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relating to his plan of campaign and the rolls of his troops. Soon after his arrival at Detroit, Hull got orders from Washington to invade Canada (July 9), and three days later he crossed the Detroit River, with a pompous and threatening proclamation, to lay siege to the British post of Malden. But the march through the Ohio wilderness seems to have exhausted Hull's energy. He pottered around Malden, while his own soldiers grew disgusted and his adversary, General Isaac Brock, collected reënforcements on the northern shore of Lake Erie. As the British controlled the lake, Hull's only hope lay in a rapid and complete victory over the garrison at Malden before help could arrive. Without support from the American armies to the eastward, and separated by two hundred miles from a base of supplies to the southward, he was in a trap. When he heard that the American garrison at Mackinaw had surrendered and that British reënforcements were on the way to Malden from the east, he hastily abandoned the siege and recrossed the river to Detroit. Even when back in the fort with plenty of ammunition and over 1000 effective defenders, Hull failed to regain his courage. He sank into a mood of apathy and dejection, brooding over the imaginary picture of Indian hordes descending on Detroit with torch and tomahawk. When Brock, with only 700 men, crossed over to the American side of the Detroit River (August 16) and prepared to assault the fort, he was astonished to see a messenger approaching his lines with a white flag. Hull surrendered the fort and his entire army without striking a blow. The fall of Detroit meant the loss of the entire Northwest.1 The American military frontier receded at once from the Mississippi to the Wabash, and the American army marched through Upper Canada as prisoners of war and not as conquering heroes. General Hull was tried by court-martial, found guilty of cowardice, and condemned to be shot. But President Madison pardoned him on account of his services in the Revolutionand his gray hairs.

1The day before Hull's surrender, and by his order, Fort Dearborn at the foot of Lake Michigan was evacuated. The garrison was massacred by the Indians in the process.

The success of the plan for the invasion of Canada depended on the coöperation of the armies at both ends of Lake Erie and on the St. Lawrence. But there was no agreement between the administration at Washington and the senior major general. Dearborn, who should have been operating at Niagara to support Hull by preventing the British from transporting reënforcements up Lake Erie to Malden, was at Boston on the day of Hull's surrender, debating with himself whether he had better stay on the Atlantic seaboard or go to the Lakes. He had ordered a suspension of hostilities in order that a plan of armistice, suggested by the British when the news of the repeal of the Orders in Council reached America, might be discussed. When operations were renewed on the Niagara River, Hull's fate was already sealed, and Brock's forces were released for service at the eastern end of Lake Erie. There General Stephen Van Rensselaer of the New York militia and General Alexander Smythe of the regular army, instead of joining cordially for an effective attack, quarreled as to the time, the place, and the method of gaining the Canadian shore. Van Rensselaer led a little body of regulars across the river (October 13) and seized Queenstown Heights, but the New York militia refused to leave the state and complacently watched the rout of the regulars by a superior Canadian force. Smythe then took his turn, very fierce in proclamation and very tame in action. Aside from a morning raid off Black Rock, in which he captured a few British guns and partially destroyed a bridge, all his bluster resulted in nothing. Whenever he considered an embarkment, the inadequacy of his force appalled him. Early in December he decided to go into winter quarters. Peter B. Porter publicly accused Smythe of cowardice, and the men fought a duel-after their seconds had taken the balls out of the pistols. It was in accordance with the general opéra bouffe on the Niagara. Out of 4000 American troops gathered there in the autumn of 1812, not 1000 could be persuaded to cross the river.

Dearborn himself, with a force as large as Hull's and Smythe's combined, was in command on Lake Champlain, intending to march down on Montreal as Smythe attacked at

Niagara. On November 19 he marched to the Canadian line, which his militia refused to cross, and four days later he marched back to Plattsburg. Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smythe had at least set some soldiers on Canadian soil, but the senior major general could only march his army twenty miles and back, like the King of France in the jingle. "He was laughed at," wrote George Hay, "by both Federalists and Republicans, and should have gone the way to retirement along with Hull and Smythe, to make room for better men." But it took more than a calamity to nerve Madison to make a dismissal.

A pleasing contrast to this dismal record of our armies on the Canadian frontier was furnished by the exploits of our little navy in the first six months of the war. Three days after his uncle had disgracefully surrendered Detroit (August 19) Captain Isaac Hull, in the 44-gun frigate Constitution, met the British brig Guerrière (38 guns) in the north Atlantic, and in a spirited battle of half an hour reduced her to a floating hulk of wreckage. When the news of Hull's victory reached Boston it sent a wave of enthusiasm through the country. It mattered little that the American frigate was superior in every way to her adversary; the important thing was that a British warship, whose captain had been active in impressing sailors from our merchantmen and had spread on the log of his plundered victims a taunting challenge to any American frigate, had struck its colors. The days of John Paul Jones had returned. Our captains hastened to sea to emulate the deed of Hull. In October the 18-gun sloop Wasp made prize of the equally matched Frolic, convoying a British West Indian fleet, 600 miles east of Norfolk. A few days later the United States, commanded by Decatur, defeated the Macedonian off the Azores and brought her into New London-the only British warship ever brought into an American port as a prize. In December Captain Bainbridge, in the Constitution, destroyed the Java off the coast of Brazil, the British and American frigates being equally matched in size, guns, and crew. In six months the Americans had forced three British frigates and two sloops of war to strike their colors, while they themselves

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had lost nothing larger than the 18-gun Wasp.1 Our privateers had taken over 300 British merchantmen in seven months. Of course, the loss of four or five warships was of small consequence to the great British navy; but the American victories had the moral effect of stimulating our flagging zeal and the practical effect of keeping the British cruisers away from our ports just when the large fleet of merchantmen which had sailed from England on the repeal of the Orders in Council, and before the news of the declaration of war had reached Europe, were bringing millions of dollars' worth of imports to strengthen our impoverished treasury.

The news of these victories did not arrive in time to affect the election of 1812, in which Madison defeated his rival, De Witt Clinton, by the not very ample margin of 128 votes to 89. The Federalists made large gains in New England and New York, electing double the number of representatives that they had sent to the famous Twelfth Congress. The new Congress, called in extra session in May, 1813, was obliged by the pressing needs of the war to put behind it the whole Jeffersonian policy of the abolition of internal taxes and to levy duties on carriages, auction sales, sugar, salt, wines, and liquors, besides apportioning a direct tax of $3,000,000 among the states and imposing a stamp tax on notes and bills of exchange. The expenses of the government had mounted to $16,000,000 for the six months preceding the call of Congress, and it was estimated that $27,000,000 more would be needed to see the year 1813 through. To supplement the revenue from tariff and internal taxes, Congress authorized a loan of $7,500,000. All these financial measures had been carefully prepared by Gallatin before he sailed for Europe on a mission which we shall notice presently, and were passed by respectable majorities. The government was obliged to struggle on, as best it could, with loans and taxes and the emission of Treasury notes, while our import trade sank, under the increasing severity of the

1A few hours after the Wasp's victory over the Frolic the 74-gun British ship Poictiers had hove in sight and taken both the victor and her prize into Bermuda.

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