Tecumseh and Brock (19 page)

Chapter 10

The Capture of Fort Detroit

O
N AUGUST 15,
BROCK'S MEN
and Tecumseh's warriors marched to Sandwich, establishing British headquarters in the house Hull had recently vacated. Brock had about seven hundred British regulars at his disposal, and Tecumseh's native force was about the same size.

The fort across the river was a formidable defensive stronghold. Built in the shape of a parallelogram, Fort Detroit was well constructed and heavily buttressed. Its rampart was twenty-two feet in height and had openings for cannon. A twelve-foot-wide and eight-foot-deep moat surrounded the fort. Hardwood stakes, ten feet in length and sharpened at the tips, encircled the area, placed at a forty-five-degree angle.
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Brock dispatched two officers under a flag of truce to deliver a message to General Hull, demanding that he surrender. “The force at my disposal authorizes me to require of you the immediate surrender of Fort Detroit,” Brock wrote. Brock's letter played on Hull's fears of native warriors: “It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination [the word Hull had earlier used in his message to Canadians], 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.”
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Despite his anxieties, which were heightened by the presence of his own family and numerous civilians inside the walls of the fort, Hull showed no sign of timidity in his staunch answer: “I have no other reply to make, than to inform you that I am prepared to meet any force, which may be at your disposal, and any consequences which may result from any exertion of it you may think proper to make.”
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While Brock and Tecumseh readied their men for the crossing to the American side of the river and the assault on the fort, the major general ordered his gunners to open fire with their cannon from Sandwich. Hull's gunners returned fire with salvos from his fort's 24-pounder guns. On the first day, the exchange of cannon fire inflicted little damage on either side. But the next morning a cannonball fired from Sandwich struck the fort's mess hall and killed two men. One of the dead was a doctor from the Ohio volunteers. The other was Lieutenant Porter Hanks, the U.S. officer who had recently surrendered Fort Michilimackinac.

During the War of 1812 the rules of engagement dictated that both sides exchange captured soldiers to avoid having to feed and guard them. Those released swore an oath that they would not resume fighting until an enemy soldier of equivalent rank had also been released. Once the exchange was made, the soldiers could again take up arms. The unfortunate Hanks had been released by the British under such an arrangement and had been sent to Fort Detroit.
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On the morning of the bombardment, a young mother in Detroit wrote down her reaction to the roar of the guns: “Hour after hour how I passed thus alone, listening to the booming cannon and the startling and shrieking as a ball whizzed by the house, sometimes feeling almost sure that it was a mark for the enemy and thinking perhaps the next shot should terminate my existence.”
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While early-nineteenth-century artillery pieces were unwieldy in the field, larger guns could be used to both defend fortifications and to assault them. In the War of 1812, these included large-bore guns mounted on carriages of the kind used at sea.

Another artillery piece deployed in the war was the howitzer. Invented in Sweden in the late seventeenth century, the howitzer had a short barrel that allowed it to fire at a sharp angle. By the middle of the eighteenth century, light and mobile howitzers were often deployed in the field by European armies; in the War of 1812, they were mounted on wooden field carriages in the manner of guns (cannon). With this weapon, adroit gunners honed the art of lobbing a metal shell, filled with powder and equipped with a wooden fuse, into an enemy fort. Ideally, it would explode above the heads of the defenders, showering them with deadly splinters. A howitzer could also be armed with an incendiary shell to set enemy fortifications alight or, better yet, strike enemy powder magazines and set off a giant explosion. Howitzers of the time could not be aimed with any precision, but they could cause real damage. When the defenders of a fort were running low on supplies, their morale was wavering, and their commanders were shaky, a howitzer was an effective psychological weapon.

A third type of artillery deployed during the conflict was the mortar. Normally held in place on a wooden bed at a forty-five-degree angle, the mortar was outfitted with a double chamber. The projectile was loaded into the larger chamber, and the smaller chamber, housed at the rear, was filled with gunpowder. Mortars fired what were called “bombs.” On the outside, a bomb looked like a solid cannonball, but its hollow interior was filled with gunpowder. Just before firing the weapon, a gunner would place a wooden fuse in a hole in the bomb. The fuse would be cut to the desired length to time the distance it would fly before it exploded. When the fuse was lit, it burnt down to the bomb, setting it off. Well timed, the bomb would fly over the wall of a fort, exploding to strike personnel or powder magazines. Because of the fixed emplacement of the mortar, which could not easily be adjusted, the amount of gunpowder used in the charge was varied to achieve the desired range.

Henry Shrapnel, a British army officer and inventor, added to the arsenal available to the British during the War of 1812. He invented the “spherical case,” a hollow cannonball that was filled with shot and burst in midair. Adopted by the British army in 1803 as an anti-personnel device, the weapon came at once to be called the “shrapnel shell,” after its inventor.

In addition, there was the rocket, which was invented by Sir William Congreve in 1804. The rocket was housed in an iron case containing the black powder that was used to propel it. Attached to this was a warhead. Launched from an upright wooden guide pole, the rocket had a maximum range of about 3.2 kilometres; the distance was adjusted by setting the angle of the launching frame. The rockets were notoriously inaccurate, but they were an effective psychological tool that the British deployed both at sea and on land.

The night before the British guns took the lives of two men at Fort Detroit, Tecumseh and about six hundred warriors paddled quietly across the Detroit River and landed undetected three kilometres south of the fort. The following morning, a sunny and pleasant August 16,
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Brock's force, made up of three hundred British regulars and four hundred Canadian militia, was divided into three groups for the crossing. With the guns at Sandwich providing cover, the British and the Canadians crossed the river. The general stood at the prow of the lead boat. As soon as the landing was complete, Brock positioned himself at the head of the column. As was his practice, he led from the front, attired in his scarlet uniform. A British quartermaster who had crossed the river with Brock urged him to make himself less of a target for the Americans. “If we lose you, we lose all,” he said to the general, pleading with Brock to let the troops be led by their own officers.

“Many here follow me from a feeling of personal regard,” replied Brock. He thanked the quartermaster for his concern but said, “I will never ask them [his soldiers] to go where I do not lead them.”
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Shortly after the landing, a scout brought the alarming news to Brock that several hundred American soldiers were behind him, only a few miles distant. These were the men from Ohio whom Hull had dispatched to the River Raisin in a quest for supplies but then called back to help defend Fort Detroit. Brock was between the fort and the Ohio men. Caught in such a vise, a less intrepid commander would have withdrawn his force back to the Canadian side of the river.

Brock did no such thing. He pressed ahead, calculating that he had little time to lose. In two columns, the British and the Canadians marched to within a mile of the fort. Playing on the American general's anxiety, Brock had had his Canadian militia men decked out in the discarded uniforms of British regulars. In addition, Tecumseh's men crossed in front of the fort several times, sneaking back under cover each time, to convince Hull that he faced a much greater presence of native warriors than was actually the case.

Brock halted his troops and Tecumseh joined him. The two men climbed a small hill to scout their position. What they saw was certainly unexpected. The gates of the American fort suddenly swung open and a rider galloped in their direction. From the stick he carried, there fluttered a white handkerchief. What Brock and Tecumseh did not know was that the man waving the symbol of surrender was Hull's own son, Abraham. The general had reached the conclusion that he was not able to sustain an effective defence of the fort. On his mind, in addition to his fear of the native warriors, was the protection of the civilian population of the nearby town of Detroit. General Hull had ordered his son to instruct a major to display the white flag outside the fort. But the major refused, saying that he would be damned if he would disgrace his country. So Abraham Hull hoisted the symbol of capitulation and rode out with it himself.

General Brock, who had been girding for a difficult siege, sent an officer ahead to inquire about the meaning of the white flag. The officer returned to give Brock the stunning news that General Hull was surrendering the fort forthwith. Along with his offer to surrender, the general sought two things from Brock. First, he wanted three days to ready the fort and his men for evacuation; Brock replied that he could have three hours. Hull's second request, that the Canadians who had abandoned the British forces to join the American side should be treated leniently, was refused outright.

When Brock rode through the open gates of Fort Detroit, he encountered U.S. officers and soldiers in tears, so bitter was their feeling of humiliation. General Hull was in a shabby state. For hours he sat transfixed, as though in a daze, with spittle and tobacco juice dribbling down his chin.

In a lengthy letter to U.S. Secretary of War William Eustis, written while in captivity at Fort George a few days after the surrender, General Hull set out the reasons for his decision to hoist the white flag. His case rested heavily on his claim that after the surrender of Michilimackinac “almost every tribe and nation of Indians, excepting a part of the Miamies and Delawares, north from beyond Lake Superior, west from beyond the Mississippi, south from the Ohio and Wabash, and east from every part of Upper Canada, and from all the intermediate country, joined in open hostility, under the British standard, against the army I commanded, contrary to the most solemn assurances of a large portion of them to remain neutral.”

At the head of the list of chiefs who led the warriors against the Americans was Tecumseh. Hull informed the secretary of war that native warriors were able to totally “obstruct the only communication I had with my country.” He related the sorry fate of the forces he had sent out to reopen communications, and then argued that he did not have enough men at his disposal both to “fight the enemy in the field” and to leave “any adequate force in the fort.” Outnumbered by the British troops and warriors opposing him, he chose capitulation. “A large portion of the brave and gallant officers and men I commanded,” he wrote, “would cheerfully have contested until the last cartridge had been expended . . . I could not consent to the useless sacrifice of such brave men, when I knew it was impossible for me to sustain my situation.”
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Within an hour of the surrender, the Ohio troops who had been dispatched to the River Raisin arrived outside the fort. They were shocked to discover the victorious British occupying the American installation. Most of the troops surrendered peacefully, laying down their weapons. A few, however, broke their swords, disabled their muskets, and uttered epithets concerning General Hull. The disgusted commander of the Ohio troops said that if Hull had fought, his men could have fallen on the British from the rear.

The U.S. soldiers marched out of the fort as the American flag was lowered. A British sailor pulled a Union Jack out from under his coat, and it was raised to loud cheers.

General Brock sent the news of his brilliant success to General Prevost, dating his report “Detroit, August 16, 1812.”

“I hasten to apprize Your Excellency of the capture of this very important post: 2,500 troops have this day surrendered prisoners of war, and about 25 pieces of ordnance have been taken without the sacrifice of a drop of British blood,” Brock wrote. “I had not more than 700 troops, including militia, and about 600 Indians to accomplish this service. When I detail my good fortune, your excellency will be astonished.”
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Americans saw the capitulation at Detroit as an act of ignominy. Other American soldiers who had been involved in the engagement furiously and vociferously countered Hull's case for the need to surrender the fort. Lewis Cass, colonel of the third regiment of Ohio volunteers, wrote a lengthy letter to Eustis setting out the way Hull had acted to produce “so foul a stain upon the national character.” He argued that the United States had available at Fort Detroit sufficient forces, weapons, and ammunition to make a successful stand, and that Hull had vastly exaggerated the size of the enemy he faced. “I was informed by General Hull the morning after the capitulation, that the British forces consisted of 1,800 regulars, and that he surrendered to prevent the effusion of human blood. That he magnified their regular force nearly five fold, there can be no doubt . . . Confident I am, that had the courage and conduct of the general been equal to the spirit and zeal of the troops, the event would have been as brilliant and successful as it now is disastrous and dishonourable.”
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