on June 20, and again on June 21 at Chippawa.
There is good reason to believe that Chapin, likely furious at losing another man to FitzGibbon, stopped off at the Secords’ to talk to the officers there. He may have told them that he had a plan to deal with the dastardly FitzGibbon, and that he had convinced Brigadier General Boyd of the efficacy of his plan.
Chapin was a big man, over six feet tall, and boastful, according to Boerstler, with a voice that carried easily beyond the walls of the dining room. Chapin knew that the plan to capture FitzGibbon and destroy his outpost was being set in motion. FitzGibbon had to be gotten rid of before they could take on the British. Being the braggart he was, Chapin wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to talk about it; the plan was his brainchild.
Laura had explained to Bob and Fan, the family servants, that she could not disobey the officers’ requests to provide another place at the table. The servants were to put out all the food they had and were not to forget to include the liquor. While the men were eating and drinking, according to some stories, Laura is supposed to have slipped out of the house and overheard their conversation through an open window.
One source states that earlier one of the Americans had insulted Bob, and rather than have the man suffer any more abuse, Laura had waited on the table herself. If this was the case, the officers may simply have ignored her and continued their discussion as she went about clearing their plates and refilling their glasses.
Her granddaughter, Laura Secord Clarke, daughter of Laura Ann who was born to Laura and James three years after the War of 1812, gives this version of the conversation between her grandparents after they became privy to the American information, the way she remembered her grandmother telling it.
“James, somebody ought to tell Colonel FitzGibbon they are coming.”
“Well, if I crawled there on my hands and knees, I could not get there in time,” James replied.
“Suppose I go?” was Laura’s suggestion. How could she not, knowing now what she did?
“You go, with a country in so disturbed a state? I do not think any man could get through, let alone a woman.”
“You forget, James,” said Laura, “that God will take care of me.”
However it happened that the Secords learned of the enemy’s plan of a surprise attack, or which one of them heard it first, they were in possession of a crucial piece of intelligence, and both agreed that FitzGibbon must be warned.
Like many people, Laura believed that FitzGibbon and the Indians were all that was stopping the Americans from pushing right on through the peninsula. And when that happened, it would be Loyalists like themselves who paid most heavily.
The first documentary evidence of Laura’s walk was in a petition to Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland, written by James Secord and dated February 25, 1820. James was requesting a licence to operate a stone quarry on a portion of a Queenston military reserve.
It reads, “The petition of James Secord, Senior, of the Village of Queenston, Esquire Captain in the 2nd Regiment of the Lincoln Militia, was wounded in the battle of Queenston, and twice plundered of all his moveable property … that his wife embraced an opportunity of rendering some service at the risk of her life, in going thro’ the Enemies’ Lines to communicate information to a Detachment of His Majesty’s Troops at Beaver Dams in the month of June 1813 …”
Years later, in 1853, Laura herself wrote that once she knew of the Americans’ plans she became determined to “put the British troops under FitzGibbon in possession of them, and if possible to save the British troops from capture or perhaps total destruction.”
After the British had evacuated Fort George and gone to Burlington Heights, many inhabitants of Queenston had sent their families to the safety of homes of relatives living elsewhere. There really was no one else in the neighbourhood the Secords knew whom they could ask to relay the information now in their possession. There was no alternative; Laura would have to go.
Although deeply concerned for Laura’s safety, James was well aware of how resolute the mother of his five children was. She was competent, too. The horror of the previous October and the Battle of Queenston Heights were never far from his mind. Laura had told him how she’d whisked the children off to a safe place, how she’d scoured the battlefield on Queenston Heights until she found him, and James would never forget how she’d gotten him down off the escarpment and home. Once she’d made up her mind to do something, there was no stopping her.
It was decided that Laura should leave early the next morning, June 22. In case the American attack was imminent, she had to get to De Cew’s in time for FitzGibbon to mount a counterattack.
She would go first to St. Davids, three miles from Queenston. Her half-brother Charles Ingersoll was sick and was staying at Hannah Secord’s house in the little village. Charles was engaged to Hannah’s twenty-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and the women in the house were doing what they could to nurse him back to health.
James suggested Laura might find her brother well enough to deliver the information to FitzGibbon himself. On the other hand, he pointed out, she might be able to persuade one of Hannah’s sons to take over her mission.
There would have been little sleep for Laura that night. Convinced she was doing the right thing, she’d still be mulling over in her mind the safest route to take, well aware that if she were captured the penalty for spying was death by firing squad. She wouldn’t let herself think about that.
Before dawn on June 22, she got up, and in the dark readied herself to leave the house, putting on the clothing she’d carefully chosen the previous evening: a brown cotton house dress that she’d made herself. The long straight skirt of the dress fell from a high waist, and with its elbow-length sleeves it would be cool enough. Over her shoulders she knotted a kerchief of light muslin, and slid her feet into her usual pair of low-heeled, kid leather slippers, tying them securely at the instep.
Before leaving the room she plucked a cotton sunbonnet off the peg to protect her fair complexion from the sun later in the day. For a moment Laura stood looking at her sleeping children, wishing she could say goodbye to them. But there’d been so much coming and going in the house since the occupation that it seemed as if even the walls had ears. She couldn’t risk any noisy chatter at this hour. She tiptoed from the room without waking her brood and creaked open the door.
After the door had closed softly behind her, Harriet, who had turned ten that February, slipped out of bed and went to the window. She was the only one who saw Laura leave. It was about 4:30 a.m.
“I remember seeing my mother leave the house on that fateful morning,” Harriet told author Sarah Anne Curzon in 1891, “but neither I nor my sisters knew on what errand she was bent.”
Laura had assumed there would be American sentries posted ten miles out from Fort George, and for this reason she chose to take a roundabout route to St. Davids. It was her good fortune that the sentries were actually no farther out than two miles, and she never did run into them. Still, she had prepared an excuse for being on the road at dawn and would be confident in repeating it if she were stopped. She was going to visit her sick brother.
Charles was her favourite brother; the younger ones she barely knew. Thomas had been born just prior to the Ingersoll family’s move from Queenston to the log house at Oxford-on-the-Thames, and Laura had remained behind to marry James. Two other half-brothers, Samuel and James, were born after Laura and her three sisters from her father’s first wife were already married.
It
