"Portrait of Major-General Brock, 18 x 6"
CHAPTER XXIII.
"HERO, DEFENDER, SAVIOUR."
General Sheaffe, the only field officer available, and junior colonel of the 49th, of whom the reader has already heard, had been brought from the East to take command at Niagara in Brock's absence. Like Prevost, he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1763, a son of the deputy collector of that port. There the two had been school-fellows, and both found it difficult to engage in vigorous diplomatic or military conflict with the Americans. To Sheaffe's credit, it should be said that he applied for another station.
It was Sheaffe, however, who acceded to General Dearborn's specious demand that the freedom of the lakes and rivers be extended to the United States Government during the armistice. This was done while Brock was in the West. Sheaffe it also was who, with hat in hand and strange alacrity, later agreed, despite his first terrible blunder, to repeat the offence. On the very afternoon that the British defeated the Americans at Queenston, and when the moral effect of that victory, followed up by vigorous attack, would have saved Canada from a continuance of the war, and deplorable loss of life and trade, Sheaffe actually agreed to another armistice. For this second truce, like his first, "no valid reason, military or civil, has ever been assigned." As far as the British were concerned, neither of these two was necessary, but, on the contrary, directly to their disadvantage. Isaac Brock, alas! was not made in duplicate.