Plattsburgh: The Invasion That Turned Back

A route used before

Lake Champlain runs north and south between mountain ranges, with the Richelieu River carrying its water toward the St. Lawrence and the Hudson valley lying beyond its southern end. The connection is not a continuous deep-water highway, but it is close enough to organize campaigns. Armies moving between Canada and New York repeatedly followed this corridor because boats could carry weight that animals and wagons moved slowly over rough roads.

Earlier wars had supplied the warning. French and British forces contested forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga. During the Revolution, Benedict Arnold's improvised fleet at Valcour Island delayed the British advance of 1776, while Burgoyne's army followed the same general route the next year before its surrender at Saratoga. Those campaigns did not prove that every invasion would end the same way. They established the logistics problem. Control of the lake affected the rate of movement, the location of depots, and whether an army could remain south of the border after its carried provisions ran down.

The War of 1812 made the corridor active again. Plattsburgh offered roads, a settlement, the Saranac River, and a bay partly sheltered by Cumberland Head. Farther south, American shipbuilding at Vergennes and Whitehall connected the lake to timber, iron, craftsmen, and stores. To the north, the British base at Île aux Noix guarded the Richelieu approach. Both sides were building fleets within a landscape already used for trade, fishing, ferries, and farms.

A map can make the route look inevitable. Movement along it was anything but. Spring mud, narrow roads, draft animals, weather, disease, and the capacity of boats decided how much of an army's listed strength could be delivered and fed.

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Britain could now send an army

The transfer of British troops described in the previous chapter gave Governor General Sir George Prévost roughly ten thousand men for an offensive, including experienced regulars. The force was formidable, though Atlantic travel and North American supply still applied to veterans.

British aims were not contained in one uncontested order. An advance might occupy American territory for use in peace negotiations, protect Lower Canada by pushing the danger south, threaten Albany, or widen the political separation between New England and the rest of the United States. Prévost was also the civil governor of British North America. He had reason to preserve the army that defended Canada as well as reason to use it.

American command helped create the opportunity. Secretary of War John Armstrong ordered Major General George Izard to take most of the regular force from Plattsburgh west toward the Niagara front. Brigadier General Alexander Macomb remained with about 1,500 regulars, many of them recruits or invalids, and whatever militia and volunteers could be assembled. The British advance settled the question of whether local militia would appear more effectively than a distant call had done.

Prévost crossed the border at the end of August and entered Plattsburgh on September 6 after Macomb withdrew across the Saranac. The British held the part of town north of the river. American works and the main line stood to the south, while Macdonough's squadron waited in the bay.

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Macomb prepared to delay

Macomb could not meet Prévost's army on equal terms in open country. He used the Saranac River and the ground south of it to make numbers harder to employ. Troops removed planks from bridges, built breastworks, strengthened three forts, blocked streets and approaches, and placed artillery to cover likely crossings. Small detachments contested the advance, then fell back rather than being destroyed in front of the main position.

The defending force was mixed. Regular units contained recruits, convalescents, artillerymen, and detachments left when Izard marched west. New York and Vermont militia, volunteers, sailors, and civilians added labor and numbers. Vermont participation raised a legal question because militia could resist an invasion while state authorities had objected to federal attempts to send them outside their own jurisdiction. The immediate presence of a British army made that distinction practical rather than theoretical.

For residents, preparation meant more than watching soldiers build a line. Families left town or moved goods. Buildings became quarters, storehouses, or hospitals. Fences, timber, tools, food, horses, and wagons could be requisitioned. People who stayed carried information, supplied labor, and later cared for wounded men and prisoners from both fleets. Official reports record fortifications and unit positions more reliably than this household work.

Macomb's object was time. Every defended bridge and obstructed road gave militia more time to arrive and Macdonough more time to finish his position. It also encouraged Prévost to coordinate the main land assault with the naval attack rather than spend men forcing crossings before the lake question was decided.

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The fleets were manufactured for this lake

Neither squadron arrived from the Atlantic. Ships had to be built, armed, crewed, and supplied within the Champlain system. Timber could be cut nearby, but cannon, anchors, cordage, sailcloth, fittings, powder, shot, and skilled labor had to reach the yards. Soldiers sometimes became sailors because crews were short. A ship's nominal battery concealed questions about whether its guns fitted, whether the men had served together, and whether the vessel had time to work under sail before combat.

Macdonough's principal vessels were the flagship Saratoga, the brig Eagle, the schooner Ticonderoga, and the sloop Preble, supported by gunboats. Saratoga and Eagle were recent products of the building race. The squadron combined long guns, which reached farther, with short-range carronades that threw heavy shot. Macdonough needed the British to enter a range and position where his mix of weapons could be used.

The British answered with the new Confiance, larger and more heavily armed than Saratoga, along with Linnet, Chubb, Finch, and gunboats. Confiance was launched late in August and was still being completed as the army advanced. Captain George Downie arrived shortly before the battle to command men and vessels that had not trained as a single squadron for long. This was a serious disadvantage, although it did not make the British force weak.

Army and navy schedules pressed against each other. Prévost wanted control of the lake before driving farther south. Naval officers needed time to finish Confiance and organize crews. Later British accusations about who forced an early action grew from this pressure as well as from the defeat.

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Macdonough prepared to turn

Macdonough chose to anchor inside Plattsburgh Bay rather than meet the British in open water. Cumberland Head screened the approach, so the enemy would round it and enter on a limited line. The position reduced the British advantage in long guns and made it harder to sail past the American squadron. Saratoga lay near the center, with Eagle ahead and Ticonderoga and Preble extending the line south. Gunboats occupied intervals and the flanks.

Anchoring surrendered ordinary freedom of movement in exchange for control over orientation and range. Macdonough did more than drop one anchor from each ship's bow. He attached spring lines to the anchor cables so crews could shift the angle of a hull and train its broadside. He also laid kedge anchors, smaller anchors carried out from the ship, with lines arranged to help turn Saratoga after the engaged side had been battered.

The terms need a physical picture. A broadside warship concentrated most of its heavy guns along each side. Once guns on the side facing the enemy were dismounted, blocked by wreckage, or left without crews, the untouched battery on the other side was useless unless the ship could rotate. Wind and sail might turn a free vessel. Saratoga was anchored in a crowded battle line, so hauling on prepared cables had to do the work.

Macdonough inspected the rig and trained the maneuver before September 11. The arrangement did not guarantee that damaged cables, casualties, or a drifting ship would leave it usable. It preserved an option that the crew could attempt under fire.

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Two broadsides from Saratoga

On the morning of September 11 the British squadron rounded Cumberland Head. Wind and the shape of the bay disrupted the intended deployment as the ships came under American fire. Downie brought Confiance opposite Saratoga and anchored at close range. Linnet engaged Eagle near the northern end. Chubb and Finch moved against the rest of the line while gunboats worked along its edges. The neat order shown in later prints lasted only on paper.

Confiance's opening broadside struck Saratoga with exceptional force. Guns were disabled, men were killed or wounded, and splinters turned the ship's own timbers into projectiles. American fire answered. Downie was killed early when a cannon was knocked from its carriage and crushed him. Command passed aboard a new ship whose rigging and crew were already being cut apart.

Elsewhere the British formation came undone. Chubb was badly damaged, drifted through the American line, and surrendered. Finch grounded near Crab Island and could not regain the fight. Eagle's engaged guns became difficult to use, and the brig cut its cable and shifted south to a new position. Ticonderoga fought off British gunboats at the lower end. Smoke limited what one ship could know about another, so crews worked inside a battle they could hear more completely than they could see.

After nearly two hours, Saratoga's starboard battery was largely disabled. Macdonough ordered the turning maneuver. Men hauled on the prepared spring and kedge lines, released and shifted cable as required, and rotated the damaged ship until its port battery faced Confiance. The work was slow enough to be attacked and physical enough to fail if too many sailors or fittings had been lost. It succeeded.

Confiance attempted to turn as well, but its arrangements and battered crew could not complete the evolution. Saratoga's fresh guns fired into a ship that could not answer with an equivalent broadside. Confiance struck its colors. Macdonough then brought fire against Linnet, which continued fighting after the other principal British vessels were lost and surrendered only when resistance no longer offered a useful result. The surviving British gunboats withdrew.

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Prévost ended the invasion

British land columns moved against the Saranac crossings while the fleets fought. American troops held bridges and fired from the south bank; another British movement sought a ford farther upstream. These actions imposed pressure but did not become the full defeat of Macomb's position that British officers expected. When Prévost received confirmation that the squadron had surrendered, he recalled the attack.

That night the British army withdrew in rain, leaving stores, equipment, sick men, and some stragglers behind. The retreat did not destroy Prévost's veteran force. It returned the army to Canada and abandoned the operation for which it had crossed the border. Macomb's defenders remained in possession of the works, and Macdonough held the lake with a damaged squadron and damaged prizes.

British officers condemned the decision. They believed Macomb's smaller force could have been beaten and argued that Prévost had pressed Downie to fight before the squadron was ready, then refused to let the army finish its part. Prévost answered that even possession of Plattsburgh would be dangerous without water transport and naval protection. Roads could not reliably supply so large an army deep into the corridor while American ships controlled the lake behind it.

The dispute should not be settled by pretending the immediate land battle and the larger campaign were the same question. Prévost may have been able to take the American works. Whether he could feed, reinforce, and withdraw an army after doing so was the problem created by the naval defeat. He faced recall and sought a court-martial to defend his conduct, but died in 1816 before the proceeding was held.

Evidence for this sectionBattle of Lake ChamplainCanadian military history gatewayBritish Military and Naval Records

What the result changed

Plattsburgh ended the largest British advance on the northern border in 1814 and protected the Champlain route for the remaining months of war. Its strategic effect came from the relation between a small fleet and a large army. Once British naval support was gone, distance and supply made continued movement a risk Prévost would not accept. This was a joint result even though the decisive surrender occurred on the water.

The victory did not by itself produce the Treaty of Ghent. Negotiators worked with instructions, European priorities, reports from several theaters, and news delayed by Atlantic passage. A successful British occupation in the Champlain corridor might have supported demands for territory or security arrangements. The retreat removed that prospective leverage.

American news joined Macdonough and Macomb as heroes. Congress voted honors, captured flags traveled, and providential language from Macdonough's report entered public celebration. That memory was not invented, but it simplified the mixed composition of the defenders, the labor of shipbuilders and crews, and the political decisions that had left Macomb short of regular troops. It also made a campaign about supply easier to remember as one brilliant naval turn.

Plattsburgh had its own aftermath. Residents returned to damaged or occupied property, hospitals held casualties from both sides, prisoners required food and guard, and the waterfront contained wreckage and captured vessels. The fleet's trophies left the lake; many of its material consequences did not.

Evidence for this sectionTreaty of Ghent: Primary Documents in American HistoryBattle of Lake ChamplainBattle for Baltimore CityRush–Bagot Pact and Convention of 1818War of 1812 Manuscripts and Special Collections