the Secords were in for another shock. The house had been ransacked, searched for valuables, and its contents turned upside down. During one of the lulls in fighting a few unscrupulous American soldiers had seized the opportunity to break into the deserted homes in the village and plunder them.
But this was not the time to grieve over their lost possessions. James was alive. Bob, who had returned by this time, helped Laura to make up a bed on the ground floor for him, and Laura bathed and dressed his wounds. By evening the children returned with the other villagers and were greatly relieved to find their father home.
Over the next few days the whole family prayed for James’s recovery. A doctor from Fort George was finally able to attend him, but was unable to remove the shell from James’s knee. He would never fully recover from this injury, and it would cause him pain for the rest of his life.
When James was a little stronger and could be moved, the family took him to St. Davids, where they planned to spend the winter. The house in Queenston would have to be repaired while they were gone.
Returning to St. Davids was a little like coming home. James had grown up in the tiny village, and he and Laura had spent the first few years of their marriage there among the members of his family. There were Secords on many of the farms in the area, and Laura would have plenty of help in caring for James. James’s older brother, Stephen Secord, had died four years earlier, but Hannah and their seven children were still there, running the gristmill together.
While she was in St. Davids, Laura was relieved to learn that her half-brother Charles Ingersoll had survived the Battle of Queenston 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
