On the 1st of June an army of two thousand men was collected at Dayton, in Ohio, placed under the command of an imbecile old officer of the Revolution, and directed by Detroit against the Canadian Peninsula.  The dilatory march, absurd movements, and traitorous surrender of Hull’s army to a British force of three hundred regulars and four hundred militia, are but too well known.  Another American army of about ten thousand men was afterwards raised in the west; the main division of this army under Harrison marched by three separate routes to invade Canada by way of Malden; but they failed to reach their destination, and wintered behind the river Portage.  The Eastern army was collected at Albany in the early part of the summer and placed under the command of General Dearborn, another old officer of the Revolution.  Instead of pushing this force rapidly forward upon the strategic line of Lake Champlain, the general was directed to divide it into three parts, and to send one division against the Niagara frontier, a second against Kingston, and a third against Montreal.  These orders were dispatched from Washington the 26th of June, nearly a month after Hull had begun his march from Dayton.  Dearborn’s army, on the first of September, consisted of six thousand five hundred regulars and seven thousand militia—­thirteen thousand five hundred in all:  six thousand three hundred for the Niagara frontier, two thousand two hundred at Sacketts Harbor, and five thousand for Lake Champlain.  Even with this absurd plan of campaign and faulty division of the forces, we might have succeeded if the general had acted with energy, so exceedingly weak were the Canadian means of defence; but instead of taking advantage of his superiority in numbers and the favorable circumstances of the time, he entered into an armistice with the British general, and his whole army of thirteen thousand five hundred men lay inactive till the 13th of October, when the absurd project of crossing the Niagara at Lewiston failed, because the New-York militia had constitutional scruples against crossing a river so long as the enemy were on the other side.  The Lake Champlain column, consisting of three thousand regulars and two thousand militia, a considerable portion of which had been collected as early as the first of August, had in four months advanced as far as La Cole river, a distance of about two hundred miles from Albany.  The unimportant action at this place terminated the campaign, and the army of the North returned to winter-quarters.

All the early part of the campaign of 1813, on the northern frontier, was spent in a war of detachments, in which our troops captured Fort George and York, and repelled the predatory excursions of the enemy.  In these operations our troops exhibited much courage and energy, and the young officers who led them, no little skill and military talent.  But nothing could have been more absurd than for a general, with superior forces in the vicinity of an enemy, to act