Chapter Fourteen:
Dire Distress
In 1812 Erie was a British lake.
Scarcely 90 miles from Euclid—closer than present-day Toledo—the Royal Navy yards at Amherstburg in the mouth of the Detroit River had been turning out lightly- and moderately-armed vessels for a military transport and coastal patrol force known as the Provincial Marine for over 15 years. More recently they'd turned to purpose-built warships, the vanguard of a pocket armada designed and intended to dominate the interior of North America from the Great Lakes.
The pride of their fleet were the two-masted brigs General Hunter—launched in 1807: 10 guns and nearly 100 tons—and Lady Prevost—launched 1810, at 200 tons with 13 guns. But the queen of Lake Erie was HMS Queen Charlotte. She bore three masts, square rigged—what real sailors properly called a ship—and slung 400 tons and 15 guns. The United States had nothing above Niagara Falls to challenge them, and they roamed the upper lakes where they would.
*
A new war with Great Britain had been brewing for years. It's possible that going to war with one of the world's superpowers in 1812 was not the wisest move for a toddler nation like the United States. Yet it was a thing many American leaders became convinced was not only feasible but the right thing to do.
Napoleon Bonaparte had become the master of Europe, and his armies had tied up Britain's on the Continent for a decade and more. Anyone who's been stirred by Tchaikovsky's booming 1812 Overture, the piece is a work of Russian patriotism commemorating their defense of Napoleon's thrust on Moscow that year.
Where the British did enjoy an advantage over Napoleon was at sea, and maintaining dominance on the oceans was a strategic priority, vital to warding off invasion of their island home. To crew their essential yet chronically undermanned fleet of warships the Royal Navy employed a practice known as impressment, whereby ships at sea were stopped at broadside-point and boarded, and any personnel deemed to owe allegiance to Britain in her time of need were "pressed," i.e. forced, into service. Definitively establishing nationality was a looser prospect in centuries past, and this dragnet might scoop up just about any English-speaking man—a description which fit most American mariners—aboard any ship in the Atlantic. This certainly did help them recover some deserters, as the British always claimed were the sole and rightful subjects of these seizures, but as years of war with Napoleon became decades they grew less and less particular about whom they grabbed. Literally thousands of Americans were essentially kidnapped and enslaved in this way, over a period of many years.
Also to hamper Bonaparte's war effort the British passed laws decreeing that American ships could not trade directly with mainland Europe, but had first to stop in British ports, and also there be taxed. This is not an imposition one independent sovereign nation can unilaterally make on another. Americans also believed—correctly—that from Canada certain British agents were arming and encouraging Natives to attack American settlers as they continued to push into the West, in vulnerable, infant places like Euclid and Cleaveland.
Furthermore many Americans still harbored ambitions to absorb Canada. But for the loss of a single battle before Quebec on New Year's Eve 1775 it might already have happened. And many had convinced themselves the task would be relatively easy: Britain was occupied thousands of miles away with Napoleon, they told themselves; Canadians were just Americans across a line on a map who would welcome the United States as liberators. On this proposition no less a pundit than Thomas Jefferson opined, "The acquisition of Canada... will be a mere matter of marching..."
On June 1, 1812, President James Madison laid the bill of grievances against Great Britain before Congress and invited them to take what action they felt it warranted. The lawmakers responded 17 days later with a declaration of war. It was the first time the United States as the United States had ever gone to war. And it's possible it was not the wisest move.
*
Despite the well-known and obvious threat the British posed on Lake Erie, and the well-known and obvious vulnerability of America's entire north coast—from what was Cape Vincent, New York, to what was not even yet Duluth, Minnesota—the attitude prevalent in Northeast Ohio in the early months of the War of 1812 was a frankly reckless complacency. Crisfield Johnson's History of Cuyahoga County describes it: "It was generally believed... that the forces gathering under General Van Rensselaer, on the Niagara, and under General Hull, at Detroit, would soon take possession of the upper peninsula of Canada, opposite this county, and thus relieve the people here of all farther anxiety in regard to danger..."
The plan to take Ontario—which did not yet have that name; it was then called Upper Canada, but it was Ontario—involved a two-pronged invasion from either end of Lake Erie, one across the Niagara River on the east end, and one across the Detroit River on the west. Other American invasions would come at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, and up Lake Champlain toward Montreal.
The eastern wing of the Lake Erie attack would be led by Maj. Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer, whose old and wealthy Dutch family were little short of royalty in the state of New York, and were all prominent and extremely influential in the early republic. He was in fact a distant cousin of the prolific chronicler of the early families and women of the Western Reserve, Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, and also a brother-in-law to the late (Burr, duel, 1804) Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, having married Hamilton's wife's sister, Margarita "Peggy" Schuyler, in 1783.
The western thrust was entrusted to William Hull. A Connecticut lawyer and Yale grad, Hull had served well in the Revolution, rising from a mere militia volunteer to brigadier general, and was commended by name by both George Washington and the Continental Congress. He moved to Massachusetts after the war, practiced law, became a judge, entered politics. But he had had no experience with the West when President Jefferson appointed him governor of the newly created Michigan Territory in 1805, and this man of eminent competence, even distinction, in the East was, sadly, out of his depth on the Western frontier.
Expecting war, Hull spent the winter and spring of 1812 in Washington conferring with other civilian and military leaders and President Madison, making plans for defense and offense. All agreed that Detroit was vital, both for protecting the United States' vulnerable left flank, as well as for offensive operations into Canada. There was some talk of ships, and the difficulty supplying the strategic outpost through the treacherous marshlands of western Ohio. But they were deemed too expensive. Hull was directed to cut a supply road north to Detroit from Dayton, collecting his men, primarily Ohio militia, along the way. Hull's old rank of brigadier general was restored, and the force he would command was designated the North Western Army.
Hull left the East from Baltimore at the end of April. By June he had made his way to Dayton, where he took command of the First, Second and Third Divisions of the Ohio Militia from Governor Return Jonathan Meigs. Lack of training, proper equipment and discipline, plus flat out insubordination from these Ohio men would plague Hull's expedition sometimes worse than the actual enemy. With them nonetheless Hull pushed north out of Dayton into the Maumee Valley's Great Black Swamp.
At the Maumee River Gen. Hull encountered an American packet schooner, called—rather delightfully in the context of this essay—the Cuyahoga. To hasten his way through the morass he engaged the vessel to transport some of his less essential equipage forward to Detroit by water: the regimental musicians and their instruments, some of his sickest soldiers, plus his own personal papers. He sent it off on June 30, but what neither Hull nor the crew of the Cuyahoga, both far out on the Western frontier, realized was that war between the United States and Britain had been declared on June 18. But the British on the Canadian side had heard the news. On July 2, just as it had many times before, Cuyahoga sailed lazily into the Detroit River and past the Amherstburg yards and the fort which guarded them, Fort Malden. Six British soldiers and an officer calmly approached Cuyahoga in a row boat, raising no alarm among the Americans aboard, and quickly seized the vessel with a single warning shot fired from a pistol. The sick soldiers on Cuyahoga outnumbered their enemies five to one, but were not in a condition to resist. As they floated their prize into Amherstburg, the British forced the American musicians to play "God Save the King."
When the British examined the papers they'd captured they discovered that they contained a treasure of intelligence. There were Hull's correspondence with Secretary of War William Eustis, and in those a great deal of information concerning the expedition's true strength, its estimates of the enemy's strength, plus its overall goals and strategy for attaining them. Putting these documents in a position where they risked even the possibility of falling into the hands of the enemy was a grotesque negligence on Gen. Hull's part. Before he had even arrived at Detroit his entire mission had been seriously compromised. His letters also contained intimations of Hull's possessing a near phobia of the Natives, whom he believed were essentially blood thirsty and savage, and a terror at the prospect of the type of Indian massacres of isolated White settlements which circulated widely in lurid frontier tales. This would be no slight handicap for the governor of the Michigan Territory in 1812. The British commander on the Detroit River, a brilliant soldier and a hero in Canada today, Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, would exploit all these intelligences to the utmost.
Hull arrived at Detroit at last on July 5, where those awaiting him included approximately 1,000 civilians he was charged to protect, among whom were his own daughter and grandson. Across the river his approximately 2,000 troops faced about 1,500 British and British-Canadian regulars and militia, bolstered by a never certain number of Native allies, led by the legendary Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, who had fought alongside Blue Jacket at Fallen Timbers and refused to sign the Greenville Treaty. The numerical advantage the Americans enjoyed was mitigated by the British domination of the water. Nevertheless, after just a week of preparation, Hull began his invasion, moving his men across the Detroit River into Canada on July 12, then marching them south along the riverfront toward Fort Malden.
At age 60 Hull was no longer the brash, assertive soldier he had been in his Revolutionary War youth. He proceeded cautiously and slow. He had trouble bringing his artillery pieces up the 20 miles from his crossing to the enemy fort, and was convinced he could not carry it without them. In fact, Fort Malden was so inadequately manned at that moment that Hull probably could have taken it with the forces he had on hand with a single determined attack. But he didn't know that. Also, he expected daily to hear from the other end of the lake that Gen. Van Rensselaer's attack across the Niagara had begun, threatening the supply lines of the enemy before him and perhaps forcing them to withdraw from the Detroit front completely. In actuality Van Rensselaer, beset with serious logistical problems, would not even begin that attack until October. Hull was in Canada all alone.
On July 17, Queen Charlotte appeared in the Detroit River and bombarded the invading Americans from the water. That very same day, three hundred miles up the length of Lake Huron, the deeply isolated American fort guarding the passage between Lakes Huron and Michigan, Fort Mackinac, also yet unaware that the war had begun, was surrounded and taken by a superior British force who, again, were better informed than the Americans.
When Hull learned of the surrender of Mackinac on August 3, it suddenly and drastically altered his calculations of how many Natives might be available to bolster the British forces he faced, a number he now feared could be as many as 3,000. After the loss of Mackinac Hull deemed Fort Dearborn, on the distant far shore of Lake Michigan, the embryo of what would become Chicago, which was under his North Western command, no longer defensible, and he ordered it abandoned and for its garrison to fall back to Fort Wayne in Indiana Territory. Dearborn's occupants—approximately 60 soldiers and half as many dependent civilians—left their enclosure to begin their withdrawal as ordered, and were slaughtered by Potawatomi Indians not two miles from its gates; the Indians then burned the American fort to the ground. This was Gen. Hull's nightmare, his horror-vision of what would befall him and his garrison at Detroit. And about this time is when it appears that he began to become rattled.
On August 7, still never having begun his assault on Fort Malden, Hull received word that, far from being depleted to bolster Niagara at the other end of Lake Erie, Malden was actually being reinforced by troops from there.
At the same time he received a report of Indians on their way down from the north. Perhaps these were the thousands of Native reinforcements Hull feared had been freed up by the surrender of Mackinac coming to cut him off and destroy him!
Rattled.
Hull abruptly abandoned his siege of Fort Malden and withdrew north, all the way out of Canada, across the river, and back behind the walls of Detroit.
Brock and Tecumseh were right behind him.
The British and Canadians quickly re-occupied their artillery positions opposite Detroit on their side of the river at Sandwich. It was then that Gen. Brock employed the ruses de guerre which have secured his place in the Canadian national pantheon.
On their way out Brock allowed the Americans to capture a fake letter ostensibly directed to the forces he commanded now occupying Fort Mackinac. In it he begged them to send him no more Indian reinforcements, as the 5,000 Native allies already with him around Detroit were straining his ability to keep them fed. These Indians were phantoms. In fact, the Americans still had Brock and Tecumseh outnumbered.
Gen. Brock then dispatched a message to his American opponent across the river, speaking with the confident voice of one commanding far more troops than he actually had, and also calculated to stoke what he understood to be Gen. Hull's terror.
"The force at my disposal authorizes me to require of you the immediate surrender of Fort Detroit. It is far from my intention to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond control the moment the contest commences."
A rattled Hull delayed an answer, but ultimately replied refusing the demand.
Before dawn the next day, August 16, 1812, Isaac Brock and Tecumseh invaded the United States.
Covered by Queen Charlotte and General Hunter, they landed troops about three miles below Detroit at Spring Wells, Michigan, and marched north toward the fort. The British, Canadians and Natives came up behind Detroit, between Hull and his supply line and any hope of relief or escape. There before the American stronghold Gen. Brock carefully stage-managed what his enemies could observe from within.
First he dressed his Canadian militiamen in the spare uniforms of his British regulars, falsely inflating the number of disciplined professional soldiers Gen. Hull would believe he faced with his amateur and recalcitrant force of Ohio militia.
Then, taking advantage of the terrain and forest cover, Brock marched his Native allies in a circle, in and out of the open where the Americans could see them, making the same few hundred Indians appear to be the thousands Brock very well knew Hull feared. The Indians whooped from the forest to keep up the scare. Sure the massacre he so dreaded was upon him, and certainly thinking of his own child and grandchild, Hull was heard to exclaim, "My God! What shall I do with these women and children?"
A thoroughly rattled Hull (some sources say he had been drinking heavily to calm his terror at this point) sent a message out to Brock asking for three days' truce for a chance to parley. Brock, firmly in control of the situation's momentum, replied that Hull had just three hours to surrender or be annihilated, and to punctuate his threat he ordered his batteries across the river and the guns of Queen Charlotte and General Hunter to open fire. Within minutes of the first cannonballs landing inside his stockade, and with his officers begging him not to do it, William Hull hung a white table cloth out a window, surrendering Detroit, its entire garrison, and all of Michigan along with it, without firing one single shot.
*
The scale of this military catastrophe at Detroit was immeasurable. What it precipitated across the entirety of northern Ohio was a full-blown panic. Sources don't record explicitly when this event occurred, but it was likely around August 20, 1812.
Crisfield Johnson's History of Cuyahoga County:
"...shortly after the 16th of August a messenger came dashing into Cleveland [sic] from the west, bearing the terrible news that on that day General Hull had surrendered his whole force to the British and their Indian allies, who might be expected at any moment to attack the defenseless inhabitants on the south shore of Lake Erie.
"Instantly all was excitement and anxiety. Expresses were sent out in various directions to notify the people.
"Within twenty-four hours another messenger brought the news that the British and Indians were actually approaching, their vessels had been seen near Huron [50 miles west of Cleveland], nay, as near as he could learn, they had landed in that locality, and the massacre of the people had actually commenced.
"Then indeed there was dismay on every side.
"Many doubted the correctness of the information, but few desired to run the risk of proving its falsity.
"A large proportion of the people of Cleveland [sic] set forth, in all haste, along the forest roads which led through Euclid and Newburg [sic] to safer regions.
"As the alarm spread through the county it grew more intense with every mile of advance.
"The roads were soon crowded with ox wagons and horse wagons, with travelers on horseback and travelers on foot. Here could be seen a clumsy cart in which had been thrown a feather-bed, two or three iron pots, all the crockery of the family, a side of bacon and a bag of corn meal, on top of which were a frightened matron and half a dozen tow-headed children, while the father of the family applied his long gad with unflinching energy to the backs of the lumbering cattle, which were moving altogether too slowly to suit so desperate an emergency. Swiftly passing there would be seen a woman on horseback, with one child before and another behind, while scores of men, women and children, blessed with neither horses nor oxen, were trudging wearily on foot, trembling every moment lest the dread war-whoops of the savages should be heard in their rear."
According to Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, up in the eastern Heights of Euclid Township, "Charles White and wife (Abigail Bishop)... [a]t the time of Hull's surrender, when the people thought the British were about to invade the country... hid their valuables in their well and fled to the interior of the forest."
And Crisfield Johnson goes on to describe the plight in lake-facing Euclid specifically:
"...the people of Euclid felt themselves to be in a particularly dangerous condition, exposed to assaults from the British armed vessels on the lake, and fearing possible raids from Indians on the land. When the news came of Hull’s surrender, followed swiftly by the report that the British and Indians were making a murderous progress down the lake, the people hitched up their ox sleds, loaded on their families and provisions and started eastward. They found the Chagrin River so swollen that they could not cross, and were in dire distress over the extremely unpleasant prospect."
This exodus would have clogged what is now Euclid Avenue, all through University Circle and East Cleveland and Euclid and Wickliffe, the panicked human and animal mass backing up before the impassible Chagrin in the area of what is now colloquially known as Downtown Willoughby.
The suddenly and rudely aroused populace of Cuyahoga County fielded what meager defense it could, an impromptu assemblage of miscellaneous local men bearing their personal firearms and facing an uncertain fate.
Crisfield Johnson:
"In the midst of all these, however, were to be seen some brave men, with muskets and rifles on their shoulders, hastening rapidly to Cleveland [sic] to aid in repelling the foe.
"These, united with the little squad of Clevelanders [sic], made up in the course of the day a company of thirty or forty men.
"As night came on they posted sentinels along the water's edge, and then lay down with their clothes on in the nearest deserted dwellings to await the result."
Crisfield Johnson proceeds to relate one of the most dramatic episodes in his entire History of Cuyahoga County. Again, it's not stated exactly when this happened, but it likely would have been somewhere near August 21 or so, 1812.
"Hour after hour passed, and naught occurred to renew the alarm of the day.
"But soon after midnight the sentinels quietly gave warning to their comrades.
"The latter sprang up, adjusted their powder-horns and bullet-pouches, examined the locks of their weapons, and hastened silently to the mouth of the [Cuyahoga R]iver.
"Sure enough, through the darkness of the night, the white sails and black hull of a vessel could be seen approaching from the west, and shaping her course toward the usual landing place.
"There were few vessels on the lake then, and these had mostly been taken for hostile purposes, so the approach of a ship from the west at that hour of the night looked sufficiently suspicious, and the skeptics began to think there might be something serious ahead.
"A line of determined men was formed a short distance from the landing place, and thirty old firelocks were cocked as the vessel came steadily onward.
"'Hello,' cried a sentinel, in unmilitary but convenient formula. 'Who are you?'
"'An American vessel,' was the reply. 'With paroled prisoners of Hull's army.'
"The little company gave vent to their intense relief by a general shout, then broke ranks without waiting for orders, and were soon fraternizing with the newcomers, and joining them in cursing General Hull with the utmost good will.
*
"Many of the paroled men were wounded," Crisfield Johnson says, "and Murray's store was turned into a hospital."
As noted in an earlier chapter, brothers Harvey and Elias Murray had come, along with several other members of their family, from Montgomery County, New York, northwest of Albany, to Northeast Ohio in the summer of 1810. They were cousins to the only recently former governor of Ohio and early Cleaveland big shot, Samuel Huntington, and while the brothers settled in what became Downtown, their parents, siblings, nieces and nephews all settled in Euclid. The Murray brothers built "a large, frame storehouse," one of the first structures in Cleaveland that wasn't a log cabin, on the south side of Superior in what is now Public Square with the intention of running it as a store, though as a store it never got much use. "There is no evidence that they ever stocked it with merchandise..." according to Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, and a gloomy Crisfield Johnson notes regarding Cleaveland and the Murray brothers' enterprise "...quite a little business was done at this port... the place was still in a very backward state and profits small..."
Nevertheless the Murrays' store was one of the best and most modern buildings in town, and Cuyahoga County, newly minted in the spring of 1810, used it to host its first session of its Court of Common Pleas. Still gloomy, of the first court session Crisfield Johnson notes, "There were very few suits." The building may also have housed Cleaveland's first public library, with the Murray brothers perhaps being their own best patrons, perhaps to pass the time without many paying customers. "The record kept in 1810 of books drawn from the first, small library of the hamlet contains frequently the names of Elias and Harvey Murray, and shows not only that they were fond of reading, but cared only for the best literature."
And so it sputtered along, until August 1812, the disaster at Detroit, the ship of American wounded arriving at Cleaveland dramatically in the night. "Murray's store was turned into a hospital..." Crisfield Johnson relates, "...and so used as occasion demanded during the war of 1812-14."
*
Having finally awakened to the danger they had been living in all along fully two months after war was declared, the citizens of Cuyahoga County at last formed a militia regiment.
Mustered in on August 21, 1812, it consisted of about 50 officers and men. For obscure reasons—he was only 24-years-old and is not known to have had any previous military experience—Harvey Murray was chosen as the company's captain. Perhaps he was particularly well-known and popular in town; perhaps he had shown particular competence in caring for the sick and wounded when his store was made into a hospital; perhaps his family connection to the recent governor seemed auspicious; perhaps all of the above.
Euclid Township was well represented in this company. In addition to Capt. Murray, whose parents and siblings were in Euclid, there were four sons of Euclid's empresario, David Dille, starting with Lewis, his 29-year-old second son, who was selected lieutenant, the unit's second-in-command. With him were his brothers, Asa, 24, who was chosen as a corporal, and Luther, 27, and Samuel, 15, who were privates. Seth Doan, III, the son of Euclid's retired sea captain, Timothy Doan, who as a boy of 13 had ministered to Cleaveland's sick when he arrived in 1798, had grown to a man of 27 and was selected as one of the regiment's sergeants. Carpenter and Timothy Doan son-in-law Samuel Dodge was also listed among the privates of the regiment, although his building skills would soon be recognized as better used toward more pressing needs. The old man of the unit was Euclid's original temporarily permanent settler, Joseph Burke, who was fully 52-years-old in 1812. Although he'd left Euclid for Columbia Township in 1808, Lorain County would not be established until the 1820s and Columbia was still counted as part of Cuyahoga. Burke had been a drummer as a young man in the Revolution, but that role was filled by other men in the Cuyahoga County regiment in the War of 1812, and Joseph Burke was listed simply as another private. Extraordinarily, three of his sons served right alongside him: 27-year old Aretus, 26-year-old Silas, and 20-year-old Ethan Allen, whose name recalled the Burkes' years in Vermont. McIlrath son-in-law Thomas Thomas was yet another private, as well as a "Thomas McHrath" or "Thomas McHuth," who almost certainly was Thomas McIlrath, Jr., the 16-year-old son of the Thomas McIlrath of Euclid's "five young men" of August 1803. There was a White, a Bishop and a Thorpe in the regiment as well, although due to spotty genealogical records these men cannot be connected to those Euclid families with certainty. John Carlton of Burton was a 25-year-old private married to Anna McIlrath Cozad, the daughter of Samuel and Jane McIlrath Cozad who had settled in Euclid in 1807, and the niece of both Sarah McIlrath Shaw and of Thomas McIlrath of the five young men of August 1803. Joseph Badger, the itinerant minister who had visited the Burkes on the east line of Euclid in 1801 and 1802, the Doans on the west line in 1805, and later worked with William Wick to bring Presbyterianism to Euclid, who was himself a veteran of the Revolutionary War, served as a chaplain on the headquarters staff.
It's interesting that William Coleman's name does not appear on the roster, as he was only 31 in 1812. Crisfield Johnson notes, however, that "When troops were stationed at Cleveland [sic], a small picket of horsemen was generally maintained at Euclid Creek to give notice of any possible hostile movement from that direction..." and that during the late August 1812 panic, "William Coleman went twice to Cleveland [sic] to learn the latest news... [and on] his second trip he learned that the supposed British-Indian army was only a part of Hull's surrendered forces." The center of Euclid Township where the Colemans lived remained very sparsely populated when the war came. William seems to have been active in other capacities and may therefore have been spared from more regimented militia service for these other duties.
One source—only one, but it is a good one: Crisfield Johnson's History of Cuyahoga County—notes that there was once a blockhouse at Euclid Creek, which would probably date from the war. "Mrs. [Harmon] Cushman, [Pamelia Coleman,] a daughter of William Coleman, who was born in 1819, and whose memory goes back to 1823, remembers that there was then at Euclid Creek... a blockhouse which had been built by a Mr. Randall." Randall is most likely Joel Randall, whose name appears in Johnson's lists of township officers in the early 1820s, and Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham notes that "Joel and Phoebe Randall settled here [Euclid Township, in] 1809," so it's very possible that that was the case. Phoebe Randall was of the Payne family, and the Randalls are buried in one of the lost cemeteries of Euclid, the Payne Family Cemetery. Of this, findagrave.com notes, "The Payne Family Cemetery exists as a grassy field just to the east of a wooded lot on the north side of Euclid Avenue across from Beverly Hills Drive. There is no trace of the cemetery, as all the tombstones are gone." As are all traces and nearly all memory of the Euclid blockhouse.
*
An express rider reached Elijah Wadsworth in Canfield, just west of Youngstown, with the news of the disaster at Detroit on August 23.
Wadsworth had been one of the original shareholders of the Connecticut Land Company in 1795, and relocated his family from Litchfield, Connecticut, to the Western Reserve in 1802. In 1812, among many other things, Wadsworth was a major general of Ohio militia. He commanded the state's Fourth Division, which embraced Northeast Ohio, what had been well in the rear of the theater of operations, and thus, until then, held in reserve. But Hull had handed over the first three Ohio militia divisions to Brock and Tecumseh at Detroit, and Gen. Wadsworth learned that morning that he was—had been for the last week, in fact—the senior front line military commander in the state.
Wadsworth didn't wait for orders. He immediately summoned his brigade commanders and rode with a horse troop for what he deemed to be at that moment the nearest defensible line, the Cuyahoga, to the little village on the bluff above its mouth named for his old Connecticut Land Company colleague, Moses Cleaveland.
The Fourth Division comprised four brigades, each led by a brigadier general. The First Brigade, from Jefferson County, on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, served under Brig. Gen. J. (possibly James) Miller. The Second Brigade, from Columbiana County, just north of Jefferson, was under Brig. Gen. Reasin Beall. The Third and Fourth Brigades were from the Western Reserve. The Third, from Trumbull and Ashtabula Counties, was commanded by Brig. Gen. Simon Perkins, who appears to have been favored by Maj. Gen. Wadsworth. The Fourth Brigade consisted of men from Portage, Geauga and Cuyahoga Counties, and was under Brig. Gen. Joel Paine.
Writing in 1879, Charles Whittlesey, the founder of the Western Reserve Historical Society, lamented the difficulty he himself encountered uncovering the part Northeast Ohio took in the War of 1812:
"...very few letters, editorials or reports relating to the local military operations are to be found... There seems to have been extreme reticence on the part of commanders in the field... One of the first duties of this society was the collection of such letters, records, and orders relating to the war, as had not been lost during the lapse of sixty years. Of those relating to the First Brigade (General Miller) we have scarce any, and very few pertaining to the Second Brigade (General Beall). For the Third Brigade (General Perkins) we have been more fortunate, but the company muster rolls and orders are quite deficient... From the Commander of the Fourth, (General Paine,) we have nothing."
With a focus on Cuyahoga County, Joel Paine is an enigma. For a man of a prominent family who rose to the rank of general, he left a scant paper trail and is surprisingly difficult to track down. Born in 1778 in Connecticut, he was a son of the founder of Painesville, Ohio, Edward Paine, who himself had been a militia general in the Revolution. Joel Paine died in the spring of 1813, perhaps a casualty of the war, but where and how are not recorded, nor even is his resting place. Prominent. Difficult to track down. Surprisingly so.
Gen. Wadsworth "rode into Cleveland [sic] with his horsemen about four o'clock in the afternoon of the 24th, to the great joy of the few men assembled there," and set about not so much restoring order as establishing it. He was joined that evening by a small federal force coming from the west led by Col. Lewis Cass, one of Hull's officers who had escaped capture at Detroit. ("Having been in command of a regiment under Hull he was bitterly indignant at the surrender, and never failed to denounce the cowardly general in the most virulent terms." Cass would eventually succeed his disgraced boss as governor of Michigan.) That same evening the Murrays' cousin, former Ohio governor Samuel Huntington, arrived in Cleaveland from Painesville and immediately started pulling the governmental levers still within his reach to equip and supply the men being organized by Wadsworth at the Cuyahoga. Gen. Perkins arrived on the 26th. Cass and Huntington soon rode on toward Washington bearing Gen. Wadsworth's first preliminary report to the War Department.
*
Head Quarters
Camp at Cleaveland
August 27th 1812
Honble William Eustis, Secretary at War
Sir,
I have the honor to inform you that on the 23d Inst. I received information by express from this place of the Surrender of the Northwestern Army and the fort at Detroit to the British by General Hull on the 16th Inst. A Copy of the Articles of Capitulation I send inclosed.
Considering the defenceless Situation of the western frontier, my duty impelled me instantly to issue orders to the Several Commanders of the four Brigades under my Command to detach their drafts composing a part of the 100,000 Militia.
On the 23d I repaired with a Company of Light Dragoons to this place, where I have established my head quarters, where the troops will be organized and disciplined as they arrive.
Brigadier Genl Simon Perkins, Commandant of the 3d Brigade, and Brigadier Genl Joel Paine, Commandant of the 4th Brigade, had previous to receiving my orders required from their respective Brigades one half of the effective men.
On my way hither I recd information by express that about 1000 Indians had landed at Huron River. I immediately Issued orders to Generals Reasin Beall & Perkins to march with all possible speed the whole of their respective Brigades to Cleaveland. On my arrival at this place I was happy to learn that, instead of the savages having landed, as was feared, they were the unfortunate Officers and Soldiers surrendered by General Hull.
Not expecting an immediate Attack from the Indians, and believing that an armistice had been entered into by [American] Genl [Henry] Dearborn & [British General] Sir George Prevost, as I had been informed, I thought proper this day to countermand my last orders to Generals Beall and Perkins, as to require only one thousand men from their Brigades, three hundred from the first Brigade, and two hundred from the 4th.
I was in some degree compelled to this measure from the great difficulty in procuring provisions, there being no publick Stores and the Country new. And also on account of the great scarcity of arms, ammunition and Camp equipage.
My order to Genl Perkins required of him to repair immediately to Cleaveland. On giving the necessary orders and making arrangements for the march of his Brigade he arrived at this place last evening and, it being important to protect the frontier, and to Station a force which should Allay the fears of the Inhabitants who were remaining on the Huron, I ordered him to take the Command of a Battalion, until officers of a suitable Grade should arrive, and march to Huron River.
This detachment would have marched tomorrow morning had I not conceived it a duty imposed upon me from the peculiar embarrassed situation of affairs in the western Country to open such of the communications as were addressed to Genl Hull from the Secretary at War which arrived last evening by the express mail.
It is unnecessary at present for me to advert particularly to these communications. From them, however, I learned that an armistice had not been agreed to by the Government, which convinced me of the hazardous situation in which so small a body of men must be placed at this [illegible: westward position?]. As soon as a sufficient number of troops shall arrive I intend to detach a force sufficient to protect the Inhabitants from the incursions of the Indians and prevent, if possible, an invasion by the British of the Country east of the Sandusky.
Every exertion in my power will be made to procure ammunition, Camp equipage and such articles as are necessary for a Campaign, but munitions of war are principally owned by the [federal] Government. I have applied to the Commandant of the [federal] Garrison at Pittsburgh for those articles which I deemed indispensably necessary, stating the defenceless situation of the Country and the prospect of an immediate attack from the Savages, but his duty would not permit him to comply with my request. I have procured some supplies on my own responsibility and shall continue to use my Credit for that purpose, but it will be totally out of my power to fulfill my engagements unless assisted by the [federal] Government. By Mr. Huntington, in Company with Col. Cass, whom I sent express on the 24th, you will be informed of many particulars which I have not time to relate.
I have the honor to be, with Respect, your Obedient Servant,
Elijah Wadsworth
Majr Genl, 4th Division Ohio Militia
*
More local men straggled in to Cleaveland every day, and as they did the officers present did what (little) they could to feed, quarter, equip and train them, trying their best to transform them from what they were—farmers and kids with old guns—into usable military units.
Capt. Murray's Cuyahoga County company was assigned to the First Regiment of Gen. Paine's Fourth Brigade. This put the Euclid men under the command of Majors Samuel Jones, of Cleaveland, and Eleazer Hickox, of Burton. Above them was another Burton man, and someone with very deep ties to Euclid. Jedediah Beard—brother of 1798 Euclid pioneer Amariah, uncle of Euclid's first baby Clorinda, whom John Moss himself had helped move from Granville, New York, onto the Western Reserve in 1800—was chosen as the First Regiment's commanding Lieutenant Colonel. Like Harvey Murray, exactly what qualified Jedediah Beard for command, and fairly high command at that, is obscure. He had little military experience other than having previously served as captain of Burton's militia unit in peacetime. But perhaps he performed well in that role and was well-liked and respected. In Ohio in 1812 that was enough.
Charles Whittlesey, writing in 1879, recorded that, "Before the close of the month of August [1812], General Wadsworth and General Perkins had reduced the heterogeneous materials around them into the semblance of military order. Men were abundant and full of ardor, but the accessories were wholly wanting..." Nevertheless, having stabilized, he felt, the situation at the Cuyahoga, Gen. Wadsworth was determined to extend his defensive perimeter.
Rivers formed natural obstacles for an enemy to advance into lakeshore Ohio, and Gen. Wadsworth moved to halt any potential enemy progress by strengthening previously neglected positions further to the west. Around September 1, at his order, Ohio militiamen "...crossed the Cuyahoga..." and "...headed for the Huron river by the land route... To General Perkins was assigned the command of all troops at the front, with a large discretion... On the 6th of September we find them at the mouth of the Huron, with about 400 men." This contingent included Capt. Harvey Murray's Cuyahoga County company and with that the Euclid men.
The Huron River empties into Lake Erie in what is now Huron, Ohio, in the Western Reserve's Fire Lands, just east of Cedar Point. "On his arrival at Huron, General Perkins commenced building a temporary defense near the shore of the Lake, east of the Huron river. General Wadsworth preferred a position on the east bank about ten miles up the river, at the head of batteaux navigation."
These American positions weren't so much fortresses as large and relatively well-guarded camps, and were referred to as such. The first, on the lakeshore, dubbed Camp Huron, was soon realized to be vulnerable to attack from warships on the British-controlled lake, not to mention festering with malaria (leading some malcontents to refer to it as "Camp Nonsense"). As noted, on Wadsworth's orders Perkins soon relocated his base to a higher and more protected spot inland, in what is now Milan Township in Erie County, but which at the time was called Avery Township. It was better, though not much. The men were set to work cutting trees and digging trenches, and this new redoubt was called Camp Avery.
Charles Whittlesey:
"These forts were light stockades with block houses made of squared timber thick enough to resist musketry, generally two stories in height, with floors of timber and loop holes for infantry. In the midst of a forest it is quickly put up and easily made proof against external fires by a roof of logs covered with earth. If the troops have artillery, guns may be mounted within it having embrasures. If placed at the angles of a stockade they supply the place of bastions. Many of the forts of the Indian wars were only large and well built block houses."
Life for Gen. Perkins' 400 at Camp Avery was, in a word, miserable, though the Cuyahoga County men seem to have fared better than most.
Charles Whittlesey again:
"A letter of the 11th of September puts the number of effective [men at Camp Avery] at only 250, including Captain Burnham's company from Ashtabula, Captain Clark Parker's of Geauga, Captain Harry [sic] Murray's of Cuyahoga, and Captain Dulls (or Dolls) and Captain Cotton's of Trumbull. A poisonous malaria, generated [Whittlesey thought] by luxuriant vegetation, everywhere filled the valleys of the rivers. It is not yet [so far as Whittlesey knew when he wrote these words in 1879] determined what constitutes malaria, but its effects upon the early settlers were distressing, taking the form of intermittent fevers. The Valleys of the Huron and the Cuyahoga where the troops were collected were notorious for ague and fever, and the month of September was the worst period of the year. A large part of the men were accustomed to vegetable food, comfortable lodging, regular hours, and sufficient clothing. Their new mode of life, with irregular sleep, exposures to sun by day and fogs by night, salt and insufficient rations, greatly increased the probabilities of sickness. Mr. Giddings [a militia soldier at Camp Avery and a source for Whittlesey; more on him shortly] says: 'The bilious fever had reduced our effective troops until we were able to muster only two guards, consisting of two relieves [sic], so that each healthy man was compelled to stand post one-fourth of the time.' The Rev. Joseph Badger filled the places of chaplain, postmaster and nurse. Dr. Thompson of Hudson held the position of surgeon, with a scant supply of medicines, no sanitary assistants, and scarcely any hospital accommodations. For delicacies to sooth [sic] their collapsed and nauseated stomachs 'Parson Badger' made a mortar in the top of a stump where he pounded corn and made samp, or 'hasty pudding.' This he called 'priestcraft.' He was far more popular than the surgeon, with his prescriptions of calomel and jalap."
Provisioning Camp Avery, even poorly, was difficult, and this fact would precipitate the largest direct confrontation the Euclid men would face in the war.
*
On September 25, 1812, men from Camp Avery were dispatched to the Sandusky River, about 30 miles to the west, to recover supplies of pork and beef which had been deposited prior to Hull's surrender at a now abandoned post called Fort Stephenson, and to bring them back to their comrades on the Huron. They found the food, and loaded it into canoes for transport back to Camp Avery via the waters of Sandusky Bay, but as they approached the mouth of the bay a storm blew up on the lake and pushed them ashore onto what was then called Bull's Island, now called Johnson's Island.
Waiting it out, the commander of the expedition, Ohio Militia Major Samuel Frazier, felt something off about the nearby mainland Marblehead Peninsula, less than half a mile away across the water. Swept up in the recent panic it was supposed to be deserted, of anyone likely to be friendly at least, and Major Frazier sent one of his canoes with five or six of his men to check out the situation there.
Among the scouts were two men of the Ramsdell family, who, before the lakeshore panic, had occupied a farm on the north side of the peninsula which they called the Two Harbors. These were likely 14-year-old Valentine Ramsdell and his father Joseph, 45. They stealthily approached their erstwhile homestead along with their companions and from concealment observed their house and its surroundings occupied by what they estimated to be about 50 Indians—a number later revealed to actually have been closer to 130—eating the Ramsdells' abandoned corn and honey.
Vastly outnumbered, the Americans prudently withdrew. They quietly made their way back to their canoe and crossed back over to Bull's Island where they reported what they had found. As fast as they could Major Frazier and his men paddled over to Cedar Point and Frazier sent a fast runner ahead of his supply-laden canoes back to Camp Avery to raise the alarm of enemy Indians in the area.
The runner arrived in camp around 5 o'clock in the late afternoon of September 28, and reported his news to the commanders there. With daylight waning, Capt. Joshua T. Cotton of Austintown, adjacent to Youngstown, was assigned to gather volunteers to return in force and relieve the men on Cedar Point, then cross Sandusky Bay to the peninsula and confront the Indians and whatever other enemy they found there. Sixty-four men answered Capt. Cotton's call, and, as Whittlesey noted, Harvey Murray's Cuyahoga County men were still among the effectives. The Cuyahoga men volunteered, and this meant the Euclid men.
*
Cotton's detachment set out at sunset and marched through the night up the length of Cedar Point, reaching its tip before sunrise on the morning of September 29. They found their comrades there as they had hoped to and after re-arranging men and canoes they sent the Fort Stephenson beef back on its way toward Camp Avery then paddled over to Marblehead looking for a fight.
Joshua Reed Giddings, mentioned earlier by Whittlesey, would serve 17 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and be a leading abolitionist there in the years before the Civil War. On September 29, 1812, he was a 16-year-old private in Capt. Jedediah Burnham's Ashtabula County company and one of the volunteers in Capt. Cotton's detail to Marblehead. Shortly after his retirement from Congress in 1859 he published the first and one of the only full descriptions of the only battle known to have been fought on the Western Reserve. His unique and irreplaceable account of The Battle of the Peninsula is excerpted here at length, edited just slightly for clarity:
"We steered for what was then called the Middle Orchard, lying on the shore of the bay nearly opposite Bull's Island. Our whole number now amounted to seventy-two. We landed a little after sunrise.
"Here our arrangements were made as follows: Eight men, including a corporal, were detailed as a guard to remain with the boats. They were directed to take them to a thicket of small bull rushes, apparently half way to Bull's Island, and there to await further orders. Two flank guards of twelve men each were also detailed, one under the command of Acting Sergeant James Root, and the other under command of Acting Sergeant Thomas Hamilton. These guards were directed to keep at suitable distance on each side of the road in which the main body under the command of Capt. Cotton was to march.
"In the course of ten minutes from the time of landing, these orders were being put in execution. The boats were moving off, the flank guards were out of sight, and the main body was marching for the Two Harbors.
"At the expiration of an hour or two, the Corporal, named Coffin, who was with the boats, contrary to orders, took the smallest boat, and with ten men went ashore to obtain fruit for his little party. Once on shore they pushed their examination for fruit to the orchard lying some eighty or a hundred rods above the place of landing in the morning.
"While thus engaged they accidently discovered several canoes filled with Indians making their way down the bay, covered by the island from the view of the little party who remained with the boats. Corporal Coffin with his two companies instantly left the shore of the bay, and under cover of the woods hastened down to their boats, and with as much energy as they were able to put forth pulled for their companions, who were resting in perfect security, unconscious of danger.
"On their arrival, the four knapsacks and blankets that were on board the four boats were hastily thrown into the two lightest. Each of these was manned by four men, the Corporal in the lightest boat, who gave directions to the men in the others to make for the shore if the enemy were likely to overtake them. The two heaviest boats were thus abandoned, and the men in the others made all efforts to place as great a distance between themselves and the enemy as was possible.
"They had gotten so far before the Indians came round the island and discovered them that they were permitted to escape without much pursuit. The other boats floated near the shore, where the Indians sunk them in the shoal water by cutting holes through their bottoms, but the water being very shallow they remained in plain view. The guard in the two boats made Cedar Point, where they remained until near evening...
"While the enemy thus drove off the guard and scuttled two of the boats, Capt. Cotton and his party were marching for the Two Harbors in the full expectation of finding the Indians there. They reached Ramsdell's plantation and saw fresh signs of the enemy. The Indians had left evident marks of having been there. Fresh beef lay on the ground, putrefying in the sun, their fires were yet burning, and every indication showed that they had recently left the premises of the Ramsdells. There was some wheat in a field near the Lake, in such a situation that the owner [Mr. Ramsdell] was anxious to make it more secure. The whole force had collected in the field, and it appeared to be understood that the pursuit of the enemy was to be extended no further.
"It was between ten and eleven o'clock A M. that the return march was commenced. Mr. Hamilton, with his guard, and Captain Cotton, with the main body, were to return to the Ramsdells' house. The main body were then to return along the road leading back to the bay. Hamilton and his guard were to file off to the right and maintain their position on that flank. Root and his party were to secure the Ramsdells' wheat, and then by a diagonal route to intercept the main body at the distance of a mile or so from the Ramsdells' house.
"The day was clear and pleasant, and there was no difficulty in either of the guards keeping their direct course. Each party seemed to have moved with great regularity. Capt. Cotton and the main body were marching along the road in double file, Hamilton with the right flank guard was maintaining his position, and Root, having secured the wheat, was returning on the road on which he was directed.
"All had progressed perhaps three quarters of a mile, when suddenly Root and his party were fired upon by the enemy. His party were led by young [Valentine] Ramsdell, who acted as pilot. The ground was open timber land, with grass as high as a man's waist. The Indians rose from the grass directly in front of the party and fired as simultaneously as a platoon of militia would have fired at the word of command. At the instant they fired they raised the war whoop, and disappeared in the grass.
"Young Ramsdell fell at the first fire, pierced by several balls. One other man was also disabled, leaving but nine men beside their commander to return the fire of the enemy and hold them at bay until they should be supported by their friends under Capt. Cotton. Root directed his men to shelter themselves behind trees, and by his cool and deliberate movements stimulated them to maintain their ground. Whenever an Indian showed any part of his person he was sure to receive the salutation of a backwoodsman's rifle. The firing was kept up in an irregular manner, constantly interspersed with the yells of the Indians, until the little guard were reinforced from the main body.
"As the sound of the enemy's rifles first struck the ears of Capt. Cotton and his party they stopped short and stood silent for a moment then began to lead off from the rear without orders and without regularity. Many of them raised the Indian yell as they started. As they reached the scene of action, each advanced with circumspection as the whistling of balls informed him that he had obtained the post of danger.
"The firing continued for some fifteen minutes after the first arrival of assistance from the main body when it appeared to subside by common consent of both parties.
"As the firing became less animated the yells of the savages grew faint, and the Indians were seen to drag off their dead and wounded. About the time of these manifestations of a disposition on the part of the enemy to retire from the conflict, Capt. Cotton ordered a retreat. He retired and was followed by a large portion of his men. A few remained with Sergeants Root and Rice and maintained their position until the enemy apparently left the field.
"When the firing had entirely ceased our intrepid sergeants held a consultation, and thought it prudent to retire to where the main body had taken up a position some sixty or eighty rods in the rear of the battle ground. As soon as they and their companions reached the party under Capt. Cotton, that officer proposed to take up a line of march directly for the orchard at which they landed in the morning.
"To this proposal Sergeant Rice would not consent until the dead and wounded were brought off. He was then ordered to take one half of the men and bring them away. This order was promptly obeyed.
"The dead and wounded were brought from the scene of action to the place where Cotton was waiting with his men. There was but one man so wounded as to be unable to walk. A ball had struck him in the groin, and he was carried on the back of Sergeant Rice most of the distance. Rice was a man of great determination of purpose, and refused to leave his charge during the subsequent skirmish.
"There were two dead bodies left on the ground at the time of the retreat: [Valentine] Ramsdell, who fell at the first fire, and [Simeon] Blackman, who belonged in the southern part of Trumbull county. James S. Bills was shot through the lungs, and after being carried back to where Cotton had made a stand, and after leaving his last request with a friend, he died before the bodies of Blackman and Ramsdell were interred. The dead were interred in as decent a manner as could be done under the circumstances. The three bodies were buried together between two logs covered with leaves, dirt and rotten wood, and the line of march was again resumed.
"There was a very general expectation that the enemy would make an attempt to retrieve their evident discomfiture. They had lost some of their men, but had not taken a single scalp, which with them is regarded as disreputable, particularly when they are the aggressors, as in this instance.
"The order of march was the same as it had been previously. All proceeded regularly and silently towards the place of landing. When the main body moving along the road had arrived in sight of the improvement at the Middle Orchard there suddenly appeared two Indians some thirty or forty rods in front of the foremost numbers of our party. The Indians appeared to have suddenly discovered our men and started to run from them.
"Our men in front made pursuit, while others more cautious than their comrades called loudly for them to stop, assuring them there was danger near. Our friends stopped suddenly, and at that instant the whole body of Indians fired upon our line, being at fartherest [sic] not more than twenty rods distant, entirely concealed behind a ledge of trees that had been prostrated by the wind. It was a most unaccountable circumstance that not a man of our party was injured at this fire. The Indians were on the right of the road, and of course between the road and bay. Our party betook themselves each to his tree, and returned the fire as they could catch sight of the enemy.
"The firing was irregular for some three or five minutes when Sergeant Hamilton with the right flank guard reached the scene of action. He had unconsciously fallen somewhat behind the main body during the march. As he advanced he came directly upon the enemy's left wing. His first fire put them to flight, leaving two or three of their number on the ground. As they retreated they crossed the road in front of the main body, who by this time had been joined by Sergeant Root and the left guard.
"Having crossed the road the Indians turned about and resumed the fire. At this time Captain Cotton began to retire towards a log cabin standing within the cleared land. The retreat was very irregular, with some of the men remaining on the ground and keeping up an animated fire upon the enemy until Cotton and those who started with him had nearly reached the cabin in which they took shelter.
"Those in the rear at last commenced a hasty retreat also, and were pursued by the Indians until they came within range of the rifles of those who had found shelter in the cabin. The Indians commenced a fire upon those in the log cabin, and kept it up a short time, keeping themselves concealed behind the brush and small timber. Captain Cotton, with about twenty men, had entered this cabin, and very handsomely covered the retreat of those who remained longest on the field.
"There were about thirty Americans who went past the log cabin and proceeded to the place where we had landed in the morning expecting to find the boats in which they might escape across the bay. But the guard and two of the boats were gone, and the other two boats had earlier been scuttled. They dared not venture back to the cabin, naturally supposing that it was surrounded by the enemy. Some of them pulled off their clothes and attempted to stop the holes in one of the scuttled boats so as to enable them to cross the bay in it. Others fled at once down the shore of the bay in order to get as far from the enemy as they could, entertaining a hope that some means would offer by which they might cross over to Cedar Point.
"Others followed, and before sunset all those who had not sought shelter in the log cabin were on the eastern point of the peninsula with their wounded comrades. There were six wounded men brought away that evening, making, with the guard left in the boat, thirty-seven. These were joined by those who had remained on Cedar Point from the time they left Bull's Island on their way from Lower Sandusky, so that the whole party who reached Huron that night were between forty and fifty.
"The firing was distinctly heard on Cedar Point by Corporal Coffin and his guard of seven men, who, under a state of extreme anxiety for the fate of their companions, put off from the Point and lay as near the peninsula as they thought safe from the rifles of the enemy, should there be any there. They rejoiced to see their friends coming down the Point, bringing their wounded, wet with perspiration, many of them stained with blood, and all appearing ready to sink under the fatigues and excitement of nearly twenty-four hours unmitigated effort.
"The boats were small, and one of them was loaded at once and crossed to Cedar Point, and then returned with the other and together they took in all that remained on the peninsula, then crossed back over to Cedar Point.
"All were now collected on the beach at Cedar Point where Sergeant Wright was the highest officer in command. Eight men were detailed as oarsmen and ordered to take in the six wounded men and move directly for the mouth of Huron River. I do not recollect the number of men placed in the other boat, but believe it was eight. The remainder took up their march for Huron by land. It was my lot to act as one of the oarsmen on board the boat on which the wounded were placed.
"Daylight was fast fading away when we put out from Cedar Point into the mouth of the bay. Here we stopped some little time and listened in the silence of the evening for any noise that might come from the log cabin in which our companions were left. Hearing nothing from that distance we started for the mouth of Huron river.
"We entered the river and arrived at a place then called Sprague's Landing, about a mile above the mouth, about one or two o'clock on the morning of the 30th of September. An advance post was kept at that point, and we fortunately found one of the Assistant Surgeons belonging to the service at that place. We soon started a fire in a vacant house, and placed the wounded in it, and delivered them over to the care of the medical officer to whom I have alluded, but whose name I am now unable to recollect.
"Having accomplished this, our Sergeant Rice proposed going to headquarters that night, provided a small party would volunteer to accompany him. Anxious that the earliest possible information of the situation of Captain Cotton and his party remaining on the peninsula in the log cabin should be communicated, some eight or ten of us volunteered to accompany our determined and persevering Sergeant.
"But in the darkness of the night we mistook the road and found ourselves on a branch leading south, which left Camp Avery on the right perhaps a mile and a half. We attempted to wend our way through the forest. We soon lost our course, but wandered among the openings and woods until daylight enabled us to direct our course with some degree of correctness. We struck the road near what was then called Abbott's Landing, and reached camp a little after sunrise.
"Arrived at headquarters, both officers and men were soon made acquainted with the situation of our friends who yet remained on the peninsula. But in the enfeebled state of our skeleton army, it was difficult to obtain a sufficient force to send out to relieve them.
"During the forenoon Lieut. Allen, of the company to which I belonged, succeeded in raising some thirty volunteers and started to the peninsula in order to bring home those we had left there. Lieut. Allen, however, met with difficulty in obtaining boats to convey his men across the bay and did not reach Captain Cotton and his party until the morning of the first of October. They then found our friends in the log cabin, but the enemy were not to be seen.
"It seems that soon after Capt. Cotton and his men commenced firing upon the Indians from the cabin that the Indians retired out of danger. They seem not to have noticed the Americans who passed by the cabin during the skirmish in order to find the boats, who then passed down the bay to the point of the peninsula. Had they discovered those men they would doubtless have pursued and massacred them all. But, being unconscious of this, and there being no prospect of effecting any injury to those in the log cabin, the Indians retired to the scene of action, and stripped and scalped our two dead whom we had left on the field.
"After the Indians had retired out of sight and left our friends somewhat at leisure, our men inside the log cabin proceeded to raise a portion of the floor composed of planks split from large timber. They then dug a sort of grave for one of our dead comrades, a man named [Daniel] Mingus, and after burying the body, replaced the floor, leaving no signs of the body being deposited there. Capt. Cotton and Lieut. Allen and his party then re-crossed the bay and returned to camp on the evening of the first of October."
The Cuyahoga men were among the casualties of this battle on the Marblehead Peninsula.
James Bills, shot through the lungs, was one of Capt. Murray's. Bills left almost no record behind to know him, a fact which itself may indicate that he was young, never married, never fathered children, never acquired property or made a will. He may have originally been from New Hampshire, but where in Cuyahoga he lived is not recorded. He's still buried near where he fell on the peninsula.
"...two others, John Carlton and Moses Eldred, were wounded there." Eldred may have been from Newburgh, but later lived in North Ridgeville, and later still in Bedford. He married twice, had at least 4 children, and died in Elyria at age 87 in 1857. Carlton, as has been noted, was Euclid's Anna McIlrath Cozad's husband.
Congressman Giddings completed his memoir of the battle: "The next morning we again mustered, the roll of volunteers was called. The names of the killed and wounded being noted, we were dismissed, and each returned to his own company.
*
The unenviable task of reconstructing the North Western Army first fell to Brig. Gen. James Winchester of Tennessee. No one liked him. He was succeeded in less than a month by the governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, who had been one of Anthony Wayne's officers in the war with the Indians of the Northwest Territory in the 1790s, and who had already faced, and defeated, Tecumseh in battle the previous year along a tributary of the Wabash in Indiana called Tippecanoe, before that ongoing Indian war got folded into this new one with the British.
Harrison's orders were pretty simple: retake Detroit immediately. But Harrison was a much better general than Hull or Eustice or Madison and he ignored their uninformed urgency and set first about shoring up his lines, establishing new frontline positions progressively further west of the Huron, west of the Sandusky, first at the Maumee, in what is now the Toledo suburb of Perrysburg, Ohio, then turning the corner at the west end of Lake Erie with a fort at Frenchtown, in what is now Monroe, Michigan, at the River Raisin. Soon Camp Avery was once again far in the rear.
By then the winter was approaching, and with it the end of campaigning, and a frozen lake and with that a reprieve—for a time—from the predations of General Hunter, Lady Prevost and Queen Charlotte. The ad hoc militia thrown together for the late summer emergency could now be spared. Indeed their ongoing needs for food, powder and other supplies were actually now a burden. The men at Camp Avery were sent home.
"...not long after these affairs on the peninsula, orders were received from General Harrison to march the regiment back to Cleveland and disband it, with the thanks of the commander-in-chief. The regiment was no longer needed for service that autumn, and was as a regiment never again in the field."
Capt. Harvey Murray's Cuyahoga County regiment was discharged November 30, 1812.
"As winter approached, the war-excitement subsided. Both armies went into winter quarters, most of the militia was dismissed in December, and only a small guard was maintained at Cleveland."
"Ere long most of the Euclid people returned to their homes..."
*
"Quintus Flaminius Atkins, the oldest son of Josiah Atkins, Sr., and Mary Gillett Atkins, was born May 10, 1782, in Wolcott, New Haven County, Connecticut. His father, descended from an English family of good repute, was a man of more than usual bodily vigor and energy."
Q. F. Atkins was the sheriff of Ashtabula County before the war. In the fall of 1812 he was with Gen. Perkins' contingent at Camp Avery, serving as a lieutenant in Capt. James Stone's company, which was probably also from Ashtabula County. But the company was small and seriously understrength, and disbanded in less than two weeks.
Joel Paine was the general, but his son Edward served on his staff with the rank of captain, and "Captain Edward Paine of Chardon, a son and aid of General Paine, was at this time stationed with a company from Geauga [County], mostly mounted, at a small prairie near the Sandusky—an independent body of volunteers..." After Capt. Stone's company disbanded, Q. F. Atkins volunteered with Capt. Paine's horse troop. But after just a month this unit disbanded as well.
Roger Nettleton was among the first settlers and a community leader in what became Ashtabula County, settling first in Austintown in 1800 and later moving to Kingsville.
Lewis Dille, Sr. was David Dille's second child from his marriage with his first wife, Nancy Viers. He was the lieutenant of Capt. Murray's company through November 1812, and a letter from Murray regarding one of the men killed on the peninsula places him, Murray, and presumably his company with him, in Camp Avery as late as October 3. There was not a large age difference between Lewis Dille and his wife, but there was between his father, David Dille, and his father's second wife, Lewis' young step-mother, Mary Saylor, who came with him to Euclid in 1803, and David and Mary Saylor Dille had several small children in the fall of 1812.
If there are errors in Lieut. Atkins' account which follows, bear in mind that he likely had no reference materials at hand to consult and that 44 years had passed.
The brook mentioned is without a doubt Euclid Creek. Four rods is about 20 yards. The "loom house" of round logs might have been the Dilles' original fall 1803 cabin, with their "living house" of "hewed logs" built later after they had had a chance to settle in.
This all probably took place near the present intersection of Euclid Avenue and Highland Road in Euclid:
"A night in Euclid, Cuyahoga Co.
"In the following incidents I change from Ashtabula County to Cuyahoga County, both being important parts of the Western Reserve. My purpose is to chronicle an incident of stirring character in which Capt. Roger Nettleton of Kingsville and myself took part on the ninth of October, A.D. 1812.
"We had been serving for a month or so in a volunteer company of mounted gun men commanded by Capt. Joel Paine of Painesville. The company was formed at the request of Genl. Simon Perkins who then commanded at Camp Avery on the river Huron. It consisted of some of the most fearless and patriotic men of Ashtabula, Geauga and Cuyahoga Counties who had left their homes of their own accord (furnishing their own horses and equipment) to assist their neighbors and friends already in camp, if needed, in a time of peril, as all believed, against the common enemy, viz: the British and their Indian allies.
"Having served as long as General Perkins thought necessary we were honorably discharged, and Capt. Nettleton and myself set out on our return to our homes something over 100 miles distant. In our journey home we stayed the second night at the house of Mr. Lewis Dilley Senr in Euclid.
"It was after sunset when we arrived, and, knowing that both ourselves and our horses were weary and hungry, our kind hosts most cheerfully and bountifully provided for our wants. The family had taken supper before our arrival, and as soon as we had, we told the news from the front. Mrs. Dilley prepared for us an excellent supper, the best meal I had eaten since I began my service as a volunteer in the 'War of 1812.'
"After supper we talked about the war, and the gloomy prospects that had settled down upon Northern Ohio, Penna. and New York in consequence of Hull's surrender, until it was time for retiring.
"It was a fine still night and Mrs. Dilley with a lighted candle led the way out to what she called her loom house, built of round logs (their living house being well built of hewed logs), in which stood a loom with a web partly woven, a quill wheel, a chair or two, with a bedstead and good bed, to which we were directed as our place of rest. Nothing could have been more acceptable in our estimation, and, our hostess retiring, we were soon in bed and asleep.
"We had slept two or three hours when we were suddenly aroused by the shrill cry of, 'Fire! Fire! Our house is on fire!' by a female voice close to our door.
"We sprang from our bed and without stopping a moment to dress I seized a two-pail brass kettle and Capt. Nettleton a large swill pail, both near the door, and we ran to the brook some four rods off for water.
"As we entered with the water we saw flames rolling in volumes along the ceiling from the chimney. We dashed the water we had brought in the wood work and ceiling and in front of the chimney and went for more.
"At our second discharge the effect was quite perceptible.
"Encouraged to hope for success Mrs. Dilley was with us in our third trip, and Mr. Dilley, who seemed at first quite paralyzed by the appalling calamity, soon fell into line in seeing the intrepidity of his wife.
"From this time every moment of our united efforts brought encouragement of final success, and after some ten minutes of as hard and unremitted labor as man or woman ever performed we had the satisfaction of seeing the fire subdued and Mr. Dilley's house saved.
"Then it was that we realized that we were in utter nakedness save our shirts.
"Mrs. Dilley had been first awakened by the suffocating smoke, and, calling her husband, sprang out of bed and gave the alarm at our door. Mr. Dilley left the burning house just as Capt. Nettleton and myself were first running for water to the brook.
"As soon as we were satisfied that the danger was over Capt. Nettleton + myself went to the brook and washed, and, returning to our sleeping room, dressed ourselves, then we returned to the house we had saved.
"Here a new wonder met our eyes.
"Two sprightly children that we had neither seen nor heard until that moment were with their parents who had taken them from their bed in a log addition to the house on the north side.
"The only passage to or from this sleeping room was by a door from the room which had been on fire.
"Neither of the parents in the excitement of the fire had thought or spoken of the children until we left them to wash and dress ourselves.
"Had they mentioned the dangerous situation of their children—the most natural thing imaginable—the house must have burned down, and most likely the children burned to death in it! As the loss of a few moments in trying to rescue the children would have rendered it quite impossible to put out the fire.
"Besides, we know not what disasters would have befallen any and all who should have made an effort to pass through the burning room to save them.
"As it was, the children who had been put in bed before our arrival did not wake up until awakened by their mother, who seemed half delirious with joy when she found they had escaped without the least injury or fright.
"Mrs. Dilley said that terrible foreboding seized upon her as the first thought of them entered her mind. She was sure they had been smothered in their bed, as no sound had been heard from their room during all the noise and commotion occasioned by the fire. Never in her whole life had there been such a terrible sinking at her heart as then.
"When she opened the door to their room and found them unharmed and peacefully sleeping she was so overjoyed that she could not refrain from waking them and bringing them into the charred and blackened room, so tidy and clean when they left it and went to bed, to impress upon their young minds the great danger the frightful calamity from which they had been delivered by the timely exertions of the two strangers there present.
"Mr. Dilley and his excellent wife expressed to Capt. Nettleton and myself their gratitude for our timely assistance in a way that went to our hearts. Mrs. Dilley was the second wife of Mr. Dilley and his junior by some years. When we resumed our journey after breakfast, at parting Mrs. Dilley exclaimed, 'God bless you, my friends! May you find your wives and children all alive and in good health after your long absence from them. O, my friends, had you not stopped with us last night we should have been houseless and childless this morning! May the Almighty reward you for what you have done for us; we cannot.'
"Mr. Dilley too expressed his thankfulness in the most feeling manner, pressing us to call and share with him the comforts of life whenever we came into his neighborhood.
"Ever after, when we met, he would remind me of saving his house.
Q. F. Atkins, Racine, [Wisconsin,] April 1, 1856."
As winter settled upon the Lake Erie basin the men and women living there—British and Canadian and Native and American—took stock of the events of the year just passed, and pondered and plotted their next moves.
*
If the British got their hands on Daniel Dobbins they would have hanged him.
An American civilian sailor from Erie, Pennsylvania, 36-year-old Dobbins was master of a small merchant schooner, called Salina, which happened to be docked at Mackinac when the fort was surprised and captured by the British and their Indian allies on July 17, 1812. After being swept up with the soldiers of the small garrison the British paroled Dobbins along with their other Mackinac prisoners. Dobbins insisted he was a non-combatant, just a businessman unaware even that the war had begun caught in an unlucky circumstance, but the British didn't have time for such particulars in the midst of a military campaign and sent him with their other prisoners on to American Detroit, which no one, not even the British, were expecting to capitulate so suddenly, so soon. There, when Hull surrendered to Brock and Tecumseh just a month later, Dobbins was captured a second time, and having been captured twice the British considered him a parole violator.
As a humane way of dealing with prisoners of war, armies in centuries past would routinely release captured enemies once each man swore a solemn oath that he would not return to fighting until he had been formally exchanged. The knowledge that maltreatment (read: starvation, or murder) of helpless prisoners could surely be reciprocated in retaliation motivated each side to abide by the rules of this mostly honor-based system. For it to continue its very fragility dictated harsh penalties for violators. Violators, so far as the British were concerned, like Daniel Dobbins.
So marked, rightly or wrongly, Dobbins made an escape from Detroit and proceeded along the south shore of Lake Erie, through Gen. Wadsworth's camp at Cleaveland, then through the north end of Euclid, and back to his home in Erie, Pennsylvania. But having been convinced by his recent treatment to join the war effort he continued on to Washington. Dobbins had some valuable intelligence which he felt compelled to share, and lucky timing would find the right men in just the right frame of mind to hear what he had to say.
Detroit was an unmitigated disaster. Its loss, along with the losses of Mackinac and Dearborn, threatened the United States' hold on the entire Northwest, from Pittsburg to the Mississippi River. Detroit's recovery was essential, and the fiasco there forced Secretary of War Eustice and President Madison to revisit the need for ships, previously thought to be too expensive, on the Upper Great Lakes. But they would have to start mostly from scratch, and the British fleet prowling could raid and blast nearly any shipyard there.
Dobbins wanted to tell the war leaders about his home port in Erie, Pennsylvania. Among the best natural harbors on Lake Erie the nascent village rose behind a small, sandy peninsula curling into the lake which the French, the first Europeans to take note of it, called "Presque Isle," "half an island." As New France expanded into the North American interior it bumped into the newer British colonies, themselves swelling into the West, a circumstance eventually leading to the French and Indian War. The French built a small fort at Presque Isle in 1756 but couldn't maintain the position and it was occupied by the British in 1760. It was later captured for a time by Pontiac's warriors in the Native uprising across the Northwest in 1763. It was ceded to the United States after the Revolution and a small lake port began to develop behind Presque Isle Bay.
The peninsula protected the bay from vessels on Lake Erie and could be hardened with gun positions. A uniquely narrow channel requiring special local knowledge to navigate capped by a sand bar at its mouth made Presque Isle Bay impossible to force by an enemy in the age of sail. Dobbins knew the lakes far better than any of the leaders in Washington, and could understand the need for an American fleet without being privy to any high-level plans. He knew that Erie with its protected bay was the place to build it.
He arrived in Washington and took his ideas to Secretary of War William Eustice, who was impressed by them. Eustice arranged a meeting with the president, and Dobbins emerged from it a warrant officer in the United States Navy with an appropriation from Congress and orders from his new Commander-in-Chief to return to Erie and begin building a fleet.
*
That same fall, 27-year-old Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry, USN, was doing penance in Narraganset Bay.
The previous year, before the war had started, he had wrecked his very first command, the fourteen-gun schooner USS Revenge, running her aground off Point Judith, Rhode Island, waters lapping his own hometown, which he supposedly knew very well. There were some questions as to who was ultimately responsible, but he was the captain and the buck stopped with him, and the incident had an odor of negligence. But the early U.S. Navy was small and there was a war on and officers were needed, so Perry's superiors weren't quite ready to show him the door just yet, but they did have cause to wonder if they had pulled out the captain's chair for him too soon. So while they figured out what they wanted to do with him they gave him some boats and let him patrol Narraganset.
Meanwhile Perry's contemporaries (his peers! his friends!) were making their careers racking up the only victories the Americans were having in this war. While things were going horribly on land for the United States, at sea the young country's young—and very small—navy was enjoying success far disproportionate to its size.
The U.S. had about a dozen warships on the Atlantic in 1812; Great Britain had hundreds, perhaps even a thousand. (Think about that. In generosity to the Royal Navy, however, consider that the Americans' opportunistic little war in North America hardly registered to them contrasted with the danger of actual homeland invasion posed by Napoleon Bonaparte, and they dedicated the vast, vast majority of their capabilities toward addressing that infinitely more salient threat. What Americans would call the War of 1812 was a very minor sideshow viewed from London.)
But the baby U.S. Navy had a lot of things going for it. Their ships were extremely well designed and well built, and fewer numbers perhaps lent itself to greater attention to detail in the construction of individual craft. They were also generally built larger and heavier than comparable foreign ships in their class. American captains were highly competent, and the ratio of officers to available ships meant commanders could choose to elevate only the best of the best. U.S. ships were adequately manned and those men were volunteers, well motivated and good at their jobs. Contrast that to a Royal Navy already forced to resort to impressment to crew their hundreds of vessels, the quality of an officer corps diluted by the need for sheer numbers, and the willingness to risk literally life and literally limb of crewmen kidnapped and held hostage. Of course the Americans could not hope to stand up against Britain's overwhelming numbers, but when they could find a one-on-one engagement American ships did very well.
In the summer of 1812 the American heavy frigate USS Constitution turned around after eluding five enemy ships in a two day chase and sank the British HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia. In the battle enemy cannonballs bounced off her thick, sloped oak flanks, earning her the nickname "Old Ironsides." (Incidentally, Constitution's commander in this battle, Capt. Isaac Hull, was the biological nephew and adopted son of the same Gen. William Hull who had just days before surrendered Detroit. Capt. Hull's father died during the Revolution in the bowels of the British prison hulk Jersey, perhaps right alongside the elder William Coleman and the two elder Seth Doans. Perry's father, Christopher, had been captured from a privateer and thrown into the Jersey as well, languishing there for three months before he managed an escape. So many roads to Euclid lead through the squalid hold of the Jersey)
In the fall Stephen Decatur (the Atlanta suburb, and the central Illinois town which would make that future state the Land of Lincoln) commanding the USS United States pummeled HMS Macedonian in European waters. And just two days before the new year Constitution again, this time commanded by William Bainbridge (Bainbridge, Ohio, Geauga County), took on HMS Java off the coast of Brazil and dashingly captured her ship's wheel before sending the enemy vessel to the bottom.
Oliver Perry was absolutely desperate to get into this fight.
Toward rehabilitating his name and reclaiming his career Perry spent every free minute of 1812 furiously writing letters to Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton, touting his qualifications and humbly offering his services, all of which went deafeningly unanswered. Approaching two years since sinking his own command, feeling increasingly left behind by the day, a Washington friend, William S. Rogers, suggested to Perry that he might "like a command on Lake Erie" where "there may be opportunities of distinguishing yourself." It wasn't the Atlantic, where, from Perry's point of view, the real war was happening, but he was running out of options.
U.S. naval affairs on the Great Lakes were under the command of 41-year-old Connecticut-born Capt. Isaac Chauncey. Perry wrote to him, touting his qualifications and humbly offering his services, also noting that he could probably bring with him to the West up to 150 men. This was at least as attractive to Chauncey as the talents of this faintly tainted Rhode Islander. For building ships to fight timber Chauncey had nothing but. Rope and anchors he got from Pittsburgh, sails and powder from Philadelphia. Guns he hauled up from Virginia. But there were never, ever enough seamen on the Great Lakes shores. Chauncey replied to Perry, "You are the very person I want for a very particular service where you may gain honor for yourself and reputation for your country."
The service Chauncey had in mind was overseeing the completion and fitting out of Daniel Dobbins' little fleet under construction in Presque Isle Bay. He certainly never intended that Perry should command it in battle. In fact, he likely intended to command it himself. But not until he had first secured America's position below Niagara Falls on Lake Ontario.
Lake Erie Chauncey considered, not unimportant, but secondary. He had placed affairs there under his sub-commander, Master Commandant Jesse Duncan Elliot, whose father had fought alongside Harrison and Wayne and was killed at Fallen Timbers. Elliot, in the course of his duties, had already perfunctorily considered and dismissed Presque Isle as a Lake Erie base, largely due to the daunting sand bar at its mouth, which he, a Marylander without the intimate knowledge of home town boy Daniel Dobbins, had deemed impassible by any large warship constructed inside the bay. For Lake Erie headquarters Elliot instead chose Black Rock, now a neighborhood on the north side of Buffalo, New York, above the falls on the Niagara River. There he had begun laying up materials for the construction of two large brigs which were to be the backbone of the American fleet which would oppose the British on the Upper Lakes. Indeed it was some time before both Chauncey and Elliot were even informed by their superiors of Dobbins' mission to Presque Isle with orders directly from the Navy Department and the president, and not without some resistance before they finally accepted it.
But Black Rock had problems, not least of which was its proximity to enemy Canada. Everything the Americans did there could not only be observed from right across the river, but it was all in artillery range, even musket range at some spots. Black Rock could easily be raided, and when the river froze enemy troops could simply walk over and burn things. Furthermore vessels built and sheltered there could not sail out against the strong Niagara River current, but had to be towed from land several miles upstream before they could be launched out onto Lake Erie.
There was not much anyone could do about the current, but Capt. Chauncey and the land commander at Niagara, Gen. Van Rensselaer, were confident the threats posed by the enemy would soon be eliminated by American conquests across the river. Then, once Capt. Chauncey had driven the British from Lake Ontario, he could focus all of his efforts on to the Upper Lakes, starting with Erie.
But just as things had gone poorly for Hull at the western end of Lake Erie, Van Rensselaer's invasion on the eastern end in the fall turned out similarly disastrous. This left the base at Black Rock even more naked at the end of the year than when the war had begun in the summer.
Likewise for Chauncey. When 1813 arrived Lake Ontario, far from secured, remained very much contested, so much so that Chauncey recalled Elliot from Black Rock to Sacket's Harbor, his headquarters on the eastern end of Lake Ontario, to help him turn the faltering situation around. He also ordered the materials gathered for the big brigs moved from exposed Black Rock to the safer base at Erie, Pennsylvania, where he ordered Dobbins and his crews at last to begin work on their construction.
These crews included Euclid's Samuel Dodge, Doan son-in-law and ship-builder turned Cleaveland's first carpenter when there were no ships to build. There was more than enough work for a shipwright that year, and he apparently joined the project at Erie sometime in early 1813.
The developments on the Niagara front and Lake Ontario in late 1812 and early 1813 drastically altered the position of Oliver Hazard Perry, who found himself at Presque Isle not only in charge of the strategically vital construction of the entire Upper Great Lakes fleet, including the two biggest most important vessels, but also the senior American naval officer on Lake Erie, supplanting Elliot without trying or intending to. This turn of events had important repercussions, ones which naval historians still debate to this day.
From his arrival at Erie in March 1813, Perry attacked the considerable obstacles he faced in his mission to complete and outfit the fleet with the vigor of a young officer grasping hard at a second chance, and sure he would not get a third. More than once in the effort he would push himself past the point of collapse.
The urgency of Perry's task was increased exponentially by the intelligence that at Amherstburg the British had begun construction of a new super-ship, which, when completed, would be the largest warship on the Great Lakes: 500 tons, with 20 guns.
Perry was under tremendous pressure to finish and successfully launch the American squadron before this new British weapon could be brought to bear. He wouldn't make it.
*
"In the spring of 1813 active preparations for hostilities were again made on both sides of the frontier, and Cleveland again became a depot of supplies, and to some extent a rendezvous for troops. Major Thomas S. Jessup, of the regular army... was placed in command, though at first he had only a few companies of militia under his charge. Later, Hon. Return J. Meigs, Governor of Ohio, came to inspect the preparations making for war.
"On the 10th of May, while the latter [Gov. Meigs] was still there, a company of regular soldiers marched into town under the command of Captain Stanton Slides. These were the first and about the only regular troops stationed in Cuyahoga County during the war. They were met by Governor Meigs, and warmly welcomed by him as well as by the citizens of the place.
"There were a number of sick and wounded soldiers there, with very poor accommodations, some of whom had been there since the time of Hull's surrender. Captain Sholes immediately set some carpenters belonging to his company at work, and in a short time they erected a neat, framed hospital, about twenty feet by thirty, though without the use of a nail, a screw, or any iron article whatever, the whole being held together by wooden pins. It was covered with a water-tight roof and floored with chestnut bark. To this the invalids were speedily removed, to the very great improvement of their comfort.
"Then all the men of the company were set at work building a small stockade, about fifty yards from the bank of the lake, near the present [1879] Seneca Street [now West 3rd]. Cutting down a large number of trees twelve to fifteen inches in diameter, they cut off logs some twelve feet long each. These were sunk in the ground three or four feet, leaving the remaining distance above the surface. The sides of the logs adjoining each other were hewed down for a few inches so as to fit solidly together. This made a wall impervious to small arms, and the dirt was heaped up against the outside so as somewhat to deaden the effect of cannon balls. Next a large number of trees and brush were cut down, and the logs and brush piled together near the brink of the lake, forming a long abatis [an obstacle of sharpened sticks], very difficult to climb over, and which would have exposed any assailing party who attempted to surmount it to a very destructive fire from the fort while doing so. The post was named Fort Huntington, in honor of the ex-governor.
"Meanwhile vessels were building in the Cuyahoga, and a large amount of public stores accumulating on the banks."
*
Chauncey and Perry both hoped the fleet in Presque Isle Bay would be ready for battle by the end of May, another deadline they missed.
The American flotilla shaping up there consisted of nine vessels, smuggled down from Black Rock, scavenged around Lake Erie, or built from the Pennsylvania forests.
There was one 60 ton sloop with a single gun called Trippe, and a 94 ton schooner with two guns called Somers. Both had originally been civilian merchant vessels, converted by Dobbins' men and armed by Perry's.
There was one 180 ton brig called Caledonia which was British built in Amherstburg and captured by the Americans, one thing at least which went right for the U.S. in the Northwest. She brought three more guns.
The others were Dobbins' boats, all schooners, all built at Erie. Porcupine and Tigress were nearly identical 82 ton craft with a single gun each. Scorpion was a little larger, with two guns, and Ariel at 112 tons brought four.
The two big brigs were built keel up side by side from the same set of blueprints and were essentially identical. They were both 480 tons and bore 20 guns each, plus the hopes of the United States to hang on to one quarter of their country and any future it had in the West.
While the warships were finishing news came to Erie of another of those glorious single combat ocean battles of the war which were making Oliver Hazard Perry eat his heart out. On June 1, 1813, the British frigate Shannon met the USS Chesapeake off Boston. Just two weeks previous command of Chesapeake had been assumed by one of Perry's friends writing his name in the history books, 32-year-old Capt. James Lawrence.
As newly-minted lieutenants, Perry and Lawrence had served together in the Mediterranean during the Barbary Wars. Perry was 17 and Lawrence 21, and Perry looked up to Lawrence as a mentor and role model. Just a few years later the young officers were stationed together in New York, friendlily competing, each in command of adjacent gunboat squadrons patrolling the harbor. They worked together on duty and socialized in America's first city off, and in those years the comrades became the closest of friends.
While Perry languished following his mishap with Revenge, Lawrence was the first lieutenant aboard Constitution at her victory over Guerriere. Lawrence made captain and was given the sloop Hornet which was part of Bainbridge's task force to Brazil which ended in the sinking of HMS Java. Lawrence won his own victory against the British brig Peacock on that cruise and when he returned to the U.S. he was ordered to Boston to take command of the heavy frigate Chesapeake.
Lawrence's orders were to take the war to the enemy in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but before he could do that he first had to get out of Boston Harbor. At that time a British squadron led by the HMS Shannon under Capt. Philip Broke had Boston blockaded. Through his glass Capt. Broke could see his ship and Chesapeake were pretty evenly matched and he very much wanted to fight her, but he knew the American would not come out while outnumbered to face certain destruction.
Shannon's provisions were running low and if Chesapeake could not be enticed to come out soon Broke would be forced to withdraw to resupply. To avoid this unsatisfying outcome Capt. Broke took some extraordinary steps. First, he ordered the two accompanying ships of his squadron away to even the odds, and second, via a released prisoner, he sent Capt. Lawrence a letter, describing his complement and armaments and really inviting more than challenging a fellow gentleman officer to bring his ship out and meet him in single combat.
"Sir,
As the Chesapeake appears now ready for sea I request you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her ship to ship to try the fortune of our respective flags. To an officer of your character it requires some apology for proceeding to further particulars. Be assured sir that it is not from any doubt I can entertain for your wishing to close with my proposals, but merely to provide an answer to any objections which might be made and very reasonably upon the chance of our receiving unfair support.
The Shannon mounts twenty-four guns upon her broadside, and one light boat gun, eighteen pounders on her main deck, and thirty-two pound carronades on her quarter deck and forecastle, and is manned with a complement of 300 men and boys, beside thirty seamen, boys and passengers who were taken out of recaptured vessels lately. I am thus minute because a report has prevailed in some of the Boston papers that we had one hundred and fifty men lent us from HMS La Hogue, which really was never the case.
La Hogue is now gone to Halifax for provisions, and I will send all other ships beyond the power of interfering with us and will meet you wherever it is most agreeable to you.
If you will favour me with any plan of signals or telegraph, I will warn you, if sailing under this promise, should any of my friends be too nigh or anywhere in sight until I can detach them out of the way, or I would sail with you under a flag of truce to any place you think safest from our cruisers, hauling it down when fair to begin hostilities.
You must, sir, be aware than my proposals are highly advantageous to you, as you cannot proceed to sea singly in the Chesapeake without imminent risk of being crushed by the superior force of the numerous British squadrons which are now abroad, where all your efforts in case of a rencontre [a meeting, i.e. a battle] would, however gallant, be perfectly hopeless.
I entreat you, sir, not to imagine that I am urged by mere personal vanity to the wish of meeting the Chesapeake, or that I depend only upon your personal ambition for your acceding to this invitation: we have both nobler motives.
You will feel it as a compliment if I say that the result of our meeting may be the most grateful service I can render to my country, and I doubt not that you, equally confident of success, will feel convinced that it is only by repeated triumphs in even combats that your little navy can now hope to console your country for the loss of that trade it can no longer protect. Favour me with a speedy reply. We are short of provisions and water and cannot stay long here.
I have the honour to be, sir,
your obedient servant,
P. B. V. Broke,
Capt. of H.B.M. ship,
Shannon
(P.S.) For the general service of watching your coast it is requisite for me to keep another ship in company to support me with her guns and boats when employed near the land particularly to aid each other if either ship in chase should get on shore. You must be aware that I cannot consistently with my duty waive so great an advantage for this general service by detaching my consort without any assurance on your part of meeting me directly and that you will neither seek nor admit aid from any other of your armed vessels if I detach mine expressly for the sake of meeting you.
Should any special order restrain you from thus answering a formal challenge you may yet oblige me by keeping my proposal a secret and appointing any place you like to meet me within 300 miles of Boston in a given number of days after you sail, as unless you agree to an interview I may be busied on other service and perhaps be at a distance from Boston when you go to sea.
Choose your terms—but let us meet!"
The battle between the USS Chesapeake and HMS Shannon off Boston on June 1, 1813, is famous in both the U.S. and the British Royal Navies, both for being one of the shortest single frigate actions in history, and at the same time one of the bloodiest.
While Broke took Shannon further out to sea where he would be safe from any American shore support Lawrence closed Chesapeake with her for several hours as was common in the age of sail. Around 5:00 p.m. they came into range. The first to fire were the snipers in the tops, and a few seconds later both ships unleashed with their main guns nearly simultaneously.
The battle was decided more or less in the first volley, when Chesapeake's officers were slaughtered, and Shannon's officers were not. Lawrence himself was immediately hit, first in the knee, but he continued to command, until a moment later when a second piece of metal hit him, again in the leg, this one finding his femoral artery, and Capt. Lawrence began to bleed to death.
As he was taken below the ships became locked together and Chesapeake was boarded. From the surgeon's table Lawrence ordered, "Don't give up the ship! Fight her till she sinks!" But just another moment later he saw his own men retreating down the ladders from the deck above and knew he had lost. He gave one final, suicidal order: "Don't surrender the ship! Blow her up!" He meant it. He expected someone to set the ship's powder magazine alight and obliterate them all. But communication on Chesapeake had been destroyed and Lawrence's final order—inhumane, heedless of the lives of his men—was not transmitted. (Perhaps it would not have been obeyed if it had been.) (Perhaps it had been and it wasn't.) Lawrence lost. Chesapeake struck, and she was captured.
About one third of the combined crews of both ships became casualties, over 200 men, and nearly half of those were fatal. The battle lasted, at most, 15 minutes. Some reports said eleven.
Capt. Broke escorted his prize north to Halifax. Lawrence, his prisoner, died of his wounds en route.
When Perry, way out in the West on the shores of this inland lake, heard the news of the death of his friend on the ocean he was heartbroken. But perhaps also fired anew with resolve to get into the war, and perhaps now even some wish for revenge. So Perry, the commander on site, with the right to do it, would call one of the big brigs Niagara, to honor Elliot's command there, the base at Black Rock, the Americans fighting on that front. The other, which he would make the flagship of his little fleet, he would name for his fallen friend, and call it Lawrence.
*
The capture of Detroit in August 1812 was a massive coup for the British. But with that success also came for them a new set of serious problems.
Holding on to Detroit obligated them not only to feed and equip their own troops, plus their colonial Canadian militias, but they had also taken on the responsibility of providing for their Indian allies, plus their dependents, which was expected as the price of the Natives' friendship. The British at Detroit had to feed thousands of people, every day.
The Detroit River front was at the far end of a long supply line which stretched all the way across the Atlantic Ocean back to London. There were no real roads to speak of north of the Lakes leading that deep into the North American West, and the garrison at Detroit was almost completely dependent on supply over water.
Lake Ontario remained contested all through 1813 and the British could not rely on water supply west of their base at Kingston, itself just across the bay from the American Great Lakes command center at Sacket's Harbor, New York. They controlled the Upper Lakes, but to utilize that advantage they first had to get supplies into that pipeline, which itself was an iffy prospect. Even when supplies were forthcoming British carrying capacity on Lake Erie only went so far. This is all to say the British occupying Detroit had serious supply problems, and their hold on the American side of the river was rather tenuous. In short: they were hungry.
The Americans now had strong positions on the south shore of the lake at the lines of the Maumee and Sandusky Rivers, both of which British and allied Indian ground troops had already attacked earlier in the year and failed to carry. But the British still owned Lake Erie, and further down the shore at the mouth of the Cuyahoga there was "...a large amount of public stores accumulating on the banks," guarded mostly by motley militia, and a fort made of mud and sticks.
And on June 19, 1813, at Cleaveland, British warships appeared on the horizon.
*
"Scarcely had Captain Sholes got his little fortress [Fort Huntington, West 3rd and Lakeside] in good condition, when, on the 19th of June, the British fleet consisting of the Queen Charlotte and Lady Prevost with some smaller vessels, appeared off the coast and approached the mouth of the river with the apparent intention of landing."
But "When the fleet had arrived within a mile and a half of the harbor the wind sank to a perfect calm, and the vessels were compelled to lie there..."
Which at least gave the Americans in Cleaveland some time to prepare.
"The vessels in the Cuyahoga and the public stores were all, as far as possible, moved to Walworth Point, some two miles up the river."
The little Cuyahoga tributary Walworth Run has been completely filled in by 200-plus years of development. Its mouth was in today's Scranton Flats Park on the west bank of the Cuyahoga. The high bluffs forming the point remain and today hold up the west end of the Hope Memorial Bridge. This evacuation place for Cleaveland's military stores would have been in the Flats at the base of the Scranton Peninsula behind Irishtown Bend, down the hill and not far from the West Side Market.
Queen Charlotte had three 12-pound long guns and twelve 24-pound carronades. Lady Prevost had three 9-pound longs and ten 12-pounders. The warships carried at least 200 sailors and Royal Marines between them, plus whatever men and guns the unnamed smaller vessels possessed.
In Cleaveland, for what good it would do, "There was a small piece of artillery in the village, but it was entirely unprovided with a carriage. Judge James Kingsbury... took the hind wheels of a heavy wagon, mounted the little cannon on them, after a fashion, and placed it in position to pour its volleys into the enemy's ranks if he should attempt to land."
And what men there were in the vicinity assembled.
"Major Jessup had left, but expresses were sent out to rally the militia, and as soon as possible every man in the vicinity was hastening with musket on his shoulder toward the endangered locality."
"Meanwhile the little band of regulars made every preparation they could to defend their post, and a considerable body of militia was arrayed near by."
Then everybody on both sides waited for the wind. "...until afternoon..." when "...at length the calm ceased..."
*
If a reader has not heard of the Battle of Cleaveland of June 19, 1813, it's because it didn't happen. But it only didn't happen because of luck.
In the afternoon, "A terrific thunder-storm sprang up in the west and swept furiously down the lake, and the little fleet was soon driven before it far to the east ward, relieving the Clevelanders of all fear of an attack, at least for that day."
Very good news for Cleaveland, but, "When the storm abated the fleet lay to opposite Euclid creek, in the town of that name..."
*
The mouth of Euclid Creek today is Wildwood Park: boat ramps and picnic pavilions, and the Nottingham branch of the Cleveland Public Library, the former grounds of the Villa Angela Girls Catholic High School. On its west bank is the Euclid Beach Park Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks, certainly a candidate for the nicest place in Collinwood. On the afternoon of June 19, 1813, the enemy's two largest weapons stood just off it, and every man and musket in town was five miles west at the Cuyahoga.
The War of 1812 has been eclipsed in the American imagination by two centuries of new history piled atop it, including the catastrophes of the American Civil War and World War II. But 1812 wasn't a fake war, or a war which didn't count. Men spent it earnestly killing each other for a very long time. And during it "...the people of Euclid felt themselves to be in a particularly dangerous condition, exposed to assaults from the British armed vessels on the lake..." And here they were. "...the fleet lay to opposite Euclid creek, in the town of that name..."
"...a boat's crew went ashore..." "...a detachment landed from the British fleet..."
But in Euclid that day the enemy did something extraordinary, and telling.
"They killed an ox there... supposed to have belonged to one of the Mcllraths... cut it up hide and all, and took it off to their comrades on shipboard."
Telling, as their mission clearly had been for food. And having been blown away from the stores at Cleaveland they had seized upon the first and only edible thing they could find.
Extraordinary in the same manner of Capt. Broke's chivalric invitation to Capt. Lawrence:
"With more courtesy than could have been expected, however, they left a golden guinea in a cleft stick at the place of slaughter, with a note apologizing because in their haste they had to spoil the hide, and adding that if it had not been for the thunder shower they would have eaten their beef in Cleveland."
And with that "...they sailed off down the lake..."
*
"...the British fleet was still mistress of the lake... no one knew at what moment an invading force might be landed at any point on our long and feebly defended frontier. All eyes were anxiously directed toward the harbor of Erie..."
By June 8, masts had been fitted to both Niagara and Lawrence, and all the vessels of the squadron were floated in Presque Isle Bay not many days after. But two massive challenges remained: first manning the vessels, then surmounting the bar. On June 19, Perry wrote to the Navy Secretary that he could take the squadron over into the lake the day after his crews arrived, but it would still be weeks before Perry had the men he required.
Chauncey agreed with Perry's assessment that he needed about 750 men to crew the Lake Erie squadron. Even by mid-July he would still have fewer than 120 fit for duty. Perry had brought about 140 men with him from Rhode Island and already many of those were down with sickness. Malaria was rampant on the undeveloped Lake Erie shore and decades before the first inkling of germ theory East Coast salt water sailors would see a bounty in Lake Erie's fresh water and simply dip buckets into it for their drinking water, with the gastrointestinal effects predictable to a reader of today.
Chauncey's plan had been to clear Lake Ontario then send the men this freed up on to Lake Erie. But this did not pan out, so forces he thought he would have ready for Erie he continued to hoard for his own projects on Lake Ontario. By the summer Perry's agents were recruiting men as far away as the wharves of New York Harbor and Chesapeake Bay.
In addition to all his fitting out activities Perry scoured the Pennsylvania woods for would-be seamen, offering extraordinary deals to men who would sign on: extremely short four month enlistments (it was all he would possibly need); the promise they would be required to fight in only a single battle (he knew there would only be one, after which they would all be victorious or dead, perhaps both); even prize money (though with no merchant vessels on the lake he knew there almost surely would be none). This yielded about 60 more men.
New officers assigned to his project brought a few men here and a few men there with them as they arrived, 65 in one lot, 35 in another. At the end of July Perry received a consignment of 120 men, the dregs of Chauncey's men from Lake Ontario. Perry complained about them, a symptom of his exhaustion. Peevish, a little racist, he wrote to his boss, "The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set: blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them after they were selected." Impatient with his young subordinate Chauncey scolded him back, "I regret you are not pleased with the men sent you, for, to my knowledge, a part of them are not surpassed by any seamen we have in the fleet, and I have yet to learn that the color of the skin or the cut and trimmings of the coat can affect a man's qualifications or usefulness." Perry accepted them, of course. The exact makeup is not known, but it is estimated that about 20 percent of Perry's Lake Erie fleet were African American sailors.
At last the Navy Department, which had refused to take men from ocean-going ships to man the Great Lakes, grudgingly permitted otherwise idle men from ships undergoing repair to be borrowed, hence several score sailors from the USS Constitution under repair in Boston came to be part of Perry's fleet at Erie. These, in addition to Pennsylvania militiamen sent by the commonwealth's governor to reinforce its defenses on the Presque Isle Peninsula (which Perry would cannibalize, using soldiers for sailors), brought him almost 500 new men, and at last he had the hands he needed.
At the height of spring rains there were six feet of water over the sand bar in the mouth of Presque Isle Bay. Mid-summer there were five, or four. The smaller vessels could get over all right. But empty, stripped of guns, even without their masts, Lawrence and Niagara drew nine feet of water. Without them the entire enterprise at Erie had been useless. The massive warships had somehow to be gotten over the bar.
Dobbins' chief carpenter Noah Brown came up with the plan. The shipwrights built two 50-foot-long wooden boxes, called "camels," which were drawn alongside the stripped vessels' hulls and sunk. Beams supported by the camels were passed through the brigs' empty gun ports and when the water was pumped out they could, in theory, lift the brigs the crucial few feet.
Of course none of this, nor anything which had been going on at Erie all winter and spring, was any secret from the enemy. The British knew full well what the Americans were doing in Presque Isle Bay the entire time, and what their intentions were if Perry and Dobbins got their fleet out. From Queen Charlotte and General Hunter the British officer in charge on Lake Erie, Royal Navy Commander Robert Heriot Barclay—an acolyte of Lord Horatio Nelson and veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, where he lost an arm—maintained a blockade of the harbor, occasionally trading pot shots at extreme range with the ersatz shore batteries manned by the Pennsylvania militia. But these were sailing ships subject to the whims of the wind and weather. Plus the south shore of the lake was enemy territory and when food and water ran out (the British for their part were too smart just to dunk a bucket into Lake Erie and drink it) they had to withdraw to the north shore, sometimes all the way back to Amherstburg. So there were from time to time gaps in their blockade, and for one of these Perry now waited for the moment to make his move.
On August 1, 1813, brigs and camels ready, the sun rose over Presque Isle and the British squadron was nowhere to be seen. Perry immediately roused his men. Thus began 72 all but unbearably tense hours for the Americans at Erie.
Working frantically, knowing that at any second the enemy could re-appear, they began the back breaking labor of hauling the two giant brigs over the bar.
They started with the Lawrence, men working in the water and under it, positioning the camels, fitting the beams through the ports, pumping water in and out, and affixing ropes to pull her toward the open lake from the land. But despite it all when night fell on the first day they had failed to free her, and the men collapsed along the waterfront to get what rest they could before beginning again before dawn the next day. But they learned some lessons from their initial efforts, and on August 3, Lawrence floated free on Lake Erie. The camels were immediately detached and floated back across the bar to repeat their service for Niagara.
But Lawrence was still just a hull—no masts, sails or weapons, supremely vulnerable at that moment. And at dawn the next morning there were enemy ships on the horizon.
Through his glass, Commander Barclay could see that he had failed in a crucial part of his mission. One of the two big American brigs had gotten out onto the lake, by that time with masts and sails mounted, along with its swarm of smaller vessels, though the other brig was still high in its camels upon the bar. From his distance, however, Barclay could not see that Lawrence did not yet have any guns aboard. She was a sitting duck, and his big vessels were more than a match for the little sloops and schooners tending her, but he didn't know that. It was now the Americans' turn to bluff. With the efforts to launch Niagara ongoing, Perry turned the naked Lawrence and her compliment of little lightly armed craft onto the lake and straight toward the advancing British. Had they closed to engage they would have been wiped out. Barclay couldn't discern this level of detail through an early 19th century hand telescope, though, and believing himself, quite falsely, to be outgunned, he turned back toward the north shore. The Americans returned to Erie. By the end of the next day Niagara was free and both it and Lawrence were fully armed and underway.
*
Just as the fleet was launched Jesse Duncan Elliot returned to Lake Erie on orders from Capt. Chauncey to bolster Perry's culminating efforts at Presque Isle. This was fortunate from Perry's point of view because Elliot was an experienced and senior officer and Perry needed one to command his flagship Lawrence's sister, Niagara. Elliot may not have seen it that way, however, and historians of the United States Navy have been speculating about his state of mind at this moment for over two hundred years.
When Perry arrived, really just a few months earlier, Elliot was the commander on Lake Erie from his headquarters at Black Rock, and Perry's and Dobbins' project at Presque Isle had been a side affair. Now he was back, having accomplished little on Lake Ontario for all his efforts, and Perry was in charge, and Elliot was working for him. And historians of the United States Navy have been speculating about his state of mind at this moment for over two hundred years.
*
Before electronic communications the officer in charge of any group of warships would raise a distinctive flag above his vessel to indicate where subordinates should look for command signals, a now obsolete practice which, through tradition, nonetheless still endures today. This is the origin of the naval terms "flag officer" and "flag ship" to indicate the seat of command. With his fleet nearing completion Perry had commissioned some ladies in Erie to fashion his battle flag, which they delivered to him just prior to his fleet's departure. The eight by ten foot dark navy blue ensign bore the dying words of Perry's friend, James Lawrence, in stark white letters, "Don't Give Up The Ship!"
Thus arrayed, on August 5, 1813, the American Lake Erie squadron—Lawrence, Niagara, Caledonia, Ariel, Scorpion, Somers, Porcupine, Tigress and Trippe, nine platforms bearing 54 guns throwing 1,536 pounds of metal—set out from Erie, Pennsylvania.
They kept near to the friendly south side of the lake, and would have been a stately sight passing silently close off the shore of Euclid. They proceeded on to Cleaveland to top up before the fight.
Crisfield Johnson:
"...on the 5th day of August Perry took his fleet out of the harbor, and immediately sailed in search of the foe. In a few days he passed up the lake, feeling sure that he would soon bring the enemy to battle. The fleet lay to off the mouth of the Cuyahoga to get supplies, and the youthful commodore came ashore...[a] tall, slender, erect young man, in the glittering uniform of the United States Navy, with noble bearing and handsome, radiant face, on whom more than on any other man, at that moment, rested the fortunes and honor of America in the Northwest. The object of the brief delay having been accomplished, the commander returned to his flag-ship, the fleet spread its sails to the favoring breeze and stood away to the westward in gallant array... In long procession they swept past the shores of Brooklyn, Rockport and Dover, and sailed away in search of the foe, followed by the hopes and prayers of all the people for the ardent commander and his gallant crew."
The next stop was Sandusky and Fort Stephenson, where Perry met, conferred and coordinated with Gen. Harrison. He also picked up a few more bodies to crew his little fleet. That accomplished, he brought it at last into the small archipelago in the west end of Lake Erie just a short distance off the Marblehead Peninsula, where the Cuyahoga County men had fought the Indians the year before, out to South Bass Island, to a protected cove on its north side called Put-In-Bay.
The British squadron, outmatched the moment Niagara got over the Erie bar by three vessels and almost 700 pounds of deadly flying metal, had retreated to Amherstburg inside the mouth of the Detroit River 30 miles across the water. Their supply problems at the far end of the lake had not gotten any better. Indeed they had gotten worse. With the Americans in control of Lake Erie they were now completely cut off from supplies. Daily, as they ate through what stores of theirs remained, a clock was ticking. Sooner rather than later, and ready or not, they would have to come out and fight.
*
Perry's fleet occupied Put-In-Bay beginning August 16. For the next few weeks he sortied his squadron several times toward the mouth of the Detroit River, looking for the enemy, trying to draw them into battle.
But Barclay would not come out. He was struggling desperately to outfit his super ship, his last hope to overcome the now ascendant Americans. Her structure was completed, but the armaments earmarked for her had been captured by the Americans in April in an attack on York, the British-Canadian village on Lake Ontario which today is Toronto. What Barclay was left with to arm her was a jumble of artillery pieces of differing weights and calibers cannibalized from the land defenses at Amherstburg, Malden, Sandwich and Detroit.
On September 9, a north wind rose which would favor the British, and Barclay calculated that if he could advance undetected in darkness and surprise Perry in port at dawn that a victory just might be possible. He set out at sunset with six vessels: the established terrors of the lake, the ship Queen Charlotte with her 15 guns, and the brigs Lady Prevost with 13 more, and General Hunter with another 10. He had scavenged a schooner, the Chippewa, and a sloop, the Little Belt, which together brought four more British guns to battle. And the new ship just launched at Amherstburg, 500 tons and 20 guns, was christened to laud their victory and taunt their enemy: HMS Detroit.
But overnight the strength of the wind from the north did not hold, and Barclay was unable to close the distance to the American base before dawn arrived on September 10. They were spotted approaching the channel between South and Middle Bass Islands, and the Americans roused themselves to meet them. The Battle of Lake Erie had begun.
Closing took nearly five hours, with the Americans forced to tack against the still fading British north wind, around the point at the west end of Put-In-Bay and then toward the enemy squadron. A few minutes before noon they came into range of Barclay's guns. The band on board Detroit played "Rule Britannia," and on the last note the British flagship opened fire.
*
In Cleaveland that afternoon they were building a courthouse:
"On the 10th of September, 1813, Levi Johnson and some of his hired men were busy putting the finishing work on the rude temple of justice which he had contracted to build a year before."
"Some of them heard a noise in the distant west, which was at first supposed to be thunder. Looking up, however, they were surprised to see no clouds as far as the eye could reach in every direction."
Out in Euclid they were raising a barn:
"September 10, 1813, the people were busy raising [a] log barn below [the future site of] Collinwood. The neighbors were still few in number, and men had come from Warrensville on horseback to help in the work. The raisers were divided into two squads, who were engaged in a hot strife to see which should get up logs the fastest. At each corner was an expert axe-man, making notches and saddles to fit the logs together. Of course neither squad could really get ahead of the other, because all four sides of the house must go up together, but they could crowd each other, which was a great satisfaction."
"Suddenly, from the far northwest, a dull sound was heard rolling slowly over lake and land. Then another. And another. And another."
In Cleaveland:
"The sounds continued. Suddenly Johnson exclaimed: 'It's Perry's guns! He's fighting with the British!'"
In Euclid:
"Every axe and every log was dropped. 'That's Perry! A fight! A battle! A battle!' cried a dozen voices."
In Cleaveland:
"All the workmen by common consent threw down their hammers and nails, scrambled to the ground and hurried to the lake shore."
"In a short time all the men of the village, with many of the women and children, were gathered on the beach, listening to the sounds of battle."
In Euclid:
"In [a] minute twenty or thirty men were racing away toward the lake shore, eager to hear even the faintest echoes from the great contest. Perhaps they imagined from the distinctness of the sound that they could see the conflict, or at least could discover on the far horizon the smoke which must mark the scene of battle."
"But on their arrival nothing could be seen, as was not strange considering that the battle was seventy-five miles away. Yet the constant successions of subdued shocks, now alone, now in broadsides, hour after hour, gave notice that the conflict was still going on."
"At length, the sounds died away, only a few scattered shots were heard, and finally all was still."
In Cleaveland:
"At length there was only a dropping fire; one fleet had evidently succumbed to the other. Finally heavy shots were heard, and then all was silent."
"'Perry has the heaviest guns,' exclaimed Johnson. 'Those are Perry's shots. He has won the day. Three cheers for Perry!'"
"Hip hurrah,' responded the crowd, willing to believe the assertion, but yet separating with anxious hearts, uncertain what might be the result."
*
The battle was no melee. Each vessel's opponent was determined and assigned beforehand. The two largest Americans would take on the two largest British, Perry's Lawrence on Detroit, Elliot's Niagara on Queen Charlotte. The next largest American, Caledonia, was assigned to the next largest British, Lady Prevost. The smaller vessels were likewise paired with appropriate opposites.
The British fleet had more long guns, with a longer range, but less kinetic power, and often less accuracy. The Americans were strong with carronades, a type of cannon which delivered a devastating punch, but from a shorter distance, though that also made misses less likely. Perry's gamble was if he could endure the fire from Barclay's long range guns long enough to close within the range of his carronades that he could smash them.
Then, just before the fleets met, the dying British north wind at last completed its overnight turn toward the American south. This suddenly gave the Americans the greater degree of control over the battle, a favorable condition known as the weather gage. Just as he had while bluffing with the unarmed Lawrence when she was fresh over the bar at Presque Isle, and with the wind now on his side, the aggressive Perry rushed her toward the enemy line, eager to bring his powerful carronades into range and expecting his fleet to follow. Little Ariel and Scorpion were right along with him, but further back in the American line the other vessels led by Elliot on the Niagara didn't come up to support their commodore, leaving Perry in his flagship horribly exposed.
Seeing the firepower of the Americans diminished by the separation of their two most powerful vessels the British moved to concentrate their own fire by bringing Queen Charlotte up in their line, and together with Detroit the two powerful enemy ships pummeled Lawrence and the men aboard her. In a short while three-quarters of her crew were made casualties, all her guns silenced, and Lawrence knocked out of the fight.
*
Miraculously—utterly miraculously—aboard the shattered Lawrence, Perry was among the very very few who remained completely unhurt. And Lawrence and her supporting vessels had done some damage to their enemy. The British vessels were no longer in pristine condition, nor were their officers all still standing. And Niagara, twin to Perry's wrecked flagship, stood a mile back as yet barely engaged in the battle completely fresh.
Nearly as miraculous, a rowboat hanging from Lawrence's side outboard of the battle also was undamaged. Perry pulled down his "Don't Give Up the Ship" flag and detailed several sailors with him into the boat, and frantically they rowed toward Niagara.
The British saw immediately what the Americans were doing, and correctly deduced Perry's intentions. Every gun both deck and shoulder mounted in the entire British fleet fired at the half dozen men in the little rowboat trying to stop them. But again, almost miraculously, Perry was completely untouched by the gunfire. He climbed aboard Niagara and brusquely took command of her.
Elliot, all but dumbfounded having witnessed the astonishing events which had nearly impossibly brought his commander right before him on his deck, could only think to ask Perry how the battle was going. "Badly," was Perry's curt reply. He then ran up his command flag and pointed Niagara right at the British.
Battle damaged, without the wind, and with their command and communication structures compromised, Queen Charlotte and Detroit attempted to maneuver to face the fresh American warship rushing toward them and in their frenzy became entangled with one another.
Perry passed Niagara between the mass of Detroit and Queen Charlotte to his starboard and Lady Prevost to port and was able to engage all three enemy vessels simultaneously with broadsides from the batteries on both sides of his own. In the case of Detroit and Queen Charlotte, Niagara was able to fire straight down the lengths of their decks, the most devastating type of naval fire known as raking fire. The smaller American vessels were also coming up on Detroit and Queen Charlotte from behind and battering them with their own raking fire from the opposite end.
It was only moments later that the large British vessels all struck their flags and surrendered. Chippewa and Little Belt made a run toward Canada, but they were overtaken by Scorpion and Ariel and surrendered as well.
*
It was a complete victory, to this day the only time in history that an entire British Royal Navy fleet has ever surrendered to an enemy.
Casualties on both sides were high, not so much in sheer numbers, so far as those things go in war, but in the percentage of the men who took part who were killed and wounded. In addition to grape and canister shot, which turned naval cannons into gigantic maiming and murdering shotguns, solid balls blasted wood into thousands of chunks and splinters, as well as simply carrying away limbs and heads outright. The Americans lost 27 killed and 96 wounded. The vast majority of those were aboard the Lawrence as she endured pummeling as the focal point of British guns nearly alone for a couple of hours. Indeed, aboard Perry's flagship about 80 percent of her crew were incapacitated or killed, which makes the length of time she held out before surrendering quite noteworthy, and Perry's escape completely unscathed all the more miraculous. The British and Canadians lost 41 killed and 96 wounded, including Commodore Barclay, who lived but lost his remaining arm plus a leg to Perry on Lake Erie that day.
Anchored northeast of tiny West Sister Island, 10 miles west of Put-In-Bay, Perry scrawled a quick report to his land counterpart, Gen. Harrison:
"Dear Gen’l,
We have met the enemy and they are ours: two Ships, two Brigs, one Schooner + one Sloop.
Yours, with great respect and esteem
O.H. Perry."
Then a just slightly longer one to the Secretary of the Navy, William Jones:
"U.S. Brig Niagara
off the Western Sister
Head of Lake Erie
Sept. 10th, 1813
4 p.m.
Sir,
It has pleased the Almighty to give to the arms of the United States a signal victory over their enemies on this Lake. The British squadron consisting of two ships, two brigs, one schooner & one sloop have this moment surrendered to the force under my command, after a sharp conflict.
I have the honor to be Sir
Very Respectfully
Your Obed Servt
O.H. Perry"
*
No one actually came back in to Amherstburg to tell the British they'd lost. But they had heard the cannons on the afternoon of the 10th and when none of their vessels returned that did seem to indicate that things had not gone well for their side.
The imminent exhaustion of British supplies at the west end of Lake Erie was what had compelled Barclay to venture out to face Perry's superior force. And now with the lake lost so was their supply line. On top of that the Americans could now at any time land anywhere on the north shore of Lake Erie or in the Detroit River and completely cut them off from the rest of Canada. Detroit was indefensible.
In the year since its capture British command there had passed from Isaac Brock to Maj. Gen. Henry Procter. On September 23, 1813, Procter abandoned the United States and began a retreat up the Thames, a river flowing down the neck of the western Upper Canada peninsula into Lake St. Clair, hoping to join up with intact British forces at the east end of Lake Erie on the Niagara River.
Harrison and Perry were right behind him.
Using a variety of small craft—including nearly 90 bateaux built in the Cuyahoga at Cleaveland—Perry ferried Harrison's army from Sandusky to Put-in-Bay to Middle Sister Island to stage them for a new invasion of Canada. Simultaneously, American land troops thrust north from their line at the River Raisin. On September 27, Kentucky militia cavalry led by Col. Richard Mentor Johnson recaptured Detroit. The same day Harrison's men from Perry's boats landed unopposed on the Canadian shore south of Amherstburg and burned the shipyards, then burned Fort Malden next door.
While Harrison chased Procter up the Thames Valley, Perry sailed past re-occupied Detroit and the abandoned Canadian batteries at Sandwich into Lake St. Clair and took the shallow-draft Porcupine, Tigress and Scorpion into the Thames to add riverine firepower to the pursuit.
Marching with the British—the starving troops daily becoming less of an army and more of a mob—were hundreds of Native warriors and refugees. Among those was Tecumseh, despondent, and angry. With the evacuation of Detroit and this retreat east his British allies were abandoning the American Northwest, which had been where he proposed to create a Native American homeland. That dream was over. Worse still, Tecumseh knew the return of the Americans to Michigan and Illinois would mean revenge raids, and a relentless process of extermination to finally, permanently subdue the Northwest for the United States. The British were abandoning them, dishonorably. Tecumseh let Procter know it. He shamed him and challenged him to turn and make some effort to face the enemy.
Procter promised Tecumseh he would make a stand at the forks of the Thames, the location today of Chatham, Ontario, past the point of navigation on the river, where they would be safe from fire from Perry's gunboats. But when they arrived at the forks Procter saw it was a lousy place to fight so they marched on, 15 miles past, to an Indian settlement due north of Bay Village, Ohio, called Moraviantown. By cruel coincidence this town had been founded by the Christian Moravian Delaware Indians who had survived the 1782 massacre in Gnadenhutten in the Ohio Country—the one at which Euclid's David Dille was present—who had fled the United States after the Revolutionary War and sought refuge in wilderness western Upper Canada. War, and American soldiers, had found them once again.
The resulting Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, was a short one. His blood up, Perry had attached himself to Harrison as a "volunteer aide" and commanded a small contingent of dry-land soldiers. Col. Johnson's mounted Kentuckians slashed through the bedraggled British and allied Indians and routed them. Tecumseh was killed, by one account by Col. Johnson himself, and his death at the Thames was the end of the 12,000 year Native American story in Northeast Ohio.
*
The day after the Battle of Lake Erie "...a swift-riding express, on the way to Washington, brought the news [first to Cleaveland, then on to Euclid] that Perry was victorious, and that British or Indian invasion need no longer be feared."
Oliver Hazard Perry was the most famous man in America. In Northeast Ohio, indeed pretty much everywhere they went, the victorious commanders were feted, as noted by Crisfield Johnson:
"General Harrison and Commodore Perry went down the south shore of Lake Erie [on their way] to Buffalo, stopping at Cleveland [sic], where they were entertained with a banquet.... [Afterward] Judge Kingsbury brought about the assemblage of a special meeting of Masons in their honor at his farm on the ridge [in Newburgh Heights]."
After the Thames U.S. troops led by Lewis Cass—Gen. Cass by then—would occupy western Upper Canada for the rest of the war. It was a harsh occupation, marked first by the seizure of food for the occupying army, then, as discontent in the district rose, arrests, expulsions, burning homes, and executions. It's remembered with bitterness in western Ontario to this day. Very few Americans even know it happened.
"The lake was open to a late period that year [1813], and on the 21st of December the people along the shore saw the gallant Lawrence sailing down on its way to Erie, where it became a hospital-ship, being followed slowly by the captured British vessels Detroit and Queen Charlotte."
*
The War of 1812 ground on on other fronts for another year.
More inconclusive skirmishes took place to the east on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. British operations in the Chesapeake Bay resulted in the burning of Washington, and an attack on Fort McHenry guarding Baltimore in the composition of The Star Spangled Banner. The British attempted to take control of the entirety of the interior of North America by seizing the outlet of the Mississippi River at New Orleans, but were thwarted by Tennessee general Andrew Jackson.
Late in 1814 American and British delegates meeting in Ghent, Belgium, negotiated a treaty of peace which they signed on Christmas Eve. Hostilities would cease, prisoners would be exchanged, territory taken from the United States in the East would be traded for the Canadian territory taken by Harrison, Perry, Johnson and Cass in the West, restoring the pre-war borders. The U.S. Senate ratified it on February 16, 1815, officially bringing the war to an end, leaving the British once again free to focus fully on Napoleon.
Bonaparte's invasion of Russia was among the worst military disasters in world history. British and Prussian allies forced him into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. A week after the Ghent treaty was signed Napoleon escaped and returned to mainland Europe. He raised another army and the allies pursued him to Waterloo, where he was at last decisively defeated. They exiled him this time to St. Helena, 7,500 miles away in the South Atlantic, where he died ignominiously of stomach cancer in 1821. After a generation of global war there followed in Europe a general peace which lasted nearly a century.
*
The 1817 Rush-Bagot Treaty between the United States and Great Britain demilitarized the Great Lakes, ending 40 years of the Americans trying again and again to conquer Canada. The warships of the Battle of Lake Erie became redundant and illegal. Those that could be repurposed or sold off were, and several were scuttled to preserve them in the shallow waters of Misery Bay, a small cove of Presque Isle Bay at Erie.
General Hunter became simply the Hunter, and was used as a U.S. Army transport. She ran aground in a storm on Lake Huron in August 1816 on the Canadian side and was abandoned. Pieces of Hunter emerged from the sand in 2001 and Canadian researchers excavated her remains. Artifacts from the wreck are now on exhibit in the Bruce County Museum and Cultural Centre in Southampton, Ontario.
HMS Lady Prevost became USS Lady Prevost and supported Harrison's army late in the war. She was scuttled at Erie in 1815.
Queen Charlotte was so badly damaged in the battle that she could not be repaired to the standards of military use. She was sold to a civilian buyer after the war who used her as a timber transport. She was broken apart in Buffalo in 1844.
HMS Detroit was also sold and used as a commercial vessel. In 1841 she was retired at Buffalo, and a group of investors bought her hulk with plans to crash the historic ship over Niagara Falls. They set up the vulgar spectacle in September 1841, but Detroit, as if preserving the dignity of the men who died aboard her, ran aground in the Niagara River before reaching the precipice, and eventually broke apart and disappeared into the falls' mist piece by anticlimactic piece.
Perry's battered flagship Lawrence was also scuttled in Misery Bay. Her remains were raised in 1875 and carted to Philadelphia where she was put on display in the first World's Fair held in the United States, the Centennial International Exhibition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wooden knick-knacks made from pieces of the Lawrence were to be sold as souvenirs, but shortly after the fair closed in November 1876, the exhibition hall she was displayed in caught fire and it and Lawrence burned down to nothing.
Niagara participated in the successful recapture of Detroit and a failed attempt to retake Mackinac. She was scuttled at Misery Bay in 1820 and later raised and sold off for use as a commercial transport. But she was in such poor condition her new owners sank her again at Erie in 1836. In 1913 at the centennial of the Battle of Lake Erie she was purchased by the City of Erie, Pennsylvania, to be a tourist attraction and raised once again. The vessel has been so heavily restored through the years, so many pieces replaced, that she is no longer considered the actual Niagara but merely a replica. The Brig Niagara is maintained as a floating museum docked at the Erie Maritime Museum on the Erie waterfront and is frequently seen in summertime tall ships displays on the Upper Great Lakes. On September 10, 2013, she was the star of a 200th anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of Lake Erie in the waters off Put-In-Bay.
*
Oliver Hazard Perry is a legend in the United States Navy. "Don't Give Up the Ship" is its motto, and the original flag is one of the most treasured artifacts in the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, Maryland. "We have met the enemy and they are ours" is a battle cry for the entire American military, and the Oliver Hazard Perry class of missile frigates went into service in the U.S. Navy in the 1970s and are still on duty today. The U.S. Naval War College resides in his home town of Newport, Rhode Island. In Ohio North Perry, South Perry, Perry, Perrysburg, Perrysville, two Perry Townships and a Perrysburg Township, as well as Perry County south of Columbus all bear his name, along with scores of other places, streets and buildings in the southern Lake Erie basin and in Rhode Island. On South Bass Island, the Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial at Put-In-Bay is a national park. A 352-foot Doric column erected there at the centennial of the battle in 1913 celebrates both the victory and the enduring peace between the United States and Canada which has followed. The monument was depicted on a quarter at the 200th anniversary of the battle in 2013. That same year a U.S. postage stamp was issued featuring a painting by William Henry Powell of Perry transferring his flag, the original of which hangs in the U.S. Senate. A marble monument to Perry and his victory was erected in Monumental Park, what is now Public Square, in Cleveland on the eve of the Civil War in 1860. It was moved to University Circle in the 1890s, then back downtown in the 1990s.
There is no class of warship named for Jesse Duncan Elliot. Indeed there has never been even a single U.S. warship named for him.
Historians of the United States Navy have been speculating about Elliot's state of mind at the Battle of Lake Erie for over two hundred years. Perry, in reports to his superiors, never overtly criticized Elliot's actions in the battle, but his praise for him was noticeably faint, his role generally glossed over. But some of the junior officers involved began almost immediately to cast doubt concerning the vigor with which Capt. Elliot performed his part aboard Niagara prior to Perry transferring his flag and assuming command.
Elliot claimed he was engaged along with the rest of the squadron during the entirety of the action, which was technically true, but only with his longest range guns from the most extreme possible distance; the danger to which Niagara was exposed was negligible. As to failing to support his commander while Lawrence went in and bore the pounding of the enemy's guns alone, Elliot had Niagara's sails rigged in such a way as to retard his vessel's forward motion, essentially, in sailing terms, applying the brakes.
At various times to account for his actions Elliot claimed he had experienced signaling problems, confusion as a result of the movement in the enemy's line of his designated opponent, Queen Charlotte, and faithful adherence to his strict orders to maintain his place in the line of battle stuck behind Caledonia, the slowest vessel in the American fleet. It was difficult to accuse Elliot of cowardice: he had already been lauded and decorated for several bold and dangerous actions earlier in the war. Those unwilling to accept his exculpatory explanations usually fall into two camps: The generous believe that Elliot was insubordinate, that he felt Perry rushing in headlong toward the enemy was a reckless act and declined to follow him. The ungenerous believe that Elliot was treasonous, that he left Perry exposed hoping he would be killed so that he, Elliot, could then step in and assume command of the fleet.
Elliot was aware of and not pleased with the way he was portrayed in Perry's reports. However Perry was being quite measured. He knew there were legitimate questions regarding Elliot's conduct and he was doing what he could to diffuse an awkward situation. But Perry went home to Rhode Island a national hero, and got what he always wanted. He was promoted to Captain retroactive to September 10, 1813, and given command of his own ocean-going ship, the USS Java, a new 1,500 ton frigate with 44 guns named for the victory over HMS Java off Brazil in 1812, which was under construction in Baltimore. Elliot for his reward got Lake Erie back, but what that meant after the battle was command of the few small craft which remained on what had become a backwater front, posted in wilderness Erie, Pennsylvania. He resented Perry, and while he probably would have been well advised just to let the matter go, he could not. The war ended before Perry could take Java into combat, but Elliot's sour feelings toward him festered.
In the years after the war Elliot continued to bring the matter up in the press, and he and Perry exchanged letters which grew increasingly testy. Eventually Elliot challenged Perry to a duel, but Perry declared the challenge beneath his dignity and declined to meet it. Instead in answer he finally drew up court martial charges on Elliot for his actions at the Battle of Lake Erie.
Wishing to make this unseemly quarrel go away, the Secretary of the Navy persuaded the president, by then James Monroe, to offer Perry a prestigious diplomatic post in South America if he would forego formally filing the court martial charges. Perry accepted. On the Orinoco River in what is now Venezuela Capt. Oliver Hazard Perry contracted yellow fever and died on his own thirty-fourth birthday, August 23, 1819.
*
Perry's opposite, Robert Heriot Barclay, was grievously maimed in the service of his country. He faced a court martial for the loss of the fleet. "He tottered before the court-martial like a Roman trophy—nothing but helm and hauberk," one rather harsh witness of the event recorded. The proceeding was a formality, an entering into the official record the explanation of how the loss of the king's properties had come about. Barclay was declared to have acted to the best of his abilities and in accordance with the highest standards of the Royal Navy. He was promoted to captain, though with such injuries his active naval career had in fact come to a practical end. He continued to serve in what capacities he could until 1824 when he was awarded what today would be considered a disability pension and died in Edinburgh, Scotland, 13 years later.
Maj. Gen. Henry Procter escaped the Thames with about 250 of his men and 400 Native allies. They stumbled in to the British forts at the west end of Lake Ontario and were folded into the forces there. Procter, no Brock, was court martialed for his actions at the battle, but he was not exonerated as Barclay had been. It ended his career.
Tecumseh's body was borne away and hidden to prevent it from becoming a trophy for the Americans. No one knows for sure what happened to it, though perhaps somewhere some elect band of Natives still keep and pass down the secret.
Perry's friend James Lawrence was buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in British Canada right after the battle with Shannon. "The British wrapped his body in the Chesapeake's ensign. At Halifax he would be buried with full military honors, with six officers of the Royal Navy serving as pallbearers." His adversary, Capt. Phillip Broke, himself seriously wounded in their battle, spoke what few words he was able at the funeral. Lawrence's body was exhumed and returned to the United States just a few days after the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. He was reinterred in New York in the yard of Trinity Church at the foot of Manhattan where he rests today just a few feet away from Alexander Hamilton, who at that time had only just been buried there less than ten years earlier. That churchyard cemetery was filled with debris from the collapsing World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.
Chesapeake was repaired and fought out the rest of the war on the other side as HMS Chesapeake. After, she was sold at auction and broken up for her valuable processed timber. Her boards and beams were made into a flour mill, which operated commercially into the 1970s and stands today as a tourist attraction—the Chesapeake Mill—in Wickham, England, near Britain's Channel coast.
Daniel Dobbins returned to Erie and resumed sailing the Upper Great Lakes, working in the coastal patrol service which later became part of the U.S. Coast Guard. He died and was buried in Erie in 1856. Everything on the Erie waterfront is named Dobbins.
Isaac Brock rushed from the Detroit front to meet Stephen Van Rensselaer's long-delayed invasion across the Niagara River in October 1812. He met him at Queenston Heights, just north of Niagara Falls, on October 13, and the Americans were repulsed, but Brock was killed in the battle. His deft command and ultimate sacrifice while successfully defending Canada from multiple invasions have made him one of that country's first and greatest national figures. His statue in Queenston Heights Park on the Canadian side of the Niagara River stands atop a monument 184 feet high.
After surrendering Detroit William Hull was made a prisoner and taken to Montreal. He was exchanged in 1814 and returned to the United States where he was promptly arrested and charged with treason, cowardice in the face of an enemy, neglect of duty, and conduct unbecoming an officer. In a short court martial he was acquitted of the treason charge but found guilty of all the others and sentenced to death, to this day the only American general ever sentenced to death for actions taken in command. In consideration of both his age and his prior distinguished service during the Revolution, President Madison commuted his sentence, but Hull was dishonorably discharged from the United States Army and his name stricken from the rolls. Effectively banished from Michigan as well, Hull returned to his Eastern home in Newton, Massachusetts, where he spent the remainder of his life trying to vindicate his actions in the summer of 1812. He died in Newton in 1825.
William Henry Harrison was elected the ninth President of the United States. He contracted pneumonia delivering the longest inaugural speech in American history in a winter rain and died 30 days into his presidency. Andrew Jackson was the seventh president. Richard Mentor Johnson, largely upon his reputation as having slain Tecumseh, was elected vice president under Martin Van Buren in 1836.
Samuel Huntington, third Governor of the State of Ohio, returned home to Painesville. He was killed in an accident supervising the construction of a road to his estate there in 1817. He's buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Painesville in a plot overlooking the Grand River.
After demobilization in the fall of 1812 Elijah Wadsworth went back to Canfield, relinquished his command, and effectively retired. During the emergency that year he had paid for a good deal of the defense of the United States himself on his own credit. He died a debtor, under a judgement, on December 30, 1817. For what good it did him Congress forgave his debts posthumously in 1825. Wadsworth, Ohio, in Medina County is named for him.
Simon Perkins went into banking. He owned large tracts in what is now the City of Akron and what became the route of the Ohio and Erie Canal. He died very rich in 1844.
Joel Paine is a mystery. And why he should be such a mystery is a mystery. He died on April 8, 1813, in Painesville.
Jedediah Beard returned to Burton and resumed his life as a farmer and occasionally a Geauga County commissioner. "Colonel Beard will be remembered as tall and erect in his old age, with white hair braided in the old-fashioned cue that trailed behind upon his shoulders." His oldest child, son Thomas, went west in 1819 and founded the town of Beardstown, in west-central Illinois. Sometime in the 1830s Jedediah and his wife, Charlotte Nichols Beard, left Burton and joined the settlement there. Charlotte died in 1840, and is buried in the Beard Cemetery in Beardstown. Jedediah died in 1843, and is most likely buried right beside her.
Harvey Murray served one month as the sheriff of Cuyahoga County in 1813, and was succeeded by Seth Doan. He became obscure after the disbanding of the Cuyahoga County regiment, but both he and his brother eventually abandoned Cleaveland to join the rest of their family out in Euclid. "Immediately after the close of the war in 1815, emigration [to Euclid Township] set in with more force than ever on account of the temporary cessation. At this time began to be seen a slight appearance of a village where Collamer [East Cleveland] now [1879] stands, though it was then called Euclid. Enoch Murray started a store there shortly after the war. In 1818 Benjamin P. Beers and Myndert Wemple [more on them soon] settled in the township. Mr. Wemple [said] that Enoch Murray was then keeping store at Euclid (now Collamer)..." Enoch Murray sold the Collamer store to Thomas McIlrath, likely the Thomas McIlrath, Jr. who was the son of Euclid's Thomas McIlrath of August 1803, and who served in the Cuyahoga County regiment.
"Enoch Murray of East Cleveland... died 1819 and left a widow, Katherine Smith Murray, and young children... Capt. Harvey Murray had a grist-mill on a creek in East Cleveland, and probably was living there at the time of his death, which occurred about 1827. As his wife died then also, they were undoubtedly victims of the typhoid fever scourge of that year. Their children were left orphans at a tender age, and were cared for by sympathetic friends and neighbors."
All the Murrays are buried in East Cleveland in the First Presbyterian churchyard. Their store downtown was torn down in 1855.
John Carlton survived being wounded on the Peninsula but retired from the field to find that his wife, Euclid's Anna McIlrath Cozad, had died in his absence at the age of 21. Why is not recorded, but childbirth it was not, and therefore some manner of disease is most likely. She is buried with her family in the First Presbyterian churchyard in East Cleveland. Carton went back to Geauga County, and he himself died shortly after the Battle of Lake Erie and almost exactly one year after the Battle of the Peninsula, on September 23, 1813. Why for him is not recorded either, but perhaps wounds, or disease, or grief, or all three. He is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery in Huntsburg in Geauga County. Who raised their orphan daughter, Harriet, is not to be found, perhaps her McIlrath or Cozad grandparents in Euclid. But she married William Hale of Bath in Summit County and their family farm is now preserved by the Western Reserve Historical Society as Hale Farm and Village.
Euclid's Thomas Thomas "...got drowned in the Mouth of the Cuyahoga by the upsetting of a boat" on June 6, 1814, leaving "...a wife and four small children..." One child, Thomas Thomas, Jr., died. The rest survived, lived to adulthood, married, and had families. Josephus Thomas died in Euclid in 1855. Ada Thomas went west and died in Kansas in 1877. William Thomas died in Cleveland in 1887. His wife, Mary Anne McIlrath Thomas, lived in Euclid until 1860, and was buried in the new Woodland Cemetery. Thomas Thomas also rests in the First Presbyterian churchyard.
Joseph Burke of Columbia Township formerly of Euclid continued his service in the war somewhere in the Lake Erie theater, but where and how are not recorded. "...in June 1814 he with some others that were sick were landed at Cleveland. His son came and took him home to Columbia on an ox sled where he survived but a few days..." He died on the 4th of July, 1814, and lies in the Columbia Center Cemetery in Lorain County.
*
Fort Huntington was dismantled after the war and its location, very near the heart of the rapidly growing City of Cleveland, was plowed under and trampled over.
A hundred years later a new courthouse for Cuyahoga County was under construction just east of where the fort had stood, and, noting the centennial, the Early Settlers Association of the Western Reserve lobbied for a replica to be built there, but nothing came of it. The spot remained vacant as developers and city leaders considered what to do with the valuable downtown property. In 1937 the Early Settlers Association finally succeeded in purchasing the land and renewed their hopes of building a replica of Fort Huntington on it, but the pressures of the Great Depression and then the Second World War shelved those plans once again. They contented themselves knowing it was preserved (the City at times wanted to make the spot a parking lot, then a jail) and the site became a downtown greenspace, Fort Huntington Park, right on the edge of the Warehouse District at West 3rd and Lakeside.
A cannon, reputedly a British cannon captured from one of the enemy vessels at the Battle of Lake Erie, but certainly reminiscent of the single artillery piece scrounged up to defend all of Cleaveland by Judge Kingsbury in June 1813, was installed, and still points northwest, ostensibly protecting the mouth of the Cuyahoga from threats from Detroit and Amherstburg. And the marble Perry Monument was appropriately relocated to the park from University Circle in 1991.
Other monuments with no connection to the War of 1812 have been added to Fort Huntington Park through the years. A bronze statue of Olympic athlete Jesse Owens, who moved as a child with his family to Cleveland from his birthplace in Alabama, was installed in 1982; the Greater Cleveland Peace Officers Memorial, a monument to fallen Cleveland police officers, came in 1993; a statue of John T. Corrigan, a Cuyahoga County prosecutor who worked for 35 years in the neighboring courthouse, was added in 2004. One is also called upon to ignore the four-lane Route 2 viaduct running at eye-level as it begins its leap over the Cuyahoga just across the street from Fort Huntington Park, as well as the Cleveland Browns' First Energy Stadium, built upon 20th century landfill which extends the shoreline a half mile further into Lake Erie than was there in 1813. These are worthy commemorations and valuable progress, but they do nothing to preserve the memory of the war and make the park a bit of a hodgepodge.
There is a bronze plaque affixed to a small boulder near where the Ohio Turnpike passes over the Huron River in Milan Township in Erie County that marks the approximate location of Camp Avery. That's all there is to find.
A stone carved with the names of Bills, Blackman, Mason, Mingus and young Valentine Ramsdell stands in the Battlefield Cemetery on the south shore of the Marblehead Peninsula overlooking Sandusky Bay. Nearby is another erected by Congressman Giddings in 1858 to honor his fallen comrades.
Cedar Point today is home to one of the world's premiere roller coaster amusement parks.
*
The War of 1812 is poorly remembered in both Britain and the United States (not so in Canada, where it became one of their nation-defining events). The conflict is usually—and quite incorrectly—dismissed as inconsequential.
But the Americans had looked to complete an incomplete acquisition of Canada, which would have radically altered the fate of North America, and they failed. And the British had looked to split apart and destroy the young, weak, divided United States, which would have radically altered the fate of the world, and they failed.
Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans prevented the British from seizing the Mississippi River, which would have stopped the United States from expanding across the continent. His conquest of the Southeast set the stage for the rise of the cotton economy, which paved the road to the Civil War.
The British and Americans had radically different visions for the Northwest. The British intended to make the Great Lakes region a Native American homeland, a buffer zone between the United States and their North American dominions, which also would have halted the march of the United States across the continent. Instead, at the end of the war Tecumseh was dead, and large-scale coordinated Native resistance to American expansion east of the Mississippi was all but finished.
And, by the way, impressment ended, and the British stopped interfering with American ships. Free trade and sailors' rights, Capt. Lawrence.
The War of 1812 was a big deal, particularly along the shores of Lake Erie. In Euclid, and Cleveland as well, it's mostly been forgotten. It shouldn't be. Far, far more than any other, ever, this war was for their homes.
The information in Chapter Fourteen is drawn from the following sources:
Adjutant General of Ohio. Roster of Ohio Soldiers in the War of 1812. Press of the Edward T. Miller Co., 1916.
Altoff, Gerald T. Oliver Hazard Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie. The Perry Group, 1999.
Atkins, Quintus Flaminius. "A Night in Euclid, Ohio, in Oct. A.D. 1812, by Q. F. Atkins, Written in April 1856." MSS 2018, Container 1, Folder 6. WRHS archive, Cleveland, Ohio.
Giddings, J.R. "Remembrances of the Skirmish with the Indians on the Peninsula in the War of 1812." The Firelands Pioneer, May 1859.
Gilpin, Alec R. The War of 1812 in the Old Northwest. Michigan State University Press, 1958.
Johnson, Crisfield. History of Cuyahoga County Ohio. D. W. Ensign & Co., 1879.
Oreh, Nick. "Fort Huntington Park." Cleveland Historical website. https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/518.
Riddle, A.G. "The Battle of the Peninsula, September 29, 1812." The Magazine of Western History, Vol. 1, No. 5, March 1885.
Rybka, Walter P. The Lake Erie Campaign of 1813: I Shall Fight Them This Day. The History Press, 2012.
Skaggs, David Curtis. "Aftermath of Victory: The Perry-Elliott Controversy." Naval History Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 1. Jan. 2014. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2014/january/aftermath-victory-perry-elliott-controversy
Skaggs, David Curtis. Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage and Patriotism in the Early U.S. Navy. Naval Institute Press, 2006.
Toll, Ian W. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U. S. Navy. W.W. Norton and Company, 2006.
Wadsworth, Elijah. Letter to Secretary of War William Eustice, August 27, 1812. Michigan Historical Collections. Vol. 40. Michigan Historical Commission, Michigan State Historical Society. https://quod.lib.umich.edu
Whittlesey, Charles. "Gen. Wadsworth's Division, War of 1812." Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society Tract No. 51, December 1879.
Whittlesey, Charles. "The Battle of the Peninsula, Sept. 29, 1812, General Wadsworth's Division, Ohio Militia." Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Historical Society Tract No. 72, 1888.
Whittlesey, Charles. Early History of Cleveland, Ohio. Fairbanks, Benedict and Co., 1867.
Wickham, Gertrude Van Rensselaer. Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve. The Woman’s Department of the Cleveland Centennial Commission, 1896.
Wickham, Gertrude Van Rensselaer. The Pioneer Families of Cleveland 1796-1840. Evangelical Publishing House, 1914.
Genealogy websites:
ancestry.com
findagrave.com