THE EDUCATION OF WINFIELD SCOTT
It was the sort of message no soldier ever wants to receive, particularly not an untried 26-year-old U.S. Army officer leading his men as they confronted a disciplined and heavily reinforced British opponent. On the afternoon of October 13, 1812, Lieutenant Colonel Winfield Scott opened the note from his commanding officer, Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer. “I have passed through my camp,” Van Rensselaer advised him. “Not a regiment, not a company is willing to join you. Save yourself by a retreat, if you can.”
Just a few hours earlier Scott had crossed the 250-yard-wide Niagara River to take charge of a ragtag force of regulars and militia on the heights overlooking the Canadian hamlet of Queenston, Ontario. Shortly after he arrived, Scott realized that the British force spread out before him was being heavily reinforced. From a strategic standpoint, Scott’s men had a good position on the heights, but with no reinforcements of his own, the prospects for holding it were rapidly evaporating. Concluding that nothing more could be accomplished on Canadian soil that day, Scott led his men down the steep bank to the river but found no boats waiting to take them back across to American soil.
Scott could barely contain his abject contempt for the New York militiamen.
The problem wasn’t that Van Rensselaer had no men to send to Scott. It was that some of the militia units still on the New York side of the Niagara River had refused to follow
