1812 by Walter R. Borneman

Author:Walter R. Borneman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061835728
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-03-15T21:00:00+00:00

But Wilkinson’s descent downriver toward Montreal proved short-lived. Reaching the mouth of the Salmon River just below Cornwall and now well aware that Wade Hampton’s force was not moving to join him, Wilkinson turned south and went into a winter camp at French Mills on the U.S.–Canadian border. It was to prove a miserable place for any soldier unlucky enough to spend time there. Any attacks that Wilkinson launched from French Mills were purely verbal, designed to place any and all blame for the failed campaign on Hampton. On November 17 Wilkinson wrote Armstrong expressing “amazement and chagrin” at Hampton’s conduct and asserting that the “game was in view, and had he [Hampton] performed the junction directed, would have been ours in eight or ten days.”25

While Armstrong, Wilkinson, and Hampton engaged in a series of letters and intrigue designed to place the blame for another failure to capture Montreal on anyone besides themselves, the New York Gazette cut to the core of the matter with a little poem:

What fear we, the Canadians cry,

What dread have we from these alarms?

For sure, no danger now is nigh,

’Tis only Wilkinson in arms.26

Just when it looked as if things could not get any worse, the end of 1813 brought cataclysmic news from the Niagara frontier. Left by Winfield Scott to garrison Fort George, New York militia general George McClure found himself with fewer than 250 men by December. He took it upon himself to abandon the hard-won post and retreat across the river to Fort Niagara on the American side. As he did so, he also ordered the burning of the nearby Canadian village of Newark. In a blinding snowstorm and amid bitter cold, its inhabitants were put out in the streets, among them many widows and wives with small children.

Nine-year-old John Rogers watched his mother carry her cherished mantelpiece out into the street moments before their house went up in flames. Mrs. William Dickson lay ill in her bed, but was carried out, bed and all, and tossed in the snow while the thousand books of her husband’s library—arguably one of the finest in Upper Canada—were turned to ashes. Mrs. Alex McKee managed to save only one item, a large tea tray that she tried to use as a sled to keep her young daughter’s feet from the freezing snow—to no avail.

In all, ninety-eight houses burned that night, almost the entire town of Newark. It was hard to say who were more dazed, the four hundred refugees fleeing the town or the British troops and Canadian militia arriving on the scene. They would remember this. This was much different from the government buildings the Americans had torched at York the previous spring. This was personal. The revenge would be personal as well, and would burn far longer than the flames of Newark, not only across the river to Buffalo, but also all the way to Washington the following year.27

The first revenge was quick in coming. Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond had assumed command of

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