by Mark Zuehlke
Before the Americans could clear the British from the deck, Broke jumped over Chesapeake’s railing with a larger boarding party close behind. Seeing the danger, Lawrence struggled to his feet and shouted: “Don’t give up the ship! Don’t give up the ship!” Carried below to his cabin, now serving as the surgeon’s operating theatre, Lawrence demanded that the surgeon rush up to the deck and order that the crew fight to the last, refusing to strike the colours. “They shall wave while I live,” he gasped.
It was too late. The hand-to-hand melee ended when the senior American officer ordered his men to lay down their arms. A battle that had lasted a mere fifteen minutes had transformed the two ships into slaughterhouses. Broke lay dying, the victim of a sabre wound. 23 other British sailors were dead and another 58 wounded. The Americans had lost 61 killed and 85 wounded. Lawrence lived for four more days, but refused to speak or acknowledge the surrender. When he died the British officer commanding the prize-crew ordered his body wrapped in the ship’s colours. Chesapeake was taken to Halifax, where the American commander was buried with full honours.8
The capture of Chesapeake did much to quell criticism of the Royal Navy at home and marked the end of the U.S. Navy’s dominance of the sea that had marked the previous year, while the blockades and raids of its coasts demonstrated that America could do little to safeguard itself from direct naval attack. Repeated amphibious raids sent the clear message that the British could strike where and when they wanted with near impunity.
The first British raid was conducted in Chesapeake Bay by Admiral Sir George Cockburn in April. Intelligence reports showed that the Americans had such weak defences in place that Warren provided only a single frigate to support the landing of about 180 seamen, 200 marines, and a small artillery detachment. On April 28 the raiders struck Frenchtown on the Elk River and burned a large quantity of military stores and several small vessels. They escaped with only one man wounded.
Five days later Cockburn struck again, attacking and destroying an artillery battery at Havre de Grace along with several nearby homes. The raiders then pushed several more miles up the Susquehanna River and spent the ensuing day wrecking a cannon foundry. Again only one man was wounded during this escapade. On May 5, Cockburn went up the Sassafras River to Georgetown and Fredericktown, scattered some local militia and burned any houses from which their owners had fled. Cockburn established a pattern here that subsequent British raiders adopted. Those inhabitants who stayed and cooperated by accepting forced sale of goods the British wanted had their houses spared. Those who either resisted or took flight saw their homes looted and burned.
This early success, against what Warren described as the most vulnerable country to raiding he had ever seen, prompted the Admiralty to commit more resources to amphibious operations against the American coastline. Warren was allocated 2,400 men, consisting mostly of two Royal Marine battalions numbering 1,684. While Lord Bathurst saw these operations as a means to take pressure off Canada, the Admiralty instructed Warren to focus on objectives that would cripple the U.S. Navy.
The larger force’s first attempt came on June 22, with an attack against a fort manned by about 700 Americans on Craney Island in Chesapeake Bay. Poor intelligence resulted in the landing boats running aground well offshore, and the attack crumbled. Forty men were dead, wounded, or missing when the attackers withdrew with nothing to show for the attempt. Warren ordered a less ambitious operation three days later against Hampton, where a small artillery battery and a couple of hundred militia were dug in facing the James River. The militia were quickly driven off, the guns captured, and the village pillaged. A company of French prisoners of war recruited into the army ran amok. Wrote Lt. Col. Charles Napier, who had commanded one element of the raid, “every horror was committed with impunity, rape, murder, pillage: and not a man was punished.” Col. Sir Thomas Beckwith reported to Warren that controlling the Frenchmen had proved impossible and that many were liable to desert at the first opportunity. In early July, Warren had them packed off to Halifax and shipped back to Britain.
More raids followed in July, with Cockburn leading a detached force south to attack Ocracoke Island and Portsmouth, North Carolina. Two American vessels were captured and the inhabitants forced to sell cattle and stores. Warren, meanwhile, continued running raids in Chesapeake Bay when and where he liked. In August, with malaria and other fevers running wild through the ranks of his soldiers and sailors, Warren abandoned the bay, sailing north to recoup his strength in Halifax. The success of the British blockades and raids had left no doubt in the minds of either the British or the Americans that the United States could prevail only by succeeding in its campaigns against Canada.9
Unlike his predecessor Paul Hamilton, who had concerned himself exclusively with seagoing matters, American Secretary of the Navy William Jones remained distinctly aware of the need to gain mastery of the Great Lakes. Operations against Canada, he wrote Commodore Isaac Chauncey at Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario, “will depend absolutely on our superiority on all the lakes.”10 The two lakes that really mattered were Erie and Ontario, for it was around their shores that much of the 1813 land war would be fought. Chauncey realized the strategic importance of Lake Ontario. He also knew that the naval battle for control of the lake depended less on tactics one or the other side might develop than on sheer weight of numbers. Given that neither the Americans nor the British had a significant naval presence on the lakes, the side most likely to prevail would be the one that managed to float the most vessels after the spring thaw.
All through the winter shipwrights had been hammering together ships. On Lake Ontario the British laboured on two frigates, one at Kingston, the other at York. The Americans at Sackets Harbor had launched the 24-gun corvette Madison in November, purchased a number of schooners for refitting into warships, and laid the keel of another corvette, the 26-gun General Pike, which Chauncey hoped to launch in June. At Presque Isle on Lake Erie the Americans had established a small naval yard, and in March young Capt. Oliver Hazard Perry assumed command of that lake’s fleet. Much to his chagrin, Perry discovered the work here was only in its infancy and he was unlikely to contest British control of the waters until mid-to late summer. Perry could not compensate in just a few months for the American failure to establish any pre-war naval presence on the lakes. So Jones’s prescription that the United States must gain superiority over the lakes to ensure successful land operations was clearly beyond attainment.
The British, meanwhile, were hampered by a badly organized chain of command in their naval program for the Great Lakes. Initially Sir George Prevost, in his capacity of governor, controlled it through the offices of the army Quartermaster General’s Department. With no shipbuilding experience, the army turned to local Canadians to both construct and man the fleet. Precious few of these men had any more experience with warships than the soldiers. In March 1813, a British officer reviewing the capabilities of the ships on the lakes lamented to Prevost: “I do not conceive there is one Man of this Division fit to Command a Ship of War.”11
Prevost quietly agreed. The previous fall he had begged Lord Bathurst for naval supplies and, more importantly, qualified seamen. He also wanted the lake navy placed under Admiralty command. Bathurst agreed, but it took time for orders to this effect to reach Admiral Warren in Halifax. Consequently, it was not until March that Warren freed a small number of officers from sea duty and sent them to the lakes. Meanwhile the Admiralty dispatched 400 officers and men under command of Commodore Sir James Lucas Yeo, who was to command the lake navy. Only thirty, Yeo had gone to sea as a ten-year-old ensign, rising to the rank of post captain by his twenty-fifth birthday. He and his contingent of officers and men sailed from Britain in late March, but would not reach Quebec until May. The Admiralty had assumed responsibility of the lake fleets with little enthusiasm, arguing that defending the vast sea lanes of the empire was already barely within its capability given the resources at hand. What ordnance could be supplied would be, as
well as a core of manpower, but the basic supply for the lake navy would remain an army responsibility. So Britain’s lake navy became somewhat of an outcast over which neither Admiralty nor army cared to admit ownership. The result was that by early spring it posed no serious threat to Chauncey’s claim to control Lake Ontario, and its superiority on Lake Erie was in doubt.
With superiority of the lakes, the Americans determined to again invade Canada. Secretary of War John Armstrong recognized Montreal as the objective of paramount importance—its capture would cut Upper Canada off from Lower Canada and reinforcement by British forces coming up the St. Lawrence River. But intelligence reports claimed that between 8,000 and 10,000 regulars were deployed at this bustling fur-trading centre. The Americans could never hope to defeat such numbers. So Armstrong turned his sights on gaining control of Lake Ontario’s shoreline in Upper Canada and the Niagara Peninsula. He ordered Maj. Gen. Henry Dearborn to assemble a corps of 4,000 men at Sackets Harbor to join Chauncey’s fleet for an amphibious assault on Kingston and thereafter the provincial capital of York. Rather than holding these communities, the intent was to destroy the shipping, shipbuilding facilities, and forts present at each, thus solving “by a single stroke every difficulty” the Americans faced in gaining control of Upper Canada. With Kingston and York in ruins, the British would be unable to supply or reinforce their troops west of Lake Ontario. Kingston was the real key, for it held the only harbour on the lake’s northern shore that could provide a viable naval station. Armstrong made clear that Kingston was the prime objective around which the rest of the campaign turned.
Once Kingston and York were ransacked, Armstrong wanted the Sackets Harbor corps to swing westward to participate in an operation against the Niagara Peninsula. A second corps of 3,000 men would be waiting in Buffalo. In concert these two formations would overrun Fort George on Lake Ontario’s shore and Fort Erie next to the lake for which it was named. Armstrong understood that there were no more than 2,100 regular troops concentrated around Lake Ontario, of which 600 were in Kingston and 1,200 garrisoned on the Niagara Peninsula. So the Americans should enjoy overwhelming numerical superiority.
Armstrong’s plan was bold, but not as bold as it might have been. American estimates of British strength at Montreal were absurdly inflated. In fact, excluding militia, there were only a little more than 9,000 troops in all the Canadas, and 2,000 of these were provincials considered of dubious quality.12 Nor were the British able to depend on significant numbers of Upper Canadian militia responding to a call to arms. Prevost had admitted to Lord Bathurst in May that call-ups were causing “growing discontent [and] dissatisfaction of the Mass of the People of Upper Canada, in consequence of the Militia Laws upon a population thinly scattered over an extensive range of Country, whose zeal was exhausted & whose exertions had brought want and ruin to the doors of many.” A good number of the American settlers were packing up and crossing the border to the south. His only recourse had been to move more regulars out of Lower Canada to create a thin screen that might withstand the expected American assault. The militia, Prevost lamented, had “been considerably weakened by the frequent desertion of even the well disposed part of them to their farms, for the purpose of getting seed into the ground before the short summer of this country had too far advanced.”13
If Armstrong had seriously overestimated the numbers of British regulars in the Canadas, his calculations were conservative in the extreme compared to those added up by Dearborn. Claiming sources “entitled to full credit,” Dearborn reported that Prevost had assembled 6,000 to 8,000 men in Kingston alone. He expected Prevost to concentrate there for operations against Sackets Harbor, a fear he had harboured throughout the winter and which had been reinforced in his mind by a British raid in February against the small fort garrison at Ogdensburg—the only real base the Americans had managed to establish on the St. Lawrence River. In a daring attack out of Prescott, the fort standing on the opposite shore, British troops had crossed the frozen mile-wide river on foot, driven off the small garrison, burned several ice-bound ships, and carried off the military stores on sleighs back to Canada.14 Dearborn was so rattled he was quick to believe any reports that large British forces threatened Sackets Harbor.
Chauncey little credited Dearborn’s fears. Rather, he believed the British were massing in order to march against Maj. Gen. William Henry Harrison’s army out on the western frontier. But he agreed that there were at least sufficient men garrisoning Kingston to ensure that an attack against its forts would bog down in a drawn-out siege that would limit the American ability to conduct further operations in 1813. He proposed instead to abandon the attack on Kingston and destroy only the ships and shipbuilding facilities at York. Chauncey believed this would sufficiently weaken the British on Lake Ontario to ensure America retained supremacy. Once York was reduced, the two corps would carry out Armstrong’s Niagara plan. British loss of Fort Erie would free several American ships currently confined in Black Rock by its overlooking guns. Once these vessels were free, the Americans would control Lake Erie and be able to assist Harrison in recovering Detroit and capturing Fort Malden. With the British presence in the west eliminated, it would be a simple matter to sail the length of Lake Huron and reoccupy Fort Michilimackinac, leaving the Americans in control of the frontier. Harrison could then either eliminate Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy at leisure or impose a new treaty should they sensibly decide to sue for peace. The British would be left with Kingston and Montreal, but little else.
Chauncey’s was a tidy plan that looked good when little wooden boats and soldiers were moved about on a map, but it failed to address the fact that even if it succeeded the Americans would not have conquered Canada. And they were too sparse on the ground to hope to hold whatever they captured against a major British offensive. Great Britain would still be free to pour in more soldiers and supplies via the St. Lawrence River and carry out a campaign the following year to wrest back everything the United States might win in 1813. Only by seizing Montreal to create a blocking position on the St. Lawrence could the Americans hope to choke off British reinforcement of Upper Canada.
Dearborn embraced Chauncey’s strategy and proceeded to listlessly gather troops for the planned operations despite Armstrong’s urgings to make haste. The strategy the general determined to follow was, in the words of one analyst, akin to someone who, “desiring to fell a tree, should procure a ladder and begin cutting the outermost branches, instead of striking at the trunk by the ground.”15 Presented with the details of the revised plan, Armstrong reluctantly approved it on March 29.16
Not until April 24 did Dearborn rouse to action and lead 1,700 soldiers onto fourteen of Chauncey’s vessels. Aboard the corvette Madison, the commodore then led the expedition out onto the lake. It was a foul day. The ships pitched and yawed wildly in heavy weather. Realizing some of the small, heavily laden vessels might founder, Chauncey soon ordered the fleet to come about and return to harbour. The next day the weather was better and the fleet sailed toward York. Below decks, hundreds of the soldiers became violently ill anyway because of the close confines they had to endure. There was a general sense of relief when York was spotted in the distance on the afternoon of the next day.
P. Finan, a soldier of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment stationed there, described York—which had a population of less than a thousand—as a “pleasant little town, the houses generally of wood, and containing some good shops. Being the seat of government of the upper province, it has a house of assembly, court house, etc. It is situated at the lower end of a long bay formed by a narrow peninsula stretching up the lake, parallel with the shore, about two miles. On the extremity of this, called Gibraltar Point, stands a light-house, and exactly opposite to it, on the mainland, the garrison is situated.”17
That garrison was pathetically small: 700 militia, dockworkers, and a few Indians along with five under-strength companies of regulars. There was no fort, just a temporary munitions magazine, a two-storey woo
den blockhouse, and a defensive ditch surrounding Government House. Several lightly entrenched batteries stood along the shore to the west of the town and another battery stood next to the blockhouse. In the Front Street shipyard a large frigate named Sir Isaac Brock was nearing completion and nearby the old schooner Duke of Gloucester was under repair. Although not in command of the garrison, Sir Roger Sheaffe took immediate charge of the town’s defence.
Aboard Madison, Dearborn was seasick and disinclined to lead the amphibious assault. The old general’s fighting days were well past. At 250 pounds, he could barely walk. When horse and carriage were unavailable, a couple of soldiers pulled him about in a two-wheeled cart. Dearborn passed command to thirty-four-year-old Brig. Gen. Zebulon Montgomery Pike, a professional soldier with nineteen year.’ service behind him. Ambitious and impulsive, Pike determined to attain glory taking York or die trying.18
As Chauncey’s ships had clearly been sighted by the British, the landing was put off to the following morning. April 27 was a lovely spring day, and the sailing vessels glided across the calm waters of the lake with several boats full of troops preparing for the landing in tow. It was, P. Finan noted, “an elegant and imposing appearance.”19
The first wave of Americans went ashore in flat-bottomed boats under covering fire from Chauncey’s dozen warships, landing about two miles west of Government House and the blockhouse. Three companies hit the beach and quickly forced the single company of regulars to withdraw, but not before about half of its strength was eliminated in a fierce clash. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment was caught trying to reach the beach and thrown back with a loss of thirty-six men.
