The series of Engagements on Lake Huron left the British in control of the lake and their Native American allies in control of the northwestern sector of the Old Northwest for the latter stages of the War of 1812 including Mackinac Island.
An American force which had failed to recapture the vital outpost at Fort Mackinac in August 1814 attempted to starve its garrison into surrender by destroying the schooner Nancy which carried supplies to Mackinac from the Nottawasaga River and then blockading the island with two gunboats. A party of sailors of the Royal Navy and soldiers from the garrison of Mackinac captured both gunboats by surprise in the first week of September, leaving the British in control of the lake until the end of the war.
The Old Northwest, as the modern American Midwest was known at the time, was inhabited by various Native American peoples who in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were resisting, with British support, efforts of American colonists to settle in the region. The British military outpost at St. Joseph Island was the most distant extent of British authority, and furthest from reinforcement from Lower Canada. The Montreal-based North West Company, which dominated the fur trade in the Great Lakes region, was active in supplying guns to the Native Americans in exchange for furs. Almost all the "Nor'Westers", as the locally-based Scottish and French-Canadian fur traders and employees of the North West Company were known, had Native American wives, so there were close connections between the company and the Native American peoples in the region. American influence in the area was represented by a trading post and fort (Fort Mackinac) on nearby Mackinac Island.
When the United States declared war on Britain in 1812, the North West Company put its ships and its voyageurs at the disposal of the British government. The Nor'Westers pressed the British to take Fort Mackinac and to move the British garrison on St. Joseph Island to the company's trading post at Sault Ste. Marie. Captain Charles Roberts, commanding the garrison at St. Joseph Island, hastily assembled a force of 47 soldiers from the 10th Royal Veteran Battalion, 3 artillerymen, 180 Nor'Westers who were mostly French-Canadian voyageurs and 400 Native Americans. Learning that the small American garrison (61 men) of Fort Mackinac were not aware that war had been declared, Roberts' force landed on Mackinac Island in the early hours of 17 July 1812 and forced the Americans to surrender without fighting.
The news inspired large numbers of Natives to rally to the British and to Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who was leading a confederacy of Native American tribes resisting the Americans in the Northwest. It also affected the morale of the American army under Brigadier General William Hull, who later surrendered at the Siege of Detroit. Although the Americans were aware of the importance of regaining control of the region, the British hold on the area was secure for the remainder of 1812 and for much of 1813 as their armed vessels controlled Lake Erie and repeatedly thwarted the efforts of the American Major General William Henry Harrison to regain Detroit.
The early republic period saw the United States move from the weak Articles of Confederation to the federal Constitution ratified in 1788, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. George Washington served two terms as president (1789–1797), establishing precedents for executive authority, and the federal capital moved permanently to Washington D.C. in 1800. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled the nation's territory for roughly $15 million, opening vast trans-Mississippi lands to American expansion. The War of 1812 against Britain ended inconclusively but produced a surge of American national identity and eliminated most British support for Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) and the Creek War (1813–1814) broke Indigenous confederacies that had resisted US expansion. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 temporarily balanced slave and free states as the nation expanded westward, but embedded the contradiction of slavery in every subsequent territorial debate.
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