hauling down
their colors from the flagstaff of Fort George, they left them flying
over the fortification, and tried to prevent them from being removed by
chopping down all the cleats for ascent, and greasing the pole so that
no one could climb to the top and pull down the British flag or replace
it by the colors of the United States. An agile sailor boy, named Van
Arsdale, who had probably ascended many trees in search of bird's nests,
and clambered up the masts of ships until he had become an expert
climber, nailed new cleats to the flagstaff and climbed to its summit,
bearing with him the flag of the new republic. When he reached the top
he cut down the British flag and suspended that of the United States.
This greasy trick may have been the act of some wag of the retiring
fleet, and might have been taken for a joke had it not been followed by
hostile acts which indicated that this was the initial step in a long
course of hostility and meanness.

But it was soon followed by the retention of the lake forts which fell
into British hands during the Revolutionary War, and which, by the terms
of the treaty, were to be surrendered. Instead of surrendering them
according to the stipulations of the treaty, they held them, and not
only occupied them for thirteen years, but used them as storehouses and
magazines from which the Indians were fed and clothed and armed and
encouraged to tomahawk and scalp Americans without regard to age or sex.
And then followed a series of orders in council, by which the commerce
of the United States was almost swept from the seas, and their sailors
forcibly taken from American ships to serve on British. These orders in
council were so frequent that it seemed as if the French on one side of
the British Channel and the English on the other were hurling decrees
and orders at one another for their own amusement while inflicting dire
injuries on other nations, and especially the Americans.

Had it not been for these hostile acts of the British there would have
been no War of 1812. Had they continued to treat the young republic with
the justice and liberality to which they agreed in fixing its western
boundary in the treaty of 1783, no matter what their motive may have
been, there would have been no cause for war between the two countries.
The Americans had hardly recovered from the wounds inflicted in the
Revolutionary War. They were too few and too weak and too poor to go to
war with such a power a