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The War of 1812 from
the U.S. army's point of view
Editor's note: The following article, extracted from An American Military
History: Army Historical Series, published by the Office of the Chief of
Military History, United States Army, provides an interesting overview of the
War of 1812 from an American perspective.
To Great Britain the War of I8I2 was simply a burdensome adjunct of its
greater struggle against Napoleonic France. To the Canadians it was
clearly a case of naked American aggression. But to the Americans it was
neither simple nor clear. The United States entered the war with
confused objectives and divided loyalties and made peace without
settling any of the issues that had induced the nation to go to war.
Origins of the War
The immediate origins of the war were seizure of American ships, insults
and injuries to American seamen by the British Navy, and rapid
expansion of the American frontier. The British outrages at sea took two
distinct forms. One was the seizure and forced sale of merchant ships
and their cargoes for allegedly violating the British blockade of Europe.
Although France had declared a counterblockade of the British Isles and
had seized American ships, England was the chief offender because its
Navy had greater command of the seas. The second, more insulting,
type of outrage was the capture of men from American vessels for forced
service in the Royal Navy. The pretext for impressment was the search
for deserters, who, the British claimed, had taken employment on
American vessels.
The reaction in the United States to impressment differed from that
aroused by the seizure of ships and cargoes. In the latter case the
maritime interests of the eastern seaboard protested vigorously and
demanded naval protection, but rather than risk having their highly
profitable trade cut off by war with England they were willing to take an
occasional loss of cargo. Impressment, on the other hand, presented no
such financial hardship to the shipowners, whatever the consequences
for the unfortunate seamen, and the maritime interests tended to
minimize it.
To the country at large the seizure of American seamen was much more
serious than the loss of a few hogsheads of flour or molasses. When a
British naval vessel in June 1807 attacked and disabled the USS
Chesapeake and impressed several members of the crew, a general
wave of indignation rose in which even the maritime interests joined.
This was an insult to the flag, and had Jefferson chosen to go to war
with England he would have had considerable support. Instead he
decided to clamp an embargo on American trade. In New England scores
of prosperous shipowners were ruined, and a number of thriving little
seaports suffered an economic depression from which few recovered.
While the rest of the country remembered the Chesapeake affair and
stored up resentment against Britain, maritime New England directed its
anger at Jefferson and his party.
The seat of anti-British fever was in the Northwest and the lower Ohio
Valley, where the land-hungry frontiersmen had no doubt that their
troubles with the Indians were the result of British intrigue. Stories were
circulated after every Indian raid of British Army muskets and equipment
being found on the field. By 1812 the westerners were convinced that
their problems could best be solved by forcing the British out of Canada.
While the western "war hawks" urged war in the hope of conquering
Canada, the people of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory
entertained similar designs against Florida, a Spanish possession. The
fact that Spain and England were allies against Napoleon presented the
southern war hawks with an excuse for invading Florida. By this time,
also, the balance of political power had shifted south and westward;
ambitious party leaders had no choice but to align themselves with the
war hawks, and 1812 was a Presidential election year.
President Madison's use of economic pressure to force England to repeal
its blockade almost succeeded. The revival of the Non-Intercourse Act
against Britain, prohibiting all trade with England and its colonies,
coincided with a poor grain harvest in England and with a growing need
of American provisions to supply the British troops fighting the French in
Spain. As a result, on June 16, 1812, the British Foreign Minister
announced that the blockade would be relaxed on American shipping.
Had there been an Atlantic cable, war might have been averted.
President Madison had sent a message to Congress on June 1 listing all
the complaints against England and asking for a declaration of war.
Dividing along sectional lines the House had voted for war on June 4, but
the Senate approved only on June 18 and then by only six votes.
The Opposing Forces
At the outbreak of the war the United States had a total population of
about 7,700,000 people. A series of border forts garrisoned by very
small Regular Army detachments stretched along the Canadian
boundary: Fort Michilimackinac, on the straits between Lake Michigan
and Lake Huron; Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago; Fort
Detroit; and Fort Niagara, at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake
Ontario. (Map 15) The actual strength of the Regular Army in June 1812
totaled approximately 11,744 officers and men, including an estimated
5,000 recruits enlisted for the additional force authorized the preceding
January, in contrast to an authorized strength of 35,600. The Navy
consisted of 20 vessels: the 3 large 44-gun frigates, 3 smaller frigates of
the Constellation class rated at 38 guns, and 14 others.
Congress did not lack the will to prepare for war. In March 1812 it had
tried to place the Army's supply system on a more adequate footing by
establishing a Quartermaster Department on the military staff in place of
the inefficient and costly military agent system. At the same time
Congress created the Office of the Commissary General of Purchases in
the War Department, and for the first time since the Revolution the
Army's supply system was placed under the exclusive control of the
Secretary of War. In May Congress had made provision for an Ordnance
Department, responsible for the inspection and testing of all ordnance,
cannon balls, shells, and shot, the construction of gun carriages and
ammunition wagons, and the preparation and inspection of the "public
powder." It enlarged the Corps of Engineers by adding a company of
bombardiers, sappers, and miners, and expanded and reorganized the
Military Academy at West Point. In addition to increasing the Regular
Army, Congress had authorized the President to accept volunteer forces
and to call upon the states for militia. The difficulty was not planning for
an army, but raising one.
One of the world's major powers was ranged against the United States,
but on the basis of available resources the two belligerents were rather
evenly matched. Most of Britain's forces were tied up in the war against
Napoleon, and for the time being very little military and naval assistance
could be spared for the defense of Canada. At the outbreak of the war,
there were approximately 7,000 British and Canadian Regulars in Upper
and Lower Canada (now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec). With a
total white population of only about half a million, Canada itself had only
a small reservoir of militia to draw upon. When the war began, Maj. Gen.
Isaac Brock, the military commander and civil governor of Upper Canada,
had 800 militiamen available in addition to his approximately 1,600
Regulars. In the course of the war, the two provinces put a total of
about 10,000 militia in the field, whereas in the United States probably
4so,ooo of the militia saw active service, although not more than half of
them ever got near the front. The support of Indian tribes gave Canada
one source of manpower that the United States lacked. After the Battle
of Tippecanoe, Tecumseh had led his warriors across the border into
Canada, where, along with the Canadian Indians, they joined the forces
opposing the Americans. Perhaps 3,500 Indians were serving in the
Canadian forces during the Thames River campaign in the fall of 1813,
probably the largest number that took the field at any one time during
the war.
The bulk of the British Navy was also fighting in the war against
Napoleon. In September I8I2, three months after the outbreak of war
with the United States, Britain had no more than eleven ships of the line,
thirty-four frigates, and about an equal number of smaller naval vessels
in the western Atlantic. These were all that could be spared for
operations in American waters, which involved the tremendous task of
escorting British merchant shipping, protecting the St. Lawrence River,
blockading American ports, and at the same time hunting down American
frigates.
A significant weakness in the American position was the disunity of the
country. In the New England states public opinion ranged from mere
apathy to actively expressed opposition to the war. A good many
Massachusetts and Connecticut shipowners fitted out privateers—
privately owned and armed vessels that were commissioned to take
enemy ships—but New England contributed little else to the prosecution
of the war, and continued to sell grain and provisions to the British.
Canada was not faced with the same problem. Nevertheless, many
inhabitants of Upper Canada were recent immigrants from the United
States who had no great desire to take up arms against their former
homeland, and there were other Canadians who thought that the
superiority of the United States in men and material made any defense
hopeless. That General Brock was able to overcome this spirit of
defeatism is a tribute to his leadership.
The Strategic Pattern
The fundamental strategy was simple enough. The primary undertaking
would be the conquest of Canada. The United States also planned an
immediate naval offensive, whereby a swarm of privateers and the small
Navy would be set loose on the high seas to destroy British commerce.
The old invasion route into Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the
Richelieu River led directly to the most populous and most important part
of the enemy's territory. The capture of Montreal would cut the line of
communications upon which the British defense of Upper Canada
depended, and the fall of that province would then be inevitable. But
this invasion route was near the center of disaffection in the United
States, from which little local support could be expected. The west
where enthusiasm for the war ran high and where the Canadian forces
were weak, offered a safer theater of operations though one with fewer
strategic opportunities. Thus, in violation of the principles of objective
and economy of force, the first assaults were delivered across the
Detroit River and across the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake
Ontario.
The war progressed through three distinct stages. In the first, lasting
until the spring of 1813, England was so hard pressed in Europe that it
could spare neither men nor ships in any great number for the conflict in
North America. The United States was free to take the initiative, to
invade Canada, and to send out cruisers and privateers against enemy
shipping. During the second stage, lasting from early 1813 to the
beginning of 1814, England was able to establish a tight blockade but
still could not materially reinforce the troops in Canada. In this stage the
American Army, having gained experience, won its first successes. The
third stage, in 1814, was marked by the constant arrival in North
America of British Regulars and naval reinforcements, which enabled the
enemy to raid the North American coast almost at will and to take the
offensive in several quarters. At the same time, in this final stage of the
war, American forces fought their best fights and won their most brilliant
victories.
The First Campaigns
The first blows of the war were struck in the Detroit area and at Fort
Michilimackinac. President Madison gave Brig. Gen. William Hull, governor
of the Michigan Territory, command of operations in that area. Hull
arrived at Fort Detroit on July 5, 1812, with a force of about 1,500 Ohio
militiamen and 300 Regulars, which he led across the river into Canada a
week later. (See Map 15 above.) At that time the whole enemy force on
the Detroit frontier amounted to about 150 British Regulars, 300
Canadian militiamen, and some 250 Indians led by Tecumseh. Most of
the enemy were at Fort Malden, about twenty miles south of Detroit, on
the Canadian side of the river. General Hull had been a dashing young
officer in the Revolution, but by this time age and its infirmities had made
him cautious and timid. Instead of moving directly against Fort Malden,
Hull issued a bombastic proclamation to the people of Canada and
stayed at the river landing almost opposite Detroit. He sent out several
small raiding detachments along the Thames and Detroit Rivers, one of
which returned after skirmishing with the British outposts near Fort
Malden. In the meantime General Brock, who was both energetic and
daring, sent a small party of British Regulars, Canadians, and Indians
across the river from Malden to cut General Hull's communications with
Ohio.
By that time Hull was discouraged by the loss of Fort Michilimackinac,
whose sixty defenders had quietly surrendered on July 17 to a small
group of British Regulars supported by a motley force of fur traders and
Indians that, at Brock's suggestion, had swiftly marched from St. Joseph
Island, forty miles to the north. Hull also knew that the enemy in Fort
Maiden had received reinforcements (which he overestimated tenfold)
and feared that Detroit would be completely cut off from its base of
supplies. On August 7 he began to withdraw his force across the river
into Fort Detroit. The last American had scarcely returned before the first
men of Brock's force appeared and began setting up artillery opposite
Detroit. By August IS five guns were in position and opened fire on the
fort, and the next morning Brock led his troops across the river. Before
Brock could launch his assault, the Americans surrendered. Militiamen
were released under parole; Hull and the Regulars were sent as
prisoners to Montreal. Later paroled, Hull returned to face a court-martial
for his conduct of the campaign, was sentenced to be shot, and was
immediately pardoned.
On August 15, the day before the surrender, the small garrison at
distant Fort Dearborn, acting on orders from Hull, had evacuated the
post and started out for Detroit. The column was almost instantly
attacked by a band of Indians who massacred the Americans before
returning to destroy the fort.
With the fall of Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Dearborn, the entire territory
north and west of Ohio fell under enemy control. The settlements in
Indiana lay open to attack, the neighboring Indian tribes hastened to
join the winning side, and the Canadians in the upper province lost
some of the spirit of defeatism with which they had entered the war.
Immediately after taking Detroit, Brock transferred most of his troops to
the Niagara frontier where he faced an American invasion force of 6,500
men. Maj. Gen. Stephen van Rensselaer, the senior American
commander and a New York militiamen, was camped at Lewiston with a
force of goo Regulars and about 2,300 militiamen. Van Rensselaer owed
his appointment not to any active military experience, for he had none,
but to his family's position in New York. Inexperienced as he was in
military art, van Rensselaer at least fought the enemy, which was more
than could be said of the Regular Army commander in the theater, Brig.
Gen. Alexander Smyth. Smyth and his 1,650 Regulars and nearly 400
militiamen were located at Buffalo. The rest of the American force, about
1,300 Regulars, was stationed at Fort Niagara.
Van Rensselaer planned to cross the narrow Niagara River and capture
Queenston and its heights, a towering escarpment that ran
perpendicular to the river south of the town. From this vantage point he
hoped to command the area and eventually drive the British out of the
Niagara peninsula. Smyth, on the other hand, wanted to attack above
the falls, where the low and the current less swift, and he refused to co-
operate with the militia general. With a force ten times that of the British
opposite him, van Rensselaer decided to attack alone. After one attempt
had been called off for lack of oars for the boats, van Rensselaer finally
ordered an attack for the morning of October 13. The assault force
numbered 600 men, roughly half New York militiamen; but several boats
drifted beyond the landing area, and the first echelon to land, numbering
far less than 500, was pinned down for a time on the river bank below
the heights until the men found an unguarded path, clambered to the
summit, and, surprising the enemy, overwhelmed his fortified battery
and drove him down into Queenston.
The Americans repelled a hastily formed counterattack later in the
morning, during which General Brock was killed. This, however, was the
high point of van Rensselaer's fortunes. Although 1,300 men were
successfully ferried across the river under persistent British fire Prom a
fortified battery north of town, less than half of them ever reached the
American line on the heights. Most of the militiamen refused to cross the
river, insisting on their legal right to remain on American soil, and
General Smyth ignored van Rensselaer's request for Regulars.
Meanwhile, British and Canadian reinforcements arrived in Queenston,
and Maj. Gen. Roger Sheave, General Brock's successor, began to
advance on the American position with a force of 800 troops and 300
Indian skirmishers. Van Rensselaer's men, tired and outnumbered, put
up a stiff resistance on the heights but in the end were defeated—300
Americans were killed or wounded and nearly 1,000 were captured.
After the defeat at Queenston, van Rensselaer resigned and was
succeeded by the unreliable Smyth, who spent his time composing windy
proclamations. Disgusted at being marched down to the river on several
occasions only to be marched back to camp again, the new army that
had assembled after the battle of Queenston gradually melted away.
The men who remained lost all sense of discipline, and finally at the end
of November the volunteers were ordered home and the Regulars were
sent into winter quarters. General Smyth's request for leave was hastily
granted, and three months later his name was quietly dropped from the
Army rolls.
Except for minor raids across the frozen St. Lawrence, there was no
further fighting along the New York frontier until the following spring.
During the Niagara campaign the largest force then under arms,
commanded by Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn, had been held in the
neighborhood of Albany, more than 250 miles from the scene of
operations. Dearborn had had a good record in the Revolutionary War
and had served as Jefferson's Secretary of War. Persuaded to accept
the command of the northern theater, except for Hull's forces, he was in
doubt for some time about the extent of his authority over the Niagara
front. When it was clarified he was reluctant to exercise it. Proposing to
move his army, which included seven regiments of Regulars with artillery
and dragoons, against Montreal in conjunction with a simultaneous
operation across the Niagara River, Dearborn was content to wait for his
subordinates to make the first move. When van Rensselaer made his
attempt against Queenston, Dearborn, who was still in the vicinity of
Albany, showed no sign of marching toward Canada. At the beginning of
November he sent a large force north to Plattsburg and announced that
he would personally lead the army into Montreal, but most of his force
got no farther than the border. When his advanced guard was driven
back to the village of Champlain by Canadian militiamen and Indians,
and his Vermont and New York volunteers flatly refused to cross the
border, Dearborn quietly turned around and marched back to Plattsburg,
where he went into winter quarters.
If the land campaigns of 1812 reflected little credit on the Army, the war
at sea brought lasting glory to the infant Navy. Until the end of the year
the American frigates, brigs-of-war, and privateers were able to slip in
and out of harbors and cruise almost at will, and in this period they won
their most brilliant victories. At the same time, American privateers were
picking off English merchant vessels by the hundreds. Having need of
American foodstuffs, Britain was at first willing to take advantage of New
England's opposition to the war by not extending the blockade to the
New England coast, but by the beginning of 1814 it was effectively
blockading the whole coast and had driven most American naval vessels
and privateers off the high seas.
The Second Year, 1813
On land, the objects of the American plan of campaign for 1813 were the
recapture of Detroit and an attack on Canada across Lake Ontario. (See
Map 15 above.) For the Detroit campaign, Madison picked Brig. Gen.
William H. Harrison, governor of the Indian Territory and hero of
Tippecanoe. The difficulties of a winter campaign were tremendous, but
the country demanded action. Harrison therefore started north toward
Lake Erie at the end of October 1812 with some 6,500 men. In January
1813 a sizable detachment, about 1,000, pushed on to Frenchtown, a
small Canadian outpost on the Raisin River twenty-six miles south of
Detroit. There the American commander, Brig. Gen. James Winchester,
positioned his men, their backs to the river with scant natural protection
and their movements severely hampered by deep snow. A slightly larger
force of British Regulars, militiamen, and Indians under Col. Henry
Proctor soundly defeated the Americans, killing over 100 Kentucky
riflemen and capturing approximately 500. The brutal massacre of
wounded American prisoners by their Indian guards made "Remember
the Raisin" the rallying cry of the Northwestern Army, but any plans for
revenge had to be postponed, for Harrison had decided to suspend
operations for the winter. He built Forts Meigs and Stephenson and
posted his army near the Michigan border at the western end of Lake
Erie.
The Ontario campaign was entrusted to General Dearborn, who was
ordered to move his army from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor, where
Commodore Isaac Chauncey had been assembling a fleet. Dearborn was
to move across the lake to capture Kingston and destroy the British
flotilla there, then proceed to York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper
Canada, to capture military stores, and finally he was to co-operate with
a force from Buffalo in seizing the forts on the Canadian side of the
Niagara River.
The American strategy was sound. The capture of Kingston, the only
tenable site for a naval station on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario,
would give the United States control of the lake and, by cutting the
British lines of communications, frustrate enemy plans for operations in
the west. After the fall of Kingston, the operations against York and the
Niagara forts would be simple mopping-up exercises. When the time
came to move, however, Dear" born and Chauncey, hearing a rumor that
the British forces in Kingston had been reinforced, decided to bypass
that objective and attack York first. About 1,700 men were embarked
and sailed up Lake Ontario without incident, arriving off York before
daybreak on April 27. Dearborn, who was in poor health, turned over the
command of the assault to Brig. Gen. Zebulon Pike, the explorer of the
Southwest. The landing, about four miles west of the town, was virtually
unopposed. The British garrison of about 600 men, occupying a
fortification about halfway between the town and the landing, was
overwhelmed after sharp resistance, but just as the Americans were
pushing through the fort toward the town, a powder magazine
exploded, killing or disabling many Americans and a number of British
soldiers. Among those killed was General Pike. Remnants of the garrison
fled toward Kingston, 150 miles to the east. The losses were heavy on
both sides—almost 20 percent of Dearborn's forces had been killed or
wounded. With General Dearborn incapacitated and General Pike dead,
the troops apparently got out of hand. They looted and burned the
public buildings and destroyed the provincial records. After holding the
town for about a week, they recrossed the lake to Niagara to an attack
against the forts on the Canadian side of the Niagara River.
Meanwhile, Sackett's Harbor had been almost stripped of troops for the
raid on York and for reinforcing the army at Fort Niagara. At Kingston,
across the lake, Sir George Prevost, the Governor-General of Canada,
had assembled a force of 800 British Regulars in addition to militia.
Taking advantage of the absence of Chauncey's fleet, which was at the
other end of the lake, Prevost launched an attack on Sackett's Harbor
with his entire force of Regulars on the night of May 26. The town was
defended by about 400 Regulars and approximately 750 militiamen,
under the command of Brig. Gen. Jacob Brown of the New York militia.
Brown posted his men in two lines in front of a fortified battery to cover
a possible landing. Coming ashore under heavy fire the British
nevertheless pressed rapidly forward, routed the first line, and pushed
the second back into the prepared defenses. There the Americans held.
The British then tried two frontal assaults, but were repulsed with heavy
losses. While they were re-forming for a third attack, General Brown
rallied the militia and sent them toward the rear of the enemy's right
flank. This was the turning point. Having suffered serious losses and in
danger of being cut off, the British hurriedly withdrew to their ships.
On the same day that Prevost sailed against Sackett's Harbor, General
Dearborn at the western end of Lake Ontario was invading Canada with
an army of 4,000 men. The operation began with a well-executed and
stubbornly resisted amphibious assault led by Col. Winfield Scott and
Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, USN, with Chauncey's fleet providing
fire support. Outnumbered more than two to one, the British retreated,
abandoning Fort George and Queenston to the Americans. (See Map I6
below) An immediate pursuit might have sealed the victory, but
Dearborn, after occupying Fort George, waited several days and then
sent about 2,000 men after the enemy. The detachment advanced to
within ten miles of the British and camped for the night with slight regard
for security and even less for the enemy's audacity. During the night a
force of about 700 British attacked the camp and thoroughly routed the
Americans. Dearborn withdrew his entire army to Fort George. About two
weeks later, a 500-man detachment ventured fifteen miles outside the
fort and surrendered to a force of British and Indians that was half as
large. After these reverses there was no further action of consequence
on the Niagara front for the remainder of the year. Dearborn, again
incapacitated by illness, resigned his commission in early July. Both
armies were hard hit by disease, and the American forces were further
reduced by the renewal of the war in the west and by an attempt
against Montreal.
MAP 16
Hull's disaster at Detroit in 1812 and Harrison's unsuccessful winter
campaign had clearly shown that any offensive action in that quarter
depended upon first gaining control of Lake Erie. Commander Perry had
been assigned the task of building a fleet and seizing control of the lake.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1813, except for the time he had
joined Dearborn's force, the 27-year-old Perry had been busy at Presque
Isle assembling his fleet, guns, and crews. By the beginning of August
his force was superior to that of the British in every respect except long-
range armament. Sailing up the lake, he anchored in Put-in-Bay, near
the line still held by General Harrison in the vicinity of Forts Meigs and
Stephenson, and there on September 10 Perry met the British Fleet,
defeated it, and gained control of Lake Erie.
As soon as the damage to Perry's ships and the captured British vessels
had been repaired, Harrison embarked his army and sailed against Fort
Malden. A regiment of mounted Kentucky riflemen under Col. Richard M.
Johnson moved along the shore of the lake toward Detroit. Vastly
outnumbered on land and now open to attack from the water, the British
abandoned both Forts Malden and Detroit and retreated eastward.
Leaving a detachment to garrison the forts, Harrison set out after the
enemy with the Kentucky cavalry regiments, five brigades of Kentucky
volunteers, and a part of the 27th Infantry, a force of about 3,500 men.
On October 5 he made contact with the British on the banks of the
Thames River about eighty-five miles from Malden. (See Map 15.) The
enemy numbered about 2,900, of whom about 900 were British Regulars
and the remainder Indians under Tecumseh. Instead of attacking with
infantry in the traditional line-against-line fashion, Harrison ordered a
mounted attack. The maneuver succeeded completely. Unable to
withstand the charging Kentuckians, the British surrendered in droves.
The Indians were routed, and Tecumseh, who had brought so much
trouble to the western frontier, was killed. Among those who
distinguished themselves on that day was Commander Perry, who had
ridden in the front rank of Johnson's charge.
As a result of the victory, which illustrated successful employment of the
principles of offensive and mass, Lake Erie became an American lake.
The Indian confederacy was shattered. The American position on the
Detroit frontier was re-established, a portion of Canadian territory was
brought under American control, and the enemy threat in that sector
was eliminated. There was no further fighting here for the rest of the
war.
The small remnant of the British force that had escaped capture at the
Thames—no more than 250 soldiers and a few Indians—made its way
overland to the head of Lake Ontario. Harrison, after discharging his
Kentucky volunteers and arranging for the defenses of the Michigan
Territory, sailed after it with the remainder of his army. He arrived at the
Niagara frontier at an opportune time, since the American forces in that
theater were being called upon to support a 2-pronged drive against
Montreal.
The expedition against Montreal in the fall of 1813 was one of the worst
fiascoes of the war. It involved a simultaneous drive by two forces: one,
an army of about 4,000 men assembled at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain
under the command of Brig. Gen. Wade Hampton and another, of about
6,000 men under the command of Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson, which was
to attack down the St. Lawrence River from Sackett's Harbor. Hampton
and Wilkinson were scarcely on speaking terms, and there was no one
on the spot to command the two of them. Neither had sufficient strength
to capture Montreal without the other's aid; each lacked confidence in
the other, and both suspected that the War Department was leaving
them in the lurch. At first contact with the British, about halfway down
the Chateaugay River, Hampton retreated and, after falling back all the
way to Plattsburg, resigned from the Army. Wilkinson, after a
detachment of about Mono men was severely mauled in an engagement
just north of Ogdensburg, also abandoned his part of the operation and
followed Hampton into Plattsburg.
In the meantime, during December 1813 the British took advantage of
the weakened state of American forces on the Niagara frontier to
recapture Fort George and to cross the river and take Fort Niagara,
which remained in British hands until the end of the war. Before
evacuating Fort George the Americans had burned the town of Newark
and part of Queenston. In retaliation the British, after assaulting Fort
Niagara with unusual ferocity, loosed their Indian allies on the
surrounding countryside and burned the town of Buffalo and the nearby
village of Black Rock.
During 1813 a new theater of operations opened in the south. Andrew
Jackson, an ardent expansionist and commander of the Tennessee
militia, wrote the Secretary of War that he would "rejoice at the
opportunity of placing the American eagle on the ramparts of Mobile,
Pensacola, and Fort St. Augustine." (See map 17 below) For this purpose
Tennessee had raised a force of 2,000 men to be under Jackson's
command. Congress, after much debate, approved only an expedition
into that part of the gulf coast in dispute between the United States and
Spain, and refused to entrust the venture to the Tennesseans. Just
before he went north to take part in the Montreal expedition, General
Wilkinson led his Regulars into the disputed part of West Florida and,
without meeting any resistance, occupied Mobile, while the Tennessee
army was left cooling its heels in Natchez.
MAP 17
An Indian uprising in that part of the Mississippi Territory soon to
become Alabama saved General Jackson's military career. Inspired by
Tecumseh's earlier successes, the Creek Indians took to the warpath in
the summer of 1813 with a series of outrages culminating in the
massacre of more than 500 men, women, and children at Fort Mims.
Jackson, with characteristic energy, reassembled his army, which had
been dismissed after Congress rejected its service for an attack on
Florida, and moved into the Mississippi Territory. His own energy added
to his problems, for he completely outran his primitive supply system and
dangerously extended his line of communications. The hardships of the
campaign and one near defeat at the hands of the Indians destroyed
any enthusiasm the militia might have had for continuing in service.
Jackson was compelled to entrench at Fort Strother, on the Coosa River,
and remain there for several months until the arrival of a regiment of the
Regular Army gave him the means to deal with the mutinous militia.
At the end of March 1814 he decided that he had sufficient strength for a
decisive blow against the Indians, who had gathered a force of about
goo warriors and many women and children in a fortified camp at the
Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River. Jackson had about 2,000 militia
and volunteers, nearly 600 Regulars, several hundred friendly Indians,
and a few pieces of artillery. The attack was completely successful. A
bayonet charge led by the Regulars routed the Indians, who were
ruthlessly hunted down and all but a hundred or so of the warriors were
killed. "I lament that two or three women and children were killed by
accident," Jackson later reported. The remaining hostile tribes fled into
Spanish territory. As one result of the campaign Jackson was appointed
a major general in the Regular Army. The campaign against the Creeks
had no other effect on the outcome of the war, but for that matter
neither had any of the campaigns in the north.
Fighting also broke out during 1813 along the east coast where a British
fleet blockaded the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, bottling up the
American frigates Constellation at Norfolk and Adams in the Potomac.
(See map 18 below) Opposed only by small American gunboats, the
British under Admiral Sir John Warren sought "to chastise the Americans
into submission," and at the same time to relieve the pressure on
Prevost's forces in Canada. With a flotilla, which at times numbered
fifteen ships, Rear Adm. Sir George Cockburn, Warren's second-in-
command, roamed the Chesapeake during the spring of 1813, burning
and looting the prosperous countryside. Reinforced in June by 2,600
Regulars, Warren decided to attack Norfolk, its navy yard and the
anchored Constellation providing the tempting targets. Norfolk's
defenses rested chiefly on Craney Island, which guarded the narrow
channel of the Elizabeth River.
The island had a 7-gun fortification and was manned by 580 Regulars
and militia in addition to 150 sailors and marines from the Constellation.
The British planned to land an 800-man force on the mainland and, when
low tide permitted, march onto the island in a flanking movement. As the
tide rose, another 500 men would be rowed across the shoals for a
frontal assault. On June 22 the landing party debarked four miles
northwest of the island, but the flanking move was countered by the
highly accurate marksmanship of the Constellation's gunners and was
forced to pull back. The frontal assault also suffered from well-directed
American fire, which sank three barges and threw the rest into
confusion. After taking 81 casualties, the British sailed off in disorder.
The defenders counted no casualties.
MAP 18
Frustrated at Norfolk, Warren crossed the Roads to Hampton where he
overwhelmed the 450 militia defenders and pillaged the town. A portion
of the fleet remained in the bay for the rest of the year, blockading and
marauding, but the operation was not an unalloyed success. It failed to
cause a diversion of American troops from the northern border and, by
strengthening popular resentment (Cockburn was vilified throughout the
country), helped unite Americans behind the war effort.
The conduct of the war in 1812 and 1813 revealed deficiencies in the
administration of the War Department that would plague the American
cause to the end. In early 1813 Madison replaced his incompetent
Secretary of War William Eustis with John Armstrong, who instituted a
reorganization that eventually resulted in the substitution of younger,
more aggressive field commanders for the aged veterans of the
Revolution. Congress then authorized an expansion of the Army staff to
help the Secretary manage the war. In March it re-created the offices of
Adjutant General, Inspector General, Surgeon, and Apothecary General
and assigned eight topographical Engineers to the staff.
Competent leadership meant little, however, without sufficient logistical
support, and logistics, more than any other factor, determined the
nature of the military campaigns of the war. Lack of transportation was a
major problem. The United States was fighting a war on widely
separated fronts that required moving supplies through a wilderness
where roads had to be built for wagons and packhorses. For this
reason, ammunition and clothing supplies proved inadequate. General
Harrison had to depend on homemade cartridges and clothing from Ohio
townsmen for his northwestern campaign, and General Scott's Regulars
would fight at Chippewa in the gray uniforms of the New York militia.
Winter found the troops without blankets, inadequately housed, and
without forage for their horses. Most important, the subsistence supply
failed so completely that field commanders found it necessary to take
local food procurement virtually into their own hands.
Transportation difficulties accounted for only part of the problem. The
supply system devised in 1812 proved a resounding failure.
Congressional intent notwithstanding, the Quartermaster General had
never assumed accountability for the money and property administered
by his subordinates or administrative control over his deputies in the
south and northwest. Moreover, the functions of his office, never clearly
defined, overlapped those of the Commissary General. In a vain attempt
to unravel the administrative tangle, Congress created the office of
Superintendent General of Military Supplies to keep account of all military
stores and reformed the Quartermaster Department, giving the
Quartermaster General stricter control over his deputies. In practice,
however, the deputies continued to act independently in their own
districts.
Both Congress and the War Department overlooked the greatest need
for reform as the Army continued to rely on contractors for the collection
delivery of rations for the troops. With no centralized direction for
subsistence supply, the inefficient, fraud-racked contract system proved
to be one of the gravest hindrances to military operations throughout
the war.
The Last Year of the War, 1814
After the setbacks at the end of 1813, a lull descended on the northern
frontier. In March 1814 Wilkinson made a foray from Plattsburg with
about 4,000 men and managed to penetrate about eight miles into
Canada before some 200 British and Canadian troops stopped his
advance. It was an even more miserable failure than his attempt of the
preceding fall.
In early 1814 Congress increased the Army to 45 infantry regiments, 4
regiments of riflemen, 3 of artillery, 2 of light dragoons, and 1 of light
artillery. The number of general officers was fixed at 6 major generals
and 16 brigadier generals in addition to the generals created by brevet.
Secretary of War Armstrong promoted Jacob Brown, who had been
commissioned a brigadier general in the Regular Army after his heroic
defense of Sackett's Harbor, to the rank of major general and placed him
in command of the Niagara-Lake Ontario theater. He also promoted the
youthful George Izard to major general and gave him command of the
Lake Champlain frontier. He appointed six new brigadier generals from
the ablest, but not necessarily most senior, colonels in the Regular Army,
among them Winfield Scott, who had distinguished himself at the battle
of Queenston Heights and who was now placed in command at Buffalo.
British control of Lake Ontario, won by dint of feverish naval construction
during the previous winter, obliged the Secretary of War to recommend
operations from Buffalo, but disagreement within the President's cabinet
delayed adoption of a plan until June. Expecting Commodore Chauncey's
naval force at Sackett's Harbor to be strong enough to challenge the
British Fleet, Washington decided upon a co-ordinated attack on the
Niagara peninsula. (See Map I6.) Secretary Armstrong instructed General
Brown to cross the Niagara River in the vicinity of Fort Erie and, after
assaulting the fort, either to move against Fort George and Newark or to
seize and hold a bridge over the Chippewa River, as he saw fit.
Brown accordingly crossed the Niagara River on July 3 with his force of
3,500 men, took Fort Erie, and then advanced toward the Chippewa
River, sixteen miles away. There a smaller British force, including 1,500
Regulars, had gathered to oppose the Americans. General Brown posted
his army in a strong position behind a creek with his right flank resting
on the Niagara River and his left protected by a swamp. In front of the
American position was an open plain, beyond which flowed the
Chippewa River; on the other side of the river were the British.
In celebration of Independence Day, General Scott had promised his
brigade a grand parade on the plain the next day. On July 5 he formed
his troops, numbering about 1,300, but on moving forward discovered
British Regulars who had crossed the river undetected, lined up on the
opposite edge of the plain. Scott ordered his men to charge and the
British advanced to meet them. The two lines approached each other,
alternately stopping to fire and then moving forward, closing the gaps
torn by musketry and artillery fire. They came together first at the flanks,
while about sixty or eighty yards apart at the center. At this point the
British line crumbled and broke. By the time a second brigade sent
forward by General Brown reached the battlefield, the British had
withdrawn across the Chippewa River and were retreating toward
Ancaster, on Lake Ontario. Scott's casualties amounted to 48 killed and
227 wounded; British losses were 137 killed and 304 wounded.
Brown followed the retreating British as far as Queenston, where he
halted to await Commodore Chauncey's fleet. After waiting two weeks
for Chauncey, who failed to co-operate in the campaign, Brown withdrew
to Chippewa. He proposed to strike out to Ancaster by way of a
crossroad known as Lundy's Lane, from which he could reach the
Burlington Heights at the head of Lake Ontario and at the rear of the
British.
Meanwhile the British had drawn reinforcements from York and Kingston,
and more troops were on the way from Lower Canada. Sixteen
thousand British veterans, fresh from Wellington's victories over the
French in Europe, had just arrived in Canada, too late to participate in
the Niagara campaign but in good time to permit the redeployment of
the troops that had been defending the upper St. Lawrence. By the time
General Brown decided to pull back from Queenston, the British force at
Ancaster amounted to about 2,200 men under General Phineas Riall;
another 1,500 British troops were gathered at Fort George and Fort
Niagara at the mouth of the Niagara River. As soon as Brown began his
withdrawal, Riall sent forward about 1,000 men along Lundy's Lane, the
very route by which General Brown intended to advance against
Burlington Heights; another force of more than 600 British moved out
from Fort George and followed Brown along the Queenston road; while a
third enemy force of about 4oo men moved along the American side of
the Niagara River from Fort Niagara. Riall's advance force reached the
junction of Lundy's Lane and the Queenston road on the night of July 24,
the same night that Brown reached Chippewa, about three miles
distant. Concerned lest the British force on the opposite side of the
Niagara cut his line of communications and entirely unaware of Riall's
force at Lundy's Lane, General Brown on July 25 ordered Scott to take
his brigade back along the road toward Queenston in the hope of
drawing back the British force on the other side of the Niagara; but in
the meantime that force had crossed the river and joined Riall's men at
Lundy's Lane. Scott had not gone far when much to his surprise he
discovered himself face-to-face with the enemy.
The ensuing battle, most of which took place after nightfall, was the
hardest fought, most stubbornly contested engagement of the war. For
two hours Scott attacked and repulsed the counterattacks of the
numerically superior British force, which, moreover, had the advantage in
position. Then both sides were reinforced. With Brown's whole
contingent engaged the Americans now had a force equal to that of the
British, about 2,900. They were able to force back the enemy from its
position and capture its artillery. The battle then continued without
material advantage to either side until just before midnight, when
General Brown ordered the exhausted Americans to fall back to their
camp across the Chippewa River. The equally exhausted enemy was
unable to follow. Losses on both sides had been heavy, each side
incurring about 850 casualties. On the American side, both General
Brown and General Scott were severely wounded, Scott so badly that he
saw no further service during the war. On the British side, General Riall
and his superior, General Drummond, who had arrived with the
reinforcements, were wounded, and Riall was taken prisoner.
But [i.e., both] sides claimed Lundy's Lane as a victory, as well they
might; but Brown's invasion of Canada was halted. Commodore
Chauncey, who failed to prevent the British from using Lake Ontario for
supply and reinforcements, contributed to the unfavorable outcome. In
contrast to the splendid co-operation between Harrison and Perry on
Lake Erie, relations between Brown and Chauncey were far from
satisfactory. A few days after the Battle of Lundy's Lane the American
army withdrew to Fort Erie and held this outpost on Canadian soil until
early in November.
Reinforced after Lundy's Lane, the British laid siege to Fort Erie at the
beginning of August but were forced to abandon the effort on
September 21 after heavy losses. Shortly afterward General Izard
arrived with reinforcements from Plattsburg and advanced as far as
Chippewa, where the British were strongly entrenched. After a few
minor skirmishes, he ceased operations for the winter. The works at Fort
Erie were destroyed, and the army withdrew to American soil on
November 5.
During the summer of I8I4 the British had been able to reinforce Canada
and to stage several raids on the American coast. Eastport, Maine, on
Passamaquoddy Bay, and Castine, at the mouth of the Penobscot River,
were occupied without resistance. This operation was something more
than a raid since Eastport lay in disputed territory, and it was no secret
that Britain wanted a rectification of the boundary. No such political
object was attached to British forays in the region of Chesapeake Bay.
(See Map 18.) On August 19 a force of some 4,000 British troops under
Maj. Gen. Robert Ross landed on the Patuxent River and marched on
Washington. At the Battle of Bladensburg, five days later, Ross easily
dispersed 5,000 militia, naval gunners, and Regulars hastily gathered
together to defend the Capital. The British then entered Washington,
burned the Capitol, the White House, and other public buildings, and
returned to their ships.
Baltimore was next on the schedule, but that city had been given time to
prepare its defenses. The land approach was covered by a rather
formidable line of redoubts; the harbor was guarded by Fort McHenry
and blocked by a line of sunken gunboats. On September 13 a spirited
engagement fought by Maryland militia, many of whom had run at
Bladensburg just two weeks before, delayed the invaders and caused
considerable loss, including General Ross, who was killed. When the
fleet failed to reduce Fort McHenry, the assault on the city was called off.
Two days before the attack on Baltimore, the British suffered a much
more serious repulse on Lake Champlain. After the departure of General
Izard for the Niagara front, Brig. Gen. Alexander Macomb had remained
at Plattsburg with a force of about 3,300 men. Supporting this force was
a small fleet under Commodore Thomas Macdonough. Across the border
in Canada was an army of British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars whom
Sir George Prevost was to lead down the route taken by Burgoyne thirty-
seven years before. Moving slowly up the Richelieu River toward Lake
Champlain, he crossed the border and on September 6 arrived before
Plattsburg with about 11,000 men. There he waited for almost a week
until his naval support was ready to join the attack. With militia
reinforcements, Macomb now had about 4,500 men manning a strong
line of redoubts and blockhouses that faced a small river. Macdonough
had anchored his vessels in Plattsburg Bay, out of range of British guns,
but in a position to resist an assault on the American line. On September
11 the British flotilla appeared and Prevost ordered a joint attack. There
was no numerical disparity between the naval forces, but an important
one in the quality of the seamen. Macdonough's ships were manned by
well-trained seamen and gunners, the British ships by hastily recruited
French-Canadian militia and soldiers, with only a sprinkling of regular
seamen. As the enemy vessels came into the bay the wind died, and the
British were exposed to heavy raking fire from Macdonough's long guns.
The British worked their way in, came to anchor, and the two fleets
began slugging at each other, broadside by broadside. At the end the
British commander was dead and his ships battered into submission.
Prevost immediately called off the land attack and withdrew to Canada
the next day.
Macdonough's victory ended the gravest threat that had arisen so far.
More important it gave impetus to peace negotiations then under way.
News of the two setbacks—Baltimore and Plattsburg—reached England
simultaneously, aggravating the war weariness of the British and
bolstering the efforts of the American peace commissioners to obtain
satisfactory terms.
New Orleans: The Final Battle
The progress of the peace negotiations influenced the British to continue
an operation that General Ross, before his repulse and death at
Baltimore, had been instructed to carry out, a descent upon the gulf
coast to capture New Orleans and possibly sever Louisiana from the
United States. (See Map /7.) Major General Sir Edward Pakenham was
sent to America to take command of the expedition. On Christmas Day,
1814, Pakenham arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi to find his
troops disposed on a narrow isthmus below New Orleans between the
Mississippi River and a cypress swamp. They had landed two weeks
earlier at a shallow lagoon some ten miles east of New Orleans and had
already fought one engagement. In this encounter, on December 23,
General Jackson, who had taken command of the defenses on December
I, almost succeeded in cutting off an advance detachment of 2,000
British, but after a 3-hour fight in which casualties on both sides were
heavy, he was compelled to retire behind fortifications covering New
Orleans.
Opposite the British and behind a ditch stretching from the river to the
swamp, Jackson had raised earthworks high enough to require scaling
ladders for an assault. The defenses were manned by about 3,500 men
with another 1,000 in reserve. It was a varied group, composed of the
7th and 44th Infantry Regiments, Major Beale's New Orleans
Sharpshooters, LaCoste and Daquin's battalions of free Negroes, the
Louisiana militia under General David Morgan, a band of Choctaw
Indians, the Baratorian pirates, and a motley battalion of fashionably
dressed sons and brothers of the New Orleans aristocracy. To support
his defenses, Jackson had assembled more than twenty pieces of
artillery, including a battery of nine heavy guns on the opposite bank of
the Mississippi.
After losing an artillery duel to the Americans on January 1, Pakenham
decided on a frontal assault in combination with an attack against the
American troops on the west bank. The main assault was to be delivered
by about 5,300 men, while about boo men under Lt. Col. William
Thornton were to cross the river and clear the west bank. As the British
columns appeared out of the early morning mist on January 8, they were
met with murderous fire, first from the artillery, then from the muskets
and rifles of Jackson's infantry. Achieving mass through firepower, the
Americans mowed the British down by the hundreds. Pakenham and one
other general were killed and a third badly wounded. More than 2,000 of
the British were casualties; the American losses were trifling.
Suddenly, the battle on the west bank became critical. Jackson did not
make adequate preparations to meet the advance there until the British
began their movement, but by then it was too late. The heavy guns of a
battery posted on the west bank were not placed to command an attack
along that side of the river and only about 800 militia, divided in two
groups a mile apart, were in position to oppose Thornton. The Americans
resisted stubbornly, inflicting greater losses than they suffered, but the
British pressed on, routed them, and overran the battery. Had the British
continued their advance Jackson's position would have been critical, but
Pakenham's successor in command, appalled by the repulse of the main
assault, ordered Thornton to withdraw from the west bank and rejoin
the main force. For ten days the shattered remnant of Pakenham's army
remained in camp unmolested by the Americans, then re-embarked and
sailed away.
The British appeared off Mobile on February 8, confirming Jackson's fear
that they planned an attack in that quarter. They overwhelmed Fort
Bowyer, a garrison manned by 360 Regulars at the entrance to Mobile
Harbor. Before they could attack the city itself, word arrived that a treaty
had been signed at Ghent on Christmas Eve, two weeks before the
Battle of New Orleans.
The news of the peace settlement followed so closely on Jackson's
triumph in New Orleans that the war as a whole was popularly regarded
in the United States as a great victory. Yet at best it was a draw.
American strategy had centered on the conquest of Canada and the
harassment of British shipping; but the land campaign failed, and during
most of the war the Navy was bottled up behind a tight British blockade
of the North American coast.
If it favored neither belligerent, the war at least taught the Americans
several lessons. Although the Americans were proud of their reputation
as the world's most expert riflemen, the rifle played only a minor role in
the war. On the other hand, the American soldier displayed unexpected
superiority in gunnery and engineering. Artillery contributed to American
successes at Chippewa, Sackett's Harbor, Norfolk, the siege of Fort Erie,
and New Orleans The war also boosted the reputation of the Corps of
Engineers, a branch which owed its efficiency chiefly to the Military
Academy. Academy graduates completed the fortifications at Fort Erie,
built Fort Meigs, planned the harbor defenses of Norfolk and New York,
and directed the fortifications at Plattsburg. If larger numbers of
infantrymen had been as well trained as the artillerymen and engineers,
the course of the war might have been entirely different.
Sea power played a fundamental role in the war. In the west both
opponents were handicapped in overland communication, but the British
were far more dependent on the Great Lakes for the movement of
troops and supplies for the defense of Upper Canada. In the east, Lake
Champlain was strategically important as an invasion corridor to the
populous areas of both countries. Just as Perry's victory on Lake Erie
decided the outcome of the war in the far west, Macdonough's success
on Lake Champlain decided the fate of the British invasion in 1814 and
helped influence the peace negotiations.
The militia performed as well as the Regular Army. The defeats and
humiliations of the Regular forces during the first years of the war
matched those of the militia, just as in a later period the Kentucky
volunteers at the Thames and the Maryland militia before Baltimore
proved that the state citizen soldier could perform well. The keys to the
militiamen's performance, of course, were training and leadership, the
two areas over which the national government had little control. The
militia, occasionally competent, was never dependable, and in the
nationalistic period that followed the war when the exploits of the
Regulars were justly celebrated, an ardent young Secretary of War, John
Calhoun, would be able to convince Congress and the nation that the
first line of defense should be a standing army.
the U.S. army's point of view
Editor's note: The following article, extracted from An American Military
History: Army Historical Series, published by the Office of the Chief of
Military History, United States Army, provides an interesting overview of the
War of 1812 from an American perspective.
To Great Britain the War of I8I2 was simply a burdensome adjunct of its
greater struggle against Napoleonic France. To the Canadians it was
clearly a case of naked American aggression. But to the Americans it was
neither simple nor clear. The United States entered the war with
confused objectives and divided loyalties and made peace without
settling any of the issues that had induced the nation to go to war.
Origins of the War
The immediate origins of the war were seizure of American ships, insults
and injuries to American seamen by the British Navy, and rapid
expansion of the American frontier. The British outrages at sea took two
distinct forms. One was the seizure and forced sale of merchant ships
and their cargoes for allegedly violating the British blockade of Europe.
Although France had declared a counterblockade of the British Isles and
had seized American ships, England was the chief offender because its
Navy had greater command of the seas. The second, more insulting,
type of outrage was the capture of men from American vessels for forced
service in the Royal Navy. The pretext for impressment was the search
for deserters, who, the British claimed, had taken employment on
American vessels.
The reaction in the United States to impressment differed from that
aroused by the seizure of ships and cargoes. In the latter case the
maritime interests of the eastern seaboard protested vigorously and
demanded naval protection, but rather than risk having their highly
profitable trade cut off by war with England they were willing to take an
occasional loss of cargo. Impressment, on the other hand, presented no
such financial hardship to the shipowners, whatever the consequences
for the unfortunate seamen, and the maritime interests tended to
minimize it.
To the country at large the seizure of American seamen was much more
serious than the loss of a few hogsheads of flour or molasses. When a
British naval vessel in June 1807 attacked and disabled the USS
Chesapeake and impressed several members of the crew, a general
wave of indignation rose in which even the maritime interests joined.
This was an insult to the flag, and had Jefferson chosen to go to war
with England he would have had considerable support. Instead he
decided to clamp an embargo on American trade. In New England scores
of prosperous shipowners were ruined, and a number of thriving little
seaports suffered an economic depression from which few recovered.
While the rest of the country remembered the Chesapeake affair and
stored up resentment against Britain, maritime New England directed its
anger at Jefferson and his party.
The seat of anti-British fever was in the Northwest and the lower Ohio
Valley, where the land-hungry frontiersmen had no doubt that their
troubles with the Indians were the result of British intrigue. Stories were
circulated after every Indian raid of British Army muskets and equipment
being found on the field. By 1812 the westerners were convinced that
their problems could best be solved by forcing the British out of Canada.
While the western "war hawks" urged war in the hope of conquering
Canada, the people of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory
entertained similar designs against Florida, a Spanish possession. The
fact that Spain and England were allies against Napoleon presented the
southern war hawks with an excuse for invading Florida. By this time,
also, the balance of political power had shifted south and westward;
ambitious party leaders had no choice but to align themselves with the
war hawks, and 1812 was a Presidential election year.
President Madison's use of economic pressure to force England to repeal
its blockade almost succeeded. The revival of the Non-Intercourse Act
against Britain, prohibiting all trade with England and its colonies,
coincided with a poor grain harvest in England and with a growing need
of American provisions to supply the British troops fighting the French in
Spain. As a result, on June 16, 1812, the British Foreign Minister
announced that the blockade would be relaxed on American shipping.
Had there been an Atlantic cable, war might have been averted.
President Madison had sent a message to Congress on June 1 listing all
the complaints against England and asking for a declaration of war.
Dividing along sectional lines the House had voted for war on June 4, but
the Senate approved only on June 18 and then by only six votes.
The Opposing Forces
At the outbreak of the war the United States had a total population of
about 7,700,000 people. A series of border forts garrisoned by very
small Regular Army detachments stretched along the Canadian
boundary: Fort Michilimackinac, on the straits between Lake Michigan
and Lake Huron; Fort Dearborn, on the site of what is now Chicago; Fort
Detroit; and Fort Niagara, at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake
Ontario. (Map 15) The actual strength of the Regular Army in June 1812
totaled approximately 11,744 officers and men, including an estimated
5,000 recruits enlisted for the additional force authorized the preceding
January, in contrast to an authorized strength of 35,600. The Navy
consisted of 20 vessels: the 3 large 44-gun frigates, 3 smaller frigates of
the Constellation class rated at 38 guns, and 14 others.
Congress did not lack the will to prepare for war. In March 1812 it had
tried to place the Army's supply system on a more adequate footing by
establishing a Quartermaster Department on the military staff in place of
the inefficient and costly military agent system. At the same time
Congress created the Office of the Commissary General of Purchases in
the War Department, and for the first time since the Revolution the
Army's supply system was placed under the exclusive control of the
Secretary of War. In May Congress had made provision for an Ordnance
Department, responsible for the inspection and testing of all ordnance,
cannon balls, shells, and shot, the construction of gun carriages and
ammunition wagons, and the preparation and inspection of the "public
powder." It enlarged the Corps of Engineers by adding a company of
bombardiers, sappers, and miners, and expanded and reorganized the
Military Academy at West Point. In addition to increasing the Regular
Army, Congress had authorized the President to accept volunteer forces
and to call upon the states for militia. The difficulty was not planning for
an army, but raising one.
One of the world's major powers was ranged against the United States,
but on the basis of available resources the two belligerents were rather
evenly matched. Most of Britain's forces were tied up in the war against
Napoleon, and for the time being very little military and naval assistance
could be spared for the defense of Canada. At the outbreak of the war,
there were approximately 7,000 British and Canadian Regulars in Upper
and Lower Canada (now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec). With a
total white population of only about half a million, Canada itself had only
a small reservoir of militia to draw upon. When the war began, Maj. Gen.
Isaac Brock, the military commander and civil governor of Upper Canada,
had 800 militiamen available in addition to his approximately 1,600
Regulars. In the course of the war, the two provinces put a total of
about 10,000 militia in the field, whereas in the United States probably
4so,ooo of the militia saw active service, although not more than half of
them ever got near the front. The support of Indian tribes gave Canada
one source of manpower that the United States lacked. After the Battle
of Tippecanoe, Tecumseh had led his warriors across the border into
Canada, where, along with the Canadian Indians, they joined the forces
opposing the Americans. Perhaps 3,500 Indians were serving in the
Canadian forces during the Thames River campaign in the fall of 1813,
probably the largest number that took the field at any one time during
the war.
The bulk of the British Navy was also fighting in the war against
Napoleon. In September I8I2, three months after the outbreak of war
with the United States, Britain had no more than eleven ships of the line,
thirty-four frigates, and about an equal number of smaller naval vessels
in the western Atlantic. These were all that could be spared for
operations in American waters, which involved the tremendous task of
escorting British merchant shipping, protecting the St. Lawrence River,
blockading American ports, and at the same time hunting down American
frigates.
A significant weakness in the American position was the disunity of the
country. In the New England states public opinion ranged from mere
apathy to actively expressed opposition to the war. A good many
Massachusetts and Connecticut shipowners fitted out privateers—
privately owned and armed vessels that were commissioned to take
enemy ships—but New England contributed little else to the prosecution
of the war, and continued to sell grain and provisions to the British.
Canada was not faced with the same problem. Nevertheless, many
inhabitants of Upper Canada were recent immigrants from the United
States who had no great desire to take up arms against their former
homeland, and there were other Canadians who thought that the
superiority of the United States in men and material made any defense
hopeless. That General Brock was able to overcome this spirit of
defeatism is a tribute to his leadership.
The Strategic Pattern
The fundamental strategy was simple enough. The primary undertaking
would be the conquest of Canada. The United States also planned an
immediate naval offensive, whereby a swarm of privateers and the small
Navy would be set loose on the high seas to destroy British commerce.
The old invasion route into Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the
Richelieu River led directly to the most populous and most important part
of the enemy's territory. The capture of Montreal would cut the line of
communications upon which the British defense of Upper Canada
depended, and the fall of that province would then be inevitable. But
this invasion route was near the center of disaffection in the United
States, from which little local support could be expected. The west
where enthusiasm for the war ran high and where the Canadian forces
were weak, offered a safer theater of operations though one with fewer
strategic opportunities. Thus, in violation of the principles of objective
and economy of force, the first assaults were delivered across the
Detroit River and across the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake
Ontario.
The war progressed through three distinct stages. In the first, lasting
until the spring of 1813, England was so hard pressed in Europe that it
could spare neither men nor ships in any great number for the conflict in
North America. The United States was free to take the initiative, to
invade Canada, and to send out cruisers and privateers against enemy
shipping. During the second stage, lasting from early 1813 to the
beginning of 1814, England was able to establish a tight blockade but
still could not materially reinforce the troops in Canada. In this stage the
American Army, having gained experience, won its first successes. The
third stage, in 1814, was marked by the constant arrival in North
America of British Regulars and naval reinforcements, which enabled the
enemy to raid the North American coast almost at will and to take the
offensive in several quarters. At the same time, in this final stage of the
war, American forces fought their best fights and won their most brilliant
victories.
The First Campaigns
The first blows of the war were struck in the Detroit area and at Fort
Michilimackinac. President Madison gave Brig. Gen. William Hull, governor
of the Michigan Territory, command of operations in that area. Hull
arrived at Fort Detroit on July 5, 1812, with a force of about 1,500 Ohio
militiamen and 300 Regulars, which he led across the river into Canada a
week later. (See Map 15 above.) At that time the whole enemy force on
the Detroit frontier amounted to about 150 British Regulars, 300
Canadian militiamen, and some 250 Indians led by Tecumseh. Most of
the enemy were at Fort Malden, about twenty miles south of Detroit, on
the Canadian side of the river. General Hull had been a dashing young
officer in the Revolution, but by this time age and its infirmities had made
him cautious and timid. Instead of moving directly against Fort Malden,
Hull issued a bombastic proclamation to the people of Canada and
stayed at the river landing almost opposite Detroit. He sent out several
small raiding detachments along the Thames and Detroit Rivers, one of
which returned after skirmishing with the British outposts near Fort
Malden. In the meantime General Brock, who was both energetic and
daring, sent a small party of British Regulars, Canadians, and Indians
across the river from Malden to cut General Hull's communications with
Ohio.
By that time Hull was discouraged by the loss of Fort Michilimackinac,
whose sixty defenders had quietly surrendered on July 17 to a small
group of British Regulars supported by a motley force of fur traders and
Indians that, at Brock's suggestion, had swiftly marched from St. Joseph
Island, forty miles to the north. Hull also knew that the enemy in Fort
Maiden had received reinforcements (which he overestimated tenfold)
and feared that Detroit would be completely cut off from its base of
supplies. On August 7 he began to withdraw his force across the river
into Fort Detroit. The last American had scarcely returned before the first
men of Brock's force appeared and began setting up artillery opposite
Detroit. By August IS five guns were in position and opened fire on the
fort, and the next morning Brock led his troops across the river. Before
Brock could launch his assault, the Americans surrendered. Militiamen
were released under parole; Hull and the Regulars were sent as
prisoners to Montreal. Later paroled, Hull returned to face a court-martial
for his conduct of the campaign, was sentenced to be shot, and was
immediately pardoned.
On August 15, the day before the surrender, the small garrison at
distant Fort Dearborn, acting on orders from Hull, had evacuated the
post and started out for Detroit. The column was almost instantly
attacked by a band of Indians who massacred the Americans before
returning to destroy the fort.
With the fall of Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Dearborn, the entire territory
north and west of Ohio fell under enemy control. The settlements in
Indiana lay open to attack, the neighboring Indian tribes hastened to
join the winning side, and the Canadians in the upper province lost
some of the spirit of defeatism with which they had entered the war.
Immediately after taking Detroit, Brock transferred most of his troops to
the Niagara frontier where he faced an American invasion force of 6,500
men. Maj. Gen. Stephen van Rensselaer, the senior American
commander and a New York militiamen, was camped at Lewiston with a
force of goo Regulars and about 2,300 militiamen. Van Rensselaer owed
his appointment not to any active military experience, for he had none,
but to his family's position in New York. Inexperienced as he was in
military art, van Rensselaer at least fought the enemy, which was more
than could be said of the Regular Army commander in the theater, Brig.
Gen. Alexander Smyth. Smyth and his 1,650 Regulars and nearly 400
militiamen were located at Buffalo. The rest of the American force, about
1,300 Regulars, was stationed at Fort Niagara.
Van Rensselaer planned to cross the narrow Niagara River and capture
Queenston and its heights, a towering escarpment that ran
perpendicular to the river south of the town. From this vantage point he
hoped to command the area and eventually drive the British out of the
Niagara peninsula. Smyth, on the other hand, wanted to attack above
the falls, where the low and the current less swift, and he refused to co-
operate with the militia general. With a force ten times that of the British
opposite him, van Rensselaer decided to attack alone. After one attempt
had been called off for lack of oars for the boats, van Rensselaer finally
ordered an attack for the morning of October 13. The assault force
numbered 600 men, roughly half New York militiamen; but several boats
drifted beyond the landing area, and the first echelon to land, numbering
far less than 500, was pinned down for a time on the river bank below
the heights until the men found an unguarded path, clambered to the
summit, and, surprising the enemy, overwhelmed his fortified battery
and drove him down into Queenston.
The Americans repelled a hastily formed counterattack later in the
morning, during which General Brock was killed. This, however, was the
high point of van Rensselaer's fortunes. Although 1,300 men were
successfully ferried across the river under persistent British fire Prom a
fortified battery north of town, less than half of them ever reached the
American line on the heights. Most of the militiamen refused to cross the
river, insisting on their legal right to remain on American soil, and
General Smyth ignored van Rensselaer's request for Regulars.
Meanwhile, British and Canadian reinforcements arrived in Queenston,
and Maj. Gen. Roger Sheave, General Brock's successor, began to
advance on the American position with a force of 800 troops and 300
Indian skirmishers. Van Rensselaer's men, tired and outnumbered, put
up a stiff resistance on the heights but in the end were defeated—300
Americans were killed or wounded and nearly 1,000 were captured.
After the defeat at Queenston, van Rensselaer resigned and was
succeeded by the unreliable Smyth, who spent his time composing windy
proclamations. Disgusted at being marched down to the river on several
occasions only to be marched back to camp again, the new army that
had assembled after the battle of Queenston gradually melted away.
The men who remained lost all sense of discipline, and finally at the end
of November the volunteers were ordered home and the Regulars were
sent into winter quarters. General Smyth's request for leave was hastily
granted, and three months later his name was quietly dropped from the
Army rolls.
Except for minor raids across the frozen St. Lawrence, there was no
further fighting along the New York frontier until the following spring.
During the Niagara campaign the largest force then under arms,
commanded by Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn, had been held in the
neighborhood of Albany, more than 250 miles from the scene of
operations. Dearborn had had a good record in the Revolutionary War
and had served as Jefferson's Secretary of War. Persuaded to accept
the command of the northern theater, except for Hull's forces, he was in
doubt for some time about the extent of his authority over the Niagara
front. When it was clarified he was reluctant to exercise it. Proposing to
move his army, which included seven regiments of Regulars with artillery
and dragoons, against Montreal in conjunction with a simultaneous
operation across the Niagara River, Dearborn was content to wait for his
subordinates to make the first move. When van Rensselaer made his
attempt against Queenston, Dearborn, who was still in the vicinity of
Albany, showed no sign of marching toward Canada. At the beginning of
November he sent a large force north to Plattsburg and announced that
he would personally lead the army into Montreal, but most of his force
got no farther than the border. When his advanced guard was driven
back to the village of Champlain by Canadian militiamen and Indians,
and his Vermont and New York volunteers flatly refused to cross the
border, Dearborn quietly turned around and marched back to Plattsburg,
where he went into winter quarters.
If the land campaigns of 1812 reflected little credit on the Army, the war
at sea brought lasting glory to the infant Navy. Until the end of the year
the American frigates, brigs-of-war, and privateers were able to slip in
and out of harbors and cruise almost at will, and in this period they won
their most brilliant victories. At the same time, American privateers were
picking off English merchant vessels by the hundreds. Having need of
American foodstuffs, Britain was at first willing to take advantage of New
England's opposition to the war by not extending the blockade to the
New England coast, but by the beginning of 1814 it was effectively
blockading the whole coast and had driven most American naval vessels
and privateers off the high seas.
The Second Year, 1813
On land, the objects of the American plan of campaign for 1813 were the
recapture of Detroit and an attack on Canada across Lake Ontario. (See
Map 15 above.) For the Detroit campaign, Madison picked Brig. Gen.
William H. Harrison, governor of the Indian Territory and hero of
Tippecanoe. The difficulties of a winter campaign were tremendous, but
the country demanded action. Harrison therefore started north toward
Lake Erie at the end of October 1812 with some 6,500 men. In January
1813 a sizable detachment, about 1,000, pushed on to Frenchtown, a
small Canadian outpost on the Raisin River twenty-six miles south of
Detroit. There the American commander, Brig. Gen. James Winchester,
positioned his men, their backs to the river with scant natural protection
and their movements severely hampered by deep snow. A slightly larger
force of British Regulars, militiamen, and Indians under Col. Henry
Proctor soundly defeated the Americans, killing over 100 Kentucky
riflemen and capturing approximately 500. The brutal massacre of
wounded American prisoners by their Indian guards made "Remember
the Raisin" the rallying cry of the Northwestern Army, but any plans for
revenge had to be postponed, for Harrison had decided to suspend
operations for the winter. He built Forts Meigs and Stephenson and
posted his army near the Michigan border at the western end of Lake
Erie.
The Ontario campaign was entrusted to General Dearborn, who was
ordered to move his army from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor, where
Commodore Isaac Chauncey had been assembling a fleet. Dearborn was
to move across the lake to capture Kingston and destroy the British
flotilla there, then proceed to York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper
Canada, to capture military stores, and finally he was to co-operate with
a force from Buffalo in seizing the forts on the Canadian side of the
Niagara River.
The American strategy was sound. The capture of Kingston, the only
tenable site for a naval station on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario,
would give the United States control of the lake and, by cutting the
British lines of communications, frustrate enemy plans for operations in
the west. After the fall of Kingston, the operations against York and the
Niagara forts would be simple mopping-up exercises. When the time
came to move, however, Dear" born and Chauncey, hearing a rumor that
the British forces in Kingston had been reinforced, decided to bypass
that objective and attack York first. About 1,700 men were embarked
and sailed up Lake Ontario without incident, arriving off York before
daybreak on April 27. Dearborn, who was in poor health, turned over the
command of the assault to Brig. Gen. Zebulon Pike, the explorer of the
Southwest. The landing, about four miles west of the town, was virtually
unopposed. The British garrison of about 600 men, occupying a
fortification about halfway between the town and the landing, was
overwhelmed after sharp resistance, but just as the Americans were
pushing through the fort toward the town, a powder magazine
exploded, killing or disabling many Americans and a number of British
soldiers. Among those killed was General Pike. Remnants of the garrison
fled toward Kingston, 150 miles to the east. The losses were heavy on
both sides—almost 20 percent of Dearborn's forces had been killed or
wounded. With General Dearborn incapacitated and General Pike dead,
the troops apparently got out of hand. They looted and burned the
public buildings and destroyed the provincial records. After holding the
town for about a week, they recrossed the lake to Niagara to an attack
against the forts on the Canadian side of the Niagara River.
Meanwhile, Sackett's Harbor had been almost stripped of troops for the
raid on York and for reinforcing the army at Fort Niagara. At Kingston,
across the lake, Sir George Prevost, the Governor-General of Canada,
had assembled a force of 800 British Regulars in addition to militia.
Taking advantage of the absence of Chauncey's fleet, which was at the
other end of the lake, Prevost launched an attack on Sackett's Harbor
with his entire force of Regulars on the night of May 26. The town was
defended by about 400 Regulars and approximately 750 militiamen,
under the command of Brig. Gen. Jacob Brown of the New York militia.
Brown posted his men in two lines in front of a fortified battery to cover
a possible landing. Coming ashore under heavy fire the British
nevertheless pressed rapidly forward, routed the first line, and pushed
the second back into the prepared defenses. There the Americans held.
The British then tried two frontal assaults, but were repulsed with heavy
losses. While they were re-forming for a third attack, General Brown
rallied the militia and sent them toward the rear of the enemy's right
flank. This was the turning point. Having suffered serious losses and in
danger of being cut off, the British hurriedly withdrew to their ships.
On the same day that Prevost sailed against Sackett's Harbor, General
Dearborn at the western end of Lake Ontario was invading Canada with
an army of 4,000 men. The operation began with a well-executed and
stubbornly resisted amphibious assault led by Col. Winfield Scott and
Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, USN, with Chauncey's fleet providing
fire support. Outnumbered more than two to one, the British retreated,
abandoning Fort George and Queenston to the Americans. (See Map I6
below) An immediate pursuit might have sealed the victory, but
Dearborn, after occupying Fort George, waited several days and then
sent about 2,000 men after the enemy. The detachment advanced to
within ten miles of the British and camped for the night with slight regard
for security and even less for the enemy's audacity. During the night a
force of about 700 British attacked the camp and thoroughly routed the
Americans. Dearborn withdrew his entire army to Fort George. About two
weeks later, a 500-man detachment ventured fifteen miles outside the
fort and surrendered to a force of British and Indians that was half as
large. After these reverses there was no further action of consequence
on the Niagara front for the remainder of the year. Dearborn, again
incapacitated by illness, resigned his commission in early July. Both
armies were hard hit by disease, and the American forces were further
reduced by the renewal of the war in the west and by an attempt
against Montreal.
MAP 16
Hull's disaster at Detroit in 1812 and Harrison's unsuccessful winter
campaign had clearly shown that any offensive action in that quarter
depended upon first gaining control of Lake Erie. Commander Perry had
been assigned the task of building a fleet and seizing control of the lake.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1813, except for the time he had
joined Dearborn's force, the 27-year-old Perry had been busy at Presque
Isle assembling his fleet, guns, and crews. By the beginning of August
his force was superior to that of the British in every respect except long-
range armament. Sailing up the lake, he anchored in Put-in-Bay, near
the line still held by General Harrison in the vicinity of Forts Meigs and
Stephenson, and there on September 10 Perry met the British Fleet,
defeated it, and gained control of Lake Erie.
As soon as the damage to Perry's ships and the captured British vessels
had been repaired, Harrison embarked his army and sailed against Fort
Malden. A regiment of mounted Kentucky riflemen under Col. Richard M.
Johnson moved along the shore of the lake toward Detroit. Vastly
outnumbered on land and now open to attack from the water, the British
abandoned both Forts Malden and Detroit and retreated eastward.
Leaving a detachment to garrison the forts, Harrison set out after the
enemy with the Kentucky cavalry regiments, five brigades of Kentucky
volunteers, and a part of the 27th Infantry, a force of about 3,500 men.
On October 5 he made contact with the British on the banks of the
Thames River about eighty-five miles from Malden. (See Map 15.) The
enemy numbered about 2,900, of whom about 900 were British Regulars
and the remainder Indians under Tecumseh. Instead of attacking with
infantry in the traditional line-against-line fashion, Harrison ordered a
mounted attack. The maneuver succeeded completely. Unable to
withstand the charging Kentuckians, the British surrendered in droves.
The Indians were routed, and Tecumseh, who had brought so much
trouble to the western frontier, was killed. Among those who
distinguished themselves on that day was Commander Perry, who had
ridden in the front rank of Johnson's charge.
As a result of the victory, which illustrated successful employment of the
principles of offensive and mass, Lake Erie became an American lake.
The Indian confederacy was shattered. The American position on the
Detroit frontier was re-established, a portion of Canadian territory was
brought under American control, and the enemy threat in that sector
was eliminated. There was no further fighting here for the rest of the
war.
The small remnant of the British force that had escaped capture at the
Thames—no more than 250 soldiers and a few Indians—made its way
overland to the head of Lake Ontario. Harrison, after discharging his
Kentucky volunteers and arranging for the defenses of the Michigan
Territory, sailed after it with the remainder of his army. He arrived at the
Niagara frontier at an opportune time, since the American forces in that
theater were being called upon to support a 2-pronged drive against
Montreal.
The expedition against Montreal in the fall of 1813 was one of the worst
fiascoes of the war. It involved a simultaneous drive by two forces: one,
an army of about 4,000 men assembled at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain
under the command of Brig. Gen. Wade Hampton and another, of about
6,000 men under the command of Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson, which was
to attack down the St. Lawrence River from Sackett's Harbor. Hampton
and Wilkinson were scarcely on speaking terms, and there was no one
on the spot to command the two of them. Neither had sufficient strength
to capture Montreal without the other's aid; each lacked confidence in
the other, and both suspected that the War Department was leaving
them in the lurch. At first contact with the British, about halfway down
the Chateaugay River, Hampton retreated and, after falling back all the
way to Plattsburg, resigned from the Army. Wilkinson, after a
detachment of about Mono men was severely mauled in an engagement
just north of Ogdensburg, also abandoned his part of the operation and
followed Hampton into Plattsburg.
In the meantime, during December 1813 the British took advantage of
the weakened state of American forces on the Niagara frontier to
recapture Fort George and to cross the river and take Fort Niagara,
which remained in British hands until the end of the war. Before
evacuating Fort George the Americans had burned the town of Newark
and part of Queenston. In retaliation the British, after assaulting Fort
Niagara with unusual ferocity, loosed their Indian allies on the
surrounding countryside and burned the town of Buffalo and the nearby
village of Black Rock.
During 1813 a new theater of operations opened in the south. Andrew
Jackson, an ardent expansionist and commander of the Tennessee
militia, wrote the Secretary of War that he would "rejoice at the
opportunity of placing the American eagle on the ramparts of Mobile,
Pensacola, and Fort St. Augustine." (See map 17 below) For this purpose
Tennessee had raised a force of 2,000 men to be under Jackson's
command. Congress, after much debate, approved only an expedition
into that part of the gulf coast in dispute between the United States and
Spain, and refused to entrust the venture to the Tennesseans. Just
before he went north to take part in the Montreal expedition, General
Wilkinson led his Regulars into the disputed part of West Florida and,
without meeting any resistance, occupied Mobile, while the Tennessee
army was left cooling its heels in Natchez.
MAP 17
An Indian uprising in that part of the Mississippi Territory soon to
become Alabama saved General Jackson's military career. Inspired by
Tecumseh's earlier successes, the Creek Indians took to the warpath in
the summer of 1813 with a series of outrages culminating in the
massacre of more than 500 men, women, and children at Fort Mims.
Jackson, with characteristic energy, reassembled his army, which had
been dismissed after Congress rejected its service for an attack on
Florida, and moved into the Mississippi Territory. His own energy added
to his problems, for he completely outran his primitive supply system and
dangerously extended his line of communications. The hardships of the
campaign and one near defeat at the hands of the Indians destroyed
any enthusiasm the militia might have had for continuing in service.
Jackson was compelled to entrench at Fort Strother, on the Coosa River,
and remain there for several months until the arrival of a regiment of the
Regular Army gave him the means to deal with the mutinous militia.
At the end of March 1814 he decided that he had sufficient strength for a
decisive blow against the Indians, who had gathered a force of about
goo warriors and many women and children in a fortified camp at the
Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River. Jackson had about 2,000 militia
and volunteers, nearly 600 Regulars, several hundred friendly Indians,
and a few pieces of artillery. The attack was completely successful. A
bayonet charge led by the Regulars routed the Indians, who were
ruthlessly hunted down and all but a hundred or so of the warriors were
killed. "I lament that two or three women and children were killed by
accident," Jackson later reported. The remaining hostile tribes fled into
Spanish territory. As one result of the campaign Jackson was appointed
a major general in the Regular Army. The campaign against the Creeks
had no other effect on the outcome of the war, but for that matter
neither had any of the campaigns in the north.
Fighting also broke out during 1813 along the east coast where a British
fleet blockaded the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays, bottling up the
American frigates Constellation at Norfolk and Adams in the Potomac.
(See map 18 below) Opposed only by small American gunboats, the
British under Admiral Sir John Warren sought "to chastise the Americans
into submission," and at the same time to relieve the pressure on
Prevost's forces in Canada. With a flotilla, which at times numbered
fifteen ships, Rear Adm. Sir George Cockburn, Warren's second-in-
command, roamed the Chesapeake during the spring of 1813, burning
and looting the prosperous countryside. Reinforced in June by 2,600
Regulars, Warren decided to attack Norfolk, its navy yard and the
anchored Constellation providing the tempting targets. Norfolk's
defenses rested chiefly on Craney Island, which guarded the narrow
channel of the Elizabeth River.
The island had a 7-gun fortification and was manned by 580 Regulars
and militia in addition to 150 sailors and marines from the Constellation.
The British planned to land an 800-man force on the mainland and, when
low tide permitted, march onto the island in a flanking movement. As the
tide rose, another 500 men would be rowed across the shoals for a
frontal assault. On June 22 the landing party debarked four miles
northwest of the island, but the flanking move was countered by the
highly accurate marksmanship of the Constellation's gunners and was
forced to pull back. The frontal assault also suffered from well-directed
American fire, which sank three barges and threw the rest into
confusion. After taking 81 casualties, the British sailed off in disorder.
The defenders counted no casualties.
MAP 18
Frustrated at Norfolk, Warren crossed the Roads to Hampton where he
overwhelmed the 450 militia defenders and pillaged the town. A portion
of the fleet remained in the bay for the rest of the year, blockading and
marauding, but the operation was not an unalloyed success. It failed to
cause a diversion of American troops from the northern border and, by
strengthening popular resentment (Cockburn was vilified throughout the
country), helped unite Americans behind the war effort.
The conduct of the war in 1812 and 1813 revealed deficiencies in the
administration of the War Department that would plague the American
cause to the end. In early 1813 Madison replaced his incompetent
Secretary of War William Eustis with John Armstrong, who instituted a
reorganization that eventually resulted in the substitution of younger,
more aggressive field commanders for the aged veterans of the
Revolution. Congress then authorized an expansion of the Army staff to
help the Secretary manage the war. In March it re-created the offices of
Adjutant General, Inspector General, Surgeon, and Apothecary General
and assigned eight topographical Engineers to the staff.
Competent leadership meant little, however, without sufficient logistical
support, and logistics, more than any other factor, determined the
nature of the military campaigns of the war. Lack of transportation was a
major problem. The United States was fighting a war on widely
separated fronts that required moving supplies through a wilderness
where roads had to be built for wagons and packhorses. For this
reason, ammunition and clothing supplies proved inadequate. General
Harrison had to depend on homemade cartridges and clothing from Ohio
townsmen for his northwestern campaign, and General Scott's Regulars
would fight at Chippewa in the gray uniforms of the New York militia.
Winter found the troops without blankets, inadequately housed, and
without forage for their horses. Most important, the subsistence supply
failed so completely that field commanders found it necessary to take
local food procurement virtually into their own hands.
Transportation difficulties accounted for only part of the problem. The
supply system devised in 1812 proved a resounding failure.
Congressional intent notwithstanding, the Quartermaster General had
never assumed accountability for the money and property administered
by his subordinates or administrative control over his deputies in the
south and northwest. Moreover, the functions of his office, never clearly
defined, overlapped those of the Commissary General. In a vain attempt
to unravel the administrative tangle, Congress created the office of
Superintendent General of Military Supplies to keep account of all military
stores and reformed the Quartermaster Department, giving the
Quartermaster General stricter control over his deputies. In practice,
however, the deputies continued to act independently in their own
districts.
Both Congress and the War Department overlooked the greatest need
for reform as the Army continued to rely on contractors for the collection
delivery of rations for the troops. With no centralized direction for
subsistence supply, the inefficient, fraud-racked contract system proved
to be one of the gravest hindrances to military operations throughout
the war.
The Last Year of the War, 1814
After the setbacks at the end of 1813, a lull descended on the northern
frontier. In March 1814 Wilkinson made a foray from Plattsburg with
about 4,000 men and managed to penetrate about eight miles into
Canada before some 200 British and Canadian troops stopped his
advance. It was an even more miserable failure than his attempt of the
preceding fall.
In early 1814 Congress increased the Army to 45 infantry regiments, 4
regiments of riflemen, 3 of artillery, 2 of light dragoons, and 1 of light
artillery. The number of general officers was fixed at 6 major generals
and 16 brigadier generals in addition to the generals created by brevet.
Secretary of War Armstrong promoted Jacob Brown, who had been
commissioned a brigadier general in the Regular Army after his heroic
defense of Sackett's Harbor, to the rank of major general and placed him
in command of the Niagara-Lake Ontario theater. He also promoted the
youthful George Izard to major general and gave him command of the
Lake Champlain frontier. He appointed six new brigadier generals from
the ablest, but not necessarily most senior, colonels in the Regular Army,
among them Winfield Scott, who had distinguished himself at the battle
of Queenston Heights and who was now placed in command at Buffalo.
British control of Lake Ontario, won by dint of feverish naval construction
during the previous winter, obliged the Secretary of War to recommend
operations from Buffalo, but disagreement within the President's cabinet
delayed adoption of a plan until June. Expecting Commodore Chauncey's
naval force at Sackett's Harbor to be strong enough to challenge the
British Fleet, Washington decided upon a co-ordinated attack on the
Niagara peninsula. (See Map I6.) Secretary Armstrong instructed General
Brown to cross the Niagara River in the vicinity of Fort Erie and, after
assaulting the fort, either to move against Fort George and Newark or to
seize and hold a bridge over the Chippewa River, as he saw fit.
Brown accordingly crossed the Niagara River on July 3 with his force of
3,500 men, took Fort Erie, and then advanced toward the Chippewa
River, sixteen miles away. There a smaller British force, including 1,500
Regulars, had gathered to oppose the Americans. General Brown posted
his army in a strong position behind a creek with his right flank resting
on the Niagara River and his left protected by a swamp. In front of the
American position was an open plain, beyond which flowed the
Chippewa River; on the other side of the river were the British.
In celebration of Independence Day, General Scott had promised his
brigade a grand parade on the plain the next day. On July 5 he formed
his troops, numbering about 1,300, but on moving forward discovered
British Regulars who had crossed the river undetected, lined up on the
opposite edge of the plain. Scott ordered his men to charge and the
British advanced to meet them. The two lines approached each other,
alternately stopping to fire and then moving forward, closing the gaps
torn by musketry and artillery fire. They came together first at the flanks,
while about sixty or eighty yards apart at the center. At this point the
British line crumbled and broke. By the time a second brigade sent
forward by General Brown reached the battlefield, the British had
withdrawn across the Chippewa River and were retreating toward
Ancaster, on Lake Ontario. Scott's casualties amounted to 48 killed and
227 wounded; British losses were 137 killed and 304 wounded.
Brown followed the retreating British as far as Queenston, where he
halted to await Commodore Chauncey's fleet. After waiting two weeks
for Chauncey, who failed to co-operate in the campaign, Brown withdrew
to Chippewa. He proposed to strike out to Ancaster by way of a
crossroad known as Lundy's Lane, from which he could reach the
Burlington Heights at the head of Lake Ontario and at the rear of the
British.
Meanwhile the British had drawn reinforcements from York and Kingston,
and more troops were on the way from Lower Canada. Sixteen
thousand British veterans, fresh from Wellington's victories over the
French in Europe, had just arrived in Canada, too late to participate in
the Niagara campaign but in good time to permit the redeployment of
the troops that had been defending the upper St. Lawrence. By the time
General Brown decided to pull back from Queenston, the British force at
Ancaster amounted to about 2,200 men under General Phineas Riall;
another 1,500 British troops were gathered at Fort George and Fort
Niagara at the mouth of the Niagara River. As soon as Brown began his
withdrawal, Riall sent forward about 1,000 men along Lundy's Lane, the
very route by which General Brown intended to advance against
Burlington Heights; another force of more than 600 British moved out
from Fort George and followed Brown along the Queenston road; while a
third enemy force of about 4oo men moved along the American side of
the Niagara River from Fort Niagara. Riall's advance force reached the
junction of Lundy's Lane and the Queenston road on the night of July 24,
the same night that Brown reached Chippewa, about three miles
distant. Concerned lest the British force on the opposite side of the
Niagara cut his line of communications and entirely unaware of Riall's
force at Lundy's Lane, General Brown on July 25 ordered Scott to take
his brigade back along the road toward Queenston in the hope of
drawing back the British force on the other side of the Niagara; but in
the meantime that force had crossed the river and joined Riall's men at
Lundy's Lane. Scott had not gone far when much to his surprise he
discovered himself face-to-face with the enemy.
The ensuing battle, most of which took place after nightfall, was the
hardest fought, most stubbornly contested engagement of the war. For
two hours Scott attacked and repulsed the counterattacks of the
numerically superior British force, which, moreover, had the advantage in
position. Then both sides were reinforced. With Brown's whole
contingent engaged the Americans now had a force equal to that of the
British, about 2,900. They were able to force back the enemy from its
position and capture its artillery. The battle then continued without
material advantage to either side until just before midnight, when
General Brown ordered the exhausted Americans to fall back to their
camp across the Chippewa River. The equally exhausted enemy was
unable to follow. Losses on both sides had been heavy, each side
incurring about 850 casualties. On the American side, both General
Brown and General Scott were severely wounded, Scott so badly that he
saw no further service during the war. On the British side, General Riall
and his superior, General Drummond, who had arrived with the
reinforcements, were wounded, and Riall was taken prisoner.
But [i.e., both] sides claimed Lundy's Lane as a victory, as well they
might; but Brown's invasion of Canada was halted. Commodore
Chauncey, who failed to prevent the British from using Lake Ontario for
supply and reinforcements, contributed to the unfavorable outcome. In
contrast to the splendid co-operation between Harrison and Perry on
Lake Erie, relations between Brown and Chauncey were far from
satisfactory. A few days after the Battle of Lundy's Lane the American
army withdrew to Fort Erie and held this outpost on Canadian soil until
early in November.
Reinforced after Lundy's Lane, the British laid siege to Fort Erie at the
beginning of August but were forced to abandon the effort on
September 21 after heavy losses. Shortly afterward General Izard
arrived with reinforcements from Plattsburg and advanced as far as
Chippewa, where the British were strongly entrenched. After a few
minor skirmishes, he ceased operations for the winter. The works at Fort
Erie were destroyed, and the army withdrew to American soil on
November 5.
During the summer of I8I4 the British had been able to reinforce Canada
and to stage several raids on the American coast. Eastport, Maine, on
Passamaquoddy Bay, and Castine, at the mouth of the Penobscot River,
were occupied without resistance. This operation was something more
than a raid since Eastport lay in disputed territory, and it was no secret
that Britain wanted a rectification of the boundary. No such political
object was attached to British forays in the region of Chesapeake Bay.
(See Map 18.) On August 19 a force of some 4,000 British troops under
Maj. Gen. Robert Ross landed on the Patuxent River and marched on
Washington. At the Battle of Bladensburg, five days later, Ross easily
dispersed 5,000 militia, naval gunners, and Regulars hastily gathered
together to defend the Capital. The British then entered Washington,
burned the Capitol, the White House, and other public buildings, and
returned to their ships.
Baltimore was next on the schedule, but that city had been given time to
prepare its defenses. The land approach was covered by a rather
formidable line of redoubts; the harbor was guarded by Fort McHenry
and blocked by a line of sunken gunboats. On September 13 a spirited
engagement fought by Maryland militia, many of whom had run at
Bladensburg just two weeks before, delayed the invaders and caused
considerable loss, including General Ross, who was killed. When the
fleet failed to reduce Fort McHenry, the assault on the city was called off.
Two days before the attack on Baltimore, the British suffered a much
more serious repulse on Lake Champlain. After the departure of General
Izard for the Niagara front, Brig. Gen. Alexander Macomb had remained
at Plattsburg with a force of about 3,300 men. Supporting this force was
a small fleet under Commodore Thomas Macdonough. Across the border
in Canada was an army of British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars whom
Sir George Prevost was to lead down the route taken by Burgoyne thirty-
seven years before. Moving slowly up the Richelieu River toward Lake
Champlain, he crossed the border and on September 6 arrived before
Plattsburg with about 11,000 men. There he waited for almost a week
until his naval support was ready to join the attack. With militia
reinforcements, Macomb now had about 4,500 men manning a strong
line of redoubts and blockhouses that faced a small river. Macdonough
had anchored his vessels in Plattsburg Bay, out of range of British guns,
but in a position to resist an assault on the American line. On September
11 the British flotilla appeared and Prevost ordered a joint attack. There
was no numerical disparity between the naval forces, but an important
one in the quality of the seamen. Macdonough's ships were manned by
well-trained seamen and gunners, the British ships by hastily recruited
French-Canadian militia and soldiers, with only a sprinkling of regular
seamen. As the enemy vessels came into the bay the wind died, and the
British were exposed to heavy raking fire from Macdonough's long guns.
The British worked their way in, came to anchor, and the two fleets
began slugging at each other, broadside by broadside. At the end the
British commander was dead and his ships battered into submission.
Prevost immediately called off the land attack and withdrew to Canada
the next day.
Macdonough's victory ended the gravest threat that had arisen so far.
More important it gave impetus to peace negotiations then under way.
News of the two setbacks—Baltimore and Plattsburg—reached England
simultaneously, aggravating the war weariness of the British and
bolstering the efforts of the American peace commissioners to obtain
satisfactory terms.
New Orleans: The Final Battle
The progress of the peace negotiations influenced the British to continue
an operation that General Ross, before his repulse and death at
Baltimore, had been instructed to carry out, a descent upon the gulf
coast to capture New Orleans and possibly sever Louisiana from the
United States. (See Map /7.) Major General Sir Edward Pakenham was
sent to America to take command of the expedition. On Christmas Day,
1814, Pakenham arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi to find his
troops disposed on a narrow isthmus below New Orleans between the
Mississippi River and a cypress swamp. They had landed two weeks
earlier at a shallow lagoon some ten miles east of New Orleans and had
already fought one engagement. In this encounter, on December 23,
General Jackson, who had taken command of the defenses on December
I, almost succeeded in cutting off an advance detachment of 2,000
British, but after a 3-hour fight in which casualties on both sides were
heavy, he was compelled to retire behind fortifications covering New
Orleans.
Opposite the British and behind a ditch stretching from the river to the
swamp, Jackson had raised earthworks high enough to require scaling
ladders for an assault. The defenses were manned by about 3,500 men
with another 1,000 in reserve. It was a varied group, composed of the
7th and 44th Infantry Regiments, Major Beale's New Orleans
Sharpshooters, LaCoste and Daquin's battalions of free Negroes, the
Louisiana militia under General David Morgan, a band of Choctaw
Indians, the Baratorian pirates, and a motley battalion of fashionably
dressed sons and brothers of the New Orleans aristocracy. To support
his defenses, Jackson had assembled more than twenty pieces of
artillery, including a battery of nine heavy guns on the opposite bank of
the Mississippi.
After losing an artillery duel to the Americans on January 1, Pakenham
decided on a frontal assault in combination with an attack against the
American troops on the west bank. The main assault was to be delivered
by about 5,300 men, while about boo men under Lt. Col. William
Thornton were to cross the river and clear the west bank. As the British
columns appeared out of the early morning mist on January 8, they were
met with murderous fire, first from the artillery, then from the muskets
and rifles of Jackson's infantry. Achieving mass through firepower, the
Americans mowed the British down by the hundreds. Pakenham and one
other general were killed and a third badly wounded. More than 2,000 of
the British were casualties; the American losses were trifling.
Suddenly, the battle on the west bank became critical. Jackson did not
make adequate preparations to meet the advance there until the British
began their movement, but by then it was too late. The heavy guns of a
battery posted on the west bank were not placed to command an attack
along that side of the river and only about 800 militia, divided in two
groups a mile apart, were in position to oppose Thornton. The Americans
resisted stubbornly, inflicting greater losses than they suffered, but the
British pressed on, routed them, and overran the battery. Had the British
continued their advance Jackson's position would have been critical, but
Pakenham's successor in command, appalled by the repulse of the main
assault, ordered Thornton to withdraw from the west bank and rejoin
the main force. For ten days the shattered remnant of Pakenham's army
remained in camp unmolested by the Americans, then re-embarked and
sailed away.
The British appeared off Mobile on February 8, confirming Jackson's fear
that they planned an attack in that quarter. They overwhelmed Fort
Bowyer, a garrison manned by 360 Regulars at the entrance to Mobile
Harbor. Before they could attack the city itself, word arrived that a treaty
had been signed at Ghent on Christmas Eve, two weeks before the
Battle of New Orleans.
The news of the peace settlement followed so closely on Jackson's
triumph in New Orleans that the war as a whole was popularly regarded
in the United States as a great victory. Yet at best it was a draw.
American strategy had centered on the conquest of Canada and the
harassment of British shipping; but the land campaign failed, and during
most of the war the Navy was bottled up behind a tight British blockade
of the North American coast.
If it favored neither belligerent, the war at least taught the Americans
several lessons. Although the Americans were proud of their reputation
as the world's most expert riflemen, the rifle played only a minor role in
the war. On the other hand, the American soldier displayed unexpected
superiority in gunnery and engineering. Artillery contributed to American
successes at Chippewa, Sackett's Harbor, Norfolk, the siege of Fort Erie,
and New Orleans The war also boosted the reputation of the Corps of
Engineers, a branch which owed its efficiency chiefly to the Military
Academy. Academy graduates completed the fortifications at Fort Erie,
built Fort Meigs, planned the harbor defenses of Norfolk and New York,
and directed the fortifications at Plattsburg. If larger numbers of
infantrymen had been as well trained as the artillerymen and engineers,
the course of the war might have been entirely different.
Sea power played a fundamental role in the war. In the west both
opponents were handicapped in overland communication, but the British
were far more dependent on the Great Lakes for the movement of
troops and supplies for the defense of Upper Canada. In the east, Lake
Champlain was strategically important as an invasion corridor to the
populous areas of both countries. Just as Perry's victory on Lake Erie
decided the outcome of the war in the far west, Macdonough's success
on Lake Champlain decided the fate of the British invasion in 1814 and
helped influence the peace negotiations.
The militia performed as well as the Regular Army. The defeats and
humiliations of the Regular forces during the first years of the war
matched those of the militia, just as in a later period the Kentucky
volunteers at the Thames and the Maryland militia before Baltimore
proved that the state citizen soldier could perform well. The keys to the
militiamen's performance, of course, were training and leadership, the
two areas over which the national government had little control. The
militia, occasionally competent, was never dependable, and in the
nationalistic period that followed the war when the exploits of the
Regulars were justly celebrated, an ardent young Secretary of War, John
Calhoun, would be able to convince Congress and the nation that the
first line of defense should be a standing army.