Heights. Charles had volunteered as a cavalryman in Thomas Merritt’s Niagara Light Dragoons when the war first broke out. He was twenty-six. When the unit reorganized in 1813 as the Provincial Dragoons, under Merritt’s son William Hamilton Merritt, Charles would be promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He would remain with the Dragoons until the end of the war. Charles Ingersoll would later marry William Merritt’s sister Anna Maria and become a partner with Merritt in a mercantile business in St. Catharines.
James’s brother, David Secord, who owned shops, mills, and businesses in St. Davids, had also fought at Queenston and survived. Unfortunately, his son, David Jr., had been taken prisoner by the Americans.
A favourite story of the Secord family, attributed to Laura’s grandson James B. Secord, son of Charles Badeau, gives a different version of what happened after Laura found James on the battlefield that day.
Three enemy soldiers were standing over him, two with their muskets held as if they intended to club him to death. Laura flung herself over her husband’s body, screaming that they should kill her and spare James. One of the men pushed her roughly aside, intent on his murderous deed.
Just in the nick of time, American captain John Wool stepped in and commanded the men to stop. Reprimanding them and calling them cowards, he had them taken to Lewiston under guard. Then he ordered a party of his own men to carry James down to his house. Wool didn’t even make James a prisoner-on-parole, and reportedly often visited James after the war was over, the two becoming good friends.
A colourful story, but hardly true. James had been wounded in the afternoon battle when his Car Brigade saw action, and by the time Laura ascended the Heights, the British had taken back control of it. The Americans had surrendered.
As for Captain John Wool, he was back in Lewiston by this time, having his own wounds tended to.
In November 1812, American brigadier general Henry Dearborn, appointed senior major general in the American army after the resignation of Stephen van Rensselaer (brother of Solomon, who had landed at Queenston Heights), made two bungled attempts to invade Canada. Otherwise, most of the action in the war that winter took place farther to the east, on the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario.
Late in 1812, construction began on a fort at Prescott, a port on the St. Lawrence that seemed particularly vulnerable to an attack by the Americans, in a place where the river was narrow. Fort Wellington, which would be completed in 1814, was a one-storey blockhouse enclosed by earthen ramparts. Although it was not attacked, it did serve as a rallying place for British and Canadian troops crossing the river early in 1813 for the Battle of Ogdensburg.
After losing the Battle of Queenston Heights, the Americans returned to their side of the Niagara River, and the frontier remained quiet until the following spring.
The winter of 1812–13 was a hard one for the people of the Niagara area. Every merchant in Queenston had suffered considerable losses during the battle, James Secord among them. His store had been vandalized and the shelves emptied of anything of value.
The people of the area shared what little they had with one another, and the Natives brought game to Queenston and St. Davids, providing the residents with a little meat. Even the British army was as generous with its stores as was possible.
Captain Isaac Chauncey of the U.S. navy had arrived in Sackets Harbor, New York, on the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario in October 1812. He would command the American naval effort on Lakes Ontario and Erie. In November his fleet of seven ships chased the British Royal George into Kingston Harbour. He was prevented from attacking the ship by the guns on shore, but he did manage to keep the British fleet bottled up at Kingston until winter came and the navigation season ended.
All through the winter both sides in the conflict continued constructing warships at a feverish pace, each side trying to out-build the other. British shipbuilders at Kingston and York were trying to match the American ship Madison, with its twenty-four guns. Across the lake at Sackets Harbor, Chauncey was building an even larger vessel.
During the first eight months of the war there had been a series of raids all along the St. Lawrence, and British supply boats on the river were constantly harassed. In September 1812, American troops stationed at Ogdensburg, New York, under Captain Forsyth of the 1st U.S. Rifles, raided Gananoque, Ontario. This resulted in a retaliatory attack by the British in October.
In February 1813, two hundred American soldiers and a number of volunteers crossed the ice at night to the Canadian side of the river and freed a group of American citizens held in the Brockville jail. Before fleeing back to Ogdensburg, they seized supplies, arms, and forty-five of the town’s most prominent citizens. The Canadian captives were soon set free, but on February 22, eight hundred British troops and Canadian militia crossed the ice from Prescott and attacked Ogdensburg.
As a result of the Battle of Ogdensburg, a large part of the town was damaged, the fort dismantled, and the barracks burned. Captain Forsyth and some of his riflemen escaped overland to Sackets Harbor, where he asked for additional troops to help him take back Ogdensburg. His request was denied.
As far as the people of Ogdensburg were concerned, Forsyth was responsible for the attack on their town. Under a flag of truce, British lieutenant colonel “Red George” Macdonnell, the commander of Fort Wellington at Prescott, had earlier come to see Captain Forsyth to complain about the continuous raids, but Macdonnell had been met with nothing but insults.
After the battle, the townspeople of Ogdensburg did not want any more American troops stationed there. None would return until October 1813. In the meantime, the citizens began selling food and supplies to the British troops across the river, a practice that would continue for the duration of the war.
In 1813, Sir James Lucas Yeo became the British Royal Navy’s commander for Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. In the spring the fleets belonging to both Canada and the United States jockeyed up and down Lake Ontario, keeping an eye on each other but managing to avoid any major confrontations.
That all changed when, in April 1813, Chauncey’s American fleet of fourteen ships led an invasion of York, sailing from Sackets Harbor to the western end of the lake. Under the command of Henry Dearborn, 1,700 American regulars disembarked before dawn at what is today Sunnyside Beach. Although York was the capital of Upper Canada, the garrison there was small, consisting of only about three hundred regulars, four hundred militia and dockworkers, and about fifty to one hundred Natives. The American troops easily drove back the small force that met them, while their warships demolished the batteries on the shore.
British general Roger Hale Sheaffe, who had become commander of forces and administrator of Upper Canada after Brock’s death, advised the militia officers to surrender the town, to burn the naval storehouses, and to blow up the stone magazine in the small fort where the ammunition was stored, to keep it out of the enemy’s hands. The explosion was so huge that it was heard as far away as Niagara. Tons of falling debris from the blast damaged property, and thirty-eight American soldiers were killed, another 222 wounded. Among the dead was American brigadier general Zebulon Pike, Dearborn’s commander on shore.
Dearborn came ashore himself then to assume command, and the surrender was negotiated. Sheaffe and the British regulars abandoned the garrison at York, the militia was allowed to return home, and private property was ordered to be left untouched. But during their six-day occupation the Americans burned Government House — the residence of the lieutenant-governor — the parliament buildings, and other public buildings. When some of their shops and private homes were also robbed, the citizens of York felt they had been abandoned by the British.
In the invasion, the British lost their naval and military stores at York as well as a ship that had been under construction there. When the American fleet sailed away, it took with it one of the British vessels.
Now that York had been captured, the Americans set their sights on the Niagara frontier. The plan was that if attacks along the Niagara River turned out to be successful, the Americans would move on to Kingston.
The warmer weather had arrived, and James and Laura Secord and their five children left St. Davids and returned to their home in Queenston. It was time to prepare the