in its content.

William Henry Harrison will hear from the Prophet’s brother again and again in the years to come, for he is one of the most extraordinary native North Americans of whom history has record.

His name is Tecumseh, and six years later in the second year of the war, he and Harrison will meet face to face in mortal combat.

WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST
, 1807. Augustus John Foster, aide to the British minister to the United States, has just dispatched a letter to his mother bewailing his “sad disappointment” over the
Chesapeake
affair. It is not the incident itself that disturbs him—like every upper-class Englishman, he is convinced that the Royal Navy acted correctly—but the cruel turn of fate that has forced him to remain in the United States, “a land of swamps and pawnbrokers,” and especially in Washington, “a sink of imagination.”

Foster, who has spent four years at the British legation, cannot wait to shake Washington’s red gumbo from his boots, but the country is in such an uproar that he cannot leave while there is the slightest danger of a rupture between the two nations. Personally, he dismisses the chance of war, cannot conceive that anyone in this ridiculous capital village would have the temerity to challenge the British lion. Still, as he has informed his mother, the Americans keep themselves in a constant ferment: “anything enflames them.” He must remain at his post until tempers calm down.

He is an apple-cheeked young aristocrat of twenty-seven with the typical upper-class Englishman’s view of Americans. To describe them, in his letters home, he beggars the lexicon of every defamatory epithet. Americans are “consummate rascals,” “ragamuffins and adventurers,” “the scum of every nation on earth.”

“Corruption, Immorality, Irreligion, and, above all, self-interest, have corroded the very pillars on which their Liberty rests.”

Clearly, Foster was not bred for America. His father was a Member of Parliament. His mother, an earl’s daughter, lives with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire in an amiable
ménage à trois
. His aunt is married to the Earl of Liverpool. After the London of Mrs. Siddons and Lord Byron, of Turner and Gainsborough, the tiny capital of seven thousand souls must indeed seem a sinkhole. Just seven years old, it has become the butt of jokes—a wretched community of bogs and gullies, broken tree stumps, piles of brushwood and refuse, ponds, potholes, and endless gluelike mud, which mires the carriages on Pennsylvania Avenue and makes sensible communication all but impossible. Paving is non-existent; the streets are mere ruts. Wells are the only source of water; there is no public supply. Petty thieves and burglars abound. Pigs and cattle wander the paths that pass for avenues. The climate is intolerable, the swamps malarial.

Above this morass, each on its separate hillock, rise, incongruously, two jerry-built Greek temples yet unfinished: the Capitol and the Executive Mansion. The columns in the former are so weak they crack under the weight of the visitors’ gallery; the latter is still unplastered, its timber already rotting. The roofs of both are so badly constructed that they leak embarrassingly in every rainstorm. Even the politicians hate Washington. Some, if they had their way, would move the seat of government to Philadelphia.

Foster cannot stomach the politicians. Why, there are scarcely five congressmen who look like gentlemen! He treats them all with an amused disdain, which the more perceptive must find maddening. But then, one legislator has actually urinated in his fireplace! Foster relishes that tale. And then there was the business of the caviar that he had his
maitre d’
prepare from Potomac sturgeon. On serving it to his congressional guests, he found them spitting it out by the mouthful, having mistaken it for black raspberry jam. Is this what democracy has wrought? “The excess of democratic ferment in this people is conspicuously evinced by the dregs having got to the top,” he reports to Whitehall. It is unthinkable that these grotesque politicians would dare declare war on his country!

Whitehall agrees. The outcry over the
Chesapeake
incident subsides, and by mid-October Foster feels able to escape from the country in which he believes he has sacrificed the four best years of his life. He would not return, he declares, were he to be paid ten thousand pounds a year. But return he will in 1811, a Yankeephobe, singularly blind to the impending war, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Foster’s smug views are typical. He is scarcely back in London, reporting the state of affairs in Washington, when the British make a second move to enrage the Americans. Having called Jefferson’s bluff, they proceed to tighten their blockade of the French ports. Spencer Perceval’s government issues new Orders in Council forbidding neutral ships on pain of seizure to trade with Europe except through Britain. Any vessel that tries to enter any port controlled by Napoleon without first touching at Britain (and paying the required duties and taxes) will be treated as an enemy.

The British are clearly prepared to go beyond the accepted rules for dealing with non-belligerents. They will, if necessary, seize American shipping in the open seas as well as within territorial limits. In no other way can they hope to throttle the French.

In American eyes this is an intolerable return to colonial days. Using the excuse of war, the British are attempting to monopolize the commerce of the world—or so the Americans believe. The Orders represent a clear threat to the fledgling nation. Has the War of Independence been for nothing?

It is clear from Britain’s maritime policy that she holds the new union in contempt. To Englishmen, Americans are all uncouth frontiersmen with little breeding and no culture, “less popular and less esteemed among us than the base and bigotted Portuguese, or the ferocious and ignorant Russians,” in the words of the
Edinburgh
Review. The British ruling class believes, with Foster, that the Americans will not fight, and, believing that, thinks nothing of goading the former colonists to fury. “America,” declares Lord Sidmouth, the Lord Privy Seal, “is no longer a bugbear; there is no terror in her threats.”

For the moment, the policy works. In this yeasty winter of 1808—the year of Goethe’s
Faust
and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—America will not go to war over the Orders in Council or the
Chesapeake
affair. The country is badly divided. The Federalist opposition centred largely in the New England states is staunchly opposed to any violent solution. Yet the country’s honour has been slighted, her morale badly bruised, and there are some in the Congress who cannot forget the insult and will not let their colleagues forget. They are Republicans, mainly from the southwestern interior and the frontier states. Soon they will be known as the War Hawks, and the time is coming when they will prevail.

FORT AMHERSTBURG, UPPER CANADA
, July 11, 1808. One thousand Indian warriors and one hundred chiefs are gathered on the Canadian side of the Detroit River to hear the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Francis Gore, cautiously and delicately extend the hand of British friendship. A genial figure, he is in his fortieth year, the smooth face gone slightly to flesh, the cheeks pink from good living. He is careful to play down the possibility of war; that might excite his listeners to premature violence—the last thing the British want. But if war should come, the Indians will be needed.

“I am sure, my Children, that it is quite unnecessary for me to call to your remembrance the faithful assurance with which the King, your Father, has so uniformly complied with all his Engagements and Promises made to your Forefathers and yourselves in former times.…

“Nothing is required of you in return for your Great Father’s benevolence and religious regard to his promises, but a renewal and faithful observance of the engagements made by your ancestors and yourselves.…

“I will not offend you by entertaining the smallest doubt of your readiness on all occasions, when called upon to prove your affectionate attachment to the King, your Great Father.…

“I came not to invite you to take up the Hatchet, but I wish to put you on your guard against any attempt that may be made by any enemy whatever to disturb the peace of your Country.…”

It is the
Chesapeake
affair that has brought the Lieutenant-Governor to Amherstburg—that and the whisper of a threat from Napoleon that the French may once again take an interest in North America. Since the end of the Revolution, the British have tended to neglect the Indians. Now it is time to mend fences. But the task is complicated: how to regain the affection of the natives, take advantage of their antagonism to the Americans, subtly include them in plans for the defence of Canada, yet at the same time give Washington no cause to believe that British agents are stirring up the tribes to attack? The council at Amherstburg, to which Gore comes late, has been going on for ten days. The public manifestations of friendship and goodwill are innocuous. But who knows what is said to the Indians in private?

Gore cannot even be sure that his listeners will be given an accurate account of what he is saying, for he speaks in English, his remarks interpreted by the superintendent-general of the British Indian Department, William Claus, and his deputy, Matthew Elliott. Elliott has just been reinstated in the key post of Amherstburg, and when the Lieutenant-Governor announces his restoration to favour there are grunts of approval from his audience. In their ritual reply, the Wyandot, senior to all the tribes, express pleasure: “We can place confidence in and rely on him as a man of experience.”

It is through Elliott that the government’s new Indian policy will be channelled. And he will interpret Whitehall’s directives in his own way, according to his prejudices. These are well known: he is pro-Indian, especially pro-Shawnee, and violently anti-American. If war comes it is in Elliott’s personal interest that the British win, and not merely for reasons of patriotism. Word has reached him that if the Yankees capture Fort Amherstburg, they intend to kill him and two of his colleagues.