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Patrick Wilder, American Historian and Graeme Decarie, Canadian Historian
Further Reading |
American strategic errors that led to the disaster of the Battle of Chrysler’s FarmWilder: If you were to take a map of North America and turn it on its side, so that the east coast is at the bottom, and you would look at the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, what you would see would be a tree that divides British North America from the new Republic of the United States. In 1812 the Americans were constantly carrying out military campaigns and thrusts into the leaves of this tree and the branches in the west as well as in the Niagara frontier, when what they should have done was taken an axe to the trunk at Montreal.Decarie: Yes, either at Montreal or at Kingston... Wilder: Or at Kingston.... Too late, they understood that they should. When Secretary of War, John Armstrong, created a plan to be carried out by none other than James Wilkinson, one of the most notorious and interesting characters in American military history.... 8,000 regular troops left Sackett's Harbour in the fall of 1813, and another 4,000 troops under a general by the name of Wade Hampton, left Plattsburgh for Montreal, all of them to converge some time in November of 1813, or so they hoped.... But the results were not what they had planned because there was an intervening situation called Chrysler’s Farm.
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