SHOWDOWN ON THE SAINT LAWRENCE
Most American history textbooks explain that the War of 1812 grew out of American grievances over U.S. vessels being stopped by British warships and their seamen being pressed into Royal Navy service as “deserters,” with the added provocation of the British helping Native American tribes that resisted the settlement of the western frontier. A less mentioned casus belli, however, was the push to conquer Canada advanced by the young “War Hawks” faction in the U.S. Congress.
Just weeks after it declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812, the United States launched its first invasion of Upper Canada (now Ontario Province) from Michigan Territory on July 12. Under the unsteady hand of Brigadier General William Hull, the operation did not go well, ending with Hull’s withdrawal to Detroit and followed, on August 16, by the only surrender of a U.S. city to a foreign invader. A succession of subsequent attempts also came to nothing, including the taking, partial burning, and ultimate abandonment of York (now Toronto) in April 1813.
The Saint Lawrence campaign, as the eighth of these U.S. invasions came to be known, was another grand effort, involving two armies acting in concert to seize control of the Saint Lawrence River and Lower Canada (now Quebec Province). A classic study of the failure to coordinate an offensive at both the strategic and tactical levels, it would also feature one of the war’s bloodiest land battles and an encounter that became iconic to a nation that had yet to exist.
John Armstrong Jr., the U.S. secretary of war, conceived the Saint Lawrence campaign with the intention of commanding it personally. His plan, launching from New York, was to have Major General James Wilkinson lead 8,000 troops, accompanied by a squadron of supporting gunboats
