Brock’s energy counterbalanced every American advantage. Although he had but about fifteen hundred regular troops in his province, and was expected to remain on the defensive, the moment war was declared, June 26, he sent to Amherstburg all the force he could control, and ordered the commandant of the British post at the island of St. Joseph on Lake Huron to seize the American fort at Michillimackinaw. When Hull issued his proclamation of July 12, Brock replied by a proclamation of July 22. To Hull’s threat that no quarter should be given to soldiers fighting by the side of Indians, Brock responded by “the certain assurance of retaliation;” and he justified the employment of his Indian allies by arguments which would have been more conclusive had he ventured to reveal his desperate situation. In truth the American complaint that the British employed Indians in war meant nothing to Brock, whose loss of his province by neglect of any resource at his command might properly have been punished by the utmost penalty his Government could inflict. Brock’s proclamation partly restored confidence. When his legislature showed backwardness in supporting him he peremptorily dismissed them, August 5, after they had been only a week in session, and the same day he left York for Burlington Bay and Lake Erie. Before quitting Lake Ontario he could not fail to inquire what was the American force at Niagara and what it was doing. Every one in the neighborhood must have told him that on the American side five or six hundred militia-men, commanded by no general officer, were engaged in patrolling thirty-six miles of river front; that they were undisciplined, ill-clothed, without tents, shoes, pay, or ammunition, and ready to retreat at any sign of attack.[261] Secure at that point, Brock hurried toward Malden. He had ordered reinforcements to collect at Long Point on Lake Erie; and August 8, while Hull was withdrawing his army from Sandwich to Detroit, Brock passed Long Point, taking up three hundred men whom he found there, and coasted night and day to the Detroit River. Meanwhile, at Washington, Eustis sent letter after letter to Dearborn, pressing for a movement from Niagara. July 26 he repeated the order of July 20.[262] August 1 he wrote, enclosing Hull’s despatch of July 19: “You will make a diversion in his favor at Niagara and at Kingston as soon as may be practicable, and by such operations as may be within your control.” Dearborn awoke August 3 to the consciousness of not having done all that man could do. He began arrangements for sending a thousand militia to Niagara, and requested Major-General Stephen Van Rensselaer of the New York State militia to take command there in person. In a letter of August 7 to the Secretary of War, he showed sense both of his mistakes and of their results:[263]--