The effect of the British success at Detroit far exceeded that which had followed the capture of Mackinaw and the evacuation of Fort Dearborn.  Those, however important to the West, were regarded as mainly Indian affairs.  This was a white man’s victory and a white man’s defeat.  Hull’s proclamation thenceforth became a laughing-stock.  The American invasion had proved a fiasco.  The first American army to take the field had failed at every point.  More significant still, the Americans were shown to be feeble in organization and egregiously mistaken in their expectations.  Canada, on the other hand, had already found her champion and men quite fit to follow him.

Brock left Procter in charge of the West and hurried back to the Niagara frontier.  Arrived at Fort Erie on August 23 he was dismayed to hear of a dangerously one-sided armistice that had been arranged with the enemy.  This had been first proposed, on even terms, by Prevost, and then eagerly accepted by Dearborn, after being modified in favour of the Americans.  In proposing an armistice Prevost had rightly interpreted the wishes of the Imperial government.  It was wise to see whether further hostilities could not be averted altogether; for the obnoxious Orders-in-Council had been repealed.  But Prevost was criminally weak in assenting to the condition that all movements of men and material should continue on the American side, when he knew that corresponding movements were impossible on the British side for lack of transport.  Dearborn, the American commander-in-chief, was only a second-rate general.  But he was more than a match for Prevost at making bargains.

Prevost was one of those men who succeed half-way up and fail at the top.  Pure Swiss by blood, he had, like his father, spent his life in the British Army, and had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general.  He had served with some distinction in the West Indies, and had been made a baronet for defending Dominica in 1805.  In 1808 he became governor of Nova Scotia, and in 1811, at the age of forty-four, governor-general and commander-in-chief of Canada.  He and his wife were popular both in the West Indies and in Canada; and he undoubtedly deserved well of the Empire for having conciliated the French Canadians, who had been irritated by his predecessor, the abrupt and masterful Craig.  The very important Army Bill Act was greatly due to his diplomatic handling of the French Canadians, who found him so congenial that they stood by him to the end.  His native tongue was French.  He understood French ways and manners to perfection; and he consequently had far more than the usual sympathy with a people whose nature and circumstances made them particularly sensitive to real or fancied slights.  All this is more to his credit than his enemies were willing to admit, either then or afterwards.  But, in spite of all these good qualities, Prevost was not the man to safeguard British honour during the supreme ordeal of a war; and if he had lived in earlier times, when nicknames were more apt to become historic, he might well have gone down to posterity as Prevost the Pusillanimous.