The Invasion of Canada (48 page)

Albert Ammerman, another unwilling witness to the butchery, crouches on a log, guarded by his Indian captor. A private in the 1st Regiment of Kentucky Volunteers, he has been wounded in the thigh but is doing his best to conceal his injury, for he knows it is the Indians’ practice to kill all who cannot walk. Now he watches helplessly while the Indians loot the houses, strip the clothes from the wounded, tomahawk and scalp their prey, and set fire to the buildings. Some, still alive, force their heads out of the windows, half-enveloped in smoke and flames, seeking rescue. But there is no rescue.

Ammerman is marched off at last toward Brownstown with some other prisoners. After limping about half a mile, they are overtaken. One Indian has Captain Hart in custody and is engaged in a violent argument with another, apparently over the reward that Hart has offered for his safe conduct to Amherstburg. As Ammerman watches, the two take aim at each other as if to end the quarrel. But they do not fire. Instead they turn upon their prisoner, pull him from his horse, knock him down with a war-club, tomahawk him, scalp him, strip
him of his remaining clothing, money, and effects. Ammerman (who will shortly be ransomed in Detroit) notes that Hart, during these final moments, refrains from making any pleas and appears, to the end, perfectly calm. The news of his death, when it finally filters through to Lexington three months later, will cause a particular shiver of despair and fury in Kentucky. For this mangled and naked corpse, thrown like carrion onto the side of the road, was once the brother-in-law of Speaker Henry Clay.

Back at Frenchtown, little William Atherton (he is only five foot five) is trying to reach a small log building some distance from the scene of horror. He edges toward it, is a few steps from it, when a Potawatomi seizes him and asks where he is wounded. Atherton places a hand on his shoulder. The Indian feels it, finds it is not serious, determines that Atherton shall be his prize, perhaps for later ransom. He wraps his new possession in a blanket, gives him a hat, takes him to the back door of one of the houses, and puts the wounded Kentuckian in charge of all his plunder.

Atherton is flabbergasted. For almost an hour he has expected certain death. Now he lives in the faint hope that his life may be spared. He experiences “one of those sudden transitions of mind impossible to be either conceived or expressed, except by those whose unhappy lot it has been, to be placed in like circumstances.”

As the house blazes behind him, Atherton watches his fellow prisoners being dragged away to Brownstown. For the first time, perhaps, he has been made aware of the value a man places on his own life. He sees members of his own company, old acquaintances, so badly wounded they can scarcely be moved in their beds, suddenly leap up, hearing that the Indians will tomahawk all who cannot depart on foot. They hobble past him on sticks but, being unable to keep up, are soon butchered.

After two hours, Atherton’s captor returns with an army pack horse and a great deal of plunder. The Potawatomi hands his prisoner the bridle, and the two set off on the road to Brownstown, bordered now by a ghastly hedgerow of mutilated corpses.

They halt for the night at Sandy Creek, where a number of Potawatomi are encamped. Here, around a roaring fire of fence rails, the Indians feed their captives gruel. And here another grisly scene takes place. An Indian walks up to Private Charles Searls and proposes to exchange his moccasins for the soldier’s shoes. The exchange effected, a brief conversation follows, the Indian asking how many
men Harrison has with him. The name of the Hero of Tippecanoe seems to drive him into a sudden rage. His anger rising, he calls Searls a “Madison,” raises his tomahawk, strikes him a deep blow on the shoulder.

Searls, bleeding profusely, clutches the weapon embedded in his flesh and tries to resist, whereupon a surgeon’s mate, Gustavus Bower, tells him his fate is inevitable. Searls closes his eyes, the blow falls again, and Bower is drenched with brains and blood. Not long after, three more men are indiscriminately dispatched.

When Atherton asks his captor if the Indians intend to kill all the prisoners, the Indian nods. Atherton tries to eat, has no stomach for it, even though he has had little nourishment for three days. Then he realizes his captor does not understand English and hope returns.

The march resumes with many alarms. Atherton is in daily fear of his life, sleeping with a kerchief tied around his head in the belief that the Indians will want to steal it before tomahawking him in his sleep, thus giving him some warning. But they do not kill him. His captor, whose brother has been killed at the River Raisin, has other plans. It is the custom of the Potawatomi, among others, to adopt healthy captives into the families of those who have lost sons in the same engagement. It is some time before Atherton realizes that his enemies do not intend to kill or ransom him. On the contrary, they are determined to turn him into an Indian. For the rest of his life, if they have their way, he will live as a savage in the forest.

From Frenchtown, Dr. John Todd, surgeon for the 5th Regiment of Kentucky Volunteers who has been left in charge of the wounded, is conveyed to the British camp where he again encounters Captain William Elliott. The two met the previous evening when Todd was a witness to the discussions between Elliott and Hart. Now Todd urges Elliott to send his sleigh back to the Raisin where some of the badly wounded, including his friend Hart, may yet be saved. But Elliott, who has lived all his life with the Indians and is half Shawnee, knows it is too late and says so. When Todd presses the case, Elliott remarks that charity begins at home, that the British and Canadian wounded must be cared for first, that when sleighs are available they will be sent to Frenchtown. He adds, in some exasperation, that it is impossible to restrain the Indians and tries to explain that they are simply seeking revenge for their own losses. Tippecanoe is only fourteen months in the past, Mississinewa less than two.

Along the frozen shores of the River Raisin a great stillness has
fallen. The cold is numbing; nothing moves. Those few settlers who still remain in Frenchtown do not venture outside their doors.

In the little orchard across the river, along the narrow lane that leads from the Navarre home and beside the Detroit River road, the bodies of the Americans lie, unshriven and unburied. The Potawatomi have made it known that any white man who dares to touch the remains of any of the hated Harrison men will meet a similar fate.

The naked corpses lie strewn for miles along the roadside in the grotesque attitudes of men who, in a sudden flash, realize their last moment has come. In death they bear a gruesome similarity, for each skull is disfigured by a frozen smear of fleshy pulp where the scalp has been.

Here, contorted in death, lies the flower of Kentucky: Captain Hart and Captain Hickman; Lieutenant-Colonel John Allen; Captain John Woolfolk, Winchester’s aide-de-camp, who offered one thousand dollars to anyone who would purchase him but was tomahawked in spite of it; Captain John Simpson, Henry Clay’s fellow congressman and supporter; Ensign Levi Wells, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Wells of the 4th Infantry; Allen Darnell, whose brother looks helplessly on as he is shot and scalped because he cannot keep up with the others; and Ebenezer Blythe, a surgeon’s mate, tomahawked in the act of offering ransom. And here, like a discarded doll, is the cadaver of young Captain Price of the Jessamine Blues whose last letter home gave instructions for the upbringing of his two-year-old son.

A few days after the battle, the French inhabitants, emerging at last from their homes, are treated to a ghastly spectacle. Trotting along the roadway come droves of hogs that have been feeding off the corpses and are now carrying off the remains – whole arms and legs, skulls, bits of torso and entrails clamped between their greedy jaws. The hogs, too, are victims of the war, for they seem now to be as demented as the men who fight it, “rendered mad,” according to one opinion, “by so profuse a diet of Christian flesh.”

The war, which began so gently, has turned ugly, as all wars must. The mannerly days are over. New emotions – hatred, fury, a thirst for revenge, a nagging sense of guilt – distort the tempers of the neighbours who live on both sides of the embattled border. And it is not over. Peace is still two years away. The blood has only begun to flow.

W
ITH THE BATTLE OF FRENCHTOWN, the campaign of 1812 ended. It was too cold to fight. The war was postponed until spring, when it would become a new war with new leaders and new followers. The six-month volunteers from Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states went back to their farms, refusing to enlist for another term of service. Harrison withdrew up the Maumee to start work on a new outpost, Fort Meigs. Along the Niagara River the American regulars moved back ten miles while others went into winter quarters at Sackets Harbor, Burlington, and Greenville. The only American fighting men in Canada were the prisoners of war at Quebec.

It was as if both Canada and the United States were starting from scratch. America had a new secretary of war, John Armstrong. Most of the old commanders – Brock, Hull, Van Rensselaer, Smyth, Winchester – were gone. Dearborn’s days were numbered as were Sheaffe’s. Only two major leaders remained from the early days of 1812, Tecumseh and Harrison, old adversaries fated to meet face to face at the Thames in the autumn of 1813.

Now Canada had time to breathe. With Napoleon’s army fleeing Russia, some of the pressure was off Great Britain. A detachment of reinforcements was dispatched to Bermuda, there to wait until the ice cleared in the St. Lawrence. The United States, too, had time to rethink its strategy – or lack of it – and to plan more carefully for the future.

It was not the war that the Americans, inspired and goaded by the eloquence of Henry Clay and his colleagues, had set out to fight and certainly not the glamorous adventure that Harrison’s volunteers expected. The post-Revolutionary euphoria, which envisaged the citizen soldiers of a democratic nation marching off to sure victory over a handful of robot-like mercenaries and enslaved farmers, had dissipated. America had learned the lessons that most nations relearn at the start of every war – that valour is ephemeral, that the heroes of one war are the scapegoats of the next, that command is for the young, the vigorous, the imaginative, the professional. Nor does enthusiasm and patriotism alone win battles: untrained volunteers, no matter how fervent, cannot stand up to seasoned regulars, drilled to stand fast in moments of panic and to follow orders without question. It was time for the United States to drop its amateur standing now that it intended to do what its founding fathers had not prepared for – aggressive warfare.

It was clear that possession of the water held the key to victory. Britain, by seizing Michilimackinac and Detroit, both commanding narrow channels, effectively controlled all easy transit to the northwest and thus to the fur trade. Two other strong points, Kingston and Montreal, commanded the entrance to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence lifeline to the sea. And so, as winter gave way to spring, the ring of hammers on the Lakes announced a different kind of contest as both sides engaged in a shipbuilding race.

Immediately after Hull’s defeat, Madison and Eustis had awoken to the fact that the disgraced commander’s original proposals had been right. And so to Sackets Harbor that winter – the only available harbour at the eastern end of Lake Ontario – a new commander, Captain Isaac Chauncey, quickly dubbed a commodore, was dispatched with 700 seamen and marines and 140 ships’ carpenters to help construct two fighting ships, each of thirty-two guns. Jesse Elliott, hero of the previous summer’s attack, had added the captured
Caledonia
to the vessels he was already building. Brock had rightly seen that event as a serious and significant loss. At Erie, Pennsylvania, two twenty-gun brigs and several gunboats were also under construction. With Elliott’s warships these formed the backbone of the fleet with which Oliver Hazard Perry would in the summer of 1813 seize control of the lake from the British, thus opening up Amherstburg and the valley of the Thames to American attack.

The British were also building ships – one big vessel at the protected harbour of Kingston, another at York, wide open to attack, a split decision that proved costly when Chauncey’s fleet appeared off the capital in April. At Amherstburg a smaller vessel was under construction. But the British suffered from a lack of supplies, of mechanics, and, most important, of trained seamen. Already, following some skirmishing outside Kingston Harbour in November, control of Lake Ontario was in doubt. Was it possible that the upstart Americans could outsail, outmanoeuvre, and outfight the greatest maritime power in the world? On the Atlantic, in single engagements – the
United States
versus the
Macedonian
in October, the
Constitution
versus the Java in December – the Americans were the winners. After a season of reverses on land, these victories, though not significant in military terms, gave the country hope.