The Battle of Buffalo (also known as the Battle of Black Rock) took place during the War of 1812 on December 30, 1813, in the State of New York, near the Niagara River. The British forces drove off the American defenders and destroyed many buildings and ships. The operation was retaliation for American troops burning the Canadian village of Newark (present day Niagara-on-the-Lake).
When Brigadier General George McClure of the New York State Militia, commander of the garrison of Fort George, decided to abandon the post on December 10, 1813, he ordered the neighboring village of Newark to be destroyed. Giving the inhabitants only a few hours' notice, he turned them out into the cold winter night and burned all but one of the hundred and fifty or so buildings to the ground.
Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond, the newly appointed Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, was planning an offensive against the American positions on Niagara frontier. In the early hours of December 18, a force under Colonel John Murray captured Fort Niagara by surprise. Another force under Major General Phineas Riall raided the American side of the lower Niagara River, destroying the villages of Lewiston, Youngstown, Manchester, Tuscarora and the small military post and surrounding settlement of Fort Schlosser.
Riall's raid was eventually halted when the Americans set fire to a bridge over the Tonawanda Creek. Drummond and Riall intended further devastation, and Riall's troops returned to the Canadian side of the Niagara and marched south around Niagara Falls, carrying their boats, to launch an attack on the villages of Buffalo and Black Rock.
Riall led a force consisting of 370 men of the 1st Regiment of Foot (Royal Scots), 240 men of the 8th (King's) Regiment, 250 men of the 41st Regiment of Foot, 55 light infantrymen of the 89th Regiment of Foot, 50 grenadiers of the 100th Regiment of Foot (Prince Regent's County of Dublin Regiment), 50 Canadian Militia and 400 British-allied Native Americans. In total, the force numbered 1,415 officers and men.
Available to the American area commander, Major General Amos Hall of the New York Militia, were 2,011 men, all of them volunteers or militia. Stationed at Buffalo were 129 cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Seymour Boughton, 433 Ontario County volunteers under Lieutenant Colonel Blakeslee, 136 Buffalo Militia under Lieutenant Colonel Cyrenius Chapin, 97 of the Corps of Canadian Volunteers under Lieutenant Colonel Benajah Mallory, 382 of the Genesse Militia Regiment under Major Adams and 307 Chautauqua Militia under Lieutenant Colonel John McMahon. At Black Rock were 382 of Lieutenant Colonel Warren's and Lieutenant Colonel Churchill's Regiments under Brigadier General Timothy Hopkins, 37 mounted infantry under Captain Ransom, 83 Native Americans under Lieutenant Colonel Erastus Granger and 25 militia artillerymen with a six-pounder gun under Lieutenant Seeley.
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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