 Hey everyone, Adam Shaw here from Bervera Media Company. Today we're going to be talking about the Siege of Detroit. Right in front of you we've got a vintage military field guide of the siege during the War of 1812. It obviously, as you can see, displays various military strategic locations. It displays Fort Detroit, various towns, rivers, mills, lots of different information on this vintage map. We're going to zoom in and kind of explore it. But before we do, let's kind of give a historical background to the Siege of Detroit. The Siege of Detroit, also known as the Surrender of Detroit or the Battle of Fort Detroit, was an early engagement in the Anglo-American War of 1812. A British force under Major General Isaac Brock with Native American allies under the Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, used bluff and deception to intimidate the American Brigadier General William Hull into surrendering the fort in town of Detroit, Michigan. What's interesting about this surrender is that the armies, the American armies that were contained in the Detroit area, actually surrendered and had a larger force than the British force. And the use of this deception really kind of tilted the surrender. And I thought that was interesting. I just wanted to put that in there. In the early months before the conflict in 1812, tensions really increased greatly with Britain. President James Madison and Secretary of War William Eustis were urged by many people, including William Hull, to form an army which would secure the former Northwest Territory against Native Americans incited against the United States by British agents and fur trading companies. In particular, it was urgently necessary to reinforce the outpost of Detroit, which had a population of 800 but a peacetime garrison of only 120 soldiers. President James Madison and William Eustis agreed that they must pursue strategic military actions and localities, for which Madison offered command of the army to William Hull, an aging veteran of the American Revolutionary War. Hull, though, was reluctant to take the appointment, but no officer with his prestige or experience was immediately available. After repeated pleas from Madison, Hull finally accepted and was commissioned as a Brigadier General. Hull's army consisted initially of three regiments of Ohio militia under colonels Lewis Cass, Duncan MacArthur and James Finley. When Hull took command of them on May 25th, he found that they were badly equipped and ill-disciplined and no arrangements had been made to supply them with a military march. He made hasty efforts to remedy the deficiencies in equipment and joined by the 4th U.S. Infantry under Colonel James Miller, the army marched north from Urbana, Ohio on June 10th. On June 26th, Hull received a letter from the War Department head, William Eustis, warning that war was imminent and urging him to make haste to Detroit with all possible expedition. So essentially, he was given this order during his march from a mail carrier and it said, you need to get to Detroit very, very quickly because we're about to go to war. Hull reached Detroit by July 5th. Here, he was reinforced by attachments of the Michigan militia, including 140 of the Michigan Legionary Corps, which Hull had established in 1805. While encamped in the area, Eustis urged Hull to attack Amherstburg, a nearby fort that housed 300 British regulars, 400 Native Americans, and some militia. Hull gradually moved his force towards the fort while encompassing several indecisive skirmishes. Hull eventually decided he could not attack the British fort without artillery, which could not be brought forward because the carriages had decayed and needed repair. Hull then decided to fall back. Several of Hull's officers disagreed with this retreat and secretly discussed removing him from command. Hull at times quarreled with his military colonels since taking over the army and felt that he did not have their support in the field or with their council. Meanwhile, Major General Isaac Brock, the British commander in Upper Canada, was in York, the provincial capital, and he was mobilizing the province's militia. Although he had only a single regiment of regulars and some small detachments of veteran artillery to support militia, he was already aware that he was in no immediate threat from the disorganized and badly supplied American forces on the Niagara River. Or he didn't feel like there was a threat also coming from the lethargic American commander-in-chief Major General Henry Dearborn at Albany, New York. Only Hull's army was occupying or threatening Canadian territory because Detroit was the closest kind of American fortification that was closest to York. Based on this threat, Brock decided to dispatch 50 of his small force regulars and 250 volunteers from the militia and reinforce the Amherst Berg fort, the fort that, as we discussed previously, American General Hull was to capture. Eventually Isaac Brock made his way to Amherst Berg, arriving by about August 13th. At Amherst Berg, Brock immediately learned from Hull's captured dispatches that the morale of Hull and his army was low and that they feared that the number of Indians which might be facing them and that their supplies were short. Learning about this information, the British forces arranged for fake correspondence letters to be captured by American forces. The letters essentially stated and asked that no more Indians be allowed to proceed from Mackinaw and that there were already no less than 5,000 at Amherst Berg and supplies were running short. So essentially they, in these letters, they claimed that they had a larger force than what they actually had. General Isaac Brock then sent out a demand for surrender to General Hull that read, and this is really great. The force at my disposal, my disposal, authorizes me to require you immediate surrender of Fort Detroit. It is far from my intention to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond control the moment the contest commences. So essentially says, you know, if we go to war, we've got a lot of Native Americans that are working with our troops, but I don't have control of these Native American troops and they can wreak havoc on you. So he used Hull's greatest fears, the fear of, he used Hull's fears that there were numerous Indians and that they were wild warriors. He used that fear against Hull to strategically make an amazing surrender. Also, to deceive, this is interesting as well. He used other tactics as well to deceive the Americans. He used essentially their, the suggestion of Major Thomas Evans. Brock gave his militia the cast off uniforms of the 41st Regiment to make Hull believe most of the British forces were regulars. So he essentially equipped a lot of these militia forces with regular, essentially uniforms of much higher class warrior. The troops were told also to light individual fires instead of one fire per unit, thereby creating the illusion of a much larger army. So at night time, they'd be out looking the fort and they'd see all these fires and they'd think, oh my goodness, that's a large force. They also often marched to the positions in plain sight of the Americans, then quickly ducked behind entrenchments and marched back out of site to repeat the maneuver. So they would create their force moving towards the fort and then they'd hide behind cover and then kind of repeat the whole process and just make their army look a lot larger. Hull in his mind believed he was on the verge of battling thousands of British soldiers. And also, he heard the battle cries of Native Americans. Eventually, he had no other choice, hoisted a white flag of surrender. He then asked General Brock to have three days to agree on terms of surrender. Brock replied, he would allow him three hours. So I mean, man, this general Brock, he's not an American general, but man, I love his strategy of taking over this fort. And I mean, just no holds bar, you don't get three days during the surrender. You get three hours. I mean, what a tough SOB. I love it. I love it. There were also a little bit of background into General Hull. There were reports that General Hull had been drinking heavily prior to the surrender. He reported to have said the Indians were numerous beyond example and more greedy of violence than the Vikings or the Huns. So pretty cool background to the history of the siege of Detroit. Let's look into this map. This is a field guide of the siege of Detroit. We can see many different strategic locations kind of displayed. Remember when we talked about William Hull landing his American forces and getting there by July 5th? Well, here's the landing of Americans July 5th. They came right there. We can see the landing right here. Here's Fort Detroit. We could we could see the city of Detroit right there. Right across the river, you had the British batteries and you've got, I guess, the fortified encampment right here. So my guess is when they based on this map, they were encamped right across the river. So they didn't have exactly, you know, up front. They weren't right next to the fort, but certainly they were right across the river. So if you think about what we talked about earlier about depth perception and how they viewed the army and the deceptionary tactics, for instance, lighting several fires. When you see several fires off in the distance, your first thought is, oh my goodness, that's a massive army. Also, the movement of troops, that really helped having that kind of distance between the fort and seeing the movement and hiding behind barriers. That I'm sure that really assisted in that. I mean, also the the the correspondence letters essentially stating, you know, using falsified information that definitely contributed to the surrender very well. You know, I'm very sure of that. We can see kind of the layout. There was a shipyard over by the Rouge River right over here. That that was kind of interesting. I didn't really see a lot of information when I did my research on the siege of Detroit on a shipyard. We've got a mill right here. We can see this is a it looks like a. I want to say a. I guess a trail to York. It says to York at the top. This is a pathway to York. We see different. I guess these are little towns. McKees Smith's or it's either a building or it's signifying a small village. There is no key on this. It's probably a building. Now I think about it. It looks like a building. We've got a shipyard right there. Yeah, it's a building and the mill right here is kind of square. OK, and we've got different islands, Hog Island, Peach Island. So I just wanted to kind of show you guys this map. We kind of get an idea of the layout of the siege of Detroit and we even get to see the location where the Americans arrived on July 5th. I also have a this is I can't really zoom in. It gets really pixelated. But this is a vintage painting kind of illustrating the surrender of of Detroit and between Hull and Brock. So I just wanted to kind of share that with you guys. I hope you've learned something from this video, the strategic battle of the siege of Detroit. Man, it's kind of it's a great lesson in an intimidation. In military strategic intimidation and false information, counterintelligence. A wonderful story that probably doesn't get a lot of attention. Amazing strategy. So I just want to share that with you. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We do videos like these all the time where we talk about military history. We look at vintage maps. We talk about general history. We just did a video series on St. Patrick's Day in Irish ancestral immigration in the United States. I mean, we cover everything history. If you like history, like maps, definitely subscribe to us. Leave a comment below if you have any questions about this video or about the siege of Detroit. Please leave a comment, like this video, share this video, and I will see you guys soon. OK, take care. All right, bye.