1812

WHILE THE BLUE-WATER fleet was performing brilliantly, Madison’s Canadian campaign was experiencing one difficulty after another. The president’s notion that America could prepare quickly for war after it had been declared turned out to be a pipe dream. A new army did not instantly materialize, nor did volunteers sign up in significant numbers, nor did the untrained militiamen, who were called suddenly to arms, perform as seasoned veterans. Jefferson’s ripe apple began looking more like a prickly pear.

Key players in Madison’s invasion appeared unacquainted with his strategy and their roles. On July 16, nearly a month after the president signed the declaration of war, Army Lieutenant Porter Hanks, commander of strategically important Fort Michilimackinac on Mackinac Island, had not been favored with any new orders from the War Department. He had not even received notice that war had been declared.

He knew something was up, however. For the past two weeks an unusual number of warriors—Sioux, Chippewa, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and others—had paddled canoes passed his fort. He naturally wondered why. He assumed they were traveling to St. Joseph Island, forty miles away on the Canadian side of the border, where a tiny force of British regulars occupied decrepit Fort St. Joseph. The warriors’ dress and weaponry indicated they were not traveling for a peaceful powwow. Clearly something was going on, but he didn’t know what it was.

Hanks was naturally concerned about the defense of Mackinac Island, located at the western end of Lake Huron. It guarded the entrance to the Straits of Mackinac, connecting Lake Huron with Lake Michigan, a key point in the fur trade and in communications with the western Indian nations. The British prized the fur trade, as did the Native Americans, but of much greater importance now was whose side the tribes of the Northwest would fight on. The defense of Upper Canada, and indeed all of Canada, depended on whether the Indians would stand with the British or remain neutral.

What Hanks needed more than anything else was a pair of armed schooners to protect his island from a seaborne attack. He did not have the soldiers or weapons to defend Mackinac against an amphibious assault. A warship or two patrolling the surrounding waters would have secured Fort Michilimackinac. Hank’s superior, Brigadier General William Hull, had requested naval support from Washington long ago but was ignored. An administration that did not even think to tell Hanks a war was on could not be expected to provide naval support, nor could it furnish the soldiers and armament he required.

Hanks could not count on any friendly Indians to support him, as the British could. After the recent Battle of Tippecanoe (November 7, 1811) and the cruel treatment the tribes received generally from Americans, the Indians were not going to side with the United States. The most Madison could hope for was their neutrality. To be sure, the British had treated the Indians badly as well, and the memory of their double dealing created a good deal of caution on the part of the tribes, but Britain’s treatment was not to be compared with America’s. In fact, the angry relations Native Americans had with the United States did not have any parallel in Canada. Thanks to the wise policies of colonial administrators like General Frederick Haldimand, relations with the tribes were relatively peaceful in Canada compared with the constant turmoil in the United States. The British needed the Indians to defend Canada, and they were careful in their treatment of them. They were not trying to change their way of life, nor were they gobbling up their lands, as the Americans were.

As war approached, Madison’s policy was to placate the tribes. He did not want to be fighting them and the British at the same time. Some of the larger, more powerful nations like the Miami and the Delaware were open to an accommodation, but there was unrest among younger warriors in all the tribes, and they looked to Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet for leadership.

Brigadier General William Hull, the governor and Indian agent for the vast Michigan Territory, was aware of Tecumseh’s importance and attempted to entice him into remaining neutral, but the zealous chief would have none of it. The British, as much as Tecumseh distrusted them, were his only hope. He saw clearly what would happen to the Miami, Shawnee, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Delaware, Wyandot (the remnants of the mighty Huron, destroyed in the French and Indian War), and the other tribes should America prevail. Only by uniting and allying themselves with the British, Tecumseh believed, could the tribes hope to protect themselves against the tidal wave of American settlers sure to push them off their ancient lands and destroy their way of life should the United States prevail.

But Tecumseh did not want to start a fight with the Americans prematurely; he waited for war to be declared. This accorded perfectly with British policy, which was to make an alliance with the Indian nations but restrain them from attacking the United States, initiating a war London did not want. The British needed the Indians only if America attacked Canada. Tecumseh had no illusions about Britain; he understood the limits of her support. The British were primarily interested in keeping Canada, not in advancing Indian goals. If they had to sacrifice their Indian allies in order to secure Canada, they would. The British were all Tecumseh had, however, and he intended to use them to the extent he could.

Despite their preference for Britain, the Indians did not want to be caught on the losing side. They hoped the British, as devious and unreliable as they were, would win, but they would not fight alongside them if they thought they were going to lose. The principal British leaders in Canada, General Isaac Brock in Upper Canada and his superior at Quebec, Governor-General Sir George Prevost, appreciated the importance of an Indian alliance and the need to win the confidence of the tribes by projecting a powerful image. If the Indians were confident of a British victory, they could more than make up for the lack of regulars. Capturing Fort Michilimackinac would demonstrate the relative strength of the British and American forces in the Northwest and be of enormous value in defending Canada.

In the spring of 1812 Madison told the Indian agents and territorial governors to conciliate the tribes and keep them neutral but, at the same time, to warn them of severe consequences if they sided with the British. He even had William Henry Harrison invite the Prophet and Tecumseh to Washington for a talk. Tecumseh was open to the idea, but the meeting never took place.

Madison’s threats were hard to take seriously when only a few tiny forts defended the entire frontier. Little defense existed west of the Maumee River that flowed northeast 175 miles from Fort Wayne, to Toledo at the western end of Lake Erie, or west of the Wabash River, which flowed southwest 475 miles from Fort Recovery, Ohio, through Indiana to the Ohio River. Only small contingents of soldiers—from fifty to one hundred and twenty—were stationed at Detroit, Fort Wayne, Fort Harrison (Terra Haute), Fort Dearborn (Chicago), and Fort Michilimackinac. Lieutenant Hanks had only sixty-one men.

Unaware war had broken out, and unacquainted with the president’s war plans, Hanks was on his own. In fact, he had not received any messages from the War Department since the fall of 1811. It was not that the president and secretary of war did not understand the importance of Native American warriors to the British, or of Fort Michilimackinac; they certainly did, but with everything else needing attention and the War Department thinly staffed, many essential details were overlooked.

Unfortunately for Hanks, the British commander at Fort St. Joseph, Captain Charles Roberts, was an experienced fighter, and he did know a war was on. Furthermore, he had orders from the energetic General Brock to conduct a surprise attack on Fort Michilimackinac. Roberts’s force of forty-four regulars was pathetically weak, but with reinforcements from the Indians—perhaps three hundred—and from French-Canadian voyageurs (fur trappers), he had an excellent chance of overpowering Hanks.

The attack Hanks feared came suddenly on July 17. Roberts struck with a mixed force of regulars, fur trappers, and Indians, numbering in the hundreds. The enterprising Roberts had command of the water and landed on Mackinac with no opposition. Earlier, he had seized John Jacob Astor’s eighty-six-ton brig Caledonia that Astor used in the fur trading he conducted on both sides of the border. Roberts simply appropriated it; Astor, a staunch supporter of Madison, had no choice in the matter. With the Caledonia Roberts was able to transport two brass six-pounders, as well as all the ordinance he needed for the assault.

Continuing to meet no resistance after he landed, Roberts quickly surrounded Fort Michilimackinac and warned Hanks that if he fired a single gun, the tribesmen would massacre everyone at the fort and the adjacent village. It was a believable threat.

Along with Hanks and his men, Roberts captured four small, privately owned schooners. He put Hanks and his soldiers on parole and used two of the schooners, Salina and Mary, to transport them to Fort Detroit. Hanks was grateful to be keeping his scalp, but he was not looking forward to landing at Detroit, where General Hull was sure to initiate court-martial proceedings. Since Hanks had surrendered without a fight, he would face charges of cowardice.

Captain Roberts’s seizure of Fort Michilimackinac meant that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of warriors, energized by the American defeat, would be added to British ranks in Canada. General Hull at Fort Detroit would now have to worry about warriors from the western tribes descending on him, coordinating an attack with their British ally, taking Detroit, and not only destroying Madison’s plans for a quick thrust into Upper Canada but seizing the whole of Michigan Territory as well. Instead of America annexing Upper Canada, the British would be acquiring the huge, sparsely populated northwestern part of the United States.

UNAWARE OF THE disaster at Fort Michilimackinac, General Hull was busy preparing to carry out his twin directives of defending Detroit and invading Upper Canada. Of course, the invasion would have to wait until war was declared. He did not receive word of it until July 2; the British, who were just across the Detroit River at Fort Malden in Amherstburg, Canada, knew on June 30.

General Hull (Captain Isaac Hull’s uncle) was a distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary War, whom Jefferson had appointed governor and Indian agent for the Michigan Territory in 1805. Madison made him a brigadier general on April 8, 1812. Hull preferred appointment as secretary of war, but Madison had no intention of offering him that post and prevailed upon him to take the army command, promising he could continue as governor of Michigan.

Discussions about invading Upper Canada from Detroit had been going on in Washington since the spring of 1812, and Hull participated in them. On March 6, he wrote to Secretary of War Eustis, explaining the need to reinforce the small fort at Detroit and gain control of Lake Erie, then in possession of the small Canadian Provincial Marine. Hull was in favor of attacking Upper Canada from Detroit, but he pointed out that success depended on mounting a simultaneous attack in the Niagara area, creating a diversion that would force the British to divide their forces. Hull did not think Madison should concentrate his army and attack Montreal alone, leaving the Northwest to fend for itself.

Hull needed all the help he could get. He faced a formidable foe in forty-two-year-old Brigadier General Isaac Brock, the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. A fearless professional soldier with a keen desire to distinguish himself on the battlefield, Brock was charismatic, aggressive to the point of recklessness, always at the head of his troops, willing to bear any hardship, beloved by his men—a soldier’s soldier. He was also an imperialist with a marked devotion to the British Empire and a disdain for republican government.

Brock’s superior was Governor-General Sir George Prevost, who was well acquainted with Canadian-American affairs, having served as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia from 1808 to 1811. His headquarters were at Quebec, where he kept most of his sparse army of 7,000 to protect the fortress and the city against an American attack. He had been appointed as much for his diplomatic skills as for his fighting ability. Nationalism had begun to stir among French-Canadians in the 1790s, creating a headache for London, which Prevost was expected to handle. He spoke French and was particularly effective in enlisting French Canadians to defend Canada against the United States. Far more cautious than Brock, Prevost was focused exclusively on defending Canada. He gave no thought to invading the United States and kept the forceful, often rash Brock on a short leash. As long as Britain was tied down fighting Napoleon, Prevost expected to be on the defensive and vulnerable.

Brock’s headquarters were at the tiny capital of Upper Canada at York (now Toronto) on Lake Ontario—a long way from Amherstburg and the surrounding settlements on the Detroit River. Brock was determined to defend the province, but he had only 1,200 regular British troops, which was a formidable small force but miniscule compared to what the United States could potentially put in the field. The size of the United States would have intimidated a lesser man, but adverse odds never fazed the romantic Brock. He did have to face certain realities, however. If the Americans attacked Amherstburg and the Niagara River towns simultaneously, which is what General Hull proposed and Madison promised, Brock would not know whether to commit his few troops to Detroit or to the Niagara area, or to divide them. No matter what he did, he had little prospect of success, unless he had the support of a large number of Native Americans. Relying on the Indians made Brock uncomfortable; he knew he needed them, but he had little respect for their military capacity.

General Hull insisted that without Indian support, “the British cannot hold Upper Canada.” He foolishly suggested to Madison in the spring of 1812 that if enough reinforcements were sent to Detroit, the Indians would be intimidated, which in turn might cause the British to abandon weakly defended Upper Canada altogether. Their small lake fleet might then fall into American hands, giving the United States control of Lake Erie without having to build a fleet. The idea that Brock would just give up or that the United States did not have to build a fleet on Lake Erie was pure fantasy, although pleasing to the president, who did not want to spend time constructing warships when his grand strategy demanded action now.

But action required soldiers, and Madison did not have these any more than he had warships. Hull told the president that he required 4,000 troops to defend his headquarters at Detroit and invade Upper Canada. At the time, Hull had only 120 regulars at Detroit. Madison offered him 400 more, supplemented by militiamen from the adjacent states of Ohio and Kentucky. This arrangement seemed fine to the president. For him, the salient features of the British position in Canada were political weakness, a miniscule army, and an impossibly long supply line. Madison fancied that pro-American sentiment in Upper Canada was so strong that General Hull would probably have an easy time convincing her people to join the United States.

Generals Brock and Prevost worried about the same pro-American sentiment. As late as July 21, 1812, Brock wrote, “My situation is most critical, not from anything the enemy can do, but from the disposition of the people—the population, believe me—is essentially bad—a full belief possesses them all that the Province must inevitably succumb—this prepossession is fatal to every exertion.”

Given this political reality, Madison thought a relatively small force could overrun Upper Canada. Invading from Fort Detroit was only one part of his grand plan, however. While Hull struck from Detroit, three more thrusts into Canada were to take place: one in the Niagara region at the western end of Lake Ontario, another against Kingston at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and, the most important, against Montreal via Lake Champlain. Once Montreal was in American hands, Madison planned to assault Quebec and eventually overrun all of Canada. If he did not reach Quebec in the fall of 1812, he planned to attack in the spring of 1813.

The president was aware that dividing America’s small army to invade a vast country at four widely separated points made no strategic sense. Concentrating his forces and striking directly at Montreal was a far better strategy. Once in control of Montreal, the army could choke off provisions flowing west to Upper Canada by way of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Supply lines stretched all the way back to England; Canada produced almost nothing of her own, except raw materials. Everything else came from the mother country or from the United States. Cut off from the eastern provinces, Upper Canada would soon fall without the need for an invasion.

Quebec remained the most important target in Canada, but given the size of the American army and the political disposition of New England, Madison thought it made more sense to attack Montreal first. Instead of doing this, however, the president, for political reasons, decided to divide his forces and attack Detroit and the Niagara area first in order to take advantage, as he told Jefferson, “of the unanimity and ardor of Kentucky and Ohio.” He also believed that concentrating on Montreal alone would risk “sacrificing the Western and Northwestern frontier, threatened with an inundation of savages under the influence of the British establishment near Detroit.”

Madison appeared unaware of how important naval supremacy on lakes Erie, Ontario, and Champlain was to his Canadian project. In June 1812 the British had control of all three lakes, albeit with weak provincial forces. The only American warships on the Great Lakes were the 6-gun Adams—an old army transport built in 1800 but still serviceable—at Detroit and the 18-gun brig Oneida at Oswego on Lake Ontario, under Lieutenant Melancthon Woolsley. The Oneida had been stationed there originally to enforce Jefferson’s embargo.

The Canadian Provincial Marine, on the other hand, had the 16-gun Queen Charlotte, the 12-gun Hunter, and the 12-gun Lady Prevost on Lake Erie, and the 22-gun Royal George, the 18-gun Earl of Moira, the 14-gun armed schooner Duke of Gloucester, and the recently launched 18-gun Prince Regent on Lake Ontario. With command of both lakes the British could use their fleet of 190 bateaux (flat-bottomed river craft from twenty-four feet to forty feet in length and tapered at both ends) to ferry men and supplies between Montreal and Amherstburg.

“The decided superiority I have obtained on the Lakes in consequence of the precautionary measures adopted the last winter,” Prevost wrote to Henry Bathurst, the secretary of state for war and the colonies, “has permitted me to move without interruption . . . both troops and supplies of every description toward Amherstburg, while those for General Hull, having several hundred miles of wilderness to pass before they can reach Detroit, are exposed to be harassed and destroyed by the Indians.”

SECRETARY EUSTIS LOOKED to Ohio’s governor, Return J. Meigs, to supply significant numbers of militiamen to supplement the 400 regulars the administration was sending to Hull. Meigs was able to call up 1,800, but this was only half what Hull said he needed. The prospect of invading Canada and ending British support for the Indian nations was very popular in Ohio, but finding men to fight was still difficult.

Hull was compelled to organize his army at Urbana, Ohio, and hack a road for two hundred miles through dense forests, creeks, and swamps to Detroit. He began putting together his men at Dayton and then marched them to Urbana, where he picked up the rest of his army, and proceeded north to the rapids of the Maumee River, cutting through the wilderness terrain with enormous difficulty.

When Hull reached the Maumee, his army consisted of 1,800 inexperienced, unruly Ohio militiamen, augmented by 400 regular army troops. Three colonels, Duncan McArthur, James Finlay, and Lewis Cass, led the militia. They were in competition with each other and had no respect for the aged Hull.

From the rapids of the Maumee, Hull moved slowly toward Detroit. On June 26, when he was about halfway there, he received a letter from Eustis, dated June 18, ordering him to move quickly to Detroit and await further instructions. Incredibly, the secretary made no mention of the declaration of war. Hull was lulled into thinking he had nothing to fear from the British strongpoint at Amherstburg on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Since he was beyond the rapids of the Maumee, he chartered the Cuyahoga Packet and put his papers, heavy baggage, and sick troops aboard for a quick passage down the Maumee to Lake Erie and then to Detroit. As the unsuspecting packet attempted to pass by the town of Amherstburg, the Provincial Marine’s 12-gun brig Hunter easily captured it. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Bligh St. George, the commander at Fort Malden in Amherstburg, now had full details of Hull’s plans and his state of readiness. St. George passed the information on to General Brock, who relayed it to General Prevost in Quebec.

Hull arrived at Detroit on July 5, concerned about his shrinking supplies. The population of the town and fort was 1,200, and he judged the food supply there would last only a few weeks. He sent an urgent message to Governor Meigs for provisions, and Meigs responded handsomely, organizing a huge supply train of pack horses loaded with flour and other essential goods, along with a small herd of cattle and ninety-five guards. Getting them to Detroit, however, was no easy matter. They had to trudge two hundred difficult miles through the same forest and swamps that Hull had, and then travel overland, avoiding the western shore of Lake Erie, where the cruisers of the Provincial Marine patrolled. If that were not difficult enough, the pack train would be subject to Indian attack along the entire route, particularly when it neared Lake Erie and Fort Malden.

On July 9, four days after arriving at Detroit, Hull received instructions from Eustis to invade Canada. Given the precarious state of his army and supplies, he warned Washington not to be too sanguine about what he could accomplish. Nonetheless, in obedience to his orders, he crossed the Detroit River into Canada on July 12, and easily took the small village of Sandwich (now Windsor), lying directly across the river from Detroit and sixteen miles north of Fort Malden.

The Canadian militiamen at Sandwich fled without a fight, much to the annoyance of General Brock. Sandwich’s few inhabitants welcomed the Americans, which Hull took as an indication that most of the citizens of Upper Canada would cross over to his side. Flush from his first victory, he issued a proclamation promising the people, “You will be emancipated from tyranny and oppression and restored to the dignified station of free men.”

Dozens of deserters appeared at his camp every day, giving him the feeling that Fort Malden would fall easily. He was further buoyed by the expectation that General Dearborn had already launched an attack in the Niagara area, diverting some, if not all, of Brock’s available forces there, making a reinforcement of Malden unlikely.

Meanwhile, the British commander at Malden, Lieutenant Colonel St. George, was making his own preparations to resist the American invasion. He formed a defense line on the southern bank of the Canard River seven miles north of the fort and requested reinforcements. His force of three hundred regulars, four hundred fifty militiamen, and four hundred of Tecumseh’s warriors would not be enough to withstand Hull’s army.

The 6-gun army brig Adams added to Hull’s force. He had men working on her for some time in a yard above Detroit, and while he was away, the work was completed. She was launched on July 4 and brought at night to the Detroit waterfront for arming under the guns of the fort.

Despite having an overwhelming advantage, Hull did not attack Fort Malden immediately. He inexplicably wasted days preparing two twenty-four pounders and three howitzers, while raiding the countryside for supplies, enraging the farmers he took them from. The delay puzzled his men and made them restless. They feared the old man did not have the stomach for a fight.

Hull was still preparing when, on July 26, the captured American schooners Salina and Mary appeared suddenly at Detroit, carrying Lieutenant Hanks and his party of soldiers and citizens from Fort Michilimackinac. Hull was aghast. “The surrender opened the Northern hive of Indians,” he wrote to Secretary Eustis, “and they were swarming down in every direction.”

Instead of immediately moving on Malden before it could be reinforced, Hull continued to wait at Sandwich, frustrating his officers, who wanted to attack right away. Morale in the ranks deteriorated as day after day of inaction followed. General Brock, meanwhile, was trying hard to take advantage of Hull’s lethargy by raising five hundred militiamen to strengthen Fort Malden.

Hull continued to vacillate. He sent a detachment of two hundred men under Major Thomas Van Horne to find the supply train Governor Meigs had sent from Chillicothe (Ohio’s capital) under militia Captain Henry Brush. Overcoming near impossible terrain, Brush had reached the rapids of the Maumee on August 5, but he did not dare go farther because he would have to pass too close to Fort Malden and the British warships on Lake Erie.

Tecumseh was keeping a close eye on Hull, and he convinced the Wyandot—who were heavily influenced by the easy British victory at Michilimackinac—to join him in a surprise attack on Van Horne’s column. Tecumseh struck on August 5 at the village of Brownstone, about twenty miles south of Detroit. Taken completely by surprise, the Americans were scared out of their wits, and they ran wildly.

Even before Hull received word of the Brownstone debacle, he called a council of war to discuss the possibility of retreating. After a stormy session with officers who had lost all confidence in him, he reluctantly agreed to attack Fort Malden in three days. When he received word of the disaster at Brownstone, however, he changed his mind again. He was further rattled when two days later he heard that Brock had succeeded in sending reinforcements to Malden under Colonel Henry Proctor, who assumed command of the fort. The British position at Amherstburg was further strengthened by Wyandot and other Indians, whom the Provincial Marine ferried across Lake Erie. Even more disconcerting was intelligence that arrived on August 6, reporting that the diversion Hull was expecting General Dearborn to initiate in the Niagara area had not yet taken place.

Hull would have been shocked had he known what Major General Dearborn was actually doing. Instead of creating a diversion, he was at his headquarters in Greenbush outside Albany on August 9, discussing an armistice with Sir George Prevost’s representative, Colonel Edward Baynes, the British adjutant general in Canada. Baynes explained to Dearborn that Lord Liverpool had repealed the Orders in Council in June and was seeking a temporary armistice to give the American government time to respond.

Even though he had known since the spring that Madison expected simultaneous attacks along the Canadian border at Detroit, Niagara, Kingston, and Montreal, and Secretary Eustis had issued orders again on August 1 to begin the offensive at once, Dearborn decided to accept the armistice. It did not seem to matter that by doing so he was leaving General Hull in the lurch. Since Dearborn was not in the least ready to invade anyway (partly because of his own lack of initiative), he viewed the armistice as a godsend. It would give him time to prepare, something he should have been doing for weeks.

Ignoring instructions from Secretary Eustis was a habit of General Dearborn’s. He had been secretary of war for eight years under Jefferson, and he had trouble accepting Eustis as his superior. Earlier, when he was supposed to be at his headquarters assembling the army of invasion, he was in New England, and remained there until late July, discussing coastal defense and the calling up and use of militia with the antiwar Federalist governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Eustis wrote to him saying that the president wanted him at Albany, but Dearborn remained in Massachusetts.

As part of the armistice, Dearborn agreed to put whatever invasion plans he had on hold and act only on the defensive until Washington could respond to London’s peace initiative. To say the least, he was acting far beyond his authority. He knew, of course, that no invasion was going to take place anyway, whether he agreed to an armistice or not. The U. S. Army was utterly unprepared for an invasion. Dearborn was simply adjusting Madison’s dreams to reality. He wrote to Secretary Eustis, “I consider the agreement as favorable . . . for we could not act offensively except at Detroit for some time, and there will probably [be no] effect on General Hull or his movements.”

His claim that his actions would have no effect on Hull was astonishing. Dearborn was acting as if Hull’s command was somehow independent of his own, despite the fact that the president had clearly placed Dearborn in charge of the entire northern front. The armistice technically did not even apply to Hull. Dearborn did send a message to Hull informing him of the armistice, but it never reached him.

Not only did Dearborn disregard Hull, but he gave no thought to how the armistice would influence General Brock’s calculations. Brock had already set out for Fort Malden with reinforcements, but when he later heard of the armistice, he considered it a great boon. It would allow him time to complete his business at Detroit and return to the Niagara area and direct the defense there.

Dearborn’s letter to Eustis announcing the armistice arrived in Washington on August 13. Madison was flabbergasted and rejected it out of hand. Not only did it emasculate his whole war strategy, but he had already turned down the idea of an armistice when Ambassador Foster and Chargé Baker had proposed it in Washington earlier. Furthermore, Madison did not want to hear that his grand scheme to drive into Canada was, to say the least, unrealistic. Eustis, reflecting the president’s exasperation, fired back to Dearborn, “you will inform Sir George Prevost [that the armistice is terminated, and then] you will proceed with the utmost vigor in your operations.”

To protect himself, Dearborn had already written to his friend Madison, blaming Eustis for the mix-up. He told the president—inaccurately—that he had no orders or directions relating to Upper Canada, “which I had considered as not attached to my command, until my last arrival at this place.” He insisted that he had been “detained at Boston by direction.” He then went on to assert that, “If I had been directed to take measures for acting offensively on Niagara and Kingston, with authority such as I now posses, for calling out the militia, we might have been prepared to act on those points as early as General Hull commenced his operations at Detroit; but unfortunately no explicit orders had been received by me in relation to Upper Canada until it was too late even to make an effectual diversion in favor of General Hull.”

Despite his unwillingness to take responsibility for the inaction at Niagara and Kingston, the politically savvy Dearborn could see that the president was unwilling to accept the realities on the ground. Wanting to back off from an escalating confrontation, Dearborn sent Washington a feel-good message to relieve Madison’s anxiety for the moment. “If the troops are immediately pushed on from the southward,” he wrote to Eustis, “I think we may calculate on being able to possess ourselves of Montreal and Upper Canada before the winter sets in.”

Given the state of the American army and the lack of naval supremacy on the lakes, this assessment was laughable. Nonetheless, the president and Eustis were receptive—as Dearborn knew they would be—to the notion that with the forces in hand, Hull and Dearborn, could still “secure Upper Canada” before the year was over.

The reality was far different. At Sandwich General Hull was growing more pessimistic by the hour. He thought his position had markedly deteriorated, and he was reconsidering his decision to attack Fort Malden. He feared that large numbers of western Indians were descending on his rear, and he believed that Fort Malden itself had been reinforced to the point where it was now equal in strength to his own force. Furthermore, the British had control of the Detroit River, and Captain Brush was stuck miles away at the Maumee with Governor Meig’s supply train. In view of all this, Hull decided to retreat back to Fort Detroit. He even considered going all the way to the Maumee and making a juncture with Brush, but Ohio colonel Lewis Cass, furious at Hull’s lack of aggressiveness, warned him that if he retreated to the rapids of the Maumee, all the Ohio militiamen would go home.

On the night of August 8, under cover of darkness, Hull surprised Colonel Proctor and the Provincial Marine and moved his army across the Detroit River to the safety of Fort Detroit without incident. The next day, Hull dispatched a substantial part of his effective force, six hundred men, including two hundred regulars with cavalry and artillery under Lieutenant Colonel James Miller, to escort Brush’s supply train to Detroit and reestablish the fort’s link with Ohio. Fourteen miles south of Detroit, however, at the Indian village of Maguaga, a mixed force of two hundred fifty British regulars, militiamen, and Tecumseh’s Indians attacked Miller. After a vicious fight, Miller drove them back across the river to Amherstburg, but his men were so beaten up he returned to Detroit without making contact with Captain Brush, who by now had reached as far north as the River Raison, forty miles south of Detroit.

Meanwhile, General Brock, knowing nothing of the armistice worked out between Dearborn and Prevost, made the critical decision to ignore the threat from the Niagara area for the moment and concentrate on Hull. He also decided to take command at Fort Malden personally. Aided immeasurably by control of Lake Erie, he left Long Point on August 8 with three hundred additional troops and traveled by boat to Amherstburg, arriving five days later on the night of August 13.

The very same day, Colonel Proctor’s men began preparing a battery at Sandwich to bombard Detroit. As they did, the Ohio militia colonels and many of their men had grown so tired of Hull’s wavering they were seriously considering mutiny. Colonel Miller refused to go along with them, however, and since he was the ranking regular army officer, they backed off.

At the same time, Hull was growing increasingly despondent, worrying about what would happen to the women and children of Detroit if he were defeated. He envisioned thousands of angry tribesmen eviscerating them. While he brooded, General Brock held a strategy meeting the morning after he arrived at Fort Malden. Tecumseh, who now had 1,000 warriors at the fort, attended. He was delighted when Brock proposed crossing the river and attacking Fort Detroit right away.

Meanwhile, on August 14, Hull, knowing of the discontent bordering on mutiny in his ranks, sent the two chief malcontents, Colonels Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur, away with four hundred men to bring the supply train on the River Raison forward to Detroit by a more circuitous route. After seeing the Ohio militiamen off, Hull got word of General Brock’s arrival at Fort Malden with reinforcements, and on the fifteenth he hurriedly sent orders to Cass and McArthur to return.

Directly across the river at Sandwich, Brock was preparing a full-scale attack. On August 15 he sent a note to Fort Detroit, demanding Hull’s surrender. “It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination,” he wrote, “but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops, will be beyond my control the moment the contest commences.”

Brock’s demand seemed an outlandish, arrogant ploy, even to his own officers. Colonel Proctor thought the note was preposterous. Hull rejected Brock’s demand, but he continued to be nervous and depressed about what he viewed as his worsening situation.

Immediately after Hull’s refusal to surrender, the Provincial Marine’s Queen Charlotte and Hunter moved upriver directly before Fort Detroit and, in concert with the batteries at Sandwich, opened fire. Hull replied with thirty-three pieces of iron and brass ordinance, and an inconclusive artillery duel commenced. One of the British cannonballs struck Lieutenant Porter Hanks, who was awaiting his court-martial, and cut him in two.

While the bombardment distracted Hull, Tecumseh and six hundred warriors silently crossed the river at night, followed in the wee hours of the morning by Brock with seven hundred fifty regulars. They brought five field pieces with them. Brock had no orders from Prevost to invade the United States, but he thought the situation demanded it. He soon discovered that the American colonels Cass and McArthur were in his rear with a substantial body of men and could possibly be returning to the fort. Brock decided to attack before the Ohioans reached the battlefield. He faced a substantial roadblock, however. Hull had placed two twenty-four pounders on the road, where the British troops had to pass. Brock’s guns were six- and three-pounders. His men would have been cut to pieces. All the while, cannonballs from Sandwich on the other side of the river kept falling into the fort.

Refusing to back off, Brock exhibited a white flag and sent another message to Hull demanding that he surrender and save the fort and town from a bloody massacre. Brock’s officers were astonished at his audacity. They did not expect to succeed against the fort’s artillery, especially if Cass and McArthur were in their rear—although, as it turned out, they actually were not. (After leaving the fort, the disgruntled Ohio colonels ignored Hull’s order to return, and deliberately stayed away.)

By this time Hull was more deeply depressed than ever about his position. He believed he was greatly outnumbered, that thousands of Indians were coming from the west, and that Tecumseh’s force was three times the size it was. Brock’s demand did not seem outlandish to him at all. Fearing the entire fort and town would be butchered, he did not delay long before surrendering without a fight. The British officers and Hull’s own troops were astonished.

Brock’s unexpected triumph produced a windfall for him. Hull forfeited not only the soldiers at Fort Detroit but the troops under Cass and McArthur and even those under Captain Henry Brush at the River Raisin—2,200 regulars and militiamen. In addition, Hull surrendered 33 pieces of artillery, 2,500 muskets, 5,000 pounds of gunpowder, and all the fort’s other supplies, as well as the 6-gun brig Adams, tied up at Detroit’s waterfront. The British later rename her Detroit in honor of their victory.

Adding to Hull’s disaster, on August 15 a large force of Potawatomi massacred the American soldiers and civilians evacuating Fort Dearborn (Chicago). Afraid of just such an attack, Hull had ordered the evacuation, but it came much too late. The fort was burned, ending the last vestige of American authority west of the Maumee River. A few days later, similar Indian attacks were repulsed at Fort Harrison on the Wabash and at Fort Madison on the upper Mississippi. The battle at Fort Harrison went on for ten difficult days, from September 4 to 14. Captain Zachary Taylor was commander of the tiny American garrison, and he emerged as a hero. Hull’s evacuation order had prevented Fort Dearborn from mounting a similar defense.

Immediately after taking Detroit, General Brock annexed all of Michigan Territory in the name of George III. It was the biggest loss of territory in American history. Tecumseh’s dream of expelling the Americans from Indian lands north of the Ohio now came closer to reality.

ON AUGUST 28 President Madison and his wife were on the road, traveling to Montpelier, their plantation in Orange, Virginia, unaware of the momentous events at Detroit. The president was seriously ill with a recurring stomach ailment and in need of a long rest. Dolley feared for his life. As they approached the village of Dumfries, where they planned to stay for the night, an express rider galloped up unexpectedly and handed Madison an urgent message from Secretary Eustis, informing him of Hull’s surrender. The president was dumbfounded. His entire war plan and his political future were suddenly in peril. In spite of his health, he returned to Washington the following morning.

Not surprisingly, as they were engaged in a tight reelection fight against DeWitt Clinton of New York, the president and his closest political allies thought the first order of business was to deflect blame away from the commander in chief and place it entirely on General Hull. Madison felt that accepting any responsibility for what happened at Detroit would be politically disastrous. Jefferson reflected the administration’s approach when he wrote, “The treachery of Hull, like that of Arnold, cannot be a matter of blame to our government.” Monroe called Hull “weak, indecisive, and pusillanimous.” Colonel Lewis Cass wrote a scathing report of Hull’s surrender, which Madison had printed in the National Intelligencer.

Much later, long after the election, the discredited Hull, who had returned on parole from captivity in Canada, received a court-martial that lasted from January 3 to March 26, 1814. The presiding judge was the president’s close friend Henry Dearborn. With two-thirds of the members concurring, the court convicted Hull of cowardice and neglect of duty and sentenced him to be shot, but the general’s age and outstanding service during the Revolutionary War moved the court to recommend clemency to the president. On April 25 Madison solemnly pardoned Hull and cashiered him from the service. The culpability of the president, Secretary Eustis, and General Dearborn in the Canadian fiasco of 1812 was covered up.

Assigning exclusive blame to Hull, however, did not mitigate the dislike of the war that now spread over the entire country. Enthusiasm for invading Canada had never been strong, except in a few states, and it now sank to a new low, making recruitment for the army even more difficult. Madison’s ability to lead the war inevitably came into question. Had it not been for the wildly popular victory of the Constitution over the Guerriere, happening at the same time, Hull’s defeat probably would have cost the president reelection.

Naturally, Brock’s wholly unexpected victory delighted the British. The news reached London the first week of October—before reports of the Guerriere’s defeat. The Times wrote that General Hull’s surrender “was a glorious occurrence.” But when news of the Constitution’s success arrived only hours later, the Times could scarcely believe it. “The disaster . . . is one of that nature, with which England is but little familiar,” the editors lamented. “We would gladly give up all the laurels of Detroit, to have it still to say, that no British frigate ever struck to an American.”

The debacle at Detroit and the loss of Michigan Territory did not mean Madison was giving up his plan to invade Canada. He was more determined than ever to carry it out. Once fixed on a design, particularly one as important as the Canadian invasion, he stuck with it. This mild-mannered man, who had never seen military service, was a stubborn fighter. He viewed General Hull’s surrender as merely an unfortunate episode. In the middle of September he found another general to recover Detroit and resume the invasion. Secretary of State Monroe had volunteered for the job, but pressured by Henry Clay and the War Hawks, Madison appointed another Virginian, thirty-nine-year-old William Henry Harrison. Harrison was enormously popular in Kentucky, where the president hoped to raise a large contingent of militiamen.

Harrison was on the move quickly, trying to prevent a further deterioration of the American position in the Northwest. He dispatched an initial force of 900 from Piqua, Ohio, to relieve Fort Wayne in northeastern Indiana, which was under Indian and British attack. He then followed with 2,000 reinforcements. They drove the Indian besiegers away with no trouble.

Matters were proceeding so well in the fall that Harrison began thinking about a quick strike on Detroit. In preparation for it, he sent men to burn and butcher the inhabitants of as many hostile Indian villages as possible, but his raiders found that most of the inhabitants had already evacuated to the protection of Fort Malden.

Harrison then began running into the same difficulties that had bedeviled Hull—atrocious weather, lack of supplies, difficult terrain, and, above all, British control of Lake Erie, which permitted them to transport men and supplies with relative ease. Moving soldiers and equipment overland through thick forests and extensive swamps was next to impossible. Harrison soon became less confident about the Canadian invasion. Detroit and Fort Malden remained his objectives, but it was now obvious that capturing them would be far more difficult than the president had hoped.