The Battle of Fort George was fought during the War of 1812, in which the Americans defeated a British force and captured Fort George in Upper Canada. The troops of the United States Army and vessels of the United States Navy cooperated in a very successful amphibious assault, although most of the opposing British force escaped encirclement.
Fort George was the westernmost of the British fortified posts on Lake Ontario, the others being York, the provincial capital of Upper Canada, and Kingston where most of the ships of the Provincial Marine were based. The fort was situated on the western bank of the Niagara River near its mouth. On the American side of the river lay Fort Niagara. Fort George was constructed to replace and counterbalance Fort Niagara, which the British lost to the Americans after Jay's Treaty of 1796.
At the beginning of the war both the British forces near Fort George and the American forces at Fort Niagara felt unprepared for conflict. On May 18, 1812, Sir George Prevost, the Governor General of the Canadas, wrote a letter in response to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies who was inquiring about the military situation in Canada. He stated that there were 400 soldiers of the 41st Regiment and a Captain's Command of Artillery stationed at Fort George. He also wrote that he felt Fort George would not be able to withstand an attack by the Americans if they came with a considerable force. On the American side, Colonel Philetus Swift and Benjamin Barton wrote before the war to the Governor of New York, Daniel Tompkins, that Fort Niagara would fall to the British if a war were to be declared. By July 1812 however, the American commander at Fort Niagara was expecting a British attack and was demanding more reinforcements.
On October 8, 1812, Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer of the New York state militia outlined a plan of attack to send a militia force from Lewiston to attack Queenston which would force the British to send soldiers from Fort George to Queenston. When that happened, a force of U.S. Regulars commanded by Brigadier General Alexander Smyth were to travel by boat from Four Mile Creek to the rear of Fort George and capture the fort. This plan failed to materialize, in part because Smyth failed to cooperate. An attempt to carry out the plan on the night of October 10/11 was thwarted by bad weather. Smyth marched his detachment back to Black Rock, New York.
Van Rensselaer attacked Queenston with the troops he had at Lewiston on the night of October 13/14, without Smyth's troops.
During the ensuing Battle of Queenston Heights, the guns of Fort George and Fort Niagara began to fire at the opposite fort. During the exchange the Americans set fire to the court house, jail, and fifteen or sixteen other buildings. During this battle Fort George was left under the control of Major Thomas Evans and there were no more than twenty soldiers acting as the main guards.
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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