Courage Above All Things
Courage Above All Things GENERAL
JOHN ELLIS WOOL
AND THE U.S. MILITARY, 1812–1863
HARWOOD P. HINTON and JERRY THOMPSON
University of o k lahoma Press: n o rman
Publication of this book is made possible through the generous support of Sanchez Oil and Gas and the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, at Texas A&M International University.
of
Names: Hinton, Harwood P., 1927– author. | Thompson, Jerry D., author.
Title: Courage Above All Things : General John Ellis Wool and the U.S. Military, 1812–1863 / Harwood P. Hinton and Jerry Thompson.
Other titles: General John Ellis Wool and the U.S. military, 1812–1863
Description: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Biography of John Ellis Wool a military commander who figured prominently in many critical moments in nineteenthcentury U.S. history.”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017602 | ISBN 978- 0 -8061- 6724- 4 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Wool, John Ellis, 1784–1869. | United States. Army—Officers— Biography. | United States. Army—History—19th century. Generals—United States— Biography. | Troy (N.Y.) —Biography.
Classification: LCC E403.1.W8 H56 2020 | DDC 973.6/2092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017602
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources, Inc. ∞
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
For Diana Davids Hinton
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty and study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams
List of Maps x i
Preface x iii
1 Off to War with the Jolly Snorters 1
2 Feisty Little Colonel on Inspection 21
3 Casting Aside a Colonial Past 43
4 No Resting Place Where White Men Tread 62
5 Defending the Canadian Border 82
6 Across the Rio Grande with Old Fussy 105
7 Torrents of Blood 130
8 Nothing but Duty 152
9 Hunkers, Barnburners, and Turkey Cocks 193
10 A Vast and Distant Land 214
11 Native American Annihilation 236
12 Crying Hearts and Vigilantes 259
13 Rushing to the Colors 280
14 Epauletted Grannies and the Conceited Goose 299
15 K now Nothings and Plug Uglies 323
16 Copperheads and the New York Draft Riots 345
17 Noble Defender of the Union 362
Abbreviations 379 Notes 381 Bibliography 477 Index 505
MAPS
The West of Inspector Gen. John E. Wool, 1816–1841 99
March of Gen. John E. Wool’s Central Division from San Antonio de Béxar to Buena Vista, October–December 1846 118
Battle of Buena Vista, February 22–23, 1847 143
Gen. John E. Wool’s Department of the Pacific, January 1854–February 1857 238
PREFACE
For well more than fifty years, Harwood Perry Hinton researched and wrote a definitive biography of Gen. John Ellis Wool, a strikingly significant military figure of nineteenth-century America. Harwood was born into a poor family in a run-down house without indoor plumbing near Irving, Texas, on March 26, 1927. His father, Harwood Perry Hinton Sr., ran a small grocery store at the nearby hamlet of Twin Wells. Harwood could trace his family back to colonial Virginia and the family’s migration to North Carolina and then to Alabama. Graduating from Irving High School in suburban Dallas in 1945, Harwood wanted to join the military, but World War II was ending and he was off to the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas in College Station. His stay at College Station was cut short by a savage beating received during a freshmen hazing incident. Returning to Irving, he enrolled in courses at what became the University of Texas–Arlington. Hinton was bright, made good grades, and loved history. He was accepted at the University of Texas–Austin, where one of his professors was Walter Prescott Webb, whom Harwood found entertaining but less than inspirational.1
Diploma in hand, Harwood took a job teaching junior high school in the oil boomtown of Odessa in the heart of the Permian Basin. Getting off the train with only a suitcase and a typewriter, he soon rented a room in a two-room converted garage next to a “lady whose business kept her very busy at night,” he recalled. Harwood loved his time in Odessa but yearned to pursue his growing interest in history. Hoping to obtain a master’s degree, in 1950 he enrolled in summer classes at Columbia University in New York City. Hinton had been at Columbia for only a few weeks when the Korean War erupted and he was drafted into the army. After basic training at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was sent to Japan and assigned stenographic work. Hinton rose rapidly to the rank of sergeant and was given a top security clearance. In the land of the rising sun, he traveled extensively, dated, and enjoyed life. Diana Davids Hinton, Harwood’s second wife, is sure that it was in Japan that he obtained his love of military history.2
Back in the United States, Harwood returned to Odessa to teach and resume his summer classes at Columbia. His thesis at Columbia on John Simpson Chisum, the legendary western cattle baron who was a central player in the bloody Lincoln
County War, was revised and published in three parts by the New Mexico Historical Review in 1956 and 1957 3
While in Odessa, Harwood met a young librarian named Mary Ann Brookshire from the well-to-do and well-k nown Brookshire Brothers supermarket family of East Texas, and the two married in June 1956. Three children, John Harwood, Mary Ann, and James R., came of the marriage. By this time, Harwood had been accepted into the PhD program at the University of Wisconsin, and the couple was off to the frigid north country. Using benefits from the GI Bill and working as a teaching assistant, Harwood fell under the influence of Vernon Carstensen, a nationally known specialist in agricultural economics.4
At Madison, Hinton’s historical focus shifted toward nineteenth-c entury American military history, especially the Civil War. A lifelong fascination with the war’s impact on his paternal ancestors may have propelled him toward General Wool. Wool’s years on the western frontier, as well as the general’s pivotal role in the conflict between the United States and Mexico, especially the bloody and decisive Battle of Buena Vista, fascinated Hinton. Wool’s various assignments during the Civil War, including his command in New York City during the violent draft riots in 1863, also interested Hinton, and he decided to undertake a dissertation on Wool’s military career. Consequently, at every opportunity, Harwood spent time at the New York State Archives in Albany, which housed ninety-eight boxes of the voluminous Wool papers.5 During his fifty- one years in the army, Wool retained every document of significance, including his personal correspondence. When in the field or away from home, he wrote his wife, Sarah, several times a week. Not only did she preserve her husband’s letters as well as newspaper clippings highlighting his career, but he preserved her letters as well. Hinton meticulously copied hundreds of Wool’s letters in longhand and took thousands of pages of notes. Perusing hundreds of documents from other archives and libraries, and tracking down Wool’s relatives, Hinton completed and successfully defended his dissertation on Wool in 1960.
Hinton had several job offers, but on the recommendations of his Wisconsin mentors, he decided to accept an offer from Texas A&M University, despite his bad experience in College Station as a freshman. Besides, Ann and Harwood yearned to return to Texas. There was a downside to Texas A&M, however. The department was chaired by the larger-t han-life, dictatorial John Milton Nance, a recognized authority on the Texas Revolution and the Texas Republic. Senior faculty quarreled, and Nance insisted junior faculty teach only the survey classes in American history.6 A day or two before the end of every month, Nance would visit junior faculty in their office and ask for an accounting of their activities during the previous thirty days. In what seemed an unpardonable intrusion into a faculty’s privacy and personal life, every Sunday
afternoon after church junior faculty were expected to be at home ready to receive a social visit from either the chairman or senior faculty. Such visits were routine. Outgoing as they were, Harwood and Ann were tolerant, but the enforced entertaining became tiresome and intrusive. At the end of Hinton’s first year at A&M, five faculty, including Harwood, found jobs elsewhere. Nance later told Hinton that the exodus led the department to rethink its treatment of junior faculty.
While Hinton was in College Station in the early summer of 1961, he wrote Savoie Lottinville, director and editor of the University of Oklahoma Press, saying he was “preparing a full-length biography of Major General John Ellis Wool, 1784–1869.” Only months earlier he had defended his dissertation, a “well-researched” study of Wool’s military career, that drew largely from the voluminous Wool papers at the New York State Library. Hinton went to great lengths to impress Lottinville with Wool’s distinguished career. For a half century, Hinton pointed out, Wool was “one of America’s most illustrious figures—a soldier whose exploits school children of the pre–Civil War generation knew well.” Hinton had tentatively entitled his biography “Trojan in Blue: The Biography of John Ellis Wool.” The distinguished Rice University historian Frank Vandiver had critiqued the manuscript and recommended several revisions, Hinton explained. Lottinville responded that the University of Oklahoma Press was most interested, and Hinton promised to “get right after it.” 7
Vandiver told Hinton he had learned a lot from the biography, especially the chapter on Wool’s role in the expulsion of the Cherokees. There was little doubt Hinton had the makings of a “good book,” but Vandiver recommended several revisions. “Line for line” editing was needed and Hinton should look more into the general’s personality and private life. “Publishers are a harsh and crass breed who pay lip service to scholarly impediments and then demand that you pare it to the bone,” Vandiver went on to say. Lastly, he recommended Hinton not “blow up your man’s achievements beyond the power of your sources,” but urged him to work on it and “publish it by all means.” “I want to cite it!” Vandiver wrote. Always remember, the Rice scholar continued, “all facts are not created equal.”8
Hinton was at the University of Arizona for thirty years. There he joined John Alexander Carroll, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Pearl Harbor survivor, who had recently established the reputable historical journal Arizona and the West. Hinton was a co-editor for the journal. Fresh out of Rice University, one of Vandiver’s students, Bruce Dinges, joined Carroll and Hinton. Years later, Dinges remembered Hinton and Carroll as polar opposites. Carroll was easygoing and just as comfortable in the pool hall as in the classroom. Hinton was meticulous and dedicated and spent endless hours mentoring students and attending historical conferences to seek out potential articles for Arizona and the West.9 Decades later, a student in Hinton’s graduate symposium recalled some of his words: “If it is easy to write, it is hard to read. If
it is hard to write, it is easy to read.”10 Hinton’s new duties pressed him hard and there was little time to work on the Wool manuscript.
Along with Ray Allen Billington and others, Hinton was instrumental in establishing the Western History Association (WHA), which met for the first time in Santa Fe in 1961. The association was bound by the belief that the American West was rich in history and deserved further study.11 Meeting at the first WHA gathering in Santa Fe, Hinton told Lottinville that although his work in Tucson was “unremitting,” he planned to spend his summer “recasting and revising Wool.”12
When Hinton finally submitted the manuscript and he saw Lottinville at the WHA in Denver in the fall of 1962, there were no reader reports and Hinton grew anxious. Finally, in October, Lottinville sent Hinton a reader report, most likely from Vandiver, in which the reviewer recommended publication of the manuscript, but only with major revisions.
What sort of a person was Wool? the reviewer asked. Was Wool a “true martinet? A moderately capable soldier serving among fools? A political general?” There should be more on Wool’s family life. Moreover, the manuscript still bore the “earmarks of a dissertation.” Either Hinton could not make Wool interesting, or the general possessed a “singularly dry personality.” Wool was lacking a biographer and was deserving of one, and Hinton was undoubtedly that person, but he needed to “brighten up” the general.13
The critique was both “fair and rewarding,” Hinton told Lottinville, and he felt entirely confident in revising the manuscript to “delineate Wool’s personality and rebuild the story around the man.” A week later, Lottinville sent Hinton a contract.14 Hinton promised to begin revisions immediately and do everything possible to produce a first-class biography that would “reflect the high standards of scholarship your press has long maintained.”15 He hoped to have a final draft to Lottinville by early fall of 1962.
By January 1963, it was Lottinville who grew anxious. He asked Hinton if the manuscript could be completed in three to four months so that the press could publicize the biography for fall publication. Several months later, Hinton wrote to say that he was hoping to “push right along on the work” and planned to get a manuscript to the press “at the earliest possible moment.” But Hinton had assumed the editorship of Arizona and the West and was working hard to “bolster the sagging fortunes” of the “fine journal.” Hinton was proud of his tenure with Arizona and the West, and he felt honored that the journal had published the first articles for a number of western historians who had gone on to become leaders in their field.16 Harwood also loved teaching and he particularly enjoyed mentoring students. Scouting several history conferences a year for potential articles for Arizona and the West was also time-consuming. Hinton was hoping for “brighter news” by early winter.
In September 1966, Hinton wrote to apologize for not having a final draft. He had been forced to go back to his notes and rewrite three chapters from scratch. Lottinville was still hoping to have the book out by spring 1967. When Edward A. Shaw became director of the University of Oklahoma Press in 1967, he continued to press Harwood, saying one of the last things Lottinville told him before leaving the press was to expect a “terribly significant manuscript.”17 Hinton responded that the revisions were “going very slowly” but he was hoping to find time for them in the summer.18
For the next forty-seven years Hinton continued working on his biography of General Wool, adding a footnote here and there, always revising, rewriting, and editing. Meeting Harwood at a conference was like greeting a tornado. In minutes, the conversation turned to Wool and some aspect of the general’s career, whereupon Harwood would deliver an “encyclopedic knowledge of Western history and an amazing capacity to rattle off dates, places, and names of people,” one historian recalled.19 His daughter Mary remembered watching Westerns on TV with her father and being irritated by his constant interruptions to comment on how the saddles were not from the period being depicted, how the hats were also wrong, the clothing too modern, and the mountains just outside Dodge City, Kansas, misplaced. Hinton was always able to uncover a new document or a new piece of scholarship that needed integrating into the manuscript. Frequently the entire manuscript was retyped and, with the computer era, there were time consuming changes from one word processing software to another. Mary remembered her father constantly working on the manuscript. She also colored her father’s lecture notes which Harwood found amusing.
After thirty years in Tucson, Harwood retired, and he and Ann moved to Austin. In February 1994, tragic news followed when they learned that their son John was dead at the age of 32 from a heart attack while working at the post office back in Tucson. Neither Harwood, Ann, Mary, or James, ever got over the loss of their son and brother. Sadly, three years later in November 1997, Ann also died suddenly from cardiac arrest while sitting at a desk writing to her brother. As heartbroken as he had been when his son passed away, Harwood sought solace in a major project. He hastened to join Ron Tyler and the staff of the Texas State Historical Association as senior editor on the momentous six-volume Handbook of Texas. 20 Harwood was always as meticulous with his editing as he was with his research.
In Tucson and in Austin, Hinton worked to mentor promising young scholars such as Glen Sample Ely, Dawn Moore, Mark Santiago, Andy Masich, and Karen Underhill. Hinton also continued his exhaustive research into the life of John Chisum, a Southwestern cattle baron, hoping to turn his previous work into a booklength manuscript as he had done with Wool. Hinton was close to many well-k nown historians, and he carried on a lively correspondence with several. Among them was
John P. Wilson, whom Hinton greatly respected and considered the most knowledgeable historian of the Lincoln County War. “I have not done much with Wool in the last few years,” Hinton confessed to the Harvard-trained Wilson in March of 2000, “I have a large manuscript, but reduced eyesight—and my time has been focused elsewhere.”21 In August 2007, Harwood wrote Wilson that he was “plugging away” on the Wool biography, “although my eyesight grows dim.”22 Later yet, Hinton wrote that he had been “slicing” on the manuscript “for months—even though my eyesight continues to dim.” The “motivation is still there—and I move ahead.”23
In May 2005, Harwood and Diana Davids Olien were married in Midland. Diana was a Yale PhD and distinguished historian, who continued to teach in Odessa at the University of Texas–Permian Basin. Both enjoyed seeing mutual friends at history conferences. There were lengthy automobile drives across the vast arid expanses of West Texas where Harwood talked about the Battle of Buena Vista and other aspects of General Wool’s career, and Diana explained the differences between sweet and sour crude oil. Bruce Dinges would later remark that Harwood had the great luck of being married to two wonderful women. Mary would later say that if she could have designed a perfect partner for her father that person would have been Diana.24
While Diana was at work, Harwood spent long hours every day working on edits to his Wool manuscript. In January 2013, he contracted a severe and painful case of the shingles that seemed to settle in his left eye. “I cannot read newspapers or books at the moment and have trouble signing my name. I live on pain pills,” he acknowledged to his friend Wilson.25 He was also taking insulin three times a day to control his diabetes. Hinton was also struggling to organize his Chisum papers, which he had decided to donate to Texas Tech University. Hinton went to seven different eye specialists but there was little they could do. With the help of a bright light and magnifying equipment, Harwood could read, but barely. In fact, Diana had to read to him most of the time. His fifty years of work on the life of Gen. John Ellis Wool was at an end. The loss of his vision was a terrible blow.
In May 2016, Harwood, who never consumed alcohol, was diagnosed with stage four cirrhosis of the liver. Harwood Perry Hinton, historian of the American Southwest, died in Midland on September 6, 2016, at the age of 89 and was laid to rest in Laurel Land Cemetery in Dallas with other members of the Hinton family.26
What follows is Hinton’s long-awaited biography of Gen. John Ellis Wool, rightfully published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The study has been recast, chapters rewritten, recent scholarship added, information rearranged, and the entire manuscript thoroughly edited. Some information, especially the general’s views of race, have been given a new, more critical interpretation. When possible, the general’s family life has been incorporated into the study. As Vandiver wanted fifty-eight years ago, Wool has, I hope, been “brightened up.”
OFF TO WAR WITH THE JOLLY SNORTERS
In a graying dusk on a late-summer afternoon, August 19, 1848, sharp blasts from the Henrick Hudson echoed up and down the picturesque Hudson River, signaling the arrival of a group of dignitaries at the river port of Troy, New York. During the afternoon hundreds of people gathered near the wharf, waiting to welcome home a hero from the killing fields of Mexico. As the steamboat eased to the dock, a band struck up a lively martial tune, the crowd cheered and surged forward, all eyes turned to a small, barely five-feet-tall, spare man with a cherubic face, smartly dressed in a blue uniform and wearing the stars of a major general. It was a glorious moment for John Ellis Wool, then sixty one, whose ties to Troy ran back to his childhood. It was here, seven miles up the Hudson from the state capital of Albany, where the general had lived for nearly a decade. Coming ashore, Wool greeted municipal officials, shook hands with hundreds of old friends and dignitaries, and rode in an open carriage up Ferry Street to his residence near the town square. In the weeks that followed, there would be other celebrations of his services in Mexico, but the warm reception John Wool received that day in Troy would remain a cherished memory in his long and distinguished military career.1
Long before the nation gained its independence, the Wool family had lived in the Hudson Valley for several generations. The first of the line, Jörgen Woll, a Swede, arrived in the English colony of New York about 1700 from Viborg, in what is today Finland. He worked as a common laborer, and in 1707 married Altje Brouwer, a girl of Dutch parentage living in Brooklyn. At least nine children were born to the union, and, like many immigrant families, Jörgen’s offspring broke sharply with the past. The sons changed their surname from Woll to Wool, anglicized Swedish or Dutch given names, and married into Scotch, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh families. Several members of the Wool family became successful craftsmen and prominent citizens in New York City.2
James Wool, one of Jörgen’s younger sons, who was born in 1719, never learned a trade, and in 1768, had moved his family up the Hudson Valley to a farm on the Hoosic River, near the village of Schaghticoke in Albany (later Rensselaer) County.
Two of his sons, Ellis and John, remained in New York to complete apprenticeships. Ellis Wool became a heelmaker, but his brother John dallied at various trades. About 1772, John Wool married Ann Reliva, the daughter of a cordwainer, and settled near his father on the Hoosic River. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, several of James Wool’s sons joined the militia. The British captured Ellis and Robert Wool, and Ellis died on a dreadful New Jersey prison ship. John Wool, the father of the future general, enrolled in John Knickerbocker’s Fourteenth Regiment, Albany County Militia, and fought in the battle of Stony Point (July 16, 1779) on the Hudson, south of West Point, but afterwards saw little military service.3
With the return of peace in 1781, John Wool moved his wife and five daughters down the Hudson to the village of Newburgh, where the remnants of Gen. George Washington’s army remained camped awaiting discharge. Wool rented Martin Weigand’s two-story rickety log tavern and frame addition across the street from Washington’s headquarters. He sought work as a heelmaker, someone who made the heels of shoes or boots. The tavern received a brief financial boost in the fall of 1782 when Gen. Anthony Wayne set up his headquarters there. The shoe business was brisk, but by mid-November of 1783, the remaining veterans had left for home. The Wools postponed a planned move to New York City, as Ann was expecting a sixth child. On a cold wintry morning, February 29, 1784, she gave birth to a son, and the proud parents named him John Ellis.4
By that summer, John Wool had settled at 14 Broad Street in Lower Manhattan. At the time, New York City boasted a population of over 20,000, and extended north some two miles from the old fort or Battery. There being few shoemakers on Broad Street, Wool seemed well located for his trade but failed to prosper. On April 1, 1789, John Wool finally attained “freeman” status, but less than a year later, on July 23, 1790, he died unexpectedly at the age of forty.5
With a large family to support, the eldest being seventeen, Ann Wool sent sixye ar-old John Ellis to live with his grandparents on a farm near Schaghticoke, 171 miles up the Hudson River, just north of Troy. The family included James Wool, sixty-five, his wife Mary and their married son James Jr., who had several children and did most of the farm work. Although frail and small for his age, John was a bright and energetic boy who tackled chores cheerfully and soon learned to ride and care for a horse. But farm life was drab, dull, and the hours were long and demanding. At the local country school, he became an avid reader and became particularly interested in history. By age twelve, John Wool complained of the monotony and laborious farm life to a cousin visiting from New York City. The cousin found a merchant in Troy, ten miles downriver from Schaghticoke, who agreed to employ him as an apprentice. In the early autumn of 1796, James Wool drove his grandson in a wagon to his new home. Wool long remembered this trip, his “little all” tied
in a large handkerchief, and the despair of being thrown “upon the world” without fortune or friends at a young age.6
In 1796, Troy was a bustling community of 500 inhabitants. The village sat in a cove on the east bank of the Hudson River at the head of sloop navigation. After the revolution, the Jacob D. Vanderheyden family, who had operated farms there, laid out a town in a grove of oak and pine trees on the high ground back from the river. Immigrants, mostly from New England, arrived, and built stores, warehouses, and homes. In January of 1789, the residents named the village Troy, and after the creation of Rensselaer County in February of 1791, Troy became the county seat. The village was not only a river port, but a small industrial center. Poestenkill Creek, fed by the falls from Mt. Ida, furnished power for several small mills and supplied water for a brewery, tanning yards, potash and rope works. Trade and politics dominated village life. Many early settlers and public officials were Federalists, but by the late 1790s the followers of Thomas Jefferson had gained influence and launched a weekly newspaper, The Farmer’s Oracle.7
John Wool began his apprenticeship with a merchant on River Street, bordering the Hudson. In his free time, on clear days he frequently climbed to the 300-foot summit of Mt. Ida, where he could gaze across the river to the Mohawk River as it emptied water from the western lake country into the Hudson. Six miles to the southwest lay Albany, the state capital, with more than six thousand people. There were also visits to the wharves where old men gathered to reminisce about the Revolution and life under the British. Every boy in Troy knew ninety-year-old Col. Donald Campbell, a walking specter, his hair as white as new-fallen snow. Campbell was known for having helped to carry the mortally wounded British Gen. James Wolfe from the Plains of Abraham at Quebec during the French and Indian War. On the Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence was read to a large public gathering and the local militia paraded on the village green and fired a cannon. In his free time in the evenings, the young apprentice found a schoolmaster who agreed to tutor him. On many a “stilly night,” Wool later recalled, he wrestled with arithmetic and elementary bookkeeping.8
A break came in 1798, when Wool, then fourteen, met the genial Howard Moulton, one of Troy’s leading businessmen. Moulton liked the boy, brought him into his own home, and made him a clerk at his inn. The Moultons were a family of education and refinement. The household consisted of eight children, five daughters and three sons, who ranged from five to eighteen years of age. Sarah and Howard Jr. were near Wool’s age. Short and stout, his forehead scarred by a blow from a British sabre, the Connecticut-born Moulton had come to Troy with family money and built several stores, a three-story coffeehouse, and a twenty-t wo-room inn near the town square. Young Wool found himself in the mainstream of village life.
In many ways, Moulton was a father for the boy. “If I am indebted to any mortal being for my present standing in society,” Wool acknowledged three decades later, “it is to my early and first friend, for it is he that first animated me with hope and initiated my desires.”9
In 1802, with Moulton’s financial help, John Wool, aged eighteen, opened a small book shop on Water (formerly River) Street. Three years later, he moved into a store located under the offices of the Troy Northern Budget, where he dealt in dry goods and groceries, retail and wholesale. In the Northern Budget in June 1805, the young merchant advertised competitive prices, “Fashionable Dry Goods” and “a good assortment of groceries” from New York City. Wool also traded in various properties, and on one occasion advertised a female slave for sale. The chattel was a “Black WOMAN, about 23 years of age, well acquainted with all kinds of kitchen work, and will answer for a gentleman or farmer.” At the time, several Trojan families owned black slaves.10
Wool realized valuable political contacts could play a critical role in a young man’s world and he joined and became active in the Troy branch of the Tammany Society, a national club of Jeffersonian Republicans. At public events, he paraded in Indian regalia with the chapter, whose members carried tomahawks and banners and attached “bucktails” to the sides of their hats. Wool also enlisted in a private militia company, the Troy Invincibles, composed of Jeffersonian Republicans. The company drilled with the Troy Fusiliers (Republicans) and Trojan Greens (Federalists). Despite his short stature, his bearing and enthusiasm quickly won him the coveted position of color bearer.11
Since the politics of the time was consistently debated in the streets of Troy, as it was in most of the United States, the young merchant was acutely aware of the troubled times facing the infant nation. On the high seas, the British continued to interfere with American shipping while at the same time New York and New England carried on a growing illicit trade with Canadian markets. In 1808, President Thomas Jefferson imposed an embargo to close American ports and curb border smuggling. The Embargo Act proved ineffective, however. Frontier counties in New York complained of the slackening commerce, but Gov. Daniel D. Tompkins was hesitant to act. On November 15, Jefferson ordered certain state governors (including New York) to raise a brigade of volunteers (infantry, artillery, and cavalry) for federal service. The president lifted the embargo on March 1, 1809, before leaving office, but James Madison, his successor, honored the plans for volunteer brigades. In April, John Wool, with local political support, won the position of quartermaster of cavalry and the rank of ensign in the New York brigade. The arrangement, however, was a paper exercise, and on May 6, Madison cancelled the order. Wool, however, profited from the episode. He had stepped forward and as a result, he gained a degree of military and political recognition and made contacts beyond Troy.12
The young Wool became a notable figure in the village of Troy. A small man, standing less than five and a half feet tall with an erect bearing, precise but pleasant manners, he had gained a reputation as a prudent businessman. Wool had darkbrown hair, striking grey eyes, a prominent nose and firm mouth and chin. He was an ambitious, strong-willed young man blessed with energy and perseverance. He strove constantly to improve his education, to put his humble beginnings in the past, to excel and rise in the world and gain financial success and prestige. An active, involved citizen of Troy, the young merchant looked forward to a bright future.13
On September 27, 1809, John Wool married Sarah N. Moulton, three years his junior, in the Presbyterian Church in Troy. The couple set up housekeeping in a twostory wooden dwelling at 51 First Street near the village green. To help make ends meet, they rented a room for several years to the Rev. Jonas Coe, the minister who married them. Sarah Wool was a small, slender woman with refined tastes and manners. Affable, dignified, and discreet, she would come to play a major role in shaping her husband’s attitudes and advancing his career. She patiently tutored him in the proper social graces, was a willing listener, and shared intimately in his business and professional life. When he traveled, they corresponded regularly, and she dutifully clipped newspaper articles that chronicled his travels. John and Sarah Wool had no children of their own, but they later reared a nephew and niece.14
In early December 1809, Wool formed a partnership with Eliphalet King and renamed his small mercantile firm John E. Wool and Company. The two entrepreneurs planned to upgrade their merchandise and broaden their operations, but the expansion never developed. At midnight on March 10, 1810, the clang of a fire bell shattered the wintry silence. Wool rushed into the street, glanced toward the river, and saw flames and smoke billowing from buildings along the waterfront. Men rolled the town’s toy-like fire engine to the scene and furiously worked the hand-pumps, while others formed bucket brigades. By dawn, four buildings—including Wool’s store—lay in smoldering black ruins.15 The fire was a crushing financial blow.
Tammany friends came to his aid. John Russell, a local attorney, offered Wool employment as a clerk and began tutoring him in the law. An influential Republican, Russell spent as much time with politics as he did with his law practice. When the spring 1811 elections loomed, Wool wrote letters supporting party candidates and boldly declared his candidacy for sheriff of Rensselaer County. In one of his earliest letters, he asked local publisher Hezekiah Munsell for assistance: “I understand that John Mann, Grand Sachem of the Tammany Society, and William McMannus, Secretary, has [sic] written to you and requested your aid in procuring me the office of Sheriff of this County. If you could . . . exercise your influence in my behalf . . . it would . . . be greatly assisting an unfortunate Republican Friend.” Wool’s race was in vain, but the experience provided valuable insights into the workings and
personalities of the political arena. At the same time, he also remained active in the militia. In June 1811, he became an ensign and adjutant in Maj. William S. Parker’s battalion of Rensselaer County Riflemen. Like other young men, the law clerk was acutely aware of the nation’s drift toward war.16
The rush to war with Great Britain in 1812 found the United States divided in sentiment and unprepared for hostilities on land and sea. In New England, the stronghold of the Federalist Party, and other areas affected by European interference with American shipping, many businessmen felt the British were in the process of modifying their maritime policies and that the problems of previous years were being resolved. In the South and West, however, the followers of Jefferson were in the ascendancy and they were beginning to turn anxious eyes south to Spanish-held Florida and north to Canada. War could bring additional land and ports and enhance the prestige of the infant nation.17
Congress attempted to bolster the military establishment, but efforts to increase the army before the war largely faltered. Nevertheless, in January 1812, to supplement some 6,000 regulars manning frontier garrisons, lawmakers voted to field thirteen new regular regiments (10 infantry, 2 artillery, and 1 dragoon). In February, Congress authorized President Madison to accept 30,000 volunteers, and in April it empowered him to ask governors to hold 100,000 state militia in readiness. To head the expanding military forces, Madison turned to a group of aging men, most of whom had served as officers during the Revolutionary War. He appointed obese, sixty-oneyear-old Henry Dearborn, a former secretary of war, the senior major general.18
With news that Congress had funded additional regiments, John Wool sought and received a regular army commission. On April 14, 1812, he was made a captain in the new Thirteenth Infantry Regiment, commanded by Col. Peter Phillip Schuyler. Orders came to enlist one hundred men for Wool’s company from the local pool of males aged eighteen to forty-five. To enhance his ability to recruit, Wool promptly had himself fitted with an infantry captain’s uniform. The ensemble included a dark blue coat with ten brass buttons, a scarlet high-standing collar and cuffs, white shirt, knee breeches, boots, and a black half-moon chapeau with a white plume. A silver epaulet on the right shoulder denoted a captain’s rank. Resplendent in his military finery, Wool rode out into the countryside to post handbills and enroll men.19
On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain and the Madison administration immediately made plans to invade Canada. General Dearborn planned two attacks on Upper Canada—one from Detroit by Brig. Gen. William Hull, and one from Lewiston, New York, to protect Buffalo and control the Niagara River. A third invasion would be from the head of Lake Champlain at Plattsburgh toward Montreal, the capital of Lower Canada. The general divided New York into two militia divisions (eight brigades each) under a major general. Benjamin Mooers,
at Plattsburgh, would command in the north and Stephen Van Rensselear would assemble an army on the Niagara River.20
In late August 1812, Capt. John Wool filled his quota of recruits and rode south six miles from Troy to Cantonment Greenbush, across the Hudson from Albany. Greenbush was the principal military training center in the state. Opened in early July, the cantonment sprawled over 261 acres of farmland, and could accommodate 4,000 soldiers. When Wool arrived, summer rains had turned the camp into a sea of mud. Thirteen wooden buildings, all to be painted white, were under construction, and the ring of carpenter hammers mingled with the shouts of drillmasters, beating of drums, and the cursing cries of teamsters. Hundreds of tents covered the plain. Wool reported to Colonel Schuyler and met the nine other company commanders of the regiment. Wool drew clothing, knapsacks, tents, muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes for his Company I. The monotony of army routine began.21
The small American army, especially the militia, was poorly armed, poorly trained, and disorganized. In New England and parts of upstate New York, Federalists opposed the war and appeared unpatriotic. The war was at a standstill. On August 9, Dearborn signed a truce with Sir George Prevost, the Governor-General of Canada. At Lewiston, twelve days later, Lt. Col. Solomon Van Rensselaer, a militia officer and Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer’s cousin and chief aide, crossed the Niagara and concluded a truce at Fort George with British Gen. Roger Sheaffe. It was agreed that both British and Americans would have unrestricted travel on Lake Ontario. As Dearborn hurried men and supplies to the Niagara frontier, news reached Greenbush that General Hull had made a feeble and embarrassing invasion of Canada from Fort Detroit and surrendered a large part of his army. Dearborn ordered Van Rensselaer to prepare for action.22
By early October, in the changing colors of fall, over 7,000 American soldiers were camped on the Niagara River. Van Rensselaer’s forces included 5,800 men (2,650 militia and 3,150 regulars) at or near Lewiston, and thirty-eight miles south, near Buffalo, Brig. Gen. Alexander Smyth commanded 1,650 regulars and 386 militia. Coordinating the two forces was difficult. Smyth argued with General Van Rensselaer, his superior, over crossing sites on the river, and refused to cooperate with his commander. Van Rensselaer planned to cross from Lewiston to Queenston and attack neighboring Fort George. If successful, he could sever British communication with the western lake country and secure winter quarters for his army. British defenses were thought weak. Maj. Gen. Isaac Brock, who had defeated Hull at Detroit, commanded about 1,500 soldiers and 400 Indian allies. He had posted detachments along the river from Queenston south to the British bastion at Fort Erie, across from Buffalo, and held a small reserve at Fort George. Halfway up Queenston Heights, an eighteen-pounder cannon sat in a V-shaped earthen redan to cover the
