The council of war decided not to risk the crossing. Winder, who was considered the best of Smyth’s colonels, had opposed the scheme from the first, and reported the other officers as strongly against it. Smyth was aware of their opinions, and his appeal to them could have no object but to shift responsibility. After receiving their decision, Smyth sent a demand for the surrender of Fort Erie, “to spare the effusion of blood,” and then ordered his troops to their quarters. The army obeyed with great discontent, but fifteen hundred men still mustered in the boats, when two days afterward Smyth issued another order to embark. Once more Smyth called a council of war, and once more decided to abandon the invasion. With less than three thousand men in the boats at once, the General would not stir. Upon this, General Smyth’s army dissolved. “A scene of confusion ensued which it is difficult to describe,” wrote Peter B. Porter soon afterward,[313]--“about four thousand men without order or restraint discharging their muskets in every direction.” They showed a preference for General Smyth’s tent as their target, which caused the General to shift his quarters repeatedly. A few days afterward Peter B. Porter published a letter to a Buffalo newspaper, attributing the late disgrace “to the cowardice of General Smyth.”[314] The General sent a challenge to his subordinate officer, and exchanged shots with him. Smyth next requested permission to visit his family, which Dearborn hastened to grant; and three months afterward, as General Smyth did not request an inquiry into the causes of his failure, the President without express authority of law dropped his name from the army roll. When Dearborn received the official report of Smyth’s grotesque campaign, he was not so much annoyed by its absurdities as he was shocked to learn that nearly four thousand regular troops sent to Niagara in the course of the campaign could not supply a thousand for crossing the river.[315] Further inquiry explained that sickness had swept away more than half the army. The brigade of regulars at Buffalo, which with the exception of Winder’s regiment had never fired a musket, was reduced to less than half its original number, and both officers and men were unfit for active duty.[316] Only rest and care could restore the army to efficiency. The failures of Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smyth created a scandal so noisy that little was thought of General Dearborn; yet Dearborn still commanded on Lake Champlain the largest force then under arms, including seven regiments of the regular army, with artillery and dragoons. He clung to the idea of an attack on Montreal simultaneous with Smyth’s movement at Niagara.[317] November 8, he wrote from Albany to Eustis that he was about to join the army under General Bloomfield at Plattsburg.[318]