Tecumseh and Brock (34 page)

Key began scribbling his feelings and reflections on the back of a letter he had in his pocket.
57
The resulting work, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was adopted as the U.S. national anthem in 1931.

The divisive war was being transformed into a patriotic crusade. The battles of Lake Champlain and New Orleans would put the finishing touches to this heroic recasting of the conflict.

Chapter 18

American Victories at Lake Champlain and New Orleans

T
HE CALAMITOUS REPORT
that Washington had been occupied and devastated by the British came as a heavy blow to the American commissioners in Ghent and had the sobering effect of removing some of the more fanciful ambitions from the American agenda. Even Henry Clay, the War Hawk westerner whose goal was the conquest of Canada, expressed fears about what might lie ahead. In a letter he wrote in October 1814, he confessed, “I tremble indeed whenever I take up a late newspaper. Hope alone sustains me.”
1

By the summer and autumn of 1814, earlier hopes of acquiring Canada had faded. Gone was the sentiment expressed by Monroe to U.S. negotiators in June 1813 that “it may be worthwhile to bring to view the advantages to both Countries [Britain and the United States] which is promised, by a transfer of the upper parts and even the whole of Canada to the United States . . . The possession of it [Canada] by England, must hereafter prove a fruitful source of controversy which its transfer to the United States would remove . . . That these provinces will be severed from Great Britain at no distant day, by their own career, may fairly be presumed, even against her strongest efforts to retain them.”
2

President Madison's message to Congress in September 1814 presented an administration that hoped for peace. He noted with foreboding that the outcome of the war in Europe had removed “any check on the overbearing power of Great Britain on the ocean; and it has left in her hands disposable armaments with which, forgetting the difficulties of a remote war with a free people, and yielding to the intoxication of success . . . she cherishes hopes of still further aggrandizing a power already formidable in its abuses to the tranquility of the civilized and commercial world.” The president went on to say that in the present campaign against the United States “enemy, with all his augmented means, and wanton use of them, has little ground for exultation.” He referred to “a series of achievements which have given new luster to the American arms.” It was a statement that balanced the prospect of peace with the willingness to fight on if necessary.
3

The British took a tough line on territorial issues. They were intent on achieving the demilitarization of the Great Lakes and navigation rights on the Mississippi in return for American access to the fishery on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. This was needed, the British insisted, so that the Americans would give up their determination to conquer Canada.

The Americans baldly replied that the annexation of Canada had never been the goal of the United States. The British scoffed, pointing to General William Hull's proclamation to the people of Upper Canada in the summer of 1812 that he was invading their province to protect them. The American rejoinder at Ghent was that Hull's bombastic proclamation had not been sanctioned by Washington. To claim that the acquisition of Canada was not a war aim of the United States was clearly disingenuous, given the letters sent by Secretary of State James Monroe to the American negotiators in 1813 and 1814, which repeatedly raised the prospect of the United States' gaining some or all of the Canadian territory at the conclusion of the conflict. In a letter to his government's negotiators in January 1814, Monroe referred to his letter of the previous June “in favour of a cession of the Canadas to the United States,” which he said had “gained much additional force from further reflection.” He went on to assert that “the inevitable consequence of another war, and even of the present, if persevered in by the British Government, must be to sever those provinces by force from Great Britain. Their inhabitants themselves will soon feel their strength, and assert their independence. All these evils had therefore
better be anticipated, and provided for, by timely arrangement between
the two Governments, in the mode proposed.”
4

By the time serious negotiations got underway in the late summer of 1814, the conquest of Canada was falling off the list of achievements on which the Americans were intent. The same happened to their demand that the British stop the practice of impressment. Given the Americans' heated feelings on the issue, backing off on impressment was a major development. When President Madison met with his cabinet on June 27, 1814, he polled its members on whether they could contemplate a treaty that was silent on impressment. All responded in the affirmative. In a letter of instruction to his commissioners in Ghent, the president wrote, “You may omit any stipulation on the subject of impressment, if found indispensably necessary to terminate it. You will, of course, not recur to this expedient until all your efforts to adjust the controversy in a more satisfactory manner have failed.”
5

The British, meanwhile, opened with an apparently strong position on the creation of a native state. From England, Foreign Minister Castlereagh was constantly updating his commissioners in Ghent with fresh instructions. Through them, he advanced the initial propositions the British negotiators placed before the American team in mid-August 1814. As reported to Washington by the U.S. negotiators, the British maintained that their country sought no increase in territory on its own behalf. They did, however, insist that “the Indian allies of Great Britain” must be “included in the pacification and a definite boundary to be settled for their territory.”

“The British Commissioners stated,” the U.S. negotiators reported,
“that an arrangement upon this point was a sine qua non: that they were not authorized to conclude a Treaty of peace which did not embrace the Indians . . . and that the establishment of a definite boundary of the Indian Territory was necessary, to secure a permanent peace, not only with the Indians but also between the United States and Great Britain.”
6

With this proposal, the British were putting Tecumseh's vision of a native state on the table. It would be established between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, in a territory to be agreed on by the U.S. and Britain. It would encompass much of the region the Americans called the Old Northwest. In a memorandum addressed to the British commissioners, Canadian fur traders brashly suggested that the native state's boundary should be drawn south from Erie, Pennsylvania, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, south to Pittsburgh, and from there westward along the Ohio River.

For Henry Clay, who was committed to the cause of the settlers, the Canadian proposal was anathema, the negation of everything he had hoped for from the start of the war. The Canadian plan would have handed over the territory of Ohio, which was admitted as the seventeenth U.S. state in 1803. Even the less ambitious idea of creating a native state farther west along the Wabash River, which would cut through the present-day state of Indiana and along the boundary of Illinois, horrified Clay.

Over time, Clay had softened his position on the conquest of Canada. By the end of 1812, the discouraging course of the war had caused him to rethink. In a letter he wrote at the end of the first year of the war, he opined that “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.”
7
But he refused to surrender settler territory west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Native peoples.

In the end, just as the Americans gave up on their insistence that the British put an end to the practice of impressment, the British abandoned the idea of a native state.

The same week that the British unleashed their attacks around Baltimore and their salvos on Fort McHenry, they launched a second assault on the United States from the north. With peace talks underway in Ghent, the British were determined to drive as hard a bargain as possible with the U.S. Facts on the ground were crucial to their negotiations. Eliminating American power on Lake Champlain would powerfully assist the British negotiators.

The thrust southward came a few days after the successful and nearly bloodless occupation of eastern Maine by the British, which began in July 1814 with the seizure of Eastport, the easternmost point in Maine. (Maine remained a part of Massachusetts until it was established as a separate state in 1820.) Because Major General Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, who had served as lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia since 1811, had only twenty-five hundred soldiers available to him, the plan was to advance into Maine from the New Brunswick border only as far as the Penobscot River. This would place a substantial portion of the Maine coast in the hands of the British without taking them farther southwest into the more populous regions of Maine, which would be harder to secure with such a small occupying force.

Sherbrooke's attack went smoothly, with the Americans blowing up their installations as the enemy approached. From the coast, the British proceeded upriver and took the towns of Hampden and Bangor. Farther along the coast they occupied Machias. During the two-week operation, with only one of their soldiers killed and eight wounded, the British took 161 kilometres of coastal Maine and the adjacent backcountry, territory they held until the end of the war. Following the occupation, the male inhabitants of the region took an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.

The British hoped that by occupying territory in Maine, they would draw more of the commerce of New England, where enthusiasm for the war was tepid at best, into their sphere. They established a customs post at Castine and appointed a military governor to administer the occupied region. Under this regime, Swedish and Spanish commercial vessels carried large shipments of British goods to Hampden, next door to Bangor. From there, they were distributed across New England. The arrangements fostered robust trade between New England and Nova Scotia.
††††
8

By 1814, the British blockade was so effective that many New England communities suffered severe economic hardship and even sought ways to reach their own arrangements to end the war against Britain. For instance, the inhabitants of Nantucket Island met on July 23, 1814, to draft a petition to Admiral Cochrane to allow them to import food and fuel from the mainland during the following winter, pleading that without such an arrangement they could face starvation. In their petition, they stated that they had been “universally opposed” to the war.
9

Having won eastern Maine, the British turned their attention to Lake Champlain. An expedition commanded by General Prevost set out to seize control of the area south of Montreal, just across the U.S. border.

On July 29, the eve of the offensive, substantial British reinforcements landed in Quebec: the 4th Royal Scots; the 97th Regiment, from Ireland; and a brigade drawn from British units that had been serving in Spain and had been dispatched from Bordeaux. The following week, a brigade drawn from the 3rd (East Kent), 5th (Northumberland), 57th (West Middlesex), and 81st Regiments, along with a brigade of artillery, arrived in Montreal, but these reinforcements were not earmarked for the descent on Lake Champlain — they were to form an army reserve, supplying manpower in Kingston and providing troops in the event of an attack on Sackets Harbor.

For his offensive, Prevost could muster about 10,300 regular soldiers and militiamen. In all, he had three brigades. Major General Sir Frederick Robinson commanded the first brigade, made up of the
3rd, 27th, and 39th (Dorsetshire), 76th, and 88th (Connaught Rangers)
Regiments. At the head of the second was Major General Thomas Brisbane, whose units — the 2nd, 8th, 13th, 49th, and De Meuron Regiments and the Canadian Voltigeurs — were based in Lower Canada. Major General Manley Power led the third brigade, with soldiers from the 3rd, 5th, 1st, 27th, and 58th Regiments. A Royal Artillery brigade outfitted with five 6-pounders and one 5 1/2-inch howitzer accompanied each brigade. While the paper strength of these units totalled more than ten thousand men, the real number available for the attack was much lower after those who were sick or otherwise unavailable to their units were taken into account.
10

It has not been uncommon for American historians to portray Prevost's force as larger than it actually was and comprising more veterans than it did. Moreover, such historians argue that the objective of his offensive extended well beyond Lake Champlain to Albany or even as far as New York City. In his book
Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence
, for instance, A. J. Langguth asserts that “commanding thirty thousand veteran troops in Montreal . . . Prevost took one third of his army over the border at the town of Champlain” and was “headed toward Albany.”
11

On September 1, the British forces crossed the border, pushing down the west shore of Lake Champlain in the direction of Plattsburgh. They moved slowly along extremely poor roads.

Key to the ensuing battle was the struggle between British and American naval squadrons on the lake. Ever cautious, Prevost regarded coordination with the British naval squadron on the lake as crucial to his success, just as he had previously focused heavily on supremacy on Lakes Ontario and Erie. The British and the Americans both had naval squadrons on Lake Champlain, where they had been conducting a race to outbuild each other.

In command of the British squadron was Captain George Downie. A new frigate, the
Confiance,
had been completed just in time for the British invasion. Although the vessel was launched on
August 25, it still required cannon locks (firing devices operating on
the same principle as the flintlock on a musket) to enable the guns to fire. On September 1, Downie wrote to request cannon locks from the ordnance storekeeper at Quebec. He stressed the need for a rapid response to complete the war-worthiness of the
Confiance
: “In a few days, she will be before the Enemy, and the want of locks may be seriously injurious in the Action.”
12
In addition to the
Confiance
, the British naval squadron consisted of a brig, two sloops, and between twelve and fourteen gunboats.