The Invasion of Canada (2 page)

Henry Dearborn’s Command
: Fall, 1812

The Strategic Significance of Michilimackinac

MICHILIMACKINAC ISLAND, MICHIGAN TERRITORY, USA. The small hours of a soft July morning in 1812.

The lake is silent, save for the whisper of waves lapping the shoreline. In the starlight, the island’s cliffs stand out darkly against the surrounding flatland. In the fort above the village at the southern tip the American commander, Lieutenant Porter Hanks, lies asleep, ignorant of a war that will tragically affect his future. Napoleon has entered Russia; Wellington is pushing toward Madrid; and in Washington, the die has been cast for invasion. But history has passed Hanks by. It is nine months since he has heard from Washington; for all he knows of the civilized world he might as well be on the moon.

The civilized world ends at the Detroit River, some 350 miles to the southeast as the canoe travels. Mackinac Island is its outpost, a minor Gibraltar lying in the narrows between Lakes Huron and Michigan. Whoever controls it controls the routes to the fur country – the domain of the Nor’Westers beyond Superior and the no man’s land of the upper Missouri and Mississippi. It is a prize worth fighting for.

Hanks slumbers on, oblivious of a quiet bustling in the village directly below-of low knockings, whispers, small children’s plaints quickly hushed, rustlings, soft footsteps, the creak of cartwheels on grass – slumbers fitfully, his dreams troubled by a growing uneasiness, until the drum roll of reveille wakes him. He suspects something is going to happen. He has been seven years a soldier, knows trouble when he sees it, has watched it paddling by him for a week. An extraordinary number of Indians have been passing the fort, apparently on their way to the British garrison at St. Joseph’s Island, forty-five miles to the northeast, just beyond the border. Why? The answers are strangely evasive. The Ottawa and Chippewa chiefs, once so friendly, have turned suspiciously cool. On the British side, it is said, the tribes have gathered by the hundreds from distant frontiers: Sioux from the upper Mississippi, Winnebago from the Wisconsin country, Menominee from the shores of Green Bay.

Hanks peers over the palisades of the fort and gazes down on the village below, a crescent of whitewashed houses, following the curve of a pebbled beach. He sees at once that something is wrong. For the village is not sleeping; it is dead. No curl of smoke rises above the cedar-bark roofs;
no human cry echoes across the waters of the lake; no movement ruffles the weeds that edge the roadway.

What is going on? Hanks dispatches his second-in-command, Lieutenant Archibald Darragh, to find out. But he does not need to wait for Darragh’s report. Clambering up the slope comes his only other commissioned officer, the surgeon’s mate, Sylvester Day, who prefers to live in the village. Dr. Day’s breathless report is blunt: British redcoats and Indians have landed at the opposite end of the island. All the villagers have been collected quietly and, for their own safety, herded into an old distillery under the bluff at the west end of town. Three of the most prominent citizens are under guard as hostages.

Hanks reacts instantly to this news: musters his men, stocks his blockhouses with ammunition, charges his field pieces, follows the book. He must know that he is merely playing soldier, for he has fewer than sixty effective troops under his command men rendered stale by their frontier exile. Presently he becomes aware of a British six-pounder on the forested bluff above, pointing directly into his bastion. Through the spring foliage he can see the flash of British scarlet and – the ultimate horror – the dark forms of their native allies. A single word forms in his mind, a truly terrible word for anyone with frontier experience: massacre – visions of mutilated bodies, decapitated children, disembowelled housewives, scalps bloodying the pickets.

Hanks can fight to the last man and become a posthumous hero. If it were merely the aging troops of Fort St. Joseph that faced him, he might be prepared to do just that. But to the last woman? To the last child? Against an enemy whose savagery is said to be without limits?

A white flag flutters before him. Under its protection a British truce party marches into the fort, accompanied by the three civilian hostages. The parley is brief and to the point. Hanks must surrender. The accompanying phrase “or else” hangs unspoken in the air. The hostages urge him to accept, but it is doubtful whether he needs their counsel. He agrees to everything; the fort and the island will become British. The Americans must take the oath of allegiance to the King or leave. His troops are to be paroled to their homes. Until exchanged they can take no further part in the war.

The war? What war? The date is July 17. A full month has passed since the United States declared war on Great Britain, but this is the first Hanks has heard of it. An invasion force has already crossed the Detroit River into Canada and skirmished with the British, but nobody in Washington, it seems, has grasped the urgency of a speedy warning to
the western flank of the American frontier. It is entirely characteristic of this senseless and tragic conflict that it should have its beginnings in this topsy-turvy fashion, with the invaders invaded in a trackless wilderness hundreds of miles from the nerve centres of command.

For its dereliction the American government will pay dear. This bloodless battle is also one of the most significant. The news of the capture of Michilimackinac Island will touch off a chain of events that will frustrate the Americans in their attempt to seize British North America, an enterprise that most of them believe to be, in Thomas Jefferson’s much-quoted phrase, “a mere matter of marching.”

T
HE INVASION OF CANADA, which began in the early summer of 1812 and petered out in the late fall of 1814, was part of a larger conflict that has come to be known in North America as the War of 1812. That war was the by-product of a larger struggle, which saw Napoleonic France pitted for almost a decade against most of Europe. It is this complexity, a war within a war within a war, like a nest of Chinese boxes, that has caused so much confusion. The watershed date “1812” has different connotations for different people. And, as in Alice’s famous caucus race, everybody seems to have won
something,
though there were no prizes. The Russians, for instance, began to win their own War of 1812 against Napoleon in the very week in which the British and Canadians were repulsing the invading Americans at Queenston Heights. The Americans won the last battle of their War of 1812 in the first week of 1815 – a victory diminished by the fact that peace had been negotiated fifteen days before. The British, who beat Napoleon, could also boast that they “won” the North American war because the Treaty of Ghent, which setded the matter, had nothing to say about the points at issue and merely maintained the
status quo.

This work deals with the war that Canada won, or to put it more precisely
did not lose
, by successfully repulsing the armies that tried to invade and conquer British North America. The war was fought almost entirely in Upper Canada, whose settlers, most of them Americans, did not invite the war, did not care about the issues, and did not want to fight. They were the victims of a clash between two
major powers who, by the accident of geography, found it convenient to setde their differences by doing violence to the body of another. The invasion of Canada was not the first time that two armies have bloodied neutral ground over issues that did not concern the inhabitants; nor has it been the last.

Of all the wars fought by the English-speaking peoples, this was one of the strangest – a war entered into blindly and fought (also blindly) by men out of touch not only with reality but also with their own forces. Washington was separated from the fighting frontier by hundreds of miles of forest, rock, and swamp. The ultimate British authority was an ocean away and the nominal authority a fortnight distant from the real command. Orders could take days, weeks, even months to reach the troops.

Like some other wars, this one began bloodlessly with expressions of civility on both sides and the conviction that it would be over by Christmas. It did not end that way, for horror breeds hatred, and no war (certainly not this one) can be free of atrocity. Nor was it free of bombast. As in most wars, the leaders on both sides were convinced that their cause was just and that the Deity was firmly in their camp, leading them to victory. Slogans about “freedom” and “slavery,” “despotism” and “liberty” were batted back and forth across the border like shuttlecocks. Each side believed, or pretended to believe, that the other was held in thrall by a pernicious form of government.

At the outset, it was a gentlemen’s war. Officers on opposing sides met for parleys under flags of truce, offered hospitality, exchanged cordialities, murmured the hope that hostilities would quickly end. Belligerents addressed one another in flowery terms. The same men who declared they would never be slaves of the enemy had “the honour to be y’r humble and obedient servant.” When Isaac Brock fell at Queenston, the men responsible for his death joined in the general grief. Roger Sheaffe, his successor, expressed in writing his great regret for the wounds suffered by an opposing commander – wounds that put him out of action and helped Sheaffe win the day. “If there be anything at my command that your side of the river cannot furnish, which would be either useful or agreeable … I beg you will be so good as to have me apprised of it,” he wrote to the enemy. When the first word of the declaration of war reached the British post at Fort George on the Niagara frontier, its officers were entertaining their American
opposite numbers at dinner. They insisted that the meal continue as if hostilities had not commenced, then, with much handshaking and expressions of regret, accompanied their guests to their boats. Within a few weeks, the former dinner companions were ripping through one another’s homes and fortifications with red-hot cannonballs.

For a war of thirty months’ duration, the casualties were not heavy. In those same years many a European battle counted far more dead and wounded in a single day. But for those who did fall, it was a truly terrible war, fought under appalling conditions far from civilization and medical aid. Those victims who were torn to pieces by cannon-balls, their brains often spattering their comrades, might be considered lucky. The wounded endured agonies, banged about in open carts, exposed to blizzards or driving rain, hauled for miles over rutted tracks to the surgeon’s table where, with a musket ball clamped between their teeth and when possible a tot of rum warming their bellies, they suffered the horrors of a hasty amputation.

As the war progressed, it grew more vicious. There was savagery on both sides by white frontiersmen as well as Indians, who scalped the fallen sometimes when they were still alive. Men were roasted in flaming buildings, chopped to pieces by tomahawks, sliced open by bayonets, drowned, frozen, or felled by sickness, which took more lives on both sides than all the battles combined. There were times when a third of an army was too ill to fight. The diseases were given vague names like “ague” and “swamp fever,” which might mean influenza, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, dysentery, or simply that the combatants were too cold, too weary, or too dispirited to march or even stand. And no wonder: on both sides the armies, especially the citizen soldiers of the militia, were ill equipped for war. Men were forced to trudge through ankle-deep snow and to wade freezing rivers without shoes; to sleep in the open without blankets; to face the Canadian winter lacking mitts and greatcoats, their clothes in tatters, their hands and feet bound in rags, tormented by frostbite in January and insects in June. The military may have seen the war coming, but the politicians were not prepared to pay its price.