refusal of Massachusetts and Connecticut to muster their militia for the war. As a result, barely thirteen thousand soldiers of the twenty-five thousand on the muster list were available for service. Of those the great majority were new recruits with barely a year’s training, and the acerbic Winfield Scott judged their officers to be “imbeciles and ignoramuses.” Promotion through seniority resulted in Wilkinson’s being surrounded by a generation of brigadiers and colonels as gray-haired as himself who lacked the vigor and abrasive drive to make an inefficient organization produce wagons, weapons, and reinforcements.

Armstrong’s attention to these systemic weaknesses was spasmodic and ineffective. Of most immediate concern to Wilkinson, Armstrong not only failed to clear up the confusion of Hampton’s role, but allowed General Lewis, Wilkinson’s second-in- command, to go on leave for a month just before the operation began and appointed as his quartermaster general Robert Swartwout, brother of Burr’s lieutenant, who would only take the post part- time. The project that aroused the secretary of war’s real enthusiasm was planning the assault on Kingston.

In August, General Wilkinson traveled up the Hudson River and across country to Sackets Harbor, and on the twenty-fifth he held a council of war to decide which of Armstrong’s two plans of attack should be adopted. The council was attended by Morgan Lewis, Swartwout, and the most dynamic officer in Wilkinson’s army, Jacob Brown, whose religion and aggressive leadership won him the nickname the Fighting Quaker. The fifth member of the council, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, was, next to Wilkinson himself, the most important.

Since the attack on Kingston would require the army to be shipped across the open waters of Lake Ontario, Chauncey’s squadron of eight vessels had to establish complete dominance over the British. They had shown their superiority each time the two fleets had met, but the British vessels were still at large. However, the decision was unexpectedly simplified when Swartwout announced that only twenty- five boats were available to carry Wilkinson’s soldiers to Kingston instead of the three hundred that were needed. Unanimously, the council decided the army should march down the banks of the St. Lawrence to attack Montreal, leaving Chauncey’s fleet with the task of guarding its entrance against British warships. Once the target was chosen, Wilkinson sent orders to Hampton on Lake Champlain to be ready to move against Montreal from the south.

For the first time since his appointment, the general’s spirits soared. “All things go well here,” he assured Armstrong the following day. Within a short time, he expected Chauncey to defeat the British, his men to become healthy, and Hampton to communicate with him: “I hope he does not mean to take the stud [start sulking]. But if so, we can do without him, and he should be sent home.”

Nothing was quite as simple as Wilkinson in his burst of optimism imagined. Almost half his forces, thirty-five hundred men, were located at Fort George, near Niagara at the west end of the lake. Despite all efforts, Chauncey proved unable to trap the British squadron. One in three of the troops at Sackets Harbor remained sick. Transportation was crippled by a lack of boats and horses. The summer was coming to an end. And Hampton had unmistakably taken the stud, not only refusing to reply to Wilkinson’s messages, but complaining to Armstrong that his “command instead of being a separate one has sunk within that of a district.” To mollify him, Armstrong secretly promised that he intended to take personal command of the operation, then assured Wilkinson that Hampton and his four thousand troops would cooperate “cordially and vigorously.”

None of these concerns affected Wilkinson’s mood. He hired a spy to report on British positions in Kingston. He ordered the construction of a dozen large keelboats capable of carrying sixty men each. He was in command with people around him to execute his orders, and as always the sensation restored his confidence. In that rejuvenated state of mind, he decided to go in person to Fort George to hurry the transportation of the troops there back to Sackets Harbor. It entailed a journey of about 130 miles in an open boat, but the incompetence of the Fort George commander, Brigadier General John Boyd, described by Winfield Scott as “vacillating and imbecile beyond all endurance,” made Wilkinson’s presence necessary.

As the fall approached, time had become vital. Without the supreme commander’s personal intervention, Boyd would certainly fail to bring his soldiers east before the weather broke. Armstrong’s intention to visit Sackets Harbor at the end of the month might also have made escape attractive. “Two heads on the same shoulder,” Wilkinson commented, “make a monster.”

The voyage turned out to be a disaster. For six days he was exposed to sun, rain, and wind. By the time he arrived at Fort George, he was shivering with fever. For the next ten days he was confined to his bed, forced to dictate orders while suffering “much depression of head and stomach.” On September 16 he told Armstrong, “I have escaped my pallet and with a giddy head and trembling hand will scrawl you a few lines,” and most of what followed was devoted to listing the complex problem of transporting several thousand soldiers from one end of the lake to the other. The next day, his health was better, and he returned to his original idea of beginning the campaign with small- scale operations in the west. The British he noted had barely sixteen hundred combatant soldiers opposite him, and, he told Armstrong, he was tempted to have “a sweep at them.” Peremptorily Armstrong replied, “Let not the great objects of the campaign be hazarded,” and ordered him to return to Sackets Harbor as quickly as possible.

In the little ice age of the early nineteenth century, the onset of fall and winter came early. By late September, the weather was rapidly deteriorating, and for days contrary winds delayed the fleet of transports that Wilkinson had finally assembled. Not until early October was he able to sail back into the secluded waters of Sackets Harbor. There he found that he had been comprehensively second-guessed by Armstrong. Sweeping aside the council of war’s plans to move directly down the St. Lawrence against Montreal, the secretary of war had substituted his own project for attacking Kingston. The terse entry in Armstrong’s journal for October 4 told its own story: “General Wilkinson arrived this day in Sackett’s Harbor from Fort George. He immediately visited the Secretary of War in the company of Generals Lewis and Brown, and in the presence of these officers remonstrated freely and warmly against making an attack on Kingston.”

Wilkinson’s fury at having the council of war’s choice overturned had no more effect than his detailed argument that the lack of transport, the certainty of casualties, and the worsening weather made it impossible to assault both Kingston and Montreal. Armstrong was immovable. He had personally developed a detailed plan for capturing Kingston and insisted on its being carried out. A healthy Wilkinson would have fought back. Before Eustis broke his confidence, he had run rings round secretaries of war. Now, weakened by his illness in Fort George, he collapsed, physically and emotionally, and took to his bed.

While he lay there, the first autumn storms arrived, ten days of unremitting wind. Fearful that winter snows would soon follow, leaving too little time to reach Montreal, Wilkinson agreed on October 19 that his army should attack Kingston. Forty-eight hours later, with maddening perversity, Armstrong decided that Kingston should be canceled because the weather was too severe and the risks too high, and its failure “would extinguish every hope of grasping the other, the safer, the greater object.”

Wilkinson learned of this latest twist as he was organizing the embarkation of troops for Kingston and, as he admitted, “in my feeble condition,” could hardly do justice to his emotions. In the end, he felt capable only of demanding from the secretary of war a final, clear order “to direct the operations of my army particularly against Montreal.” He must have known that the operation, harassed by British troops, overlooked by British fortifications, lacking supplies, plans, and intelligence, and at the mercy of the approaching winter, had only a slim chance of success.

Gales out of the northwest made it perilous even to round the cape guarding Sackets Harbor to reach the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Boats were wrecked, soldiers drowned, ammunition lost, and rations ruined. November had come before the fleet of about three hundred vessels at last assembled in the river. By then disease and the diversion of men to other projects had reduced a projected army of more than twelve thousand by a third. Any hope of surprise had been blown away by the long delays caused by the storm. Chauncey proved unable to prevent British gunboats from following them into the St. Lawrence, and British troops allocated to the defense of Kingston were hurried along the riverbank to reinforce the strongpoint at Prescott, halfway to their target, and to harass Wilkinson’s army as it moved toward Montreal.

Yet with a strong column of about twenty- five hundred men including cavalry under Brown’s vigorous command on the north bank, artillery and almost four thousand soldiers on the boats, and another smaller force led by Swartwout on the south bank, Wilkinson’s force was greater than anything the British could put up in opposition. Once Hampton’s regulars and a promised fifteen hundred New York militia were added, their dominance would become overwhelming. The capture of Montreal was not impossible.

The one essential ingredient was forceful leadership. The general’s first test, passing by the fortified town of Prescott that overlooked the river, was successfully negotiated on November 5. Wilkinson had the powder and ammunition transferred from the boats into wagons, then, leaving only skeleton crews aboard, he ordered the fleet

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