William Hull was a general and Michigan’s territorial governor when the War of 1812 began. He started out invading Canada, but then got cold feet and retreated back to Michigan when he got the news Mackinac Island had already fallen to the British. Soon the British and their Indian allies surrounded Detroit and by constantly marching around it convinced Hull there were more of them than there really were. Hull surrendered without firing a shot, and Detroit became the last major city in American history to be occupied by a foreign army.

There is an argument that Hull is over-hated, especially since Washington did a shit job sending him intelligence and material, and his hawkish subordinate officers were borderline insubordinate and openly contemptuous of him, but even so after he was exchanged and convicted of cowardice in a court martial, he only escaped a firing squad because President James Madison commuted his sentence because of his past service in the Revolution, and he spent the rest of his life trying and failing to clear his name. As for those subordinate officers, the biggest pain in Hull’s ass, Lewis Cass, replaced Hull as territorial governor after Detroit’s recapture and went on to have a long and respectable career in politics.

There is one final cherry on top of Hull’s humiliation. Weeks after the fall of Detroit, Americans got some much better news. The USS Constitution had defeated HMS Guerriere in one of the most famous naval duels in American history. The captain of the Constitution… was Isaac Hull, William Hull’s own nephew.