General Smyth then called a council of war, shifted the responsibility from his own shoulders, and decided to delay the invasion. Again he changed his mind and ordered the men into the boats two days later. Fifteen hundred men answered the summons. Again the general marched them ashore after another council of war, and then and there he abandoned his personal conquest of Canada. His army literally melted away, "about four thousand men without order or restraint discharging their muskets in every direction," writes an eyewitness. They riddled the general's tent with bullets by way of expressing their opinion of him, and he left the camp not more than two leaps ahead of his earnest troops. He requested permission to visit his family, after the newspapers had branded him as a coward, and the visit became permanent. His name was dropped from the army rolls without the formality of an inquiry. It seemed rather too much for the country to bear that, in the first year of the war, its armies should have suffered from the failures of Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smyth.
It had been hoped that General Dearborn might carry out his own idea of an operation against Montreal at the same time as the Niagara campaign was in progress. On the shore of Lake Champlain, Dearborn was in command of the largest and most promising force under the American flag, including seven regiments of the regular army. Taking personal charge at Plattsburg, he marched this body of troops twenty miles in the direction of the Canadian border. Here the militia refused to go on, and he marched back again after four days in the field. Beset with rheumatism and low spirits, he wrote to the Secretary of War: "I had anticipated disappointment and misfortune in the commencement of the war, but I did by no means apprehend such a deficiency of regular troops and such a series of disasters as we have witnessed." Coupled with this complaint was the request that he might be allowed "to retire to the shades of private life and remain a mere but interested spectator of passing events."
The Government, however, was not yet ready to release Major General Dearborn but instructed him to organize an offensive which should obtain control of the St. Lawrence River and thereby cut communication between Upper and Lower Canada. This was the pet plan of Armstrong when he became Secretary of War, and as soon as was possible he set the military machinery in motion. In February, 1813, Armstrong told Dearborn to assemble four thousand men at Sackett's Harbor, on Lake Ontario, and three thousand at Buffalo. The larger force was to cross the lake in the spring, protected by Chauncey's fleet, capture the important naval station of Kingston, then attack York (Toronto), and finally join the corps at Buffalo for another operation against the British on the Niagara River. But Dearborn was not eager for the enterprise. He explained that he lacked sufficient strength for an operation against Kingston. With the support of Commodore Chauncey he proposed a different offensive which should be aimed first against York, then against Niagara, and finally against Kingston. This proposal reversed Armstrong's programme, and he permitted it to sway his decision. Thus the war turned westward from the St. Lawrence.
The only apparent success in this campaign occurred at York, the capital of Upper Canada, where on the 27th of April one ship under construction was burned and another captured after the small British garrison had been driven inland. The public buildings were also destroyed by fire, though Dearborn protested that this was done against his orders. In the next year, however, the enemy retaliated by burning the Capitol at Washington. The fighting at York was bloody, and the American forces counted a fifth killed or wounded. They remained on the Canadian side only ten days and then returned to disembark at Niagara. Here Dearborn fell ill, and his chief of staff, Colonel Winfield Scott, was left in virtual control of the army.
In May, 1813, most of the troops at Plattsburg and Sackett's Harbor were moved to the Niagara region for the purpose of a grand movement to take Fort George, at the mouth of that river, from the rear and thus redeem the failure of the preceding campaign. Commodore Chauncey with his Ontario fleet was prepared to cooperate and to transport the troops. Three American brigadiers, Boyd, Winder, and Chandler, effected a landing in handsome fashion, while Winfield Scott led an advance division. Under cover of the ships they proceeded along the beach and turned the right flank of the British defenses. Fort George was evacuated, but most of the force escaped and made their way to Queenston, whence they continued to retreat westward along the shore of Lake Ontario. Vincent, the British general, reported his losses in killed and wounded and missing as three hundred and fifty-six. The Americans suffered far less. It was a clean-cut, workmanlike operation, and, according to an observer, "Winfield Scott fought nine-tenths of the battle." But the chief aim had been to destroy the British force, and in this the adventure failed.
General Dearborn was not at all reconciled to letting the garrison of Fort George get clean away from him, and he therefore sent General Winder in pursuit with a thousand men. These were reinforced by as many more; and together they followed the trail of the retreating British to Stony Creek and camped there for the night. Vincent and his sixteen hundred British regulars were in bivouac ten miles beyond. The mishap at Fort George had by no means knocked the fight out of them. Vincent himself led six hundred men back in the middle of a black night (the 6th of June) and fell upon the American camp. A confused battle followed. The two forces intermingled in cursing, stabbing, swirling groups. The American generals, Chandler and Winder, walked straight into the enemy's arms and were captured. The British broke through and took the American batteries but failed to keep them. At length both parties retired, badly punished. The Americans had lost all ardor for pursuit and on the following day retreated ten miles and were soon ordered to return to Fort George.
General Dearborn was much distressed by this unlucky episode and was in such feeble health that he again begged to be relieved. He was, he said, "so reduced in strength as to be incapable of any command." General Morgan Lewis took temporary command at Niagara, but, being soon called to Sackett's Harbor, he was succeeded by General Boyd, whom Lewis was kind enough to describe, by way of recommendation, in these terms: "A compound of ignorance, vanity, and petulance, with nothing to recommend him but that species of bravery in the field which is vaporing, boisterous, stifling reflection, blinding observation, and better adapted to the bully than the soldier."
In order to live up to this encomium, Boyd sent Colonel Boerstler on the 24th of June, with four hundred infantry and two guns, to bombard and take an annoying stone house a day's march from Fort George. But two hundred hostile Indians so alarmed Boerstler that he attempted to retreat. Thirty hostile militia then caused him to halt the retreat and send for reinforcements. The reinforcements came to the number of a hundred and fifty, but the British also appeared with forty-seven more men. Colonel Boerstler thereupon surrendered his total of five hundred and forty soldiers. General Dearborn, still the nominal commander of the forces, sadly mentioned the disaster as "an unfortunate and unaccountable event."
There is a better account to be given, however, of events at Sackett's Harbor in this same month of May. The operations on the Niagara front had stripped this American naval base of troops and of the protection of Chauncey's fleet. Sir George Prevost, the Governor in Chief of Canada, could not let the opportunity slip, although he was not notable for energy. He embarked with a force of regulars, eight hundred men, on Sir James Yeo's ships at Kingston and sailed across Lake Ontario.
Sackett's Harbor was defended by only four hundred regulars of several regiments and about two hundred and fifty militia from Albany. Couriers rode through the countryside as soon as the British ships were sighted, and several hundred volunteers came straggling in from farm and shop and mill. In them was something of the old spirit of Lexington and Bunker Hill, and to lead them there was a real man and a soldier with his two feet under him, Jacob Brown, a brigadier general of the state militia, who consented to act in the emergency. He knew what to do and how to communicate to his men his own unshaken courage. On the beach of the beautiful little harbor he posted five hundred of his militia and volunteers to hamper the British landing. His second line was composed of regulars. In rear were the forts with the guns manned.