As Armstrong veered toward Montreal Wilkinson turned decidedly toward Kingston, and wrote the same day to the secretary a letter[239] of remonstrance, closing by a significant remark:—
“Personal considerations would make me prefer a visit to Montreal to the attack of Kingston; but before I abandon this attack, which by my instructions I am ordered to make, it is necessary to my justification that you should by the authority of the President direct the operations of the army under my command particularly against Montreal.”
The hint was strong that Wilkinson believed Armstrong to be trying to evade responsibility, as Armstrong believed Wilkinson to be trying to shirk it. Both insinuations were probably well-founded; neither Armstrong nor Wilkinson expected to capture Kingston, and still less Montreal. Wilkinson plainly said as much at the time. “I speak conjecturally,” he wrote; “but should we surmount every obstacle in descending the river we shall advance upon Montreal ignorant of the force arrayed against us, and in case of misfortune, having no retreat, the army must surrender at discretion.” Armstrong’s conduct was more extraordinary than Wilkinson’s, and could not be believed except on his own evidence. He not only looked for no capture of Montreal, but before writing his letter of October 19 to Wilkinson, he had given orders for preparing winter quarters for the army sixty or eighty miles above Montreal, and did this without informing Wilkinson. In later years he wrote:[240]—
“Suspecting early in October, from the lateness of the season, the inclemency of the weather, and the continued indisposition of the commanding general, that the campaign then in progress would terminate as it did,—‘with the disgrace of doing nothing, but without any material diminution of physical power,’—the Secretary of War, then at Sackett’s Harbor, hastened to direct Major-General Hampton to employ a brigade of militia attached to his command, in constructing as many huts as would be sufficient to cover an army of ten thousand men during the winter.”
The order dated October 16 and addressed to the quartermaster-general,[241] prescribed the cantonment of ten thousand men within the limits of Canada, and plainly indicated the secretary’s expectation that the army could not reach Montreal. In other ways Armstrong showed the same belief more openly.
All the available troops on or near Lake Ontario were concentrated at Sackett’s Harbor about the middle of October, and did not exceed seven thousand effectives, or eight thousand men.[242] “I calculate on six thousand combatants,” wrote Wilkinson after starting,[243] “exclusive of Scott and Randolph, neither of whom will, I fear, be up in season.” The army was divided into four brigades under Generals Boyd, Swartwout, Jacob Brown, and Covington,—the latter a Maryland man, forty-five years old, who entered the service in 1809 as lieutenant-colonel of dragoons. The brigades of Boyd and Covington formed a division commanded by Major-General Morgan Lewis. The second division was intended for Major-General Hampton; a reserve under Colonel Macomb, and a park of artillery under Brigadier-General Moses Porter, completed the organization.[244]
The men were embarked in bateaux, October 17, at Henderson’s Bay, to the westward of Sackett’s Harbor. The weather had been excessively stormy, and continued so. The first resting-point to be reached was Grenadier Island at the entrance of the St. Lawrence, only sixteen or eighteen miles from the starting-point; but the bateaux were dispersed by heavy gales of wind, October 18, 19, and 20, and the last detachments did not reach Grenadier Island until November 3. “All our hopes have been nearly blasted,” wrote Wilkinson October 24; but at length, November 5, the expedition, numbering nearly three hundred boats, having safely entered the river, began the descent from French Creek. That day they moved forty miles, and halted about midnight six miles above Ogdensburg. The next day was consumed in running the flotilla past Ogdensburg under the fire of the British guns at Prescott. The boats floated down by night and the troops marched by land. November 7 the army halted at the White House, about twenty miles below Ogdensburg. There Wilkinson called a council of war, November 8, to consider whether the expedition should proceed. Lewis, Boyd, Brown, and Swartwout voted simply in favor of attacking Montreal. Covington and Porter were of the opinion “that we proceed from this place under great danger, ... but ... we know of no other alternative.”[245]
More than any other cause, Armstrong’s conduct warranted Wilkinson in considering the campaign at an end. If the attack on Montreal was seriously intended, every motive required Armstrong to join Hampton at once in advance of Wilkinson’s expedition. No one knew so well as he the necessity of some authority to interpose between the tempers and pretensions of these two men in case a joint campaign were to be attempted, or to enforce co-operation on either side. Good faith toward Hampton, even more than toward Wilkinson, required that the secretary who had led them into such a situation should not desert them. Yet Armstrong, after waiting till Wilkinson was fairly at Grenadier Island, began to prepare for return to Washington. From the village of Antwerp, half way between Sackett’s Harbor and Ogdensburg, the secretary wrote to Wilkinson, October 27, “Should my fever continue I shall not be able to approach you as I intended.”[246] Three days later he wrote again from Denmark on the road to Albany,—
“I rejoice that your difficulties are so far surmounted as to enable you to say with assurance when you will pass Prescott. I should have met you there; but bad roads, worse weather, and a considerable degree of illness admonished me against receding farther from a point where my engagements call me about the 1st proximo. The resolution of treading back my steps was taken at Antwerp.”[247]
From Albany Armstrong wrote, November 12, for the last time, “in the fulness of my faith that you are in Montreal,”[248] that he had sent orders to Hampton to effect a junction with the river expedition. Such letters and orders, whatever Armstrong meant by them, were certain to impress both Wilkinson and Hampton with a conviction that the secretary intended to throw upon them the whole responsibility for the failure of an expedition which he as well as they knew to be hopeless.