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The
last great naval victory of the War of 1812 happened at
an unlikely place—the placid waters of Lake Champlain, in upstate
New York—and at an unlikely moment, as the U.S. war effort, in its
final stages, was faltering on all fronts.
The Battle of Lake Champlain, the joint Army-Navy operation also
known as the Battle of Plattsburgh, provides a window into an
ambivalent moment in U.S. history. What did this victory mean to
contemporaries, coming as it did amid so much terrible news, and
what impact might it have had on the shape of the peace, which
commissioners from both sides were already negotiating in Ghent,
United Netherlands (now Belgium)?
The naval battle itself was remarkable in its ferocity and
complexity, yet spectacular events happening at the same time
elsewhere—on the eastern seaboard and in Europe—overshadowed news of
this latest naval victory and thereby consigned the Battle of Lake
Champlain to relative obscurity.
Preparing for Battle
On the U.S.–Canadian border, particularly near Lake Champlain in
northern New York, the war was intensifying by the late summer of
1814. The British were now, finally, on the offensive because
Napoleon’s recent defeat in Europe had freed up troops, ships,
materiel, supplies, and funds for the ongoing war against the United
States.
General George Prevost, stationed just over the Canadian border,
received reinforcements of some 13,000 men, most of whom he would
use to invade the United States and take Plattsburgh and the rest of
the Champlain Valley.
On 29 August, Major General Izard departed northern New York for the
Niagara area, which cleared the way for Prevost to cross the border
with confidence two days later. Tending toward caution, however,
Prevost decided that his troops would not attack without naval
support—indeed not without a concurrent naval battle on Lake
Champlain, near the town of Plattsburgh. The Royal Navy’s Captain
George Downie would guard Prevost’s left flank and secure supply
lines as British troops occupied the area. Despite this caution,
Prevost, Downie, their officers, their men, and their government
believed that a decisive British victory was at hand.
Unfortunately for the British, stores and guns were not yet ready at
the start of September, nor was HMS Confiance, which constructors at
the Royal Navy yard at Île aux Noix, on the Richelieu River (in
present-day Quebec), raced to finish in time for engagement on Lake
Champlain.
When Confiance appeared for battle on 11 September, she did so
without a finished magazine. Small boats, laden with the necessary
ordnance, had to follow in her wake. The gunlocks, moreover, were
actually ill fitting fastenings hastily improvised by the crew.
Confiance was hardly what one could call finished.
Her crew, embarked as late as 5 September—6 days before battle—was
newly assembled and had trouble working together; they were,
according to a British post-action report, “totally unknown either
to the Officers or to each other.”
The U.S. Navy’s Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough and his Sailors
were much more fortunate. A visitor to Saratoga, Macdonough’s ship,
described him as “light and agile in frame, easy and graceful in his
manners, with an expressive countenance, remarkably placid.” These
qualities proved decisive during the battle that was to come. Most
important, Macdonough inspired in his officers something like
“unbounded confidence.”
Macdonough decided he would fight a stationary battle against the
British and therefore waited for the enemy squadron to come within
range. He instructed his four ships (assisted by ten gunboats)
to anchor in Cumberland Bay at even distances in a line from north
to south: the brig Eagle, the 26-gun corvette Saratoga, and then
Preble and Ticonderoga, both sloops. The latter would manage to
“engage nearly every British vessel on the line,” even raking “the
British flagship at a crucial juncture in the battle,” as historian
Matthew Cheser has pointed out in an essay on the battle.
Even before the battle began, the Americans could claim several
advantages:
Stationary battle meant that Sailors could focus almost entirely on
gunnery;
The shoals in and around Cumberland Bay meant that the British would
be vulnerable to natural traps they could not see;
The winds in this part of the lake were unpredictable, subject to
distortions and disturbances by the proximity of the coast.
On 11 September, moreover, winds were light, and the British
therefore lost the only real advantage they possessed: the
preponderance of long guns. Without much wind, the British ships
would be unable to maneuver in such a way as effectively to fire
broadsides from a distance. A battle at close quarters became the
foregone conclusion. Deadly to both sides, this eventuality
nonetheless played into the Americans’ hands.
The Battle on the Lake
The British squadron weighed anchor as the sun came up on 11
September. Within an hour, the squadron’s lookouts caught sight of
the American ships—“moored in line . . . , with a Division of 5 Gun
Boats on Each Flank.” At 7:40, the Royal Navy officers circulated
final instructions among each other and their sailors and soon after
their vessels headed for the American line.
The battle opened at about 9:45 with a deafening roar that continued
for nearly two hours. Spectators on nearby Cumberland Head felt the
ground shake beneath their feet. Smoke eventually obscured the view
as the ships fired at each other at extremely close range.
“The whole force, on both sides, became engaged,” according to
Macdonough, who tried from his position on Saratoga to keep track of
the melee. He could see that despite his own ship’s sorry and
deteriorating condition, her direct foe at this stage of battle,
Confiance, was probably making out worse. Indeed, the
subsequent account of a Royal Navy eyewitness confirms Macdonough’s
assessment: “Confiance having two Anchors shot away . . . , And the
wind baffling was obliged to anchor . . . within two Cables length
of her adversary.”This proximity, paired with Confiance’s increasing
difficulty maneuvering, would be her undoing.
Quite early in the battle, a gun on Confiance came off its carriage
and crushed Captain Downie, her commanding officer. Both the ship
and the squadron were now without their commander. Although
Lieutenant James Robertson, next in line of command, took up his
post immediately, he soon found that getting news and orders to the
other ships of the squadron would be all but impossible because
Confiance’s signal book was nowhere to be found.
Macdonough, though injured, managed to avoid death and continue to
direct the battle, even as his ship caught fire twice because of
“hot Shot from the Enemy’s ship.”
Meanwhile, the British brig Linnet engaged Eagle, but the British
sloop Chub, commanded by Lieutenant James McGhie, failed to assist
after losing her anchor cables, bowsprit, and main boom. Unable to
control her own course, she “drifted within the enemy’s line,”
according to McGhie, “and was obliged to surrender.” In the process,
McGhie lost two fingertips and took a splinter to the thigh.
The British sloop Finch (captured from the U.S. Navy in 1813) also
lost the ability to maneuver when her commanding officer “had the
Mortification to strike on a reef of rocks”—in fact, one of the
shoals that only the Americans knew about—an hour or so into battle.
Only Linnet and Confiance, herself in grave danger, remained
operable.
Mercifully, the mortal struggle between Confiance and Saratoga
appeared to abate. Sustained enemy fire had immobilized each ship’s
battle-facing guns—Confiance’s port side, Saratoga’s starboard.
The relative calm was deceptive, however. Macdonough was about to
deliver a most punishing coup de grace.
“Winding” the Ship and Winning the Battle
“Winding” a ship refers to the standard practice whereby ships of
sail could rotate on a central axis by manual adjustment of various
anchors at and around the bow and stern. Winding the ship was not an
easy process, particularly now, two hours into a battle at close
range.
With Saratoga’s portside guns still perfectly operable, Macdonough
now issued orders to wind the ship, whereupon the undamaged guns
would smash Confiance to splinters. When Confiance’s captain finally
saw what was about to happen, he tried to wind his own ship, but to
no avail. Confiance’s cable became tangled, which in turn stymied
the crew’s efforts to turn the stricken vessel. Meanwhile, Saratoga
swung into position and loosed a mortal broadside from her portside
guns.
Engulfed in smoke, awash with blood, and filling with water,
Confiance was in a pitiful state. Her crew refused to remain at
quarters, despite the “utmost exertions to rally them.”
The surrender of the last operable British ship, Linnet, provided a
sorry denouement to the Royal Navy’s stunning defeat. When “the
whole attention of the Enemy’s force” now “directed towards Linnet,”
as a British after-action report put it, the ship’s crew and
officers requested that their commanding officer surrender. Honoring
the request, and in order to “prevent a useless waste of valuable
lives,” Lieutenant McGhie “gave the painful orders for the colours
to be struck.”
The scene on the lake was gruesome. To the naked eye, it might have
been hard to tell who had won, so wrecked were both sides’ ships.
Perhaps the principal indication of an American victory, at least to
those on shore, was the flight of the Royal Navy’s gunboats.
According to historian John H. Schroeder, spectators at Cumberland
Head cheered, banged pans, rang bells, and blew horns as the
gunboats sped past, whereupon one of the vessels “silenced the
joyous racket with a single cannon shot.” The Americans had
indeed won the battle but not necessarily the war.
The Aftermath
Confiance suffered a shattered hull and the loss of much of her
crew, somewhere around 150 men killed or wounded. Only about 40 men
passed through the ordeal unhurt. Blood filled the ship’s deck
seams, and bodies and parts of bodies littered the deck.
Macdonough had the enemy’s wounded men transported to the U.S.
hospital encampment on nearby Crab Island and, according to British
reports, saw to it that they received treatment as good as any
American might get.
On hearing the news of the defeat on Lake Champlain, General Prevost
canceled the ground battle and fled the scene with his troops. The
Americans, under Major General Alexander Macomb, followed in hot
pursuit.
Still, the British onslaught against American positions near the
Canadian border continued apace. “Our hopes are now centered in the
Ontario fleet,” Lieutenant Colonel Edward B. Brenton (British Army)
wrote a day after the Battle of Lake Champlain. Confiance, lost in
her first engagement with the enemy, was now out of sight and out of
mind: “I am anxiously expecting the intelligence of the safe
launching of the New Ship,” Brenton continued, “to retrieve the
misfortunes of the other lakes.” Although the British had yet to
score any major victory in any of the naval battles for the Great
Lakes, they had little intention and indeed no compulsion to give up
just yet.
The Regional Context
President James Madison’s aim in the invasion of British North
America, which had commenced more than two years prior to the Battle
of Lake Champlain, had been to strike fear into the hearts of the
British secretary of state for foreign affairs, the prime minister,
and influential cabinet members and members of Parliament—so much so
that they might agree to sign a treaty with the United States that
pledged respect for American merchant vessels and an end to the
impressment—kidnapping, essentially—of U.S. merchant mariners into
the Royal Navy. British North America would be the Americans’ ransom
in this effort to get what historian J.C.A. Stagg calls “a scrap of
paper that by the end of 1814 had failed to materialize.” Indeed,
the Americans never managed to hold on to significant swaths of
British territory for long. Winning the Battle of Lake Champlain,
deep in American territory, did not bring the United States any
closer to its war aims. If anything, the outcome of the battle made
conquest of British North America even less likely. Grievously
damaged by the battle, Macdonough’s ships could no longer get
underway.
Macdonough’s victory also made no immediate difference to
conditions on the New York–Canadian border, which were not in the
Americans’ favor. The area had more or less descended into chaos and
something like civil war.
The smuggling of foodstuffs and supplies from the United States to
the British over the border near Lake Champlain hit an all-time high
in the summer before the battle. In July 1814, General Izard
observed the “open disregard . . . for the laws prohibiting
[trading] with the enemy.” Just east of Lake Champlain, “the high
roads are found insufficient for the supplies of cattle which are
[illegally] pouring into Canada [from the United States]. Like herds
of buffaloes, they press through the forest making paths for
themselves.” Indeed, as historian Alan Taylor observes, this
“smuggled produce and livestock sustained the British army in
Canada” even as it nearly tripled in size and far outstripped the
food supply in Upper Canada. Salt pork, grains, and flour
crowded the waterways to British North America. The American victory
at Lake Champlain changed none of this.
The victory at Lake Champlain also left entirely unresolved the more
complex and exceedingly destructive dimensions of the War of 1812 as
it unfolded on the U.S.–Canadian border. Loyalists and the children
of Loyalists, who opposed U.S. independence; Irish people on both
sides, who had complicated but usually adversarial relationships
with the British state; and Native American groups, who mostly
joined the British in order to check the Americans’ voracious
appetite for Indian lands—all took part in the war at the
U.S.–Canadian border.
The War of 1812 had unleashed a war of all against all in the
northern borderlands—a violent eruption that the naval battle on
Lake Champlain, however decisive, failed to stem. On the contrary,
the American war effort was collapsing: Congress refused to fund it,
the War Department failed to manage it, and the American people no
longer supported it.
The National Context
Just 18 days before the Battle of Lake Champlain, the British
conquered Washington, DC, and soldiers of the Royal Engineers set
about torching the White House and the Capitol, which, together,
housed all three branches of government. With news of the fiery
destruction of these most potent symbols of U.S. popular
sovereignty, confidence in the Madison administration evaporated.
Amid the ruins and oblivious to conditions on the Canadian front,
Congress began a six-week debate on whether to abandon the capital
for good but could not determine where might be safer.
Senators, representatives, and the public now knew that if
Washington could fall in flames, so too might New York,
Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.
Indeed, the very day of the Battle of Lake Champlain, Major General
Robert Ross (British Army) and his force of about 4,600 landed at
North Point, just fourteen miles from Baltimore, in order to besiege
it. The next day, they started on foot for the city. The day after
that, a preparatory barrage on Fort McHenry began. Yet in the
meantime, a sniper from Maryland’s militia managed to fell Major
General Ross, even though the militia failed to halt the British
advance. This loss and the British failure to take Fort
McHenry spared Baltimore and became the bright spot toward the end
of an otherwise dismal summer.
Nevertheless, it was to a burned and broken capital that news of the
victories at Baltimore and Lake Champlain first arrived. Moreover,
in September alone, Madison’s three most important cabinet members
resigned: Secretary of the Treasury George W. Campbell; Secretary of
War John Armstrong; and Secretary of the Navy William Jones.
This was nothing short of an administrative disaster.
Jones now prepared Madison for the worst: Without access to credit,
the war did not appear winnable or even sustainable anymore.
“We seem to forget,” he told the President shortly after resigning,
“that we are at War with the most potent Naval power” on earth, and
this Jones said after he had heard about the victory at Lake
Champlain.
What impact, then, did news of the Lake Champlain victory have on
decision-makers in Washington and financiers in the big cities of
the eastern seaboard? It is true that Macdonough and Macomb were
feted as heroes, but there is scant evidence to suggest that the
battle changed public opinion in any way: Nothing could unburn the
capital, and no one was willing to restock the treasury.
The International Context
Although some historians understand the Battle of Lake Champlain
(and Prevost’s retreat from Plattsburgh) as having a decisive effect
on the negotiations at Ghent, where American and British
commissioners stalled as they sought advantage in the settlement to
end the war, most historians and most of the evidence point to the
contrary argument: that the battle was of little consequence to the
British.
The British commissioners continued to operate from a position of
strength, even after learning of their side’s defeat at Lake
Champlain, while the American commissioners were still reeling from
the sacking of their nation’s capital.
When in November the British commissioners declared that they were
ready to conclude a peace and get out of the North American war,
John Quincy Adams, U.S. commissioner at Ghent, still mourning the
capital, connected Britain’s fortuitous about-face to the Battle of
Lake Champlain.
Yet the principal reason had nothing to do with the Battle of Lake
Champlain. Indeed, the sudden effort of the British to end the war
in late 1814 probably had little to do with the United States at
all.
The French monarchy, which Britain and her allies had emplaced in
Paris after Napoleon’s defeat, was fast losing support among the
majority of its subjects. Moreover, a current of revanchism among a
large segment French society threatened not just the stability of
France but also the security of the rest of Europe. The British now
needed their forces closer to home.
The American and British commissioners therefore concluded a hasty
and rudimentary peace. The treaty, signed on 24 December 1814, gave
Madison not a single one of his war aims. The British government, on
the contrary, achieved its principal objective since the beginning
of the war: the restoration of 1811 borders in North America and the
continued license to interfere with American shipping and kidnap
American mariners, should the need arise again someday.
Conclusion
Throughout the War of 1812, with some notable exceptions, U.S. naval
operations had supplied most of the Americans’ good news.
Macdonough’s victory at Lake Champlain constitutes the last great
naval triumph of the war, yet its legacy is complicated by
historical context. A war that was supposed to change,
fundamentally, the relationship between Britain and the United
States instead resulted in the status quo antebellum.
–– Adam Bisno, PhD, NHHC Com. and Outreach Div., Sept 2019;
Published: Wed Dec 08 10:02:55 EST 2021
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