1812. BALTIMORE MOBS. 555 condemn in unmeasured terms such as were bad; and asked why in the face of such a record Republicans could rejoice in the destruction of a press at Baltimore. They filled their columns with all the details of the riot, they nicknamed Baltimore Mobtown, and foolishly and unjustly laid all the blame on the administration. In Philadelphia an account of the riot was printed as a hand-bill, and, headed by the words "Madison's Mob," was spread over the city. The Republicans retorted with a long list of Federal misdeeds. Who, it was asked, were the men that insulted Congressman Widgery on the exchange at Boston? Who stoned the house of Benjamin Austin in the same town? Who hustled Judge Turner through the streets of Plymouth? Who sank a privateer at Providence, attacked the United States recruiting officers at Litchfield, mobbed a deputy marshal at Milford, burnt a ship in the custody of the United States at New Haven, and cried out for the sinking of all privateers? What was the politics of the newspaper that graced its columns with crow-bars and ploughshares in battle array, and under them put the words: "To tell you the truth, Southern brethren, we do not intend to live another year under the present national administration." As time went on, the Republicans discovered that something more than a riot had happened. All over the country decent people of both parties were alarmed. The freedom of the press had been attacked. Was this the first step, it was asked, to a state of affairs very much like the reign of terror in France? In New England such feeling found general expression. At a great meeting in Faneuil Hall the people of Boston adopted resolutions strongly condemning mobs and mob violence, expressed the belief that the outrages at Baltimore were of French origin, and the first fruit of the unnatural and dreadful alliance into which the country had entered in fact if not in form.* The members of the Leonidas Fire Society of Newburyport declared that the press should stand or they fall, and that in the late proceedings at Baltimore they beheld another proof of the strange nature of Democratic fire.† The * August 6, 1812. New England Palladium, August 17. True American, August 11, 1812. True American, August 17; Newburyport Herald. Newburyport Herald collected and published those passages of the various State constitutions in which it is asserted that the liberty of the press must be inviolably preserved. The people of Georgetown expressed the opinion that the action of the mob surpassed in atrocity the cruel murder of the German printer Palm by the despots of France.* By this time the war had opened seriously and disastrously in the far Northwest. Keeping the nature of the country in view, General Dearborn drew a plan for an offensive campaign, and sent it to the Secretary of War as early as the middle of May. A main army was to move on Montreal by the road that skirted Champlain, while three corps of militia were to hurry into Canada from Sackett's Harbor, from Niagara, and from Detroit. The plan seemed a good one, was approved, and in time the officers were chosen to carry it out. Commander Thomas Macdonough was ordered to Lake Champlain. Captain Isaac Chauncey was given command of the vessels on Lake Ontario. Dearborn was sent to Albany to make ready the expedition against Montreal. Hull had already been chosen to defend Detroit. Fear of Tecumthe, the hostility of the Indians, the border raids and murders of a year past, had so alarmed the people of Michigan that they called on the Government to defend them. The call was heard, and the Governor of Ohio was asked to detach three regiments of militia and a troop of dragoons and assemble them at Dayton, whence they were to be marched to Detroit. The Fourth Regiment of United States Infantry was next ordered to join the militia at Urbana. Happening just then to be at Washington, Hull was urged to take command. At first he refused, but at last consented, was given the rank of brigadier-general, and on May twenty-fifth joined the troops at Dayton. The condition of the militia there gathered would have disheartened a general who had not commanded the half-clad, half-fed, half-armed soldiers of the Revolution. Some had scarcely a suit of clothes. Only a few had a blanket apiece. The leather of the cartouch-boxes was rotten from old age; * True American; August 14, 1812. 1812. HULL'S MARCH TO DETROIT. 557 the arms were utterly unfit for use; there was no powder save what the men had brought themselves. But Hull was not disheartened and, for the last time in his military career, made a show of energy. Powder was brought from the mills in Kentucky. A few score of blankets were given by the people of Ohio, and when the guns and muskets had been mended by the smiths of Dayton and Cincinnati the little army set out for Detroit. As the troops pushed slowly across the wilderness, putting up block-houses, building rude bridges over the streams and clumsy roads across the swamps, a letter from Washington made known to Hull that war would soon be declared, and bade him hurry on to Detroit and wait for further orders. The letter reached him on the twenty-sixth of June, when he was still some seventy-five miles from Detroit. Leaving his heavy camp equipage where he was, he marched the army with all the speed he could to the Maumee river, and near the present site of Toledo loaded his hospital stores, his intrenching tools, his personal baggage, nay, even a trunk containing his instructions and his muster-rolls on board of a schooner, sent it up the lake, and pushed on rapidly for Detroit. He had every reason to expect that Eustis would see to it that news of war reach him long before it did the British. But he was mistaken, and twenty-four hours later the schooner was captured as she passed by Fort Malden. The British officers knew of the declaration of war on June thirtieth. Hull, however, knew nothing of it till July second, when he was at Frenchtown on the river Raisin. Three days sufficed to traverse the forty miles that lay between Frenchtown and Detroit, where on the ninth a second letter gave him leave to take the offensive, and, if he felt able, cross the strait and march against Fort Malden. This was just what officers and men had been cla:noring for ever since they reached Detroit; and, now that authority had come to do it, Hull gave way. Boats were gathered as quickly as possible, and at dawn on the twelfth he crossed the river and took up his headquarters at Sandwich, a little village on the Canadian side, three miles below Detroit. Before him lay the province of Upper Canada, stretching along our frontier from Detroit to the Ottawa river, and con taining perhaps seventy-five thousand souls. York, or, as we now know it, Toronto, far away on the shores of Lake Ontario, was the capital. Sir George Prevost was Governor-General, and Brigadier-General Isaac Brock military commander. Of all the men in command on either side of the boundary line, Brock was by far the ablest. Nothing which, in such an emergency, could tend to discourage him was wanting. His troops were few and scattered. His people sympathized strongly with the Americans. His Legislature would not give him even a half-hearted support. Yet he overcame all by energy, by decision, by the good use he made of the time wasted by his enemy. In the presence of such a man but one course was open to Hull, and that was to go with all the speed he could to Fort Malden and carry it by storm, for it defended Amherstburgh and commanded the channel through which all ships must pass on their way from Lake Erie to Detroit. But he sat still at Sandwich, intrenched his camp, and issued a proclamation to the people of Canada. Lewis Cass, who commanded a regiment of militia, wrote it, and for bombast, for idle threatening, for vainglory, it is equalled, and only equalled, by the later proclamations of Porter and Smyth. Deluded by its blustering threats and gracious promises, a few militia deserted at Malden, and a few farmers, three hundred and sixty-seven in all, came to the camp at Sandwich. Deluded in turn by these, Hull waited in hope that more would follow, and this waiting proved his ruin. Brock was all activity. Troops were hurried toward Malden. The Indians were aroused. The fears of the people were allayed by a proclamation replying to that of Hull. The refractory legislators were sent home. Orders were despatched to the commander on the island of St. Joseph to seize the fort at Michilimackinaw, and Brock himself took the field. Hull meanwhile was feeling the effects of his sloth and of Brock's energy. No more Canadians came to his camp. Every day something happened to make his situation more desperate and himself more faint-hearted. The Indians cut off his communications with Ohio. The British garrison was strengthened; his officers grew insolent; his troops grew unruly. 1812. SURRENDER OF DETROIT. 559 Michilimackinaw surrendered, and he heard that the victors would soon be down on him from the Northwest. Letters from the officer who commanded the American troops on Niagara river, and from General Porter, who held the post at Black Rock, informed him that boats crowded with English soldiers had crossed Lake Ontario, and that the troops were hurrying on toward Malden. The Wyandots dug up the hatchet, and Hull, fearing for the safety of his base, recrossed the river and fell back to Detroit. There, without the smallest show of resistance, without so much as firing a gun, he surrendered, on the fifteenth of August, 1812. The first reports of the disaster at Detroit were scouted by the Republicans as Federal tricks. One journal plainly called them Federal lies. The Aurora declared they "must be put upon the shelf of imposition." But the post riders soon brought in hand-bills from Albany and Pittsburg so full of details as to leave no doubt. Then the outcry against Hull became savage. The administration, which was alone to blame, gave him up to popular vengeance, and, on charges of treason, of cowardice, of neglect of duty and unofficerlike conduct, he was tried by court-martial. The court convicted him of cowardice and sentenced him to be shot. But Madison most mercifully gave him his life, and, dismissed from the army, he spent the rest of his days in explaining the surrender and seeking to persuade his countrymen that he had been harshly and unjustly used. He was indeed a harshly used man. Not he, but Madison, Eustis, and Dearborn were to blame. Had the administration carried out the plan of attack, had Canada been vigorously invaded at the same moment from Detroit, from Niagara, from Sackett's Harbor, and from about Champlain, Brock could not have concentrated his forces about Malden and Hull would not have been captured at Detroit. Eustis, it is true, had three times written to Dearborn, then at Albany collecting troops and supplies for a northern campaign, urging and entreating him to attack from the Niagara frontier. But Dearborn was slow, and August came before he sent a detach *Eustis to Dearborn, July 20, July 26, and August 1, 1812. Defence of Dearborn, p. 4. |