This Day in Military History (Brits, Yanks in Costly Battle of Lundy’s Lane)

July 25, 1814—It might not have been the full-fledged disaster that other American land operations were in the northern theater of the War of 1812, but the Battle of Lundy’s Lane was equally decisive in shaping its outcome. And, like the larger war, this battle marked by conspicuous heroism was also characterized by major blunders, making it the bloodiest of the whole conflict.

One of these blunders was committed by an American commander who came out of this theater of the conflict with an enhanced reputation, Brigadier General Winfield Scott (seen in the image accompanying this post). Today, we know him as the greatest American soldier between Washington in the American Revolution and Grant in the Civil War. His reputation began, in a serious way, in ferociously hot conditions, in a spot where he would rather not be.

It was the greatest irony of Scott’s life that, in the most convulsive military conflict of his career, the Civil War, he would be regarded as a superannuated hero who needed to be replaced, even though, as commander in chief of the Union Army, he formulated the "Anaconda" strategy that was later employed to strangle the Confederacy. But the paradoxes of his career don’t stop there, because not all the failures of “Old Fuss and Feathers’ career were as pronounced as his detractors claimed and not all the successes as clear-cut as his supporters believed.

Case in point: Lundy’s Lane. Tipped off that the British might be planning an attack on the American side of the Niagara River, Scott marched out of Chippewa toward Queenston. The Americans came to a tavern (one of the few not burned in the area by American partisans) owned by a widow named Mrs. Wilson, who, when questioned by Scott, said (probably disingenuously) that the British numbered “about eight hundred regulars, three hundred militia and Indians, and two pieces of artillery.”

For the last several years, Scott had been chomping at the bit, waiting for a chance to show that he could do better than the aged Revolutionary War generals then in control of the army (not unlike George McClellan would act toward him 50 years later). Now was his opportunity. He didn’t stop to wait for reinforcements from his superior officer, General Jacob Brown, or to obtain any estimate of enemy strength besides the Widow Wilson’s. By the time he realized his mistake, he was facing seven pieces of British artillery, not the two mentioned by Mrs. Wilson, was outnumbered, and was caught in a crescent formed by redcoats.

Scott could have withdrawn from this disadvantageous position, but it might have demoralized his troops and dented his growing reputation as a military commander. His only choice, then, was to attack now. At six o’clock pm, Scott’s 1,500 troops attacked the 1,700 led by his opposite number, British Gen. Gordon Drummond.

What ensued then was one of the more picturesque—and deadly—battles of the war. By sunset, 500 of the 750 in Scott’s First Brigade had been cut down. An informal ceasefire took place in which both sides received reinforcements. After an hour, American and British troops faced off against each other again in pitch-black darkness, where soldiers often only saw their opponents through the flash of musket fire.

In his history Flames Across the Border, 1813-1814, Canadian historian Pierre Berton wrote of this “confused melee in which friend and foe are inextricably intermingled, struggling in the darkness, clubbing one another to death with the butts of muskets, mistaking comrades for foes, stabbing at each other with bayonets, officers tumbling from horses, whole regiments shattered.”

Scott would have two horses shot from under him before he himself would fall from a wound. He was just one of 860 U.S. casualties, and the toll was particularly devastating on his regimental commanders (seven out of 10 died or were wounded). Drummond lost 878 men, and one of his generals, Phineas Riall, was wounded and taken prisoner by the Americans.

Oh, did I mention that this fighting took place in a cemetery? An appropriate place, don’t you think? Nobody surrendered when it was over—both sides’ troops were too exhausted to do much more of anything except collapse.

British troops disposed of the corpses quickly. The bodies were in such thick clumps that British and some American soldiers and horses were thrown together and burned in a massive funeral fire.

Forced to abandon the battlefield by exhaustion, the Americans would never have so good a chance in the northern theater again. The same prize that had eluded them in the American Revolution during the joint Benedict Arnold-Richard Montgomery expedition--Canada--fell through their hands again. Within six weeks, they would not even be concerned with adding new territory but with keeping what they had, as Washington itself was invaded.

This Day in Military History (British Attack Fort Niagara)

December 18, 1813—Retaliating for American forces’ burning of Newark, Canada, approximately 500 British regulars, accompanied by 500 militia and Indians, crossed the Niagara River after midnight. The operation, planned by the new commander in Upper Canada, Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond, was carried out with maximum discipline and secrecy, resulting in the seizure of Fort Niagara by sunrise—and leaving America’s northern frontier suddenly, shockingly vulnerable.

The War of 1812 is perhaps rivaled only by the Korean War as “America’s Forgotten War.” The average American (even, I’d bet, the average American historian), if he or she is lucky, won’t have too hard a time recalling America’s naval victories in the conflict.

But, after getting past Francis Scott Key witnessing the “banner yet wave” at Fort McHenry and Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, an American is likely to experience a fog descending on the brain when it comes to land operations. Believe it or not, there’s a reason for this: land battles were, by and large—and especially along the northern border—ignominious affairs for the United States.

Egged on by Henry Clay and other “War Hawks” in Congress, President James Madison entered a war with crucial American deficits in leadership.

Secretary of War John Armstrong was an incompetent rightly distrusted by the President, and owed his post to marital connections (he was the brother-in-law of Robert Livingston).

The leaders of unsuccessful assaults on Kingston and Montreal, Henry Dearborn and James Wilkinson, were also spectacularly unsuited to their positions: Dearborn by virtue of incapacity (the 250-pounder needed to be carried around in a two-wheeled device subsequently named after him), Wilkinson by virtue of treason (though some suspected as such, nobody knew for certain, until the documentary evidence turned up in archives years after his death, that Wilkinson had taken an oath of loyalty to the Spanish crown).

In this light, the actions of Brigadier-General George McClure were hardly unusual. Holding Fort George, the only American foothold on the peninsula formed by Lakes Ontario and Erie and the Chippewa River, he took fright first at an exaggerated estimate of enemy forces by a Canadian deserter, then became even further alarmed as his own army became rapidly depleted when many militia chose to go home to their farms rather than re-enlist when their terms of service were up.

Rather than let Fort George fall into British hands, McClure decided to deny them shelter in nearby Newark by putting the town to the torch.

Fourteen years ago, on vacation in Canada, I traveled from Toronto for a day of fine theater performances at the Shaw Festival. Monuments and plaques in the area in honor of Laura Secord and Sir Isaac Brock gave me my first real hint of how American’s neighbors to the north viewed the War of 1812—as a threat to their sovereignty. But only in writing this piece did I learn that the town I was visiting, now known as Niagara-on-the-Lake, was once called Newark, and that during the War of 1812 it fell victim to an American commander’s idiocy and cruelty.

McClure’s order, carried out by a group known as the Canadian Volunteers under the command of Joseph Willocks (who had once led the town in the Canadian legislature), was a huge mistake: inhumane (it left 400 residents homeless), militarily useless (though Newark itself was torched, Fort George was left with around 1,500 tents), and provocative (in Flames Across the Border: 1813-1814, historian Pierre Berton argues that it was this act, even more than the Americans’ accidental burning of the legislature at York, or present-day Toronto, that led to the retaliatory burning of Washington, D.C.).

General Drummond was generally regarded as a distinct improvement over his predecessor, Francis de Rottenburg. A native Canadian, Drummond had been heading a military district in northern Ireland when the war broke out. Taking command of the British forces in Fort George on December 16, he immediately planned to strike back.

Reading the account of the subsequent attack on Fort Niagara sounds like the Battle of Trenton in the American Revolution, but in reverse—another December crossing and assault on an unwary enemy, carried out in the wee small hours of the morning. Drummond made sure that the oars were muffled. Sentries were overpowered and killed without warnings being sounded.

Though McClure, clued in by an informer that a British assault was in the offing, had warned the fort’s commander, Nathaniel Leonard, to be prepared, the latter was miles away with family in Lewiston, likely suffering the aftereffects of too many spirits the night before. The garrison’s soldiers, after two days of nothing happening, had decided to do what seemed sensible but turned out to be anything but—get indoors to get out of the freezing cold.

Drummond’s order to use bayonets rather than guns meant that the Americans were utterly surprised. At the end of the brief battle, 65 Americans lay dead versus only six British.

More important, the American northern frontier now lay exposed. Within short order, the British had taken and destroyed Lewiston, then done the same to Buffalo and Black Rock.

The fate of the two opposing commanders in this campaign could not have been more different. Even before he had gone ahead with the burning of Newark, McClure had been stoutly opposed by at least some Americans who knew what he planned to do. But the ferocious British-Canadian counter-assault incited Americans to an outright fury against him. While marching down the main street of Buffalo, he was taunted and fired upon. With the militia pointedly refusing even to serve under him anymore, he yielded his post to a major general and slunk away.

Drummond had his share of failures as well as successes throughout the next year’s worth of fighting. But, like Andrew Jackson would do at New Orleans, he would impose martial law on his district (farmers wouldn’t sell food to the army) and successfully rally his countrymen against invaders. When he died in London in 1854, he was the senior general in the British army.

NOTE: A friend of mine knows of a portrait of Drummond by the painter Robert McInnes. He is interested in finding out more about the provenance of this painting, which is now in northern New Jersey. If anyone reading this post has any details on this, please contact me through this blog. Thank you.