Part 20

Colonel Prince, who had been on the watch at the Park Farm, passing an anxious night with a terrified and ailing wife, had by now got word of what was happening. He made his appearance in fustian shooting-jacket and wolf-skin cap, no bad dress for the work before him, as he had not time to assume his ordinary uniform. He at once ordered the pursuit discontinued, upon which one shamming dead man got up and ran into the woods. Some stragglers in the militia fired at and killed him, and one of them, a negro of a thrifty turn like the Scotchman in Galt, pulled off the brigand’s boots and slung them over his gun; the negro, in his turn, was to be taken by straggling pirates, and again rescued. The retreat did not stop until the place where the _Champlain_ had been left was reached; she had disappeared, and the heroes of the orchard were constrained to drift about in canoes without paddles like so many Mrs. Aleshines. They used the stocks of their guns to sweep themselves ashore on Hog Island. But the river was full of drifting ice, and Lieutenant Airey and Captain Broderick, who had arrived from Amherstburg with some of the 34th, a field-piece and twenty mounted Indians from the Reserve, soon had the gun trained on the canoes. Airey himself took aim; the first ball plunged at the stern of a canoe, the second took off a man’s arm, and the arm could be seen spinning over the water. One patriot was killed outright; his comrades threw themselves flat, with the exception of the steersman, who, bending as low as he could, poled the unlucky canoe to shore. They imagined that the third shot shattered the last canoe, but its load was destined to illustrate the value of a neutrality law. The men in it were captured by the Brady Guards; were hailed, fired at and surrounded, in due order; dropped their guns overboard and were found unarmed; were taken on board the Guards’ vessel, dried themselves, and were questioned by the officer as to what they did in Canada, who set fire to the _Thames_--questions easily evaded; went through the farce of a second interrogation, were threatened with confinement, were called some hard names, answered boldly, were cheered by the onlookers; in a stern tone were ordered ashore, where they were met by “amazingly cordial” shouts; were escorted to public places of refreshment by an ex-Senator, and, in a word, received the freedom of the city of Detroit. Happy men to be there; for there was a terrible retribution going on while their exciting canoe race and triumphant entry were transpiring.

On the evening before this 3rd of December, a Dr. Hume, assistant staff-surgeon--only child of Dr. John Hume, of Almada Hill, Lanark, Scotland, in whose family the medical profession was hereditary, the father being in Egypt under Abercrombie, and a cousin-german surgeon to the Duke of Wellington--dined at the house of a friend in Sandwich. He wore his undress uniform, and during the evening went to the Park Farm, partly to see the Colonel, as times were exciting; partly to give professional advice for Mrs. Prince, who was ill to distraction from nervous fever; partly to prescribe for the Colonel himself, who “was extremely ill and worn out by fatigue both night and day;” and chiefly to see the third ill person in this afflicted family, Miss Rudyard. Hume was a fair-complexioned fellow, of easy and gentlemanly manner, with a look and countenance peculiarly mild; altogether a pleasing personality, handsome and distinguished-looking. On the morning of the attack, he and Commissary Morse directed their steps from the Park Tavern to where the sounds of firing came, the former to tender his professional services. They rode, the staff-surgeon still in uniform, and the horse in its usual military trappings. Someone suggested that to be in plain clothes might be safer, but he laughingly replied that no one would touch a doctor. As the incendiaries returned from burning the _Thames_ they met the two. Hume mistook them for Loyalists. A woman came out from her house and warned him that they were a detachment of patriots, but she was too late. The patriot account is that their captain demanded Hume’s surrender. To his question, “To whom shall I surrender?” came the answer, “To the Patriots.” He then quickly dismounted, with the uncomplimentary rejoinder, “Never, to a ---- set of rebels!” Then a dozen bullets pierced him. “Only part of our force fired--the rest, among whom I was one, thinking it quite unnecessary to go to extremes with so brave a man.” The surgeon’s body told a different story. Colonel Prince’s official despatch says that, not content with firing several balls into him, the savages stabbed him in many places with their bowie knives and mangled his body with an axe. Another Loyalist appears to have been near enough to call out, “Don’t shoot that man--he is the doctor!” This interruption and their absurd query, “Then why does he not surrender?” enabled him to slip past the corner of a house under cover of which he tried to reach a friend’s. The first man who fired must have been satisfied with his aim, for he turned to a companion and said, “You may go and take the sword, he won’t run farther.” At any rate, he retreated, pistol in hand, facing his enemies. The legends of the time say he was barbarously mutilated, dismembered, and his heart cut out, and preparations made to skin him, with a view to drumheads. It was said that these barbarities were committed under the impression that he was the dreaded Prince himself; this is now contradicted by many, as are also some of the details of the atrocities. There are those still alive who say they saw his quarters hung on the fence pickets by these human shrikes, and yet others who saw his body intact, as it lay in Mrs. Hawkins’ store. Hume’s companion fared better; he was shot at, but the balls passed through his hair.

Again to quote from the despatch: “Of the brigands and pirates, 21 were killed, besides 4 who were brought in just at the close and immediately after the engagement, all of whom I ordered to be shot upon the spot, and which was done accordingly.” Over the last thirteen words were innumerable articles written, controversies begun which nearly ended in bloodshed; they led to twelve challenges to the duello from Colonel Prince to his detractors; to debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords, where Pakington, Labouchere, Brougham, the Duke of Wellington, Melbourne and Normanby were to fight over again the famous battle of Windsor; a reward was offered on the other side of the river, for Prince’s body $800, for him alive $1,000; the much beset Colonel had notices displayed on his farm that none should venture there after dark, as he had spring-guns and man-traps set to protect himself; and lastly there was the court-martial.

Naturally such a story, horrible at first, grew as it travelled and as time progressed. “John Bishop of St. Albans, in a fit of jealousy, shot his wife and then himself,” once wrote a French newspaper. “Jean, évêque de St. Albans, dans un accès de jalousie a tué sa femme,” said the first exchange; the next editor supposed that a married bishop must be an Episcopalian--and next “The Protestant bishop of St. Albans has killed his wife and then himself.” In like manner ran the prisoner stories. One unfortunate was commanded by an onlooker to run for his life, the order to shoot having been already given. He did so, with results that are sickening in detail. Before long the four prisoners had developed into nine, who were represented as running the gauntlet, Indian fashion, with additions of further horror.

A prisoner of war is one captured in the course of acknowledged and honourable warfare, and the legality or illegality of the contest makes him a hero or a ruffian. Previous to the fourth of December, ’38, in connection with recent affairs a subject of frequent debate in the Sandwich-Windsor neighbourhood was the hanging on the spot, without the slightest form of trial, of a gang of pirates, by Sir Thomas Maitland, in the island of Malta. However, this summary proceeding on the marooners took place a couple of days after the battle with them, and what was sought for by the Canadians was a precedent for shooting on the field without allowing time for justice to mellow.

As the “Curiæ Canadenses” tells us, formerly

“These legal seats of divers ranks Have limit to St. Laurent’s banks;”

by ’37,

“... all beyond, down to Detroit, Becomes new ground for fresh exploit.”

The exploit of which these debaters, and Colonel Prince in particular, complained was the decision made under the “discouraging shade cast by Whig conciliation;” for at the last court held in Sandwich, when he was prepared to prosecute nine prisoners for murder, he found they, through some point of law which he never could be brought to understand, had become dignified as prisoners of war. As to American citizenship and neutrality laws, it was asked “What avail the speeches, messages, proclamations and paper measures of the President, when unprovoked aggressions of his people remain unpunished.” It was small satisfaction to hear their friends in the neighbouring Republic term the invaders but the roughscuffs of their people; people--they had no people, they were the repudiated of either shore. To term them prisoners of war legalized the cause of the marauders and added hundreds to their ranks. The Tories upheld Prince in his action anent the Pelee Island prisoners “who escaped their just deserts under the nickname of prisoners of war.” Never had he appeared to better advantage than in his address to the court as he declaimed, “I deny also the right of any person of the Executive Council, the right of the Lieutenant-Governor, the right of even Majesty itself, to step between the accuser and those accused of murder, and to prevent the incipient proceeding of an inquiry into the matter by the grand inquest of the country.” But a few hours before his eyes had been filled with the horror of Hume’s body the young surgeon had been in his house, in full possession of youth, health, strength and intelligence; he turned over in the barracks the smoking remains of what he believed to be his fellow-townsmen; he saw the murdered negro; he was distracted with thoughts of one very dear to him whose reason he feared would be unhinged; arson and murder, rifle and torch, the bowie-knife and axe of those whom he considered barbarians, “a cowardly and scampering set of pirates,” merited but one reward. He was in command, and he set about putting his ideas into effect. The details of the “shooting” are so shocking that it is better to omit them here; and shocking or entirely justifiable, the tale as told by historian or eye-witness differs throughout. If more brutality than the case demanded was exercised, it was rebuked by the mounted Indians who soon afterwards brought in seven prisoners from the woods where an escape had been attempted. The first cry was, “Bayonet them!” “No,” said Martin, the Indian leader, “we are Christians, we will not murder them--we will deliver them to our officers to be treated as they think proper.” When Prince saw them he ordered the waggon in which they sat to be wheeled off the road, and as soon as it reached an open spot in rear of the barracks, which still smoked, he ordered that the prisoners should be shot. “For God’s sake, don’t let a white man murder what an Indian has spared!” was the entreaty, and Colonel Prince yielded to it.

Head, once controverting the British idea that Indian warfare was inadmissible in Canada, gave a supposititious reply: “Our Indians never scalp us, never scalp each other; and they have only scalped you because, in defiance of the laws of nations, you invaded their territory to rob them of their lands. If you think their habits of war barbarous, learn in future to leave them in the placid enjoyment of peace.” But the Indians were wiser than Sir Francis in his rounded periods. The Hurons of Detroit had seen the ships of Jacques Cartier, and reported great dark animals with broad white wings spitting out fire and uttering thunder--their first experience of cannon. The cross planted at Gaspé had sent its lesson far inland by 1837, and the warrior in feathers and wampum could teach the controllers of gunpowder by example.

Harvell, the tall Kentuckian, and twelve others were buried in one grave in the lower corner of Colonel Baby’s orchard; the body of General Putnam found a grave until his wife and daughter came, had it exhumed, and took it away.

Of the survivors who scattered themselves in the woods some were discovered frozen, sitting at the roots of trees and evidently famished ere they froze; some were found round the miserable remains of a camp-fire, remnants of potatoes, their only food, scattered about. Many had been wounded, suffering tortures beyond hunger and cold. Of those taken alive most were sent to Van Diemen’s Land, among them a farmer who had joined the expedition haphazard at the last moment when he was both drunk and reckless. His wife and family could not trace what became of him; but after the lapse of twenty years he made his escape to the South Sea Islands, whence he returned to his former home, to find his wife again married, his children grown up, and his estate in due course of law divided among them. Hardship and old age had so told on him there was small fear of recognition; he obtained some small appointment, never troubled his family, and worked an Enoch Arden end to an existence spoiled by the sad freak of having been a pirate for a day.

Some found shelter with the Irish and French peasants, for although on the whole Loyalist both these nationalities had quickly-moved sympathies. One of the escaping “officers” threw himself on the protection of a big Irish woman. “Are yez a Patriarch?” He told her he was a Patriot. “Thin it’s yourself is safe enough; just hide in the cellar and kape aisy.” It is said her husband was in Prince’s employ to deliver all such up; “but bad luck to me if ivvir he sets his eye on wan o’ thim.” This peasant is said to have kept four such refugees for six weeks, so well cared for that when they arrived in Detroit they were “hale, fat and hearty as porkers.” “Now, my lads,” he remarked to his guests, “you have a taste of how the English use us poor Irish.” “Bad luck to thim,” chimed in his wife; “my own dear fader was twelve years hid in a rock for the fear av thim after the battle of Vinegar Hill, and it’s meself carried his vittles till he died.” As for Baptiste, his fine address was equal to the occasion. One hunted creature, some troopers in hot pursuit, burst into a neat little cabin where the Frenchman had risen but madame had not. Taking in the situation at a glance, he clapped a night-cap on the patriot’s head, popped him into bed beside the astonished wife, and when the soldiers entered, with elbows well in and palms extended he shrugged his ignorance of any rebels--no one but his two women-kind, _les voilà!_ He gave the searchers directions towards the bush, and in a short time had his patriot in a canoe, well out in the river, bound for Detroit.

Next morning a large concourse of people, the officers of the militia, Captain Sparkes’ company and a division of Captain Bell’s under Ensign Powell, all in full uniform and with arms reversed, preceded the corpse of the murdered Hume to the churchyard. The Grenadier company of the 34th, drawn up before the Court House, presented arms, so remaining until the procession had passed. The moaning of the wind, the naked branches of the trees above the open grave, the falling snow, were in unison with the sadness of the onlookers; “Suffer us not for any pain of death to fall away from Thee” came with a new meaning to the hearers’ hearts; the words of the ever beautiful ritual for the burial of the dead rose and fell from the rector’s lips on the wintry atmosphere; “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” a volley of musketry, and the family name of Hume was extinct. His fortune of some £20,000, derived from his mother, passed to distant relatives.

The uproar which ensued after this series of tragedies was not by any means all Loyalist-Rebel, nor yet pure righteous indignation; party feeling, private spleen, and the complexity of motives good and bad which enter into any similar demonstration where the actors are human, all had place. A man of extraordinary popularity is generally a mark for jealousy. Across the river hatred of him culminated in the action of “the waddling, twaddling Theller,” who announced that he was coming over at the head of two thousand men and would wash his hands in the blood of John Prince. The patriots who had been saved in the canoes told crowds of “Detroit’s most intelligent citizens” the details of their truly thrilling escape, not only by canoe, but from “the Indian and negro volunteers in the Royal service, or from the more brutal Orangemen.” After he was taken prisoner on the _Anne_, this Theller had experienced the weight of Colonel Prince’s foot and knew the measure of his speech. In the middle of what he terms a refreshing and invigorating sleep he was waked by a kick from “an individual of the name of John Prince, who had run away from London, England, with plenty of golden means to secure himself a retreat in the western wilds of Canada,” where he strove to “imitate the manners of the artificial nobility of his native land.” This individual Prince “was thirsting for knighthood,” was dark, mysterious, cruel, vindictive, plausible but to deceive, and--herein lay his greatest crime and was the only item of truth in Theller’s impeachment--spared no time, money, act, to crush the hopes of the friends of Canadian rebellion. “His friendly salute aroused me,” writes Theller; “he was armed to the teeth. A brace of pistols and a tomahawk graced his girdle; on his back was slung a double-barrelled gun; a long cavalry sword dangled at his side, a wide-mouthed blunderbuss in his right hand. His whole appearance betokened malignity and determined vengeance.”

Under these circumstances Colonel Prince must be excused for using his foot; clearly it was the only free part of his anatomy. Some months before this trying pedal performance, Theller on the dock at Windsor had taken upon himself to lecture the Colonel, his “blessed privilege as an American citizen” so to do, after Prince had been similarly engaged with a French-Canadian whom he suspected of disaffection. Theller knew, “by the restless brilliancy of his eye, dastardly flashing like the electricity of an approaching thunderstorm,” what he had to expect. He quietly enough stepped on the ferry ready to leave for Detroit, concluding, “Thus was I rescued for the first time from the cherished revenge of this man!”

Between their last meeting and the battle of Windsor Theller had made his wonderful leap for life from the citadel at Quebec and was back in Detroit, ready to inaugurate more mischief just when the attack was the theme of every tongue there.

Perhaps the unkindest mention of the battle was the report given, as the events progressed, by the Detroit _Morning Post_, fresh from the wonderful spy-glass of the reporter: “The infantry are evidently citizens and, as near as we can judge by means of a spy-glass, are like men employed in an unwilling service. They move at the rate of two miles an hour, and have several times stopped, as though irresolute about proceeding.”

In his own country Colonel Prince was more of a hero than ever. His journeys were ovations. Hamilton, Oakville, Chatham, and London testified to a general appreciation. In Chatham “the incorporated companies saluted him not only with arms, but with hearty cheers;” at London the Union Jack was run up on his hotel, and fire balls were thrown about to make the night brilliant; the volunteers, under Colonel Burwell, came out to do him honour, drawing from him a short, pithy address in which he announced that should a similar opportunity occur a similar result would follow, and his only regret was he had given the much-talked-of prisoners a soldier’s death; addresses, signed by hundreds of the District’s best residents, testified to approval and continued respect; and by the time he reached the House of Assembly he was greeted with a burst of enthusiasm which was supposed to and did represent the feelings of the majority of constituents as well as of members.

“Let the journalists who can in their consciences vindicate the conduct of Colonel Prince ... come out boldly and say so,” was the challenge of those who did not approve. It was taken up. The approval became more emphatic, the friendly sheets were only sorry that he had not shot “every single miscreant of the batch,” and it was proposed to raise £50 to present him with a sword. The Park Farm had a New Year visitation from Captain Leslie and the officers of the Colonel’s battalion, Mr. Ross carrying the ensign; healths were drunk, and Prince’s came second only to Her Majesty in fervour, and continued three times three. In his response the Colonel told them that the disposition of those who were against him was resolving itself into a conspiracy upon his fame, but he meant to treat them as Sir Francis Bond Head had treated the rebels--allow them to go the whole length of their vain, inglorious and ungrateful measures, and “_then he would destroy them_.”

Prince promised not a whit more than it turned out he was able to perform.

About this time his Excellency Sir George Arthur took the Erie border towns in one of his tours. Prior to his arrival in Sandwich it was said that he was one of those who disapproved of Prince. To fire the first shot, the Colonel drew up the address which it was proposed to present, and, assuming the possibility of fresh trouble, foreshadowed results: “_Certain, instant and inevitable death at our hands will be their fate, without any recognition of them as prisoners of war, or as any other sort of prisoners._” Some delay occurred in the time of arrival, and the address was sent to Toronto. When the Governor did arrive, another, expressing very different sentiments, was presented--which he demurred at receiving. The people found he had nothing prepossessing in appearance, “indeed, he is as indifferent a looking person as can be imagined,” and all waited to see the result of the interview with their beloved Colonel.

Immediately afterwards there appeared in Detroit papers, and in large, closely printed hand-bills, an anonymous and detailed narrative called “The Battle of Windsor,” written on this side and printed across the river. A copy signed by a militia colonel and twelve others was sent to the Governor in Toronto, accompanied by affidavits vouching for the truth of the charges therein contained. At once a court-martial or court of inquiry was instituted, composed of Lieutenant-Colonel Airey, Major French of the 85th, and Major Deedes, of the 34th. Never did people more speedily occupy a pit which they had digged for others. The militia colonel had been proud to preside at the meeting where summary measures and no quarter were proposed and ratified; he was now proved to have made bad feeling in the service by his literary composition; to have exaggerated, and thereby lowered the character of the service; to have aggravated the feelings of hostility already rampant on either border--and he was relieved of his commission. A meeting at once took place between Prince and one of his late libellers, at

“A gentlemanly distance, but not too near, If you have got your former friend for foe;”