This was a very brilliant little affair. Colonel Morrison of the 89th Regiment, was sent by General de Rotenburg, with a small corp amounting in all to 820 men, Regulars, Militia and Indians, to watch the motions of the American army, when it broke up from Grenadier Island, near Kingston, and to hang on and harass their rear. This was done so effectually that General Covington was detached with a body at least three times our number to drive them back. Morrison retired till he came to a spot he had selected on his downward march, and there gave them battle. Luckily for us, the first volley we fired killed General Covington, who must have been a brave fine fellow; the officer succeeding him brought his undisciplined levies too near our well-drilled troops before he deployed, and in attempting to do so, got thrown into confusion, thus giving our artillery and gun-boats an opportunity of committing dreadful slaughter among their confused and huddled masses. They rallied, however, again, but were driven off by the bayonet; but all this cost us dear, for we were too much weakened to follow up our victory. They retired therefore in comparative safety to about seven miles above the village of Cornwall, where they crossed the river without loss, save from a body of Highland militia, from Glengarry, who made a sudden attack on their cavalry while embarking, and by firing into the boats by which they were swimming over their horses, made them let go their bridles, and the animals swimming to the shore, were seized upon by Donald, who thus came into action a foot soldier, and went out of it a dragoon, no doubt, like his countryman, sorely "taight wi' ta peast" on his journey home.1 The enemy then took up a position and fortified a camp, where they remained during the winter, and when preparations were made to drive them out of it in the spring, they suddenly abandoned their position, leaving behind them their stores and baggage, and retreated, followed by our forces, as far as the village of Malone, in the State of New York. Thus ended the "partumeius mons" of the only efficient invasion of Canada during the war. The fact is, the Americans were deceived in all their schemes of conquest in Canada; the disaffected then as now were the loudest in their clamour, and a belief obtained among the Americans that they had only to display their colours to have the whole population flock to them. But the reverse of this was the case. They found themselves in a country so decidedly hostile, that their retreating ranks were thinned by the peasantry firing on them from behind fences and stumps; and it was evident that every man they met was an enemy. The militia at Lachine, after being duly thanked for their services, were sent home, and the regulars went into winter quarters; the sailors and marines to Kingston – and we, having enjoyed our newly acquired dignities for a few days, set off to join our regiment then quartered at Fort Wellington, a clumsy, ill-constructed unflanked redoubt, close to which now stands the large and populous village of Prescott, then consisting of five houses, three of which were unfinished. The journey was a most wretched one. The month of November being far advanced, rain and sleet poured down in torrents – the roads at no season good, were now barely fordable, so that we found it the easiest way to let our waggon go on with our baggage, and walk through the fields, and that too, though at every two hundred yards, or oftener, we had to scramble over a rail fence, six feet high; sometimes we got a lift in a boat, sometimes we were dragged by main force in a waggon through the deep mud, in which it was hard to say whether the peril of upsetting or drowning was the most imminent. Sometimes we marched; but all that could be said of any mode of travel was, that it was but a variety of the disagreeable; so, as there was no glory to be gained in such a service, I was anything but sorry when I learned that I was to halt for some time at a snug, comfortable, warm, cleanly, Dutch farm house, to take charge of the wounded who had suffered in the action of Chrysler's Farm.
Washington Irving is the only describer of your "American Teutonic Race," and this, my debut in the New World, put me down in the midst of that worthy people as unsophisticated as possible. It is refreshing, as his little Lordship of Craigcrook used to say, in this land where every man is a philosopher, and talks of government as if he had been bred at the feet of Machiavel, to meet with a specimen of genuine simplicity, perfectly aware of his own ignorance in matters which in no way concern him. Your Dutchman is the most unchangeable of all human beings, "Caelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt" applies with peculiar force to the Batavian in every clime on the face of the globe. In America, at the Cape of Good Hope, in the congenial marshes of Java, in the West Indies, and at Chinsurhae on the banks of the Ganges, the transmarine Hollander is always the same as in his own native mud of the dams and dykes of Holland, – the same in his house, his dress, his voracious and omniverous appetite, his thrift and his cleanliness.
Among these good, kind, simple people, I spent a month or six weeks very pleasantly. Loyal and warmly attached to the British Crown, they followed our standard in the Revolutionary War, and obtained from government settlements in Canada when driven from their homes on the banks of the Hudson. From what I could learn from them, the Americans had persecuted them and their families with a rancour they displayed to no other race of mankind. When prisoners were taken in action, while the British were treated by them with respect, and even with kindness, the Dutch were deliberately murdered in cold blood. Men without arms in their hands, but suspected of favouring the British cause, were shot before their own doors, or hanged on the apple trees of their own orchards, in presence of their wives and families, who without regard to age or sex, were turned from their homes without remorse or pity. And one old dame told me that she was for six weeks in the woods between Utica and Niagara, unaccompanied by any one but her two infant children, looking for her husband, who she luckily found in the fort of the latter place; at one time she and her poor babes must have perished from hunger, but for some Mohawk Indians, who came up and delivered them, and conducted them to the Fort. The Dutch themselves ascribe this very different treatment of the two races to the fear of the Americans that the British would retaliate in case they were ill used, while the Dutch could not.
This, however, could not have been the case, for had the Americans feared vengeance on the part of the British for the wrongs they inflicted on their countrymen, they must have equally feared that they would not quietly submit to injuries inflicted on men who were their loyal and faithful fellow subjects. I therefore suspect, that, so far as their statements were correct, and they must have been so in the main, for I have the same stories from the Dutch of the Niagara District, who had no communication whatever with their compatriots of Williamsburg, and though we must allow great latitude for exaggeration in a people who were, no doubt, deeply injured, and had been brooding over their wrongs for a period of upwards of thirty years, during all which time their wrath had gathered force as it went, and their stories having no one to contradict them, must have increased with each subsequent narrator, till they had obtained all the credence of time-honoured truth – allowing for all this, but insisting that the stories had a strong foundation in fact, the rigor of their persecution must be attributed to another feeling, and must have, I should think, arisen from this, that the Americans considered that a British subject born within the realm, and fighting for what he believed to be the rights of his country, was only doing what they themselves were doing; whereas, a North American born, whatever his extraction, fighting against what they considered the rights of the people of North America, was a traitor and an apostate, an enemy to the cause of freedom from innate depravity, and therefore, like a noxious animal, was lawfully to be destroyed, "per fas et nefas." However this may be, I found their hatred to the Americans was deep