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Battle of Lake Champlain

The American victory at the Battle of Lake Champlain was a significant turning point in the War of 1812. Despite superior enemy firepower, an American naval force was able to defeat a British squadron in September 1814 at Plattsburgh Bay in Lake Champlain. The victory broke the British waterborne supply lines and forced British troops to retreat back into Canada. A peace treaty between the two nations was signed at Ghent, Belgium, in December 1814.

On the northern front the British gathered their forces for a decisive effort. A British army of about 15,000 men was based near Montréal. The force included 11,000 British veterans, commanded by the general Sir George Prevost. The British proposed to advance toward Albany and the Hudson Valley by the same wilderness route that Major General John Burgoyne had attempted in 1777 during the American Revolution (see Saratoga, Battles of). That disastrous experience had demonstrated the need for waterborne supply, and the British built a squadron of warships in the Richelieu River for the purpose of gaining naval superiority on Lake Champlain.

The American forces on Lake Champlain were commanded by Captain Thomas Macdonough. He knew that his ships were considerably inferior in gun power to the British squadron, and that the superior British ships would have the greatest advantage in open water. To offset this advantage, he decided to moor his ships across the entrance to Plattsburgh Bay, compelling the enemy to attack him at anchor.

On the morning of September 11 the British naval squadron, commanded by Captain George Downie, sailed to Plattsburgh Bay and immediately attacked Macdonough's anchored ships. After two hours of furious cannonading, the heavier fire of Downie's 36-gun Confiance had silenced all the guns on the exposed side of Macdonough's flagship, the 26-gun Saratoga. The battle seemed to be going against the Americans until Macdonough turned his ship around using lines that he had attached to his anchor cables. He thus brought his untouched guns on the port side into action. The result was decisive. British Captain Downie was killed, and the Confiance lifted anchor and departed. The smaller British ships surrendered.

When the naval battle began, the British forces under Sir George Prevost made a halfhearted attack on American forces deployed on the heights overlooking the bay. Prevost broke off the operation the moment he realized that the American forces had defeated Downie, and the next day he began a quick retreat into Canada. Prevost refused to engage in a wilderness march without a waterborne supply line. Macdonough's courage and tenacity averted the most serious British threat to the United States during the war; the Battle of Lake Champlain was the decisive naval engagement of the War of 1812.

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