|
By John Brinckman
“I believe that the
defence of Canada, and the
co-operation of the Indians, depends on the navigation of the
Lakes.”
The Duke of Wellington, in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
secretary for war and the colonies, written at the time of the peace
talks
Commodore Perry
transfers his command from the Lawrence
to the
Niagara
Map of the
Great Lakes at the Time of the War of 1812
After the American Revolution the
grand strategy of Great Britain
was to preserve the peace by establishing an Indian buffer state.
This was to be achieved by defending British
North America
and by encouraging the various Indian nations to form a confederacy
in the west. By acting together these two powers could keep the new
nation in check and peace would be preserved.
Two things were required: A
powerful charismatic Indian chief to bring about the confederacy,
and control of the Great Lakes to enable British North America to arm its ally in the west. In the
early nineteenth century such a chief emerged, Tecumseh, of the Shawnee, whose father,
Chief Pucksinwah, had sided with the British in the American
Revolution. Born in 1768, Tecumseh witnessed the
Shawnee’s village being destroyed five times
between 1774 and 1882 and his people forced into a nomadic life. The
1774 attack was in violation of a recent treaty and in it his father
was murdered by colonials. He devoted his life to war against white
settlers encroaching on Indian land and recognized that to succeed
he needed the British as allies. Despite this enmity he was
respected by Americans as a great chief and today there is a statue
honouring him in Washington. In his youth he had an affair
with an young white woman who perfected his English and interested
him in Shakespeare; his favourite play was Hamlet. His eloquence in
that language awed friend and foe alike. His reputation as a
warrior, his charisma, and
fluency and rhetoric in Indian languages, enabled
him, with the help of his brother, a spiritual leader known as The
Prophet, to form a confederacy of those Indian nations in the
American west who were threatened by American expansion.
Egerton Ryerson in his classic work,
The Loyalists of America and
Their Times, argues convincingly and with evidence that the
schism between Loyalists and Revolutionaries goes back to 1628 with
the arrival of the Puritan Fathers on Massachusetts Bay in the
neighbourhood of what is now Boston. The Pilgrim
Fathers, who he makes clear had different values, had arrived in
1620 on the Mayflower.
From the time of their arrival the Puritans were disloyal to the
king, intolerant of the Church of England, and hostile to the
Indians. In contrast, the Pilgrims were loyal to the crown, tolerant
of other religions, and befriended the Indians.
The Loyalists, who came to
Canada
as refugees, their property confiscated by their neighbours, founded
the English-speaking nation in
Canada. Ryerson himself developed
the system of education still in use in Ontario and adopted by
other provinces. His family, originally Ryerzoon, a Dutch family who
had settled in Manhattan
were all Loyalists, their values close to the Pilgrim Fathers. The
different attitude toward Indians continued long after the War of
1812. Indians were not recognized as people at all by the United States; they did not acquire
citizenship until 1923. As Major Walsh of the
Northwest Mounted Police explained to Sitting Bull at their famous
first meeting in 1876, Indians had rights in Canada, blacks, whites, and Indians
had equal rights under the law. The Indian chief had arrived in Canada with his
band of 5,000 Sioux, following their annihilation of Colonel Custer
and the 7th Cavalry. They were escorted to the border by
the U.S. Cavalry after Canada had
agreed to take them. Sitting Bull was informed that he was now on
Canadian soil where the law is enforced uniformly for people of all
races. “There is no place here for lawless men who think it fun to
shoot and kill Indians,” declared Walsh.
The War of 1812, with the British
and Canadians allied with the Indians on one side and the
U.S.A.
on the other, commenced in Canada
with an unexpected invasion on July 12th and the seizure of Sandwich
across the river from
Detroit. The invasion had been ordered by
President Madison, and was led by General William Hull, Governor of
the Territory
of Michigan. Hull declared that the Americans would breakfast at
Sandwich, lunch at York, and dine in Montreal. But by August
5th Hull was back in Detroit. He had been
unnerved by three events: the capture of the American fort to the
west on the island of Michilimackinac at the head of Lake Michigan,
the departure of their allies, the Wyandot, who lived south of
Detroit for the British side of the river, and an Indian ambush led
by Tecumseh in Michigan that left seventeen American corpses,
mutilated with their scalps on long poles waving in the wind.
Major- General Isaac Brock, commander of
the British and Canadian forces in Upper Canada, who had ordered the
capture of Fort Michilimackinac, which controlled the entrance to
Lake Michigan, before its commander even knew there was a war on,
firmly believed that the best defense was offense, had brought
artillery and hidden it behind a stand of trees across the river
from Detroit. At dawn on August 12th the trees were cut
down and a furious and unexpected artillery bombardment commenced.
Tecumseh and Brock had considerable respect for one another and
were in communication. The Indians had been shadowing
Hull’s forces for weeks on the Michigan side, waiting
for the right moment to attack. And now Tecumseh led the Shawnee and their allies in a circle behind
the town, emerging and then re-entering the forest so that there
appeared to be many more of them than there were. An American
observer was quoted as saying that he thought “he was standing at
the entrance to Hell, with the gates thrown open to let the damned
out for an hour’s recreation on earth!” The Indians were painted,
“some covered with vermilion, others with blue clay, and still
others tattooed in black and white from head to foot.” The sound of
the cannons was almost drowned out by “the howls of the savages.”
Tecumseh had promised Brock there would be no scalping of prisoners
but battle was another matter. Hull was terrified and surrendered to Brock not just the
town of Detroit but the entire
Michigan
territory with its extensive coastline on both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
The British navy ruled the
St. Lawrence River. Lake Ontario
was a standoff: the two navies, the British based in Kingston and the American in Sackett’s
Harbour, NY, never fought one another; each patrolled its side of
the lake. There were occasional raids, notably the American attack
on York, now
Toronto, which had consequences for the
Battle of Lake Erie. The cannon intended for the HMS Detroit, which
was being built in Amherstburg, were seized and carried off. The
British navy controlled Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and,
with a fort on St. Joseph Island, the entrance to Lake
Superior. With the surrender of
Michigan
and the island of Michilimackinac, the eastern shoreline of Lake
Michigan and the entire shoreline of Lake Huron
were now British. With a fort on St. Joseph
Island at the entrance to Lake
Superior, they now in
Wellington’s words controlled ‘the navigation
of the Lakes’.
All this changed with The Battle of
Lake Erie on September 10th 1813. Before the war
a military transport service called Provincial Marine supplied
Amherstburg. It had two brigs, the HMS
Hunter and the HMS
Caledonia, and a sloop,
the HMS Queen Charlotte;
they were not warships and the crews were small and not trained for
battle. The Royal Navy took them over; this small fleet was
headquartered at Fort Malden, outside Amherstburg at the west
end of the lake. A second brig, HMS
Lady Prevost, designed to
be a warship, was under construction there when war broke out, and
in late 1812 construction began on a new much larger HMS Detroit.
Two small vessels, the
Chippewa and the Little
Belt were under construction at
Chatham.
In January, 1813,
this small fleet came under the command of Captain Robert H.
Barclay, who had been born in Scotland in
1768. He had fought under Nelson at Trafalgar, where he lost an arm.
He was a more than competent officer and by all reports he undertook
his new task with energy and determination.
The only
American war ship on Lake Erie at the start of the war, the brig USS
Adams, at Detroit, was not ready for service. She was
taken by the British with the surrender of Detroit, and renamed the HMS Detroit.
She was captured, together with the HMS
Caledonia, in a bold raid
by American sailors and soldiers on the Niagara River on October 9th, 1812. But the
American sailors ran her aground on an island, and rather than let
the British get her back, they set her on fire. The
Caledonia was taken to
the US Navy yard at Black Rock, now part of Buffalo, and joined the schooners
Somers and
Ohio,
and the sloop,
Trippe. These ships were unable to enter Lake
Erie as long as British guns controlled the Niagara River from Fort Erie, but the British abandoned the fort in May 1813.
Master Commander Oliver
Perry, who was to be Captain Barclay’s opponent, was born in Rhode Island in 1784 and
had been at sea since he was eight, serving as a midshipman under
his father, a navy captain. He was the older brother of the famous
Admiral Perry, who opened up Japan to western
trade in 1854. His father had commanded a frigate, with Oliver
on board, in the unofficial naval war with France, 1798 to
1800. He had also had experience working in shipyards. So far in the
war he had been in command of a flotilla of gun boats that defended
the harbour at Providence, R.I., on Narragansett Bay against much larger British warships.
He arrived at Black Rock, N.Y.
in May 1813 with a seasoned crew from Rhode Island, and was now in command of the US Navy on Lake Erie. He had the American fleet that at that time
consisted of five vessels towed by oxen up the river to the lake and
they sailed, with himself in command of the prize brig,
Caledonia, to
Presqu’Isle, now Erie, Pennsylvania,
which had been chosen to be the US Navy base on the lake. President
Madison had ordered the construction of four schooner rigged
gunboats and two brigs. The re-capture of Detroit was a top priority and this required command of Lake Erie. General Harrison was advancing with a large
force but it was necessary for the Americans to take control of Lake
Erie if Detroit was to be
re-captured.
But they had a problem: there was a
sandbar across the entrance to the harbour at Presqu’Isle;
the water was five feet at its deepest point. The ships could not
cross the bar with the cannons aboard. So what they had to do was
float the ships across unarmed and then load and mount the guns,
which could take several days. The British were well aware of
this and Captain Robert Barclay, British commander of the
Lake Erie fleet, kept watch over the harbour and took up
his position there on July 20th. He had with him, the
Queen Charlotte, the
Hunter, and the newly
completed Lady Prevost.
Two smaller vessels, the
Chippewa, and the Little
Belt joined them when they were not transporting supplies from
Long Point to Amherstburg. As long as the British fleet
maintained this position, Perry’s fleet was trapped.
‘For reasons that have
always remained obscure’, to quote from the American History
Magazine website Historynet.com, ‘Barclay sailed out of sight
on July 29 and did not reappear for two days’. But the reason was
known on the Canadian side, as we shall see.
At this
point some observers thought that Barclay should attack but the
decision was reached to go to Amherstburg, wait for the HMS Detroit
to be completed and arm her with guns from the fort there manned by
the fort’s gunners.
Commodore Perry sailed shortly afterwards for the head of the lake
and made an anchorage at Put-in-Bay from where he would make sorties off
Amherstburg challenging the Britsh fleet to come out. General
Harrison with an army of 8,000 men waited on the Miami River not far
from Detroit for Perry to take
control of the lake before attacking. General Proctor in Detroit was falling short
of supplies for which they depended on the fleet.
Captain Barclay had no
alternative than to risk an engagement. HMS Detroit was fitted with
a makeshift assortment of guns from the fort, a far from
satisfactory arrangement. With fifty or sixty seamen without battle
experience, gunners from the fort, and a detachment from the Royal
Newfoundland Regiment aboard as marines, the little fleet of six,
two ships, a brig, two schooners, and a sloop, set out on the 10th
of September. Perry’s fleet, of ten, three brigs, six schooners, and
a sloop, was seen at anchor in Put-in-Bay. It immediately weighed anchor and bore down on
the British fleet. As they did so the wind shifted from the
southwest to the southeast giving the Americans the weather gage.
At a quarter before twelve the Detroit
with its longer guns commenced firing. This was ten minutes
afterwards returned by the enemy, who bore up for close action. The
British concentrated their fire on the Lawrence,
hoping to take Commodore Perry out of the action. Perry made
their task harder by wearing, not a full dress uniform, but the
plain blue jacket of a common sailor. They succeeded in rendering
her unmanageable but Perry surprised everyone by turning her over to
his first lieutenant and setting out on a rowboat with four men for
the Niagara, where
he hoisted his pennant. Soon after Commodore Perry had left the Lawrence,
her colours were struck, but the British, from weakness of their
crews and destruction of their boats, were unable to take possession
of her.
The day seemed to poise in favour of
the British and Commodore Perry even despaired of the victory, when
a sudden breeze revived his hopes, and turned the scale in his
favour. This fortunate commander finding that the
Niagara suffered lightly
in the engagement, made a desperate effort to retrieve the fortune
of the day, and taking advantage of the breeze, shot ahead of the
Lady Prevost, Queen
Charlotte, and Hunter,
raking them with her starboard guns, and engaged the
Detroit, which, being
raked in all directions, soon became unmanageable. The
Niagara then bore around
ahead of the Queen
Charlotte, and hauling up
on starboard tack, engaged that ship, giving at the same time raking
fire with her larboard guns to the
Chippewa and the
Little Belt, while the
smaller vessels, closing to grape and canister distance, maintained
a most destructive fire. This masterly manoeuvre decided the
contest.
Captain Barclay being severely and
dangerously wounded, Captain Finnis, of the
Queen Charlotte, killed,
and every commander and officer second in command either killed or
disabled, the Detroit
and Queen Charlotte,
perfect wrecks, and after a desperate engagement of upwards of three
hours out of ammunition, the British were compelled to surrender. By
this decisive action, the whole of the British Squadron on Lake Erie was captured by the enemy, who now became
masters of the lake. The enemy lost in this action twenty-seven men
killed and ninety-six men wounded. The British lost three officers
and thirty-eight men killed, and nine officers and eighty-five men
wounded.
The prisoner were taken to Fort Sandusky
and treated well. Perry sent his famous message to General
Harrison written on the back of an envelope: “We have met the enemy
and they are ours. Two Ships, two Brigs, one Schooner and One Sloop.
Yours, with greatest respect and esteem O.H.Perry.”
Oliver Perry became
an American hero and had a successful career in the U.S. Navy,
although he was sometimes involved in controversy. In 1819 while
successfully aiding Simon Bolivar to eliminate piracy on the Orinoco
in Venezuela, he
contracted a fatal dose of yellow fever and died at the age of
thirty-four.
Robert Barclay was cleared at
a court martial for his role in the battle but the people of Upper Canada felt that he
was responsible for allowing the American fleet out of Presqu’Ile in
the first place. In his account of the affair, Ryerson, who as a boy
of ten living on the shore of Lake Erie near Long Point would have
heard the guns, wrote, “It was this episode in Captain Barclay's
proceedings which resulted in the loss of British supremacy on Lake
Erie, the loss of his fleet, his own wounding, the death of most of
his officers and sailors, General Proctor's compulsory evacuation of
Detroit and the Michigan territory, his retreat into Canada, his
defeat on the Thames at the Moravian village, involving the loss of
many of his men, with upwards of 100 lndians, including the famous
Chief Tecumseh. We do not desire to dwell upon this dark spot in the
life of Captain Barclay; but the whole mystery is explained in the
Mrs. Amelia Harris's Memoirs of her father and the early settlement
of Long Point.”
She wrote: “When the weather was
too rough for the blockading squadron to remain outside the harbour,
it was too rough for the American fleet to get over the bar;
consequently we felt very safe. This was during the summer of 1813.
During this summer Captain Barclay used to have private information
– not very reliable, as the result proved – of what progress the
ships were making on the stocks. He used occasionally to leave the
blockade and go to Amherstburg and come to Ryerse. The Americans
took note of this, and made their plans and preparations for his
doing so. There was a pretty widow of an officer of some rank in
Amherstburg, who was very anxious to go to
Toronto. Captain Barclay offered her a
passage in his ship and brought her to Ryerse, and then escorted her
to Dr. Rolph's, where he and some of his officers remained to dinner
the following day. When they came in sight of Erie, they saw all the
American fleet riding safely at anchor outside the bar. No one
could have fought more bravely than Captain Barclay. At the same
time, those who knew of his leaving the blockade could not help
feeling that all the disasters of the upper part of the province lay
at his door.”
The British grand strategy for North
America from 1783 until 1815 was for peace to be maintained by a
balance of three powers: British North America, the United States,
and a confederacy of Indian nations. The Indian chiefs in the west
were persuaded of the wisdom of forming a confederacy against
American aggression by the charismatic Tecumseh. But with his death
outside Moravian Town at the Battle of the Thames in Upper
Canada, the confederacy fell apart, and the United States were able
(until the Civil War of 1860-65 the U.S.A. was always referred to in
the plural) to pick the tribes off one by one in the course of the
19th century.
Was this all the result of a
British naval officer’s infatuation for “a pretty widow”?
Probably not. Both
sides claimed victory in the War of 1812: Canada because the
American invasion was successfully repulsed and the U.S.A because of
General Jackson’s decisive defeat of a British army in the south,
which actually took place, unbeknownst to either side, after the
peace treaty had been signed.
The hand that the British held during the peace treaty negotiations
at Ghent in 1814 would have been greatly strengthened had they
continued to control Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan. As it was they conceded Michilimackinac, Fort Niagara,
and eastern Maine in exchange for Amherstburg and
Sandwich. The Napoleonic wars over, supplies and
reinforcements of all kinds, including cannon for the ships, could
have been brought to Detroit, to Amherstburg,
to the fleet, and to all the settlements on the lakes. More ships
could have been built. But one can only suppose that the British
would have come to the same conclusion they did.
When Henry Goulburn, undersecretary for war and the colonies,
brought up the subject of an Indian buffer state, John Quincy Adams,
the chief American negotiator, who ten years later was to become
President of the United States, declared: “To condemn vast
regions of territory to perpetual barrenness and solitude, that a
few hundred savages might find wild beasts to hunt upon, was a
species of game law that a nation descended from Britons would never
endure.”
Goulburn commented afterwards: “It was opposing a feather to a torrent. I
had, till I came here, no idea of the fixed determination which prevails in the
breast of every American to extirpate the Indians and appropriate their
territory.” The British concluded that their grand strategy of three nations
living in peace could not work: There would be no peace unless the British
abandoned their Indian allies to American domination and dispossession. But with
control of the lakes might they not have been more optimistic?
Again, probably not. A recent and excellent documentary made for the
American Public Broadcasting System, interviews contemporary native
scholars, who declare that many of their people today feel betrayed
by the British in the peace settlement. The fact is that neither the
British and Canadians nor the Americans won the War of 1812; the
native peoples lost.
This was the fate of hunter-gatherers world-wide as Jared
Diamond explains in Guns,
Germs and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies. But it was not
just a case of farmers replacing hunter-gatherers in America.
Consider the Nez-Perce: who converted to Christianity, studied the
white man’s ways and emulated them. They farmed their rich land in Oregon. But they were
ordered off it by the U.S. government,
because it was coveted by white settlers, and given a reservation on
poor land elsewhere. This was enforced by the United States Cavalry.
Many of them accepted; those who chose to fight ended up as refugees
in Canada, like the loyalists before them, and after
them, escaped slaves, and those who refused to fight in the war in Viet Nam.
Note to Reader:
The writer has drawn extensively on the following:
The Invasion of Canada by Pierre Berton, Anchor Canada
Flames Across the Border by Pierre Berton, Anchor Canada
The Loyalists of America and Their Times by Egerton Ryerson, Wm. Brigss
The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor, Knopf
Other works have been consulted
|
