BROCK MONUMENT, QUEENSTON HEIGHTS
The invaders were resting on their arms, snatching a breakfast of biscuit and cheese about midday, when General Sheaffe arrived from Fort George with troops breathless from running. A heart-shattering huzza from the village warned the Americans that help had come, and they were to arms in a second; but Sheaffe had swept round the Heights, Indians on one side of the hill, soldiers on the other, and came on the surprised Americans as from the rear. There was a wild whoop, a dash up the hill, a pause to fire, when the air was splinted by nine hundred instantaneous shots. Then through the smoke the British rushed the Heights at bayonet point. For three hours the contest raged in full sight of Lewiston, a hand-to-hand butchery between Sheaffe's fresh fighters and the Americans, who had been on their feet since midnight. Indian tomahawk played its part, but it is a question if the scalping knife did as deadly work as the grenadier's long bayonets. Cooped up between the enemy and the precipice, the American sharpshooters waited for the help that never came. In vain Van Rensselaer's officers prayed and swore and pleaded with the volunteer troops on the Lewiston side. The men flatly refused to cross; for boat loads of mangled bodies were brought back at each passage. Discipline fell to pieces. It was the old story of volunteers, brave enough at a spurt, going to pieces in panic under hard and continued strain. Driven from Queenston Heights, the invaders fought their way down the cliff path by inches to the water side, and there … there were no boats! Pulling off his white necktie, an officer held it up on the point of his sword as signal of surrender. It was one of the most gallant fights on both sides in Canadian history, though officers over on the Lewiston shore were crying like boys at the sight of nine hundred Americans surrendering.
Truce was then arranged for the burial of the dead. The bodies of Brock and Macdonnell were laid on a gun wagon and conveyed between lines of sorrowing soldiers, with arms reversed, to the burial place outside Fort George. As the regimental music rang out the last march of the two dead officers, minute guns were fired in sympathy all along the American shore. "He would have done as much for us," said the American officers of the gallant Brock.
Van Rensselaer at once resigns. "Proclamation" Smyth, whose addresses resemble Fourth of July backwoods orations, succeeds as commander of the American army; but "Proclamation" Smyth makes such a mess of a raid on Fort Erie, retreating with a haste suggestive of Hull at Detroit, that he is mobbed when he returns to the United States shore. But what the United States lose by land, they retrieve by sea. England's best ships are engaged in the great European war. From June to December, United States vessels sweep the sea; but this is more a story of the English navy than of Canada. The year of 1812 closes with the cruisers of Lake Ontario chasing each other through many a wild snowstorm.
As the year 1812 proved one of jubilant victory for Canada, so 1813 was to be one of black despair. With the exception of four brilliant victories wrested in the very teeth of defeat, the year passes down to history as one of the darkest in the annals of the country. The population of the United States at this time was something over seven millions, and it was not to be thought for one moment that a nation of this strength would remain beaten off the field by the little province of Ontario (Upper Canada), whose population numbered barely ninety thousand. General Harrison hurries north from the Wabash with from six to eight thousand men to retrieve the defeat of Detroit. At Presqu' Isle, on Lake Erie, hammer and mallet and forging iron are heard all winter preparing the fleet for Commodore Perry that is to command Lake Erie and the Upper Lakes for the Americans. At Sackett's Harbor similar preparations are under way on a fleet for Chauncey to sweep the English from Lake Ontario; and all along both sides of the St. Lawrence, as winter hedged the waters with ice, lurk scouts,—the Americans, for the most part, uniformed in blue, the Canadians in Lincoln green with gold braid,—watching chance for raid and counter raid during the winter nights. The story of these thrilling raids will probably pass into the shadowy realm of legend handed down from father to son, for few of them have been embodied in the official reports.
From being hard pressed on the defensive, Canada has suddenly sprung into the position of jubilant victor, and if Brock had lived, she would probably have followed up her victories by aggressive invasion of the enemy's territory; but all effort was literally paralyzed by the timidity and vacillation of the governor general, Sir George Prevost. Prevost's one idea seems to have been that as soon as the obnoxious embargo laws were revoked by England, the war would stop. When the embargo was revoked and the armistice of midsummer simply terminated in a resumption of war, this idea seems to have been succeeded by the single aim to hold off conclusions with the United States till England could beat Napoleon and come to the rescue. All winter long scouts and bold spirits among the volunteers craved the chance to raid the anchored fleets of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, but Prevost not only forbade the invasion of the enemy's territory, but before the year was out actually advocated the abandonment of Ontario. If his advice had been followed, it is no idle supposition to infer that the fate of Ontario would have been the same as the destiny of the Ohio and Michigan.
One night in February the sentry at the village of Brockville, named after the dead hero, was surprised by two hundred American raiders dashing up from the frozen river bed. Before bugles could sound to arms, jails had been opened, stores looted, houses plundered, and the raiders were off and well away with fifty-two prisoners and a dozen sleigh loads of provisions. Gathering some five hundred men together from the Kingston region, M'Donnell and Jenkins of the Glengarrys prepared to be revenged. Cannon were hauled out on the river from the little village of Prescott to cross the ice to Ogdensburg. The river here is almost two miles wide, and as it was the 23d of February, the ice had become rotten from the sun glare of the coming spring. As the cannon were drawn to mid-river, though it was seven in the morning, the ice began to heave and crack with dire warning. To hesitate was death; to go back as dangerous as to go forward. With a whoop the men broke from quick march to a run, unsheathing musket and fixing bayonet blades as they dashed ahead to be met with a withering cross fire as they came within range of the American batteries. In places, the suck of the water told where the ice had given behind. Then bullets were peppering the river bed in a rain of fire, Jenkins and M'Donnell to the fore, waving their swords. Then bombs began to ricochet over the ice. If the range of the Ogdensburg cannon had been longer, the whole Canadian force might have been sunk in mid-river; but the men were already dashing up the American shore whooping like fiends incarnate. First a grapeshot caught Jenkins' left arm, and it hung in bloody splinters. Then a second shot took off his right arm. Still he dashed forward, cheering his men, till he dropped in his tracks, faint from loss of blood. No answer came back to the summons to surrender, and, taking possession of an outer battery, the Canadians turned its cannon full on the village. Under cover of the battery fire, and their own cannon now in position, the whole force of Canadians immediately rushed the town at bayonet point. Now the bayonet in a solid phalanx of five hundred men is not a pleasant weapon to stand up against. As the drill sergeants order, you not only stick the bayonet into your enemy, but you turn it round "to let the air in" so he will die; and before the furious onslaught of bayonets, the defenders of Ogdensburg broke, and fled for the woods. Within an hour the Canadians had burnt the barracks, set fire to two schooners iced up, and come off with loot of a dozen cannon, stores of all sorts, and with prisoners to the number of seventy-four.