WILLIAM HULL
Upper Canada or Ontario has not four hundred soldiers from Kingston to Detroit River; but Major General Isaac Brock calls for volunteers. The clang of arms, of drill, of target practice, resounds in every hamlet through Canada. At Kingston, at Toronto, at Fort George (Niagara), at Erie where Niagara River comes from the lake, at Amherstburg, southeast of Detroit, are stationed garrisons to repel invasion, with hastily erected cannon and mortar commanding approach from the American side. And invasion comes soon enough. The declaration of war became known in Canada about the 20th of June. By July 3 General Hull of Michigan is at Detroit with two thousand five hundred men preparing to sweep western Ontario. July 3 an English schooner captures Hull's provision boat coming up Detroit River, but Hull crosses with his army on July 12 to Sandwich, opposite Detroit, and issues proclamation calling on the people to throw off the yoke of English rule. How such an invitation fell on United Empire Loyalist ears may be guessed. Meanwhile comes word that the Northwest Company's voyageurs, with four hundred Indians, have captured Michilimackinac without a blow. The fall of Michilimackinac, the failure of the Canadians to rally to his flag, the loss of his provision boat, dampen Hull's ardor so that on August 8 he moves back with his troops to Detroit. Eight days later comes Brock from Niagara with five hundred Loyalists and one thousand Indians under the great chief Tecumseh to join Procter's garrison of six hundred at Amherstburg. The Canadians have come by open boat up Lake Erie from Niagara through furious rains; but they are fighting for their homes, and with eager enthusiasm follow Brock on up Detroit River to Sandwich, opposite the American fort. Indians come by night and lie in ambush south of Detroit to protect the Canadians while they cross the river. Then the cannon on the Canadian side begin a humming of bombs overhead. While the bombs play over the stream at Sandwich, Brock rushes thirteen hundred men across the river south of Detroit, and before midday of August 16 is marching his men through the woods to assault the fort, when he is met by an officer carrying out the white flag of surrender. While Brock was crossing the river, something had happened inside the fort at Detroit. It was one of those curious cases of blind panic when only the iron grip of a strong man can hold demoralized forces in hand. The American officers had sat down to breakfast in the mess room at day dawn, when a bomb plunged through the roof killing four on the spot and spattering the walls with the blood of the mangled bodies. Disgraceful stories are told of Hull's conduct. Ashy with fright and trembling, he dashed from the room, and, before the other officers knew what he was about, had offered to surrender his army, twenty-five hundred arms, thirty-three cannon, an armed brig, and the whole state of Michigan. The case is probably more an example of nervous hysterics than treason, though the other American officers broke their swords with rage and chagrin, declaring they had been sold for a price. It was but the first of the many times the lesson was taught in this war, that however well intentioned a volunteer's courage may be, it takes a seasoned man to make war. Ten minutes later, a boy had climbed the flagstaff and hung out the English flag over Detroit. Of the captured American army Brock permitted the volunteer privates to go home on parole. The regulars, including Hull, were carried back prisoners on the boats to Niagara, to be forwarded to Montreal. At Montreal, Hull was given back to the Americans in exchange for thirty British prisoners. He was sentenced by court-martial to be shot for treason and cowardice, but the sentence was commuted.
MAP SHOWING THE LOCATION OF THE MILITARY OPERATIONS ON THE DETROIT RIVER
At Niagara River, where the main troops of Ontario were centered, Brock's victory was greeted with simply a madness of joy. From the first it had been plain that the principal fighting in Ontario would take place at Niagara, and along the river Brock had concentrated some sixteen hundred volunteer troops, raw farm hands most of them, with a goodly proportion of descendants from the United Empire Loyalists, who had furbished out their fathers' swords. But the army was in rags and tatters; many men had no shoes; before Brock captured the guns at Detroit there had not been muskets to go round the men, and there were not cannon enough to mount the batteries cast up along Niagara River facing the American defenses. As the boats came down Lake Erie and disembarked the American prisoners on August 24, at Fort Erie on the Canadian side, opposite Black Rock and Buffalo, wild yells of jubilation rent the air. By nightfall every camp on the Canadian side for the whole forty miles of Niagara River's course echoed to shout and counter shout, and a wild refrain which some poet of the haversack had composed on the spot:
We 'll subdue the mighty Democrats and pull their dwellings down,
And have the States inhabited with subjects of the Crown.
Take a survey of the Niagara region. South is Lake Erie, north is Lake Ontario, between them Niagara River flowing almost straight north through a steep dark gorge hewn out of the solid rock by the living waters of all the Upper Lakes, crushed and cramped, carving a turbulent way through this narrow canyon. Midway in the river's course the blue waters begin to race. The race becomes a dizzy madness of blurred, whirling, raging waters. Then there is the leap, the plunge, the shattering anger of inland seas hurling their strength over the sheer precipice in resistless force. Then the foaming whirlpool below, and the shadowy gorge, and the undercurrent eddying away in the swift-flowing waters of the river coming out on Lake Ontario. On one side are the Canadian forts, on the other the American, slab-walled all of them, with scarcely a stone foundation except in bastions used as powder magazines. Fort Erie on the Canadian side faces Buffalo and Black Rock on the American side. Where the old French voyageurs used to portage past the Falls, about halfway on the Canadian side south of the precipice, is the village of Chippewa. Here Brock has stationed a garrison with cannon. Then halfway between the Falls and Lake Ontario are high cliffs known as Queenston Heights, in plain view of the American town of Lewiston on the other side. Cannon line the river cliffs on both sides here. All about Lewiston the fields are literally white with the tents of General Van Rensselaer's army, now grown from twenty-five hundred to almost eight thousand. On the Canadian side cannon had been mounted on the cliffs known as Queenston Heights. Possibly because the two hundred men would make poor showing in tents, Brock has his soldiers here take quarters in the farmhouses. For the rest it is such a rural scene as one may witness any midsummer,—rolling yellow wheat fields surrounded by the zigzag rail fences, with square farmhouses of stone and the fields invariably backed by the uncleared bush land. Six miles farther down the river, where the waters join Lake Ontario, is the English post, Fort George, near the old capital, Newark, and just opposite the American fort of Niagara. With the exception of the Grand Island region on the river, it may be said that both armies are in full view of each other. Sometimes, when to the tramp—tramp—tramp of the sentry's tread a loud "All's well" echoes across the river from Lewiston to the Canadian side, some wag at Queenston will take up the cry through the dark and bawl back, "All's well here too"; and all night long the two sentries bawl back and forward to each other through the dark. Sometimes, too, though strictest orders are issued against such ruffian warfare by both Van Rensselaer and Brock, the sentries chance shots at each other through the dark. Drums beat reveillé at four in the morning, and the rub-a-dub-dub of Queenston Heights is echoed by rat-tat-too of Lewiston, though river mist hides the armies from each other in the morning. Iron baskets filled with oiled bark are used as telegraph signals, and one may guess how, when the light flared up of a night on the Canadian heights, scouts carried word to the officers on the American side. One may guess, too, the effect on Van Rensselaer's big untrained army, when, with the sun aglint on scarlet uniform, they saw their fellow-countrymen of Detroit marched prisoners between British lines along the heights of Queenston opposite Lewiston. Rage, depression, shame, knew no bounds; and the army was unable to vent anger in heroic attack, for England had repealed her embargo laws, and when Brock came back from Detroit he found that an armistice had been arranged, and both sides had been ordered to suspend hostilities till instructions came from the governments. The truce, it may be added, was only an excuse to enable both sides to complete preparations for the war. In a few weeks ball and bomb were again singing their shrill songs in mid-air.