1812 seizure of Fort Detroit wasn’t bloodless

History reveals battle came with sorrow and suffering

Lydia Bacon and Porter Hanks must be conducting graveyard spin classes as that myth that Detroit was captured in the War of 1812 without a drop of blood being shed mutates into widely accepted fact.

Maybe it suits the tenor of our times to believe our side, the good guys, pulled off a nonviolent miracle in persuading the U.S. army to surrender Fort Detroit without a whimper, let alone a blast of gunfire.

I groaned last Friday, at the unveiling of that magnificent bronze statue of Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and Major- General Sir Isaac Brock in the new Sandwich Street roundabout, when Mayor Drew Dilkens told the crowd, which included lots of school kids, that Detroit had been seized on Aug. 16, 1812, “without any loss of life.”

I don’t blame Dilkens. He’s not a historian. Neither am I. And in this age, most folks don’t know who fought the Second World War, let alone one that ended two centuries ago. This bit of wishful thinking that nobody died, that it was a cross-border kumbaya party, has been repeated in the media more than once without being corrected.

Thankfully, there were erudite eyewitnesses who left us fascinating accounts of Fort Detroit under siege.

The best, available on a number of American university websites, came from Lydia Bacon, the 26-year-old wife of U.S. army quartermaster Josiah Bacon, who travelled on horseback and by boat to be with her husband and his regiment.

The day before the surrender, she watched Brock’s soldiers demolish a building in what is now downtown Windsor, near what became the former Windsor Star building on Ferry Street, to reveal a battery of cannons aimed at Detroit. “The British soldiers are very busy pulling down the large house, which conceals their battery. If I did not feel half frightened out of my wits, I could laugh, to see what quick work they make of it,” Bacon wrote.

There was no laughter the following dawn as British iron shot (cannon balls) came screeching over the Detroit River into the fort.

“As some ladies were making cylinders ( bags to hold gunpowder) and scraping lint in case it should be wanted, a 24-pound shot entered the door next to the one they were standing in and cut two officers … directly in two, their bowels gushing out. The same ball passed through the wall into a room where a number of people were and took the legs of one man and the flesh of the thigh of another.

“Soon after this another ball of equal size entered the hospital room and a poor fellow who lay sick on his bed had his head severed from his body instantly and his attendant was likewise killed, the shot striking him in his breast,” Bacon recalled.

Making a run across the fort’s courtyard with other women and children for the comparative safety of a root cellar, she described the terror of being under fire.

“I felt as if my nerves would burst, my hair felt as if it was erect upon my head, which was not covered, and my eyes raised upward to catch a glimpse of the bombs, shells and balls that were flying in all directions,” wrote Bacon, while a prisoner on a British vessel, the Queen Charlotte, following the surrender.

At least seven Americans, including 27-yearold Lieut. Hanks, died before General William Hull, in an act that enraged Americans and resulted in his court martial and near execution, surrendered the fort and with it the vast Michigan Territory. Two British soldiers were wounded by U.S. shelling.

Poor luckless Hanks was already in custody in Detroit for surrendering strategic Fort Mackinac, where he hadn’t been notified that war had been declared, when a cannonball took off his head.

It’s wonderful that Brock and Tecumseh have been properly recognized by Windsor. It’s a magnificent and long overdue heritage achievement.

But the capture of Detroit, that one-sided triumph that upended U.S. invasion plans, was more than a stroll in the park. It came, as all battles do, with its allotment of sorrow and suffering.