A Signal Victory: The Lake Erie Campaign, 1812-1813

By David C Skaggs and Gerard Altoff

The Battle of Lake Erie on 10 September 1813 is considered by many to be the most important naval confrontation of the War of 1812. Made famous by the American fleet commander Oliver Hazard Perry's comment, "We have met the enemy and they are ours," the battle marked the U.S. Navy's first successful fleet action and was one of the rare occasions when the Royal Navy surrendered an entire squadron. This book draws on British, Canadian, and American documents to offer a totally impartial analysis of all sides of the struggle to control the lake. New diagrams of the battle are included that reflect the authors' modification of traditional positions of various vessels. The book also evaluates the strategic background and tactical conduct of the British and the Americans and the command leadership exercised by Perry and his British opponent, Commander Robert H. Barclay. Not since James Fenimore Cooper's 1843 book on the subject has the battle been examined in such detail, and not since Alfred Thayer Mahan's 1905 study of the war has there been such a significant reinterpretation of the engagement. First published in hardcover in 1997, the book is the winner of the North American Society for Oceanic History's John Lyman Book Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612512266

Book preview

A SIGNAL VICTORY

A

SIGNAL

VICTORY

The Lake Erie Campaign

1812–1813

DAVID CURTIS SKAGGS

GERARD T. ALTOFF

BLUEJACKET BOOKS

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

This book has been brought to publication by the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 1997 by David Curtis Skaggs and Gerard T. Altoff

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Bluejacket Books printing, 2000

ISBN 978-1-61251-226-6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Skaggs, David Curtis.

A signal victory : the Lake Erie campaign, 1812-1813 / David Curtis Skaggs and Gerard T. Altoff.

p.          cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Erie, Lake, Battle of, 1813. 2. United States—History—War of 1812—Campaigns. I. Altoff, Gerard T., 1949-. II. Title.

E356.E6S56   1997

973-5’ 23—dc23                                           97-12236

To the memory of those who served on all sides in this struggle over the future of the Great Lakes

It has pleased the Almighty to give the arms of the United States a signal victory over their enemies on this lake.

—Captain Oliver H. Perry to Secretary of the Navy William Jones,

September 10,1813

Wars usually last longer and cost more than governments expect; and they rarely achieve the political goals that might justify the risks, the cost and the pain.

—Piers Mackesy, War without Victory:

The Downfall of Pitt, 1799–1802

Contents

Preface

Introduction: South Bass Island

Part One: Prologue to the Battle

1Strategic Background

2Preparing for the 1813 Campaign

3Building and Manning the Fleets

Part Two: The Ordeal of Combat

4Preliminaries to Combat

5The Battle of Lake Erie

6Denouement

Appendix: British Squadron Armament

Notes

Glossary of Nautical Terms

Bibliographic Essay

Index

Preface

The genesis of this volume dates back to 1988, when the two of us were members of a committee that organized a scholarly conference celebrating the 175th anniversary of the battle of Lake Erie. Professor Skaggs was the coeditor of the volume of essays resulting from that meeting, and Mr. Altoff contributed the descriptive narrative of the battle contained therein. In the following years, we continued our interest in the engagement and its ramifications and made a variety of contributions broadening the understanding of various aspects of that battle.

In 1994 we began the collaborative work presented here. Our objectives were threefold: first, to provide an updated study of a battle that had not received serious scholarly analysis since Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote his Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812 nine decades earlier; second, to reassess the Lake Erie campaign in its strategic and tactical dimensions using a greater variety of sources and a less nationalistic viewpoint than previously presented; and third, to incorporate the experiences of individuals from all sides and various levels of society who contributed to the outcome. Our focus is on the Lake Erie campaign, not just the battle off Put-in-Bay, Ohio. Because of this, we incorporated much more background on strategic and operational decisions made both in London and Washington and by regional army and navy commanders on both sides than previous studies have. Finally, we wanted to convey, as much as the record allowed, the personalities that contributed to and were affected by the struggle to control the upper Great Lakes during the first year and a half of the War of 1812.

A study of this sort involves more than those whose names appear on the title page. Professor Skaggs was the fortunate recipient of institutional support from Bowling Green State University, which provided released time, allowed him to pursue research far from his principal place of employment, and funded a graduate assistant and a research consultant. In addition, he received released research time during a visiting professorship from the Air War College of Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

At a risk of omitting the names of some benefactors, we wish to particularly thank research assistant Charles Morrisey, a native of New Brunswick who is a graduate student at Bowling Green; archivist Bob Garcia of Fort Malden National Historic Park in Amherstburg, Ontario; Douglas L. Hendry of Ottawa, who researched various archives in Canada and England for us; Christopher McKee of Grinnell College, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the early American navy proved very beneficial; Peter Rindlisbacher of Amherstburg, a masterful artist of the Great Lakes nautical tradition; Captain Walter B. Rybka, master of the brig Niagara, maintained by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission at Erie; and two superintendents of Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial, Put-in-Bay, Harry C. Myers and Richard A. Lusardi. A particular debt of gratitude is owed Dr. Yu Zhou, assistant professor of geography at Bowling Green State University, who produced the maps and diagrams. Others whose support and interest were important to the final outcome were James C. Bradford, Dennis Carter-Edwards, Kevin P. Crisman, Frederick C. Drake, Timothy Dubé, William S. Dudley, Robert Graham, Donald R. Graves, Harold D. Langley, Donald F. Melhorn, Jr., Patrick Wilder, and a host of staff members at such institutions as the William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan; the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; the Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa; the Institute for Great Lakes Research and the Jerome Library of Bowling Green State University; the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; the Naval War College Library and the Newport Historical Society, Newport, R.I.; and the John Hay Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence. The trustees of the Welch Regiment Museum (41st/69th Foot), Cardiff Castle, South Wales, graciously allowed us to use James Cochrane, The War in Canada, 1812–1814 (undated manuscript from the 1840s). An enormous debt is owed Paul Wilderson and the editorial staff of the Naval Institute Press, who have provided services and encouragement beyond the ordinary. Finally, we would like to thank our wives, Margo and Cyndee, for the patient faith they showed during this project, which dragged on far longer than they or we ever anticipated.

A SIGNAL VICTORY

INTRODUCTION

South Bass Island

A small but verdant isle appear’d in view,

And Asteris the advancing pilot knew:

An ample port the rocks projected form,

To break the rolling waves and ruffling storm:

That safe recess they gain with happy speed,

And in close ambush wait the murderous deed.

The Odyssey

SOUTH B ASS I SLAND ’ S 1,382 acres make it the third largest of twenty-six limestone islands in western Lake Erie. Its protected cove, known as Putin- Bay, was described by an early commentator as being the BEST HARBOR between Buffalo and [Fort] Malden at the mouth of the Detroit River. Put-in-Bay was deep enough at certain points, to admit vessels of 400 tons burthen to anchor within twenty yards of the shore. Frequently used by sailing vessels as a refuge from lake storms and as a place to await favorable winds for entering the Detroit River, Put-in-Bay was one of the best-known locations on Lake Erie. At the island’s center was the entrance to a cave containing an amphitheater-like limestone cavern, measuring 170 feet by 40 feet, and a deep pool of water. Inside were centuries-old relics from Indian visitations to this sacred site. The island’s flora included three hundred acres of oak, black walnut, red cedar, and honey locust, and its fauna included not only an abundance of deer and rattlesnakes but also, during migratory seasons, an enormous variety of birds. ¹

In 1807, New England’s Edwards family secured from the Connecticut Land Company title to a portion of the mainland in what is now Lorain County, Ohio, and claim to several Lake Erie islands. John Stark Edwards began the family’s settlement on South Bass Island in 1811. He sent his agent, Seth Done, and various laborers to drive off French squatters and clear the land. With its deep harbor and its location in the navigation lane between Buffalo and Detroit, the island seemed an ideal site at which to build a comfortable and profitable residence. By 1812 a commodious new home overlooked the picturesque bay and the first harvest of wheat had yielded twelve hundred bushels. Corn, potatoes, vegetables, and timothy grew in Edwards’s fields and gardens, and three hundred merino sheep and a stock of hogs grazed in the luxuriant meadow and the woods. Only the numerous rattlesnakes seemed to disrupt Edwards’s idyll.

This tranquil world collapsed in early 1812 when the winds of war reached Lake Erie. Even before the formal declaration, Edwards abandoned his estate and fled to the mainland. War canoes from the mouth of the Detroit sailed among the Lake Erie islands and into Put-in-Bay. Indians, their faces painted black to symbolize their combat intentions, destroyed Edwards’s grain, burned his house and barns, and killed most of his livestock. Only a few hogs escaped to roam the woods and to survive amidst the chaos. For a few months, they, the deer, and the rattlesnakes had the island to themselves.

John Stark Edwards died in the autumn of 1812, but the memory of the finest harbor between Buffalo and the Detroit River was not forgotten by those who sailed Lake Erie. In the summer of 1813 it became the anchorage for an American fleet. For a few days an army encamped on the island en route to invading the Canadian shore just a few miles away. Some U.S. Navy vessels spent the winter of 1813–14 frozen in Put-in-Bay’s waters. After that, the harbor returned to its traditional use as a refuge for those sailing the lake. With the advance of steam-powered vessels, the island drifted into splendid isolation, except for a few settlers and the visitors who came each summer to enjoy its cool breezes.²

Today, activity on the island increases each summer. Its harbor is filled with pleasure craft, and tourists ascend to the top of a Doric tower commemorating the men who died in the battle of Lake Erie and the nearly two centuries of peace that have followed. From the tall column they survey the lake, its myriad islands, and the Canadian and American shorelines that come easily into view. There is little to remind them of the carnage that occurred nearby and of the hostile intentions of dedicated men from the United States, the British Empire, and several Indian nations who roamed these now-peaceful shores and sailed this great body of freshwater.

Governor-General Sir George Prevost National Archives of Canada C-19123

Governor-General Sir George Prevost

National Archives of Canada C-19123

Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo National Archives of Canada C-22895

Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo

National Archives of Canada C-22895

Major General Henry Procter Fort Malden National Historic Park

Major General Henry Procter

Fort Malden National Historic Park

Commander Robert Heriot Barclay Institute for Great Lakes Research, Bowling Green State University

Commander Robert Heriot Barclay

Institute for Great Lakes Research,

Bowling Green State University

General William Henry Harrison Library of Congress U5Z62-13009

General William Henry Harrison

Library of Congress U5Z62-13009

Commodore Isaac Chauncey Library of Congress U5Z62-513

Commodore Isaac Chauncey

Library of Congress U5Z62-513

Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry Library of Congress U5Z62-16940

Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry

Library of Congress U5Z62-16940

Master Commandant Jesse Duncan Elliott Library of Congress U5Z62-110554

Master Commandant Jesse Duncan Elliott

Library of Congress U5Z62-110554

PART ONE

Prologue to the Battle

1

Strategic Background

Ye generous chiefs! on whom the immortals lay

The cares and glories of this doubtful day;

On whom your aids, your country’s hopes depend;

Wise to consult, and active to defend!

The Iliad

JAMES M ADISON was an unlikely chief executive for the young republic. A professorship of politics at Princeton College, his alma mater, was a far more likely position than the one he occupied, president of the United States of America. Moreover, like Woodrow Wilson, his Princetonian successor a century later, he seemed more likely to lead his countrymen into prolonged peace than become a wartime president. Yet there he was on 18 June 1812, signing a declaration of war against the most powerful nation on the earth—the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

President Madison requested the declaration on the grounds that Great Britain was engaged . . . in a series of acts, hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation. Among such acts were violating the American flag on the great high way of nations, violating the rights and the peace of our Coasts, seizing thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, and dragging them on board their Ships of War, where they were subjected to the severities of their discipline and ordered to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors. All these violations were done, the president told Congress, not because the Americans were interfering with the Belligerent rights of Great Britain . . . [or] supplying the wants of her Enemies, which she herself supplies, but because neutral nations were interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation.

Besides the problems related to neutral trading rights, officers and agents of the British government developed combinations with various Indian tribes that had just renewed . . . on one of our extensive frontiers; a warfare, which is known to spare neither age nor sex, and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity.¹

The debate over the war declaration was bitter, regional, and partisan. All the Federalist members of Congress opposed it. In the House of Representatives it passed seventy-nine to forty-nine; in the Senate the vote was a narrow seventeen to thirteen. In one of those bitter ironies, five days after the president signed the declaration, Britain’s cabinet repealed the Orders in Council that were at the heart of the neutral-rights rationale for war. But this news would not stop a contest already in progress. For the nearly two centuries since, historians, politicians, and polemicists have argued over why, for the second time in just over third of a century, the world’s two English-speaking nations were at war.²

Regardless of the rationale, seldom has a nation gone into a military struggle less prepared than did the United States that summer. For years the Republican administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had conducted a policy of frugality with public monies, especially where it concerned the army and navy. Dr. William Eustis of Massachusetts was Madison’s secretary of war and Paul Hamilton of South Carolina his secretary of the navy. Neither was gifted in the art of public administration, and both quickly demonstrated their lack of talent to all concerned. Undoubtedly, part of their failure was owing to a decided lack of administrative support in Washington; Eustis had eight clerks and Hamilton had two to coordinate a war being waged from the rockbound coasts of Maine to the bayous of Louisiana, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.³

The Strategic Situation

Although their offices were in the same building, seldom did Eustis and Hamilton coordinate activities. Instead, each service went off to fight its own war. Interservice rivalries and parochial concerns dominated most of the operations conducted during the war, especially the first year.⁴

The troops with which the war and navy secretaries were to conduct the war were few, inferior, untrained, and inexperienced. At the outset of the Jefferson administration, the Republicans cut army strength to one artillery and two infantry regiments, with a total strength of 3,350 officers and men. The war scare following the unprovoked British attack on the USS Chesapeake in 1807 led to an authorization of eight more regiments. However, efforts to raise the full complement of troops failed, and additional attempts to expand the regular army to over 30,000 did not come until January 1812. By then many regular troops and their officers were as inexperienced as their wartime volunteer counterparts from the state militias. A good example of the ill-preparedness of the army may be seen in the congressional authorization in February 1812 allowing the purchase of horses and equipage for the light artillery, which had been immobilized in 1809 when their horses had been sold.

Originally, regulars were expected to enlist for five years, but by the end of 1812 that requirement was changed to the duration of the war. The army of 1812 was mostly a frontier constabulary and coastal artillery force, with little experience in logistics, large-unit maneuvers, or strategic planning. The key to U.S. mobilization efforts lay with the militia volunteer units. For the most part these were not ordinary militia units, but rather individual short-time and wartime volunteer companies and regiments raised and officered by the various states. They provided the largest portion of the troops utilized in the conflict.⁵

At the war’s outset the regular army’s senior officers consisted of overage Revolutionary War veterans and political hacks, both of whom proved inadequate to the task. By the end of 1813 these so-called professional soldiers had demonstrated their incompetence and a new layer of leadership emerged from the lower-ranking professionals and the volunteers. By then the Americans’ strategic advantage had vanished. They were going to have to spend a considerable amount of energy regaining the losses on the Great Lakes frontier.⁶

The navy may have been more professional in its officers, but it was torn by personal rivalries and grossly inferior to the Royal Navy in manpower, firepower, and vessels. The British had three fighting ships for every U.S. naval gun. In June of 1812 there were nearly 700 Royal Navy warships at sea, while the U.S. Navy had only 17 seagoing vessels and 165 gunboats. Moreover, since the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the French and Spanish fleets, which had been so critical to the Americans in their war for independence, no longer diverted the British. There was no way the United States was going to contest the Royal Navy’s control of the North Atlantic.⁷

What, then, was the United States’ military objective? It had to be some British possession that was valuable enough to secure the desired concessions regarding freedom of the seas. Congressman Henry Clay put it bluntly: When the War was commenced Canada was not the end but the means; the object of the War being the redress of injuries, and Canada being the instrument by which that redress was to be obtained.⁸

A casual observation might lead to the expectation of an easy American victory. There were 7.5 million citizens in the young republic, while in British North America there were approximately 500,000 whites. Both sides were rife with disaffection. The French Canadians of Upper and Lower Canada were particularly vulnerable to American political and economic inducements, as were the thousands of former American citizens who had migrated to the Lake Ontario and Lake Erie basins of Upper Canada. In the United States, opposition to the war was largely localized in New England and New York, on whose borders the war would be fought. The leaders of the more populous New England states, Connecticut and Massachusetts, were Federalists who defiantly opposed the use of their militias in Mr. Madison’s War. Fortunately for the president, the political leadership in New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont was largely Republican. Perhaps historians have given too much credit to the Federalists, since there was considerable support for the war among the populace, as the recruiters for several of the new infantry regiments found. Still, most Americans, even the Federalists, expected the Canadas to fall quickly—if not to the unwillingness of the French-speaking and former Americans to fight, then to the advent of U.S. troops on their borders.

These estimates of the situation favoring the Americans were overly optimistic. The Canadas’ strategic situation has been compared to a gigantic tree—its roots were the North Atlantic, its trunk the St. Lawrence River, and its branches the rivers and lakes that drained into that waterway. Since the Americans could not dig up the roots by gaining control of the ocean, their objective should have been the trunk. Instead, they spent most of the war fighting for the branches, making a few ineffectual hatchet swings at the trunk that merely glanced off with little damage. Americans, who point with pride to the naval victories of Oliver Hazard Perry and Thomas Macdonough on Lakes Erie and Champlain, to the land victory at the Thames, and to the bloody fighting along the Niagara frontier that laid much of the foundation for the professional army and navy, need to understand that strategically these battles were at the periphery—the branches, as it were—of Canada. Control of the Great Lakes might save the Old Northwest from the British, but this could have been accomplished more decisively by control of the St. Lawrence somewhere between Montreal and the mouth of the Ottawa River. This achieved, the great Canadian tree would have been barked, and its branches, cut off from their sustenance, would have died.

The tree analogy was known to American commanders during the war. U.S. Navy captain Arthur Sinclair would write that "Montreal is the Root at which the Axe should have been first directed [to] cut off the communication from their resources, and the upper provinces must fall of course. But, he continued, the army has begun at the wrong ends. His commander, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, wrote, It has always been my opinion that among the best means to conquer the Canadas was . . . by taking and maintaining a Position on the St. Lawrence—this would be killing the tree by ‘girdling’—the branches deprived of their ordinary Supplies from the root, die of necessity."⁹

From the outset of the war, American officials understood the most critical strategic objective. Major General Henry Dearborn (Jefferson’s secretary of war) recommended a main attack via Lake Champlain toward Montreal, with secondary operations in the vicinity of Detroit, Niagara, and Kingston.¹⁰ Brigadier General John Armstrong expressed similar sentiments to Secretary of War Eustis in January 1812. The main action should be a regular army invasion of Canada against Montreal—a post which, commanding alike the navigation of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, if seized . . . would give . . . control over all that portion of the Canadas lying westward of itself. To reach this object, he continued, your line of operations may be taken on either side of Lake Champlain, provided you have secured the command of the lake.¹¹

Armstrong’s letter, perhaps the most cogent statement of American strategic interests written before the outbreak of hostilities, recognized several critical aspects of a campaign against the Canadas. He identified two primary American military objectives: the protection of the frontiers and the seizure of Montreal. The first would be accomplished by the creation of regional wartime volunteer battalions for local defense on the frontier along Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan, the creation of mounted frontiersmen units to strike Indian villages and British settlements, and the establishment of well-built and well-supplied frontier fortifications at such places as Detroit. Armstrong’s letter constituted one of the first recognitions of the critical importance of naval control of the lakes to the survival of Detroit. His primary objective required an attack on Canada by regular army units marching down the Lake Champlain-Richelieu River route toward what he called an "object of important. . . decisive character"—Montreal.¹²

Armstrong was not alone in these opinions. Governor William Hull of Michigan Territory wrote the secretary of war in early 1811 that the navigation of these lakes is extremely difficult. . . . I need not state to you the importance of this communication in the present state of our foreign relations; Indeed, Sir, as long as England is entitled to half of these Waters, and holds the opposite shore, it will, I presume be necessary to adopt measures to preserve the communications, and support our rights on them.¹³ Governor Hull stands out most conspicuously among the earliest advocates of gaining naval dominance on the lakes. A year later he echoed these sentiments in another letter to Secretary Eustis. There was no way the tiny garrisons at Detroit, Mackinac, and Chicago could defend themselves against a combined British-Indian attack, he wrote. Every outpost north of the Rock River in modern northwestern Illinois to the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio must fall. There is nothing, he warned, (in the event of war) [that] can prevent this state of things but an adequate force on the Detroit river, opposite to the settlements in Upper Canada. Recognizing the logistical peril of a force so far from its base of supplies, Hull queried, How is it to be supported? He answered his own question: If sir, we cannot command the Ocean, we can command the inland Lakes of our country—I have always been of the opinion that we ought to have built as many armed vessels on the Lakes as would have commanded them—we have more interest in them than the British nation, and can build vessels with more convenience.

Governor Hull saw clearly the key to success in the Great Lakes region; however, he recognized this area to be a secondary theater of operations. The primary thrust should be toward Montreal. Perhaps, he said, "it is more expedient to leave the Michigan territory to it’s [sic] fate, and direct the force to Montreal. This will prevent all communication by the St. Lawrence with Upper Canada, and it must of course surrender."¹⁴

Why, if they understood the basic strategic objectives, did the Americans fail to take Canada? There were numerous factors. First, a strategy focused on Montreal required a year to mobilize, equip, and train the necessary forces. It depended upon the British, Canadians, and Indians doing relatively little while the Americans prepared. This would not be the case. This leads to the second major factor—the determined opposition by British regulars and a core of Canadians (many of whom were Loyalists or their descendants) who acted with vigor and dispatch and who knew from the beginning where their vulnerability lay and how they might distract the Americans. Third was the determined opposition of several Great Lakes Indian tribes, for whom this conflict represented their last chance to militarily stop the onslaught of the American pioneers into their homeland. Allied with the British, the Native Americans represented an enormous threat to U.S. settlements in the states of Ohio and Kentucky and the territories of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. Finally, the relative incompetence of American military leadership resulted in a series of disasters, frustrating the achievement of the national strategic goals. From a strategic point of view, the Indian and British victories of 1812 in the Great Lakes region represented a massive diversion effort that refocused much American attention to the branches and not enough on the strategic Canadian trunk.

On the British side the situation was reversed. British North America consisted of five provinces: Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Lower Canada (modern Quebec), and Upper Canada (modern Ontario). Accurate population statistics are impossible to obtain, but some estimates can be made. On the eve of war, Newfoundland had little permanent population and consisted mostly of summertime fishermen. Nova Scotia’s population was less than 70,000, and New Brunswick’s less than 30,000. Lower Canada contained around 330,000, mostly French-speaking inhabitants, and Upper Canada’s population was approximately 90,000. More than half the region’s residents spoke French as their native language. In Upper Canada there were large numbers of residents originally born in what became the United States, some of whom were Loyalist émigrés, many others who migrated after American independence in search of economic opportunities or fewer Indian troubles. The degree of loyalty to the British Crown of these latest emigrants, which comprised a majority of the anglophone population of Upper Canada, was questionable. Among many of the minority, English-speaking Protestant residents of the Canadas, there was considerable distrust of the loyalty of their francophone, Roman Catholic neighbors.¹⁵

In September 1811, Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost became Captain-General and Governor in Chief in and over the Provinces of Upper & Lower Canada, New-Brunswick, Nova-Scotia, and the Islands of Prince Edward and Cape Breton, and their several Dependencies, Vice-Admiral of the same, Lieutenant-General and Commander of all his Majesty’s Forces in the Provinces of Lower and Upper Canada, Nova-Scotia & New-Brunswick, and in the Islands of Prince Edward, Cape Breton, Newfoundland and the Bermudas. The French-speaking son of a Swiss native who had risen to the rank of major general in the British army, Prevost had served as governor of the Caribbean islands of Saint Lucia and Dominica and had proven conciliatory toward the French population of these British imperial appendages. As lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia between 1808 and 1811, Prevost provided pragmatic executive leadership in relations with a sometimes recalcitrant legislature. A conservative by temperament and a loyal supporter of the Church of England, he could conciliate Roman Catholics and Scottish Presbyterians, and proponents of legislative supremacy and royal prerogative, in a manner that made him an effective governor-general. None of this conciliatory attitude went over well with the Protestant, anglophone minority in Lower Canada, which would do anything it could to undercut Prevost’s position with respect to imperial authorities.¹⁶

The Great Lakes Frontier

General Prevost’s immediate subordinate in Upper Canada was Major General Sir Isaac Brock. As had been the case with Prevost, Brock acceded to the lieutenant governorship of Upper Canada as part of a deliberate British policy to combine executive and military powers in one person’s hands as war with the United States threatened. In some respects, Brock’s problems with his provincial population were more serious than Prevost’s in Lower Canada. In February 1812 Brock met with his legislature at York (now Toronto) and found it impossible to secure a law requiring an oath of abjuration to any foreign power or the suspension of habeas corpus in an emergency. The American sympathizers in the legislature were a major force opposing him. Even after the declaration of war in June, Brock found the legislators, magistrates, [and] militia officers to be sluggish and indifferent to the emergency at hand. So serious was the situation that he proposed to Prevost the imposition of martial law in Upper Canada. With a somewhat ambiguous authorization to do so from Prevost, Brock immediately assumed dictatorial powers in his province.¹⁷

Brock faced enormous defeatism on the part of residents of his province. To counter this attitude, the Upper Canada commander desired to revise the mandated defensive strategy of the British high command. Prevost had been ordered not to commence offensive operations except it be for the purposes of preventing or repelling Hostilities or unavoidable Emergencies. Quite correctly, the general perceived the most strategically vulnerable points to be along the Canadian tree trunk—the St. Lawrence River. He considered Montreal the Americans’ first object of attack and developed his defensive plans accordingly. In the Montreal vicinity he directed the 49th and 100th Regiments of Foot, the 10th Royal Veterans Regiment, the Canadian Voltigeurs, and the Glengarry Light Infantry Fencibles into a defense in depth. Prevost concentrated these forces to counteract the likely American advance down the Lake Champlain-Richelieu River corridor toward Montreal. The city of Quebec, the locus of the only permanent fortress in the Canadas, was a second area of emphasis. Quebec’s defenses held twenty-three hundred regular troops, making it less vulnerable than Montreal to an American invasion. Quebec constituted the outpost of last resort for the preservation of the Canadas.¹⁸

Western theater, 1812-1813

Western theater, 1812-1813

Brock took another tack. His huge, lightly populated province was vulnerable at several points, but nowhere more obviously than the critical region between Kingston, at