ond the boundaries of New England when he
announced to Congress: "The conquest of Canada is in your power. I trust
that I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily
believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place
Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet. Is it nothing to the British
nation; is it nothing to the pride of her monarch to have the last
immense North American possession held by him in the commencement of his
reign wrested from his dominions?" Even Jefferson was deluded into
predicting that the capture of Canada as far as Quebec would be a mere
matter of marching through the country and would give the troops
experience for the attack on Halifax and the final expulsion of England
from the American continent.

The British Provinces, extending twelve hundred miles westward to Lake
Superior, had a population of less than five hundred thousand; but a
third of these were English immigrants or American Loyalists and their
descendants, types of folk who would hardly sit idly and await invasion.
That they should resist or strike back seems not to have been expected
in the war councils of the amiable Mr. Madison. Nor were other and
manifold dangers taken into account by those who counseled war. The
Great Lakes were defenseless, the warlike Indians of the Northwest were
in arms and awaiting the British summons, while the whole country beyond
the Wabash and the Maumee was almost unguarded. Isolated here and there
were stockades containing a few dozen men beyond hope of rescue,
frontier posts of what is now the Middle West. Plans of campaign were
prepared without thought of the insuperable difficulties of transport
through regions in which there were neither roads, provisions, towns,
nor navigable rivers. Armies were maneuvered and victories won upon the
maps in the office of the Secretary of War. Generals were selected by
some inscrutable process which decreed that dull-witted, pompous
incapables should bungle campaigns and waste lives.

It was wisely agreed that of all the strategic points along this
far-flung and thinly held frontier, Detroit should receive the earliest
attention. At all costs this point was to be safeguarded as a base for
the advance into Canada from the west. A remote trading post within
gunshot of the enemy across the river and menaced by tribes of hostile
Indians, Detroit then numbered eight hundred inhabitants and was
protected only by a stout enclosure of logs. F