The voyage turned out to be a disaster. For six days he was exposed to sun, rain, and wind. By the time he arrived at Fort George, he was shivering with fever. For the next ten days he was confined to his bed, forced to dictate orders while suffering “much depression of head and stomach.” On September 16 he told Armstrong, “I have escaped my pallet and with a giddy head and trembling hand will scrawl you a few lines,” and most of what followed was devoted to listing the complex problem of transporting several thousand soldiers from one end of the lake to the other. The next day, his health was better, and he returned to his original idea of beginning the campaign with small- scale operations in the west. The British he noted had barely sixteen hundred combatant soldiers opposite him, and, he told Armstrong, he was tempted to have “a sweep at them.” Peremptorily Armstrong replied, “Let not the great objects of the campaign be hazarded,” and ordered him to return to Sackets Harbor as quickly as possible.
In the little ice age of the early nineteenth century, the onset of fall and winter came early. By late September, the weather was rapidly deteriorating, and for days contrary winds delayed the fleet of transports that Wilkinson had finally assembled. Not until early October was he able to sail back into the secluded waters of Sackets Harbor. There he found that he had been comprehensively second-guessed by Armstrong. Sweeping aside the council of war’s plans to move directly down the St. Lawrence against Montreal, the secretary of war had substituted his own project for attacking Kingston. The terse entry in Armstrong’s journal for October 4 told its own story: “General Wilkinson arrived this day in Sackett’s Harbor from Fort George. He immediately visited the Secretary of War in the company of Generals Lewis and Brown, and in the presence of these officers remonstrated freely and warmly against making an attack on Kingston.”
Wilkinson’s fury at having the council of war’s choice overturned had no more effect than his detailed argument that the lack of transport, the certainty of casualties, and the worsening weather made it impossible to assault both Kingston and Montreal. Armstrong was immovable. He had personally developed a detailed plan for capturing Kingston and insisted on its being carried out. A healthy Wilkinson would have fought back. Before Eustis broke his confidence, he had run rings round secretaries of war. Now, weakened by his illness in Fort George, he collapsed, physically and emotionally, and took to his bed.
While he lay there, the first autumn storms arrived, ten days of unremitting wind. Fearful that winter snows would soon follow, leaving too little time to reach Montreal, Wilkinson agreed on October 19 that his army should attack Kingston. Forty-eight hours later, with maddening perversity, Armstrong decided that Kingston should be canceled because the weather was too severe and the risks too high, and its failure “would extinguish every hope of grasping the other, the safer, the greater object.”
Wilkinson learned of this latest twist as he was organizing the embarkation of troops for Kingston and, as he admitted, “in my feeble condition,” could hardly do justice to his emotions. In the end, he felt capable only of demanding from the secretary of war a final, clear order “to direct the operations of my army particularly against Montreal.” He must have known that the operation, harassed by British troops, overlooked by British fortifications, lacking supplies, plans, and intelligence, and at the mercy of the approaching winter, had only a slim chance of success.
Gales out of the northwest made it perilous even to round the cape guarding Sackets Harbor to reach the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Boats were wrecked, soldiers drowned, ammunition lost, and rations ruined. November had come before the fleet of about three hundred vessels at last assembled in the river. By then disease and the diversion of men to other projects had reduced a projected army of more than twelve thousand by a third. Any hope of surprise had been blown away by the long delays caused by the storm. Chauncey proved unable to prevent British gunboats from following them into the St. Lawrence, and British troops allocated to the defense of Kingston were hurried along the riverbank to reinforce the strongpoint at Prescott, halfway to their target, and to harass Wilkinson’s army as it moved toward Montreal.
Yet with a strong column of about twenty- five hundred men including cavalry under Brown’s vigorous command on the north bank, artillery and almost four thousand soldiers on the boats, and another smaller force led by Swartwout on the south bank, Wilkinson’s force was greater than anything the British could put up in opposition. Once Hampton’s regulars and a promised fifteen hundred New York militia were added, their dominance would become overwhelming. The capture of Montreal was not impossible.
The one essential ingredient was forceful leadership. The general’s first test, passing by the fortified town of Prescott that overlooked the river, was successfully negotiated on November 5. Wilkinson had the powder and ammunition transferred from the boats into wagons, then, leaving only skeleton crews aboard, he ordered the fleet to drift down on the current at dead of night and led them himself in an open gig. The moon appearing through a gap in the clouds revealed some vessels to the sentries, but despite a rattle of fire the boats came through with only one casualty. Ahead lay an eight-mile rapid known as the Longue Saut, and beyond that thirty miles of open river to their target.
But the general’s once galvanizing energy was only feebly apparent. For much of the time he veered between two extremes, prostrated in his bunk with a fever that might have been flu or malaria, alternating with periods when, according to the testimony of his fellow general, Morgan Lewis, he “seemed to be in high spirits, which I considered to be assumed to inspire confidence.” To many, however, and in particular to Colonel William King, a messenger from General Hampton, his unpredictable behavior suggested that he was drunk.
King based his suspicions on an encounter with Wilkinson on November 6, the day after passing Prescott, on board the general’s boat. He brought bad news from Hampton and approached Lewis first to ask “whether the old gentleman would be found in a good humour.” General Lewis, who was himself frequently laid low with stomach pains and dysentery, restricted himself to the cold reply that “he might perhaps find the general a little petulant from his indisposition.”
But Wilkinson’s reaction went beyond petulance. When King revealed that three weeks earlier Hampton at the head of twenty- six hundred infantry, cavalry, and artillery regulars had let himself be driven back from the river Chateaugay by a numerically inferior force of sixteen hundred Canadian militia and volunteers, Wilkinson exploded, “Damn such an army! A man might as well be in hell as command it.” Angrily he gave King an order for Hampton to rendezvous with him outside Montreal without fail, and to carry enough supplies for both their armies.
There were other reports of erratic behavior. Colonel Joseph G. Swift, a talented engineer, acknowledged that “under the influence of laudanaum the general became very merry and sang and repeated stories,” but insisted “the only evil of which was that it was not of the dignified deportment to be expected from the commander in chief.” Nevertheless, added to the shouting match with Armstrong at Sackets Harbor, the rumors of intoxication undermined confidence. In retrospect, however, the frustration of seeing the last faint chances of success being relentlessly chipped away must have done more damage to his temper than any drug. Armstrong had also fallen sick at the end of October and formally handed over command of the Montreal operation to Wilkinson. If the expedition failed, there could be no doubt where the blame would fall.