colored by the prevailing school of rhetoric, "you find the weaker
place and the smallest force to encounter.... You hold a position
which completely severs the enemy's line of operations, and which,
while it restrains all below, withers and perishes all above itself."
This great position--for it is so--Colonel Coffin[2] compares it to
Vicksburg for natural strength--was to be approached by two routes: by
Wilkinson himself in boats down the St Lawrence, and by Major-General
Wade Hampton, his almost independent subordinate, from the Champlain
border; and it was planned that the two armies should meet at the
foot of Isle Perrot,[3] thence to strike together across the Lake to
Lachine, and on to the city, which seems to have had not over, if as
many as, a thousand regulars to defend it.

Wade Hampton, with over 5,000 men (an effective regular force of 4,053
rank and file, about 1,500 militia and ten cannon[4]), was at first on
the Vermont side of Lake Champlain at Burlington[5]. He crossed to the
New York side, directing his march for Caughnawaga on the St.
Lawrence. His army[6], except the militia, was the same which, with a
certain General Dearborn at its head, paraded irregularly across the
lines and returned to Pittsburgh in the autumn of 1812. During the
year since elapsed the men had been drilled by Major-General Izard,
who had served in the French Army. They were all in uniform, well
clothed and equipped--in short, Hampton commanded, if not the most
numerous, certainly the most effective, regular army which the United
States were able to send into the field during the War. Crossing the
border on the 20th of September, 1813, he surprised a small picket of
British at Odelltown, a Loyalist settlement afterwards celebrated for
a battle in the Rebellion of 1837. He soon found himself met with what
seemed to him great difficulties, for the army was plunged into an
extensive swampy wood, the only road through which was rendered