Patriotic Fire by Winston Groom Read Free Book Online

saw the dead and wounded soldiers being returned in boats from the site of the battle. With no apparent shame, they piously invoked a clause in their original enlistment contracts with their various states, claiming that as militia they were not authorized to fight outside U.S. territory. Thus the campaign failed entirely, and the remainder of the American soldiers who had at least clawed their way to the British side of the river were captured.
    Van Rensselaer resigned and his command was given over to General Alexander Smyth, who did no better, and probably worse. Instead of attacking immediately, he cravenly took a vote of his officers on the question of assaulting the British-held Fort Erie just to the south; when they demurred, Smyth canceled operations and slunk back to his native Virginia (taking “back roads,” according to one historian), where he was cashiered from the army. So concluded Operation Niagara.
    Next came the assault against Montreal, which was planned as the prize pearl of U.S. military strategy. To lead this vital mission the secretary of war resurrected yet another Revolutionary War retread, Henry Dearborn, who himself had been secretary of war in the Jefferson administration. Old and fat at sixty-one, Dearborn was also agonizingly slow. He dithered away the summer fooling with coastal forts in New England and complaining to Washington that he couldn’t find enough troops for the invasion. Finally, in November, just before the Canadian winter set in, the War Department found it necessary to
order
the newly promoted major general to march his army north and strike at Montreal. With about 8,000 troops, Dearborn moved from Albany up to the shores of Lake Champlain and thence into Canada, where his army—or at least part of it, the militia again refusing to leave American soil—engaged in a desultory and unsatisfactory nighttime fight with a British force about half its size. After this puny effort Dearborn marched them back south again, his mission a failure and a disgrace. Ironically, Dearborn later sat on the court-martial board that sentenced the unfortunate General Hull to death for the Detroit fiasco.
    The Federalist press naturally had a field day with all this bad news, especially in populous New England, where antiwar sentiments ran high and a movement was already afoot to end the fighting. Gloomy expressions were thrown about in the press: “degrading,” “dismal perfidy,” “ruin and death,” “abysmal misfortunes,” and the like—perhaps somewhat extreme, but in truth much of the criticism stuck. Results of the 1812 campaign along the Canadian border running from New York to Michigan had left the Americans with nothing to show but a cataract of inglorious defeats that rendered the British stronger than ever, not only still holding Canada but comfortably ensconced on United States soil. With that disgraceful situation to contemplate, the U.S. Army retired to winter quarters, praying for better fortunes in the spring of 1813.
    T he American campaign of 1813 opened along the lines of the previous year, with attacks again planned along the Canadian border, except this time they were designed more to drive the British back into Canada than to actually conquer Canada itself, as had originally been intended.
    Over the winter Madison replaced his incompetent secretary of war, William Eustis, with an even worse choice, New Yorker John Armstrong, a political waffler and intriguer who, during the Revolution, had conspired to oust George Washington and incite mutiny among the Continental Army by secretly authoring an infamous correspondence known as the Newburgh Letters. Armstrong liked no one in the present administration (including Madison), and no one liked him either. About the only thing that might be said in his favor was that, unlike his predecessor, who was a mere politician, Armstrong at least had some genuine military service under his belt. But as the months moved on it became