by James Laxer
Having won eastern Maine, the British turned their attention to Lake Champlain. An expedition commanded by General Prevost set out to seize control of the area south of Montreal, just across the U.S. border.
On July 29, the eve of the offensive, substantial British reinforcements landed in Quebec: the 4th Royal Scots; the 97th Regiment, from Ireland; and a brigade drawn from British units that had been serving in Spain and had been dispatched from Bordeaux. The following week, a brigade drawn from the 3rd (East Kent), 5th (Northumberland), 57th (West Middlesex), and 81st Regiments, along with a brigade of artillery, arrived in Montreal, but these reinforcements were not earmarked for the descent on Lake Champlain — they were to form an army reserve, supplying manpower in Kingston and providing troops in the event of an attack on Sackets Harbor.
For his offensive, Prevost could muster about 10,300 regular soldiers and militiamen. In all, he had three brigades. Major General Sir Frederick Robinson commanded the first brigade, made up of the 3rd, 27th, and 39th (Dorsetshire), 76th, and 88th (Connaught Rangers) Regiments. At the head of the second was Major General Thomas Brisbane, whose units — the 2nd, 8th, 13th, 49th, and De Meuron Regiments and the Canadian Voltigeurs — were based in Lower Canada. Major General Manley Power led the third brigade, with soldiers from the 3rd, 5th, 1st, 27th, and 58th Regiments. A Royal Artillery brigade outfitted with five 6-pounders and one 5 1/2-inch howitzer accompanied each brigade. While the paper strength of these units totalled more than ten thousand men, the real number available for the attack was much lower after those who were sick or otherwise unavailable to their units were taken into account.10
It has not been uncommon for American historians to portray Prevost’s force as larger than it actually was and comprising more veterans than it did. Moreover, such historians argue that the objective of his offensive extended well beyond Lake Champlain to Albany or even as far as New York City. In his book Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, for instance, A. J. Langguth asserts that “commanding thirty thousand veteran troops in Montreal . . . Prevost took one third of his army over the border at the town of Champlain” and was “headed toward Albany.”11
On September 1, the British forces crossed the border, pushing down the west shore of Lake Champlain in the direction of Plattsburgh. They moved slowly along extremely poor roads.
Key to the ensuing battle was the struggle between British and American naval squadrons on the lake. Ever cautious, Prevost regarded coordination with the British naval squadron on the lake as crucial to his success, just as he had previously focused heavily on supremacy on Lakes Ontario and Erie. The British and the Americans both had naval squadrons on Lake Champlain, where they had been conducting a race to outbuild each other.
In command of the British squadron was Captain George Downie. A new frigate, the Confiance, had been completed just in time for the British invasion. Although the vessel was launched on August 25, it still required cannon locks (firing devices operating on the same principle as the flintlock on a musket) to enable the guns to fire. On September 1, Downie wrote to request cannon locks from the ordnance storekeeper at Quebec. He stressed the need for a rapid response to complete the war-worthiness of the Confiance: “In a few days, she will be before the Enemy, and the want of locks may be seriously injurious in the Action.”12 In addition to the Confiance, the British naval squadron consisted of a brig, two sloops, and between twelve and fourteen gunboats.
Facing them, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Macdonough, was an American squadron outfitted with the 734-ton Saratoga, classed as a heavy corvette; the schooner Ticonderoga, whose guns had to be fired by flashing the lock of a pistol at the touch holes; the small sloop Preble; and ten gunboats. Launched to further strengthen this force was a large brig, the Eagle.13
By September 5, Prevost’s force was thirteen kilometres from Plattsburgh. The slow advance gave the inhabitants of the area plenty of warning, and most of them decamped. Seven hundred New York militiamen destroyed bridges and skirmished with the enemy’s advance units. On the evening of September 6, the British reached Plattsburgh. The town was deserted, but the invaders soon came under fire from the American vessels in Plattsburgh Bay.
To deal with Macdonough’s harassment of Prevost’s army, Downie needed to position his squadron in the bay to attack the American vessels. With the 1,200-ton Confiance and its crew of 325 men, Downie was confident of victory.
The British planned a simultaneous attack on land and water. Prevost would push across the Saranac River just south of Plattsburgh, where he would attack the much inferior U.S. force commanded by Brigadier General Alexander Macomb, which consisted of about three thousand regulars and militia, only half of whom were fit for duty. While the British were attacking Macomb’s troops, Downie’s fleet was to sail into Plattsburgh Bay from the north to challenge Macdonough’s squadron.
In his book on the naval struggles during the war, Theodore Roosevelt tallied the guns available on each of the ships involved in the Battle of Plattsburgh to determine which side had the advantage in firepower. He concluded that while the British and American sides had almost equivalent overall firepower, the British had more long guns while the Americans had more carronades. This meant that the British had the edge on the lake when firing at long range, while the Americans had the advantage at close range.14
Macdonough took advantage of the natural defensive position offered him by the bay, which was about three kilometres wide. He set up his line just inside the mouth of the bay, positioning his ships between Crab Island in the southwest and Cumberland Head in the northeast.15 A key question about the battle is why Prevost insisted that Downie sail into the bay to assault the strong American position. Why didn’t he use his huge edge in manpower to assault the Americans south of Saranac River? Having then secured the shoreline, he could have set up his guns to mount a barrage on the American squadron, forcing them into the wider waters of the lake, where Downie would have been better placed to take them on. Later, Sir James Yeo, who served as commodore in the defence of British North America, expressed the opinion that Prevost put the British squadron at a serious disadvantage when he pressed Downie to attack the Americans at their anchorage in the bay.16
On the evening of September 9, Downie wrote that he would launch his attack on the American ships in Plattsburgh Bay the following day. Contrary winds, however, did not make this possible, and his attack was mounted on September 11. He brought Confiance as near as possible to Saratoga, but three hundred yards was the closest he could get. As soon as Confiance anchored, the guns on Saratoga opened fire. Then the 350-ton Linnet went after the Eagle, the northernmost vessel in the U.S. line. Finch and most of the British gunboats challenged Ticonderoga, Preble, and the U.S. gunboats.
The battle went badly for the British. A cannon was knocked loose from its carriage and crushed Downie to death. The 110-ton Finch was hit and drifted onto Crab Island, and the two British sloops were sunk. The 112-ton Chubb was disabled. British gunboats did manage to drive the U.S.’s Preble inshore, and Saratoga and Confiance were both heavily damaged but the Americans had the better of the fight. With a wealth of experience fighting on ships of this kind, Macdonough was able to wind the Saratoga around on an anchor and hawsers so that he could bring his undamaged larboard guns to bear on the enemy vessel. The American gunners fired a volley of hand spikes into the mass of British sailors on board the Confiance, who were desperately trying to turn their vessel so they could fire. Royal Navy Lieutenant James Robertson, who had taken command following the death of Downie, ordered the ship’s colours to be struck.17 By the time the Confiance surrendered, the ship had taken 105 shot holes in her hull.18
The U.S. naval victory not only set the stage for the crucial land battle at Plattsburgh, it would also determine the American view of the whole war.
While the British naval squadron was entering the bay, the armed forces
went on the offensive on land. The column was commanded by Sir Frederick Robinson, an American-born officer who had fought for the British during the Revolutionary War and migrated to England at the end of the war. Robinson started off in the wrong direction, which delayed his advance for an hour. Then four of his battalions successfully crossed the river and drove back the defenders. Just before commanding a final assault on the American positions, Robinson abruptly received the order to break off the engagement and withdraw. Some of his men, having advanced too far forward to receive the order, were forced to lay down their arms and surrender.
Prevost had issued the sudden command to retire when he learned that the British had lost the naval engagement, leaving a portion of his own force in a hopeless position. The large British force turned in the opposite direction and headed north with alacrity. In his report to Bathurst, the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Prevost blamed the entire defeat on the British failure on the lake. He continued: “Under the circumstances I had to determine whether I should consider my own fame in gratifying the ardor of the troops in persevering in the attack, or consult the more substantial interests of my country by withdrawing the Army which was yet uncrippled for the security of the provinces.”19
Theodore Roosevelt concluded that the U.S. naval victory at Plattsburgh caused Prevost’s army to flee “in great haste and confusion back to Canada, leaving our northern frontier clear for the remainder of the war; while the victory had a very great effect on the negotiations for peace.” Of American leadership in the battle, he wrote, “Macdonough in this battle won a higher fame than any other commander of the war, British or American. He had a decidedly superior force to contend against, the officers and men of the two sides being about on a par in every respect; and it was solely owing to his foresight and resource that we won the victory . . . Down to the time of the Civil War he is the greatest figure in our naval history.”20 Almost a century after the battle was fought, the esteemed naval authority Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote that “the battle of Lake Champlain, more nearly than any other incident of the War of 1812, merits the epithet decisive.”21 Decades later, Winston Churchill declared that the results of the fighting at Plattsburgh made it “a decisive battle of the war.”
Concluding his treatment of the battle, American historian Walter R. Borneman, in what can only be described as a surfeit of overstatement, contended that “had not Macomb and Macdonough made their stand, a British general less defensively inclined than Sir George Prevost may well have ended up spending the following winter in Albany if not New York City.”22
While the American victors at Plattsburgh were celebrated in Washington, the fate of Sir George Prevost was very different. Prevost’s time at the head of affairs in Lower Canada had always been controversial, as much for political as for military reasons. The influential English-speaking minority in Lower Canada resented Prevost, charging him with being too favourable to the province’s francophone majority. The military debacle at Plattsburgh allowed the critics to carve up his reputation. In the Montreal Herald, a series of anonymous articles derided him, accusing him of both military and political mismanagement. The articles were subsequently published as a pamphlet titled The Letters of Veritas and Nerva.23
On March 2, 1815, the day after Prevost learned that the peace treaty at Ghent had been ratified, he was replaced as governor by Sir George Murray, who brought with him the news that Prevost had been ordered to return to London at once to account for his handling of the military expedition to Plattsburgh. When he arrived in England, Prevost was ordered by the Prince Regent to appear at a court martial. The trial was to begin on January 15, 1816, but Prevost died ten days beforehand. At the age of forty-nine, he ended his life a humiliated man.
Americans celebrated the victory on Lake Champlain, but Andrew Jackson’s massive victory at New Orleans a few months later was the one they truly relished, the one they have savoured ever since. As American historian Walter R. Borneman put it, “Jackson had assembled a tattered force of army regulars, backwoods militia, and bayou pirates and bested the pride of British regulars.”24
The battle was made famous for the baby-boom generation of Americans by country-and-western singer Johnny Horton’s patriotic song. “In eighteen-fourteen we took a little trip,” chanted Johnny, “along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississipp’ / we took a little bacon and we took a little beans / and we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.”25
It doesn’t matter that Jackson did not reach the scene of the battle by travelling down the Mississippi. Nor has it mattered over the generations that the battle was fought after the Treaty of Ghent was signed between the warring parties, on Christmas Eve 1814. The fight at New Orleans had no effect on the outcome of the war, but it had got the pulse of Americans racing and helped Jackson win two terms as president of the United States.
The Battle of New Orleans grew out of the grand British strategy of 1814, which was to use the might of the Royal Navy and veteran personnel from the war against Napoleon to drive the Americans to end the war and to sign a treaty on terms favourable to the British. The punch to the centre at Washington and Baltimore in the summer of 1814 had been one campaign in the British strategy. Another, which had gone disastrously wrong, had been the invasion of U.S. territory south of Montreal and the battles at Plattsburgh. New Orleans had been the third planned blow, which, as it turned out, was not needed to bring the Americans to peace.
To attack New Orleans, the British planned to use a veteran army led by a veteran commander. Transported to the city by the Royal Navy, the troops would seize the port and the goods stored there, shutting down Mississippi commerce. On December 10, 1814, British troops landed from the ships of Vice Admiral Cochrane on the east bank of the Mississippi, not far from the mouth of the river. By December 23, the British had pushed to within 14.5 kilometres of the city.
The opportunity for a quick seizure of New Orleans was lost, however. It was only on Christmas Day that the commander of the British expedition, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, arrived to take command. By that time, Andrew Jackson’s troops and a labour force made up of slaves had used sugar barrels and earth to build a formidable breastwork behind a wide ditch. This barricade stretched for about a kilometre from the bank of the river to the edge of a swamp. Behind it, Jackson housed his regulars and militiamen. The troops were supported by four cannon and a naval battery on the west bank, which could provide additional firepower.
On January 8, 1815, Pakenham tried a two-pronged attack on this position. While his force attacked Jackson directly, fifteen hundred British regulars under the command of Colonel William Thornton were to cross the river and turn the flank of the U.S. position. The timing went horribly wrong. Thornton’s force did get across the river, drive off a force of Kentucky militiamen, and seize the naval guns, but they were far too late. By then, the Americans had massacred Pakenham’s attack force, pounding the dense columns of men, who were mired in the mud. Pakenham died and the British suffered two thousand casualties; the Americans lost only seventy-one men.
The Americans had won gloriously. The still-powerful British force managed to retreat down the river and seize Fort Bowyer, at the entrance to Mobile Bay.26 But by then, news that the war was over had reached New York, and from there it spread across the United States.
The legend that the United States won the War of 1812 soared after the Battle of New Orleans. It has remained aloft to this day.
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†††† In the aftermath of the British occupation of Maine east of the Penobscot, British commissioners at the peace talks, for a time, demanded that the hump of northern Maine be transferred to Britain. This would provide an easier passage on British territory between Quebec and the Maritimes.
Chapter 19
The Treaty of Ghent
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, 1814, the British and American commissioners came together
to sign the Treaty of Ghent. Weighing on the political leadership of both countries was the sheer cost of the war. Over the course of the great war in Europe and the lesser conflict in North America, Britain had been accumulating an enormous national debt. The budget presented in June 1812 planned for additional borrowing of 22.4 million pounds. In 1813, the British treasury borrowed an additional 46.8 million pounds, and in 1814 it added 40.5 million pounds. The war with the United States over its full duration added about 25 million pounds to the national debt. This heavy burden was not fully paid off for decades to come. In the U.S., the overall cost of the war was 105 million dollars. The American national debt soared from 45 million dollars in 1812 to 127 million a year after the conclusion of the conflict.1
In addition, about 1,600 British soldiers were killed in action, nearly 3,700 were wounded, and about 3,300 died from disease. These figures do not include casualties among the Canadian militia or native allies. The Americans lost 2,260 men, and about 4,500 men were wounded. While there is no reliable figure for the number of American soldiers who died of disease, it is generally reckoned that about 15,000 Americans perished from all causes during the War of 1812.
Under the treaty, the borders between the United States and British North America reverted to those that existed at the start of the conflict. The exception to this clause, and it was an important one, was the islands in Passamaquoddy Bay, off the coasts of New Brunswick and Maine (still part of Massachusetts at the time), which were claimed by both parties. Each of these islands was to remain in the possession of the side occupying it at the end of the conflict. An article in the treaty outlined the procedure to be followed to resolve this territorial dispute through the appointment of commissioners. As it turned out, this set of issues came close to provoking another war between Britain and the U.S. in future decades. The dispute was resolved only through the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842.