Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812. Volume 2. Alfred Thayer Mahan
present position under Burlington Heights, so as to cover the eastward movement of the troops, which began October 1. On the 2d the last transport had gone, and Wilkinson himself set out for Sackett's; bringing, as he reported, thirty-five hundred men. On the 3d the British fleet was seen well towards the west end of the lake; but on the 4th a vessel sent especially to reconnoitre came back with the report that it was no longer there. This proved to be a mistake; but, as it came from a careful and competent officer, Chauncey inferred that the enemy had given him the slip and gone to the eastward. He therefore ran down the lake, to cover the arrival of the troops as he had their departure. On the afternoon of the 5th, near Kingston, he captured six out of seven transports bound thither with re-enforcements. Of these, two were the schooners taken by Yeo in the engagement of August 10, which the British had not thought fit to add to their fleet, but used simply as carriers; mounting their guns on the fortifications of Kingston. Cooper justly remarks, "This sufficiently proves the equivocal advantage enjoyed by the possession of these craft." Chauncey himself, at the end of the campaign, recommended the building of "one vessel of the size of the 'Sylph,'"—three hundred and forty tons,—"in lieu of all the heavy schooners; for really they are of no manner of service, except to carry troops or use as gunboats."110 The reflection is inevitable,—Why, then, had he allowed them so to hamper his movements? It is to be feared that the long ascendency of the gunboat policy in the councils of the Government had sapped the professional intelligence even of some naval officers.
The capture of the detachment going from York to Kingston showed that the British had divined the general character of the American plans. In fact, as early as October 2, Major General de Rottenburg, who after an interval had succeeded to Brock's place in Upper Canada, as lieutenant governor and commander of the forces, had started with two regiments to re-enforce Kingston, leaving the Niagara peninsula again under the command of General Vincent. On October 6 Chauncey's squadron entered Sackett's, where Wilkinson had arrived on the 4th. The general began at once to remonstrate strenuously with Armstrong against an attempt upon Kingston, as delaying and possibly frustrating what he saw fit to style the chief object of the campaign, the capture of Montreal. The Secretary listened patiently, but overruled him.111 Kingston had been the principal object from the beginning, and still so continued; but, if the garrison should be largely re-enforced, if the British fleet should enter the harbor, or if the weather should make navigation of the lake dangerous for the transports, then the troops should proceed direct for Montreal by the river. Yeo apparently returned to Kingston soon after this; but when Chauncey left port on October 16, to bring forward from the Genesee River a detachment under Colonel Winfield Scott, he still had the understanding that Kingston was first to be attacked.
On October 19, however, the Secretary reconsidered his decision. The concentration of the army at Sackett's had not been effected until the 18th. On the 16th de Rottenburg, having coasted the north shore of the lake, reached Kingston with his two regiments, reckoned by Armstrong at fifteen hundred men. These raised to twenty-two hundred the garrison previously estimated at seven to eight hundred.112 The numbers of the Americans were diminishing by sickness, and no further re-enforcement was to be expected, excepting by uniting with the Champlain division. This had been on the move from Plattsburg since September 19, and was now at Chateaugay, on the Chateaugay River; a local centre, whence roads running northeast, to the river's junction with the St. Lawrence, immediately opposite the island of Montreal, and west to St. Regis on the St. Lawrence, forty miles higher up, gave facilities for moving in either direction to meet Wilkinson's advance. By a letter of October 12 from its commander, General Wade Hampton, this corps numbered "four thousand effective infantry, with a well-appointed train." To bring it by land to Sackett's, over a hundred miles distant, was considered too protracted and laborious in the state of the roads; better utilize the current of the St. Lawrence to carry Wilkinson down to it. In view of these circumstances, and of the supposed increased strength of Kingston, Armstrong decided to abandon the attack upon the latter and to move against Montreal, which was believed to be much weaker, as well as strategically more important.113 The movement was hazardous; for, as planned, ultimate success depended upon junction with another corps, which had natural difficulties of its own to contend with, while both were open to obstruction by an active enemy. As a distinguished military critic has said, "The Americans committed upon this occasion the same error that the British Government did in their plan for Burgoyne's march from the head of Champlain to Albany,—that of making the desired result of an important operation depend upon the success of all its constituent or component parts." It is one of the most common of blunders in war. Wilkinson and Hampton did not meet. Both moved, but one had retreated before the other arrived.
In fact, while Montreal, as the most important point in Canada for the British, except Quebec, and at the same time the one most accessible to the United States, was the true objective of the latter, concentration against it should have been made in territory entirely under American control, about Lake Champlain, and the advance begun early in the season. By its own choice the Government had relinquished this obvious and natural course, and throughout the summer had directed its efforts to the westward. When the change of operations from Niagara to the lower end of the lake was initiated, in the beginning of October, it was already too late to do more than attack Kingston, the strength of which appears to have been gravely over-estimated. Armstrong had good military ideas; but at this critical moment he seems to have faltered in the presence of an immediate difficulty, and to have sought escape from it by a hasty consent to a side measure, contrary to the soundest teachings of war.
Not the least of objections was the risk to which Sackett's Harbor, the naval base, was to be exposed. After October 16, Chauncey had remained cruising between there and Kingston, covering the approaches to the St. Lawrence. His intended trip to Genesee, to bring up Scott's eight hundred regulars, had been abandoned at the urgent demand of Wilkinson, who, while the troops were being transferred from Sackett's to Grenadier Island, at the outlet of the lake to the river, "would not allow any part of the fleet to be absent four days without throwing the responsibility, in case of a failure of his expedition, wholly on the navy."114 The commodore did not learn of the new scheme until October 30, ten days after its adoption, when he was asked to cover the rear of the army from pursuit by water, by taking position inside the St. Lawrence. While objecting strongly to the change of plan, he of course consented to afford all the co-operation in his power; but he wrote to the Navy Department, "If Sir James Yeo knows the defenceless situation of Sackett's, he can take advantage of a westerly wind while I am in the river, run over and burn it; for to the best of my knowledge there are no troops left there except sick and invalids, nor are there more than three guns mounted."115
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