used to invade unless he had the full number. Altogether, four
thousand troops, all regulars, had been sent to Niagara but many of them
had been disabled by sickness.

General Smyth then called a council of war, shifted the responsibility
from his own shoulders, and decided to delay the invasion. Again he
changed his mind and ordered the men into the boats two days later.
Fifteen hundred men answered the summons. Again the general marched them
ashore after another council of war, and then and there he abandoned
his personal conquest of Canada. His army literally melted away, "about
four thousand men without order or restraint discharging their muskets
in every direction," writes an eyewitness. They riddled the general's
tent with bullets by way of expressing their opinion of him, and he left
the camp not more than two leaps ahead of his earnest troops. He
requested permission to visit his family, after the newspapers had
branded him as a coward, and the visit became permanent. His name was
dropped from the army rolls without the formality of an inquiry. It
seemed rather too much for the country to bear that, in the first year
of the war, its armies should have suffered from the failures of Hull,
Van Rensselaer, and Smyth.

It had been hoped that General Dearborn might carry out his own idea of
an operation against Montreal at the same time as the Niagara campaign
was in progress. On the shore of Lake Champlain, Dearborn was in command
of the largest and most promising force under the American flag,
including seven regiments of the regular army. Taking personal charge at
Plattsburg, he marched this body of troops twenty miles in the direction
of the Canadian border. Here the militia refused to go on, and he
marched back again after four days in the field. Beset with rheumatism
and low spirits, he wrote to the Secretary of War: "I had anticipated
disappointment and misfortune in the commencement of the war, but I did
by no means apprehend such a deficiency of regular troops and such a
series of disasters as we have witnessed." Coupled with this complaint
was the request that he might be allowed "to retire to the shades of
private life and remain a mere but interested spectator of passing
events."

The Government, however, was not yet ready to release Major General
Dearborn but instructed him to organize an offensive which should obtain
control of the St. Lawrence River and thereby cut communication between
Upper and Lo