The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris Read Free Book Online

Niagara, was so incensed by Chauncey’s refusal to support him that he took the argument to the press. Drummond and Prevost made the same complaints about Yeo, if more quietly. 35
    As it happened, there was one decisive naval battle in 1814, but it took place on Lake Champlain, with minimal assistance from either of the great establishments on Ontario.

The Battle of Lake Champlain
    The Battle of Lake Champlain halted a major British invasion of the American northeast and ended parliamentary hopes of “rectifying” the Canadian border. The attack had two prongs: a naval assault on the American squadron at Plattsburgh on northwest Champlain and a ground invasion down the west side of the lake by some 10,000 regulars, many of them Wellington’s “best troops from Bordeaux.” 36 The war secretary, John Armstrong, acted with his usual destructiveness by transferring the bulk of the American ground forces away from Plattsburgh just before the invasion.
    The British naval squadron, under Captain George Downie, was spearheaded by a new frigate, Confiance ; its 37 guns, 31 of them long-range 24-pounders, made it nearly as powerful as Chauncey’s Mohawk . To offset Confiance , Thomas Macdonough, commander of the Champlain squadron, ordered the construction of the Eagle ; it was built by the Browns, from first keel-laying to launch, in just nineteen days. (See Table 1.6 .)
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    TABLE 1.6 Naval Forces, Lake Champlain: September 1814

    At first, the campaign unfolded as planned. The infantry veterans brushed aside sporadic opposition as they moved down the western side of the lake, arriving at Plattsburgh within a few days of the naval squadron. Plattsburgh had a formidable arrangement of forts and redoubts, and the British assumed it would take about three weeks to carry them. But sieges in hostile territory are logistics-intensive; without control of the upper lake, Prevost could not secure his supply lines. From the outset, he had insisted that the campaign depended on taking out the American squadron at Plattsburgh.
    The ensuing battle may be the only naval engagement of the war that turned almost entirely on a commander’s thoughtful battle preparation. The Plattsburgh harbor was on a bay sheltered from northerly winds. Macdonough anchored his vessels in a line broadsides out, in a narrow portion of the bay. The details of his positioning gave him two crucial advantages. The first is that he set kedges, or auxiliary anchors, with undersea cabling so crews could winch their ships around to change broadsides without losing anchorage. The second is that the narrowness of his anchorage site helped to neutralize the Confiance ’s great advantage in heavy long guns. (Macdonough implicitly counted on the British penchant for attacking without regard to tactical details.)
    The British ground forces were mostly in position, but the siege had not commenced, when Downie’s squadron appeared up the lake in the early morning of September 11, running before a brisk wind. The American masts were visible over the promontory that protected the bay, so the squadron sailed past the promontory, turned to the starboard, and proceeded directly into the bay. They lost their wind and set anchors in a line facing Macdonough’s at a distance of three hundred to four hundred yards. Both sides cheered and opened fire.
    After some two hours of pounding, both squadrons were near-wreckages, and casualties were high—Downie was killed in one of the first salvos. The weight of the Confiance was taking its toll. Although badly cut up itself, it had silenced the guns of Macdonough’s flagship, the Saratoga . But instead of striking colors, Macdonough set his crew to the winches,
and the Saratoga swung around to present a completely fresh broadside. Pounded anew, and increasingly defenseless itself, the Confiance tried a similar maneuver but got hopelessly stuck and was forced to strike. (An officer of the