Upper Canada Preserved — War of 1812 6-Book Bundle. Richard Feltoe
attack — a failure that was to cost him and his men dearly in the days to come.
Informed of the American attack at 2:00 a.m. on January 19th, Colonel Proctor was concerned that additional American forces were moving to support Winchester’s advance. He therefore moved quickly, trusting in the advantage of the moment to hit back at the enemy while their forces were divided. Leaving Amherstburg at dawn on January 20th, before all of the available militia units had arrived, his combined force of around 1,200 men made a forced march undetected by the enemy and were in striking range by the night of the 21st.
Before dawn on the 22nd, Proctor’s troops were in position only a matter of two hundred yards (183 meters) from the unprepared American camp and began their final approach. Inside the camp, the normal daily morning call to reveille was almost immediately followed by the sounds of muskets being fired by the American sentries, who saw their enemy forming up for the attack. However, instead of advancing immediately with his entire force against a surprised and unprepared enemy, Proctor ordered his artillery to open fire in reply and held back the infantry. As a result, the otherwise shocked American troops were given time to react and form up. However, not having prepared any defences, the Americans were forced to fight where they stood. During the next hour, the battle fluctuated across the frozen fields and among the buildings of Frenchtown, with the American artillery and Kentucky militias at the American centre inflicting heavy casualties within the centre of the British line. On the flanks the scene was even more chaotic, as the British Native allies and militias pressed home their attacks until they eventually broke through to the American rear. At that point the American flank positions began to crumble, with men scrambling to cross the frozen River Raisin. What followed was a rout that saw the Native warriors take full advantage of the heat of battle to exact revenge on the fleeing American troops, particularly men of the Kentucky militias. As a result, nearly four hundred were killed and an unrecorded number were listed as missing. Some American newspaper accounts even went so far as to claim that of a thousand men involved, only thirty-three evaded death or capture to return to their homes.
Among the prisoners captured was Brigadier General James Winchester, who was subsequently handed over to Colonel Proctor. Following a number of acrimonious exchanges about the respective excesses of the Native and Kentucky forces, Proctor and Winchester finally hammered out an agreement of surrender for those troops still holding out in a fortified blockhouse. Despite having achieved a stunning victory, over five hundred American prisoners then had to be fed, guarded, and protected from further Native attacks by Proctor’s limited number of non-Native troops, which itself had been reduced through battle casualties by over two hundred men.
Following the battle, prisoner’s claims that Major General Harrison and his column were only a matter of hours away persuaded Proctor that he had no realistic option but to retreat to Amherstburg with his able-bodied prisoners. However, without sufficient sleighs to carry both the British and American wounded, and believing Harrison’s forces would be there within a matter of hours to tend to them, Proctor made the fateful decision to leave around sixty American wounded in the hospital and buildings at Frenchtown.
What was not known at the time was that Harrison’s army was still more than forty miles away, nearly two days march. Shortly after noon on January 22nd, the British evacuated Frenchtown with their prisoners, arriving at Amherstburg shortly after midnight. There they were greeted by a jubilant crowd that applauded the victors, but who also had to be restrained from assaulting the Kentucky militia prisoners, who had been responsible for extensive looting and atrocities during the initial invasion of Upper Canada the previous summer. So violent were the feelings against these men that Prevost felt that although officially they could be paroled, their unarmed release on the Detroit frontier could imperil their lives at the hands of both the local citizenry and Native warriors alike. He therefore ordered their being marched, along with the captured regulars and General Winchester, to the Niagara frontier for parole and subsequent release; while the general and the regulars continued on to the prison hulks at Quebec.
Meanwhile, hearing of Winchester’s defeat, Harrison abandoned his advance and ordered a retreat back to the Maumee Rapids. After destroying Winchester’s stockpile of supplies and making no attempt to determine the enemy’s location or intentions, he continued his retreat to the Sandusky River, leaving the wounded Americans at Frenchtown abandoned and defenceless when, on the morning of January 23, 1813, a force of over two hundred Native warriors, unencumbered by any British or white restraints, descended on the village. They then began to rob the wounded Americans of their clothing, tomahawked any who were unable to move, herded the walking wounded out into the freezing air in little more than their shirtsleeves, and set fire to the buildings. What followed was a “death march” as around four or five dozen hapless prisoners were marched off into captivity, with any who faltered being summarily executed.
Hearing of this atrocity, Colonel Proctor and his subordinates made strenuous efforts to locate and ransom these prisoners. However, the political damage had been done. Even when American survivors subsequently testified that there had been no involvement, collusion, or even presence of British troops at the event, the fact that Colonel Proctor was subsequently promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, coupled with fictitious accounts and vitriolic cartoons showing smiling British troops and their officers standing by as the massacre occurred, filled the pages of American papers for months to come. The event even became a rallying cry, as “Remember the Raisin” entered the American lexicon of famous sayings related to the War of 1812.
Once again an American invasion had been thwarted, although at a long-term cost of raising the level of American determination to recover their lost territories and continue the war. In the short-term, however, it had the effect of making the American administration, and its new appointee to the position of secretary of war, Major General John Armstrong, wary of conducting operations at such a remote distance from its centre of supplies and logistics. Instead, Armstrong looked at pursuing the main American spring campaign at points along the St. Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, and on the Niagara frontier. Unfortunately for the American plans, the British forces on the St. Lawrence corridor had other ideas on that score.
THE RAID ON OGDENSBURG,
FEBRUARY 22, 1813
From the outset of the war, the fact that the St. Lawrence River was being the single line of transport into Upper Canada had been a significant weakness in the British war effort. However, despite this obvious fact, the Americans made little real effort to dominate the waterway when war was first declared. In fact, apart from some initial skirmishes between gunboats, the only real cross-border incident came when the Americans made a sortie on Gananoque, just to the east of Kingston, on September 21, 1812.
However, the potential threat level rose in early October, when a force of the First Rifle Regiment under Captain Benjamin Forsyth and several companies of New York State militia under Brigadier General Jacob Brown were sent from Sackets Harbor to garrison the small community of Ogdensburg, directly opposite the British fortifications at Prescott. Up to this point, the civilian populace of Ogdensburg had maintained a friendly and highly profitable neutrality with their “enemy” by supplying cattle and other food to the Prescott garrison. This communication was now halted and British boats were fired on as they plied the water of the river.
In retaliation, the garrison at Prescott, under Colonel Robert Lethbridge, attempted to mount an attack against Ogdensburg on Sunday, October 4, 1812. Because Lethbridge made no effort to disguise his preparations, the British intentions were clearly telegraphed to the Americans, allowing the Ogdensburg garrison of around 1,200 men to be fully prepared when the attack commenced. As the British boats approached the enemy shore, they came under heavy American artillery and musket fire, which inflicted significant damage on the vessels and casualties amongst the tightly packed men. Unable to sustain the attack, the assault collapsed, to the humiliation of the British and the added prestige of the American military commanders. In response, Colonel Lethbridge was replaced by a far more experienced combat officer, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Pearson (23rd Regiment), who undertook to bring the garrison at Prescott up