Comes again the baleful plea:
He does not say whose charges those were. “Soul-shockt” by the loss of Tecumseh so hard upon that of Joel Barlow — and with Tecumseh the only real leadership of an Indian confederacy — Cook languishes in Nova Scotia while Andrew Jackson massacres the Creeks in Alabama and Madison’s two strange replacements for General Dearborn launch their Canadian campaign. John Armstrong, the new secretary of war, is the same to whom in 1783 Henry Burlingame IV perhaps dictated the infamous “Newburgh Letters”; General Wilkinson is the same Spanish spy who conspired with “Aaron Burr” and then testified against him to save his own skin! Like its predecessor, this expedition will be a fiasco of mismanagement; by November’s end it too will have failed, and in December, with the British capture of Fort Niagara, the tide of war will begin to turn. But the retreating Americans will have burned Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) in addition to York; they will still control the Lakes; no one will have remarshaled the scattered Indians in Tecumseh’s stead — and Andrew lingers on in Halifax.
But he is not altogether idle, and nowise inattentive. Prevost’s burning of Buffalo on New Year’s Eve in retaliation for Newark, he observes, while thorough and brutal, is scarcely of so demoralizing a character to the U.S.A. generally as to prompt Madison’s peace commissioners to cede the Great Lakes to Canada. Who cares about Buffalo? Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British blockading fleet, before leaving Halifax for winter quarters in Bermuda, proposes a letter to Madison threatening further such retaliation: he would begin on the coast of Maine come spring and burn one town after another until the Americans yield, working south if necessary as far as Boston. This too, it seems to Andrew, will be a blow from the wrong quarter: the Federalists will simply be driven into supporting Madison’s war, and the southern states will be privately delighted to see New England get its comeuppance. Admiral Cockburn’s season in Chesapeake Bay, on the other hand, while of limited military effectiveness — a few buildings burned, a few women raped, much tobacco confiscated, and the port of Baltimore closed to normal shipping — strikes Andrew as having been of considerable symbolic import and strategic promise: his fleet has cruised half a year with impunity at the front door of Washington; the city newspaper is even delivered regularly to his flagship, so that he can read the editorial denunciations of himself and keep abreast of the war! Now he is wintering on Cumberland Island, off Georgia, and allegedly arming Negroes for a general rising. The plan is not serious — Andrew has seen copies of the British directive to accept in service any free or escaped Negroes who volunteer, but not to permit a slave insurrection, lest the example spread to British colonies — but it terrifies the southern whites. Andrew admires Sir George Cockburn’s
