Before daylight on 13 October 1812, American troops under Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer crossed the Niagara River to Queenston in Upper Canada. Men led by Captain John Ellis Wool climbed the heights and surprised the British commander, Major General Isaac Brock, at a battery. Brock, who had ridden up from Fort George, was killed leading a counterattack, and his aide John Macdonell was mortally wounded in a second. In the afternoon Major General Roger Hale Sheaffe marched round inland, joined John Norton's warriors and troops from Chippawa, and attacked. Many of the troops still on the New York bank would not cross, and, Sheaffe reported, Brigadier General William Wadsworth handed him his sword.
Across the river before daylight
Van Rensselaer, the American commander on the Niagara, sent his troops over from the New York bank against Queenston before daylight on 13 October. Henry Adams puts the first embarkation at three o'clock, Lieutenant Colonel Thompson Mead of the New York militia at four, and Lieutenant Colonel John Chrystie of the 13th Infantry, who led the regular column, "Between four and five o'clock".1
Chrystie's own boat lost a rowlock and drifted downstream under fire from the village. Ordered to make the Canadian shore, its pilot tried again, "literally groaning with fear", and Chrystie had to return to the American bank. The men who did land were stopped near the river, and their commander, Colonel Solomon Van Rensselaer, was wounded.2
Wool's path and the redan
Brock rode from Fort George when the firing began. Soon after daylight the landed troops climbed the heights unobserved, Chrystie writes, with Captain John Ellis Wool of the 13th in command. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB), Wool's men had found a "fisherman's path"; Brock, at the "redan" battery of one gun part way up the hill, was surprised by them above him, and he and the gunners abandoned it. Chrystie also describes a one-gun battery "half-way down" the hill and "open in the rear". Adams tells it differently: Brock was watching from an 18-pounder battery on the hill-top when Wool, climbing by a path reported to Brock as impassable, came out about thirty yards behind it.3
Brock falls
Brock gathered the nearest troops and led them up the slope on foot, and was killed. Sheaffe reported that he fell "whilst gallantly cheering his troops to an exertion for maintaining it".4
His last words are disputed. J. B. Glegg, who called Brock his friend, wrote to Brock's brother on 14 October that the ball entered his right breast and passed through his left side, and that within a few minutes he said "in a feeble voice": "My fall must not be noticed or impede my brave companions from advancing to victory". The DCB, citing George Jarvis, a volunteer beside him, and the bullet hole in his coatee, holds that he was struck in the heart and "must have died without a word". The York Gazette gave his last words as "Push on brave York Volunteers", but the DCB notes that the Volunteers were not yet on the field when he fell. It finds more plausible a letter in the Quebec Mercury of 27 October, by which, just before he was hit, he cried out "to push on the York volunteers".5
Macdonell's charge
Brock's death left his provincial aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel John Macdonell, the senior officer on the ground. He led the York Volunteers and other troops in another attack; his horse was shot under him, he was mortally wounded, and the attack failed. William Woodruff, who marched up from Niagara that morning, recalled in 1840 being told on the way up that Macdonell "had led up a small force to oppose the Americans, when he received his death-wound".6
The defenders fell back to the north end of the village. Brock's body lay in a house in Queenston, unnoticed by the Americans, Glegg writes.7
Sheaffe's long way round
Sheaffe came up from Fort George with reinforcements. He reported that a movement was made to turn the American left while artillery under Captain Holcroft engaged them in front; the DCB describes a wide flanking march to join the Indians and a party from Chippawa under Captain Richard Bullock. Warriors under John Norton had already climbed the heights and were harassing the Americans. Sheaffe praised "the judicious position which Norton and the Indians with him had taken on the woody brow of the high ground above Queenston".8
Parks Canada names Runchey's Corps of free black men among the units that fought.9
The men who would not cross
On the American bank, Chrystie writes, the boatmen forsook their duty and the crossing fell into confusion; by about eleven o'clock "At least half the boats we had in the morning were lost or damaged; not half the troops had crossed".10
When firing broke out on the heights, Chrystie saw a company of men "very handsomely equipped" that "had thereupon halted and now absolutely refused to cross, regarding neither the orders nor threats nor remonstrances of the General". According to the American Battlefield Trust, the militiamen ordered across refused to embark, and the refusal was "almost universal". Van Rensselaer, back on the American bank, wrote: "I rode in all directions; urged the men by every consideration to pass over, but in vain". He concluded that the victory "was really won, but lost for the want of a small reinforcement; one-third part of the idle men might have saved all". Mead judged that those who crossed and then fled, by recrossing or "skulking under the shore", were "deserving more censure than such as did not attempt to cross".11
Wadsworth's sword
On the heights Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott led the regulars, and Brigadier General William Wadsworth of the New York militia was there too. Van Rensselaer reported that "many of the boatmen had fled panic-struck"; Adams writes that they had all fled with the boats.12
Van Rensselaer dates the last conflict to about four o'clock, lasting about half an hour. Sheaffe wrote that the action lasted until "nearly three o'clock in the afternoon", and: "I had the satisfaction of receiving the sword of their commander, Brigadier General Wadsworth, on the field of battle".13
Sheaffe reported "upwards of 900 men" taken prisoner. Evans's return of 15 October counts 925: 19 officers and 417 men of the regulars, and 54 officers and 435 men of the militia. Adams writes that not less than nine hundred surrendered, including skulkers and militiamen who never reached the heights; the DCB gives nearly 1,000, and Parks Canada 958.14
Ceasefire and aftermath
That afternoon Van Rensselaer agreed to a British proposal of "a cessation of firing for three days", and Sheaffe's orders set its end at four o'clock on Friday 16 October.15
Evans's return gives the British loss as 2 general staff, 1 sergeant and 11 rank and file killed; 2 captains, 1 lieutenant, 1 adjutant, 6 sergeants, 66 rank and file and 1 volunteer wounded; and 20 rank and file and 1 volunteer missing. It lists only regular and militia units. A memorandum by Colonel William Claus names five Indian dead, two Cayuga chiefs, an Onondaga warrior and two Oneida warriors, and Parks Canada lists the same men. Evans estimated the American killed and wounded, with wounded sent back during the action, at 500. Adams writes that ninety Americans were reported killed. The American Battlefield Trust gives 21 British killed, 85 wounded and 22 missing or captured, and 100 Americans killed, 170 wounded and 835 missing or captured.16
Brock and Macdonell were reburied under a monument on the heights in 1824; Parks Canada notes that both lie in Brock's Monument. Van Rensselaer asked to be relieved, and Brigadier General Alexander Smyth took command at Buffalo on 24 October, Adams writes. Parks Canada calls Queenston Heights the first battle for the Niagara frontier and writes that the victory ended the American offensive of 1812; Adams and the DCB record a further American crossing near Fort Erie on 28 November, which failed.17
Also on 13 October
1943: Italy declared war on Germany, and the American, British and Soviet governments accepted Italy as a co-belligerent. A telegram from Algiers dated 12 October had reported that Italy would declare war on 13 October. Blumenson's volume of the US Army official history notes that Italy became "an Allied cobelligerent, though not an ally".18
During the night of 12 to 13 October, according to the same official history, General Mark Clark's Fifth Army attacked across the Volturno. At 0200 on 13 October the 7th Infantry of the 3d Division started to cross; by the end of the day engineers had built a jeep bridge and an 8-ton bridge, and by the morning of 14 October the division's bridgehead was four miles deep.19
