Sackets Harbor

Background

By the opening stretch of the conflict, British forces had gained mastery over the Great Lakes region. That changed in September 1812, when U.S. Navy Captain Isaac Chauncey received orders to take charge of American naval operations on Lakes Ontario and Erie, with instructions to pursue dominance over these waters before autumn's end. Acting swiftly, he assembled and transported, within a mere three weeks, a force of 149 ship carpenters, 700 sailors and marines, roughly 100 cannon, plus ample muskets and other equipment, delivering them all to Sacket's Harbor, site of an existing modest naval yard on Lake Ontario.

As the 1813 fighting season began, American military strength along the border with Canada had gathered at Sacket's Harbor. Chauncey's fleet now held an edge over its British and Canadian counterpart stationed at Kingston, while Major General Henry Dearborn commanded enough troops to overwhelm British defenses at almost any single point along their thin, stretched line. This presented the Americans with an opening to assault Kingston directly, a move that could have destroyed the British fleet and possibly delivered nearly the whole of Upper Canada into American hands.

Instead, both Dearborn and Chauncey overestimated the number of British regular troops garrisoned at Kingston. They chose instead to strike York, the seat of colonial government for Upper Canada, located at the lake's far end. On April 27th, American forces prevailed in the Battle of York, briefly holding and plundering the settlement before withdrawing toward Fort Niagara, situated where the Niagara River empties into the lake. There they made preparations for a strike against the British stronghold of Fort George across the water.

Toward the close of 1812, the Admiralty had placed Captain James Lucas Yeo in charge of British naval operations across the Great Lakes. Reaching Quebec on May 5th, 1813, he journeyed onward up the Saint Lawrence toward Kingston, accompanied by 150 naval officers and crewmen. Along this route he caught up with and joined Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost, Canada's Governor General, who was traveling the same direction. This marked Prevost's second trip to Upper Canada within four months, driven by his belief that Major General Roger Hale Sheaffe would likely need replacing, since the defeat at York had cost Sheaffe the trust of the Provincial Assembly.

Kingston received both Prevost and Yeo on May 15th. While Prevost worked to restructure his command and bolster the spirits of militia units and civilian officials, Yeo pushed forward the completion of a new sloop-of-war named Wolfe, alongside repairs to several other armed vessels. Considerable progress on this work had already been made through the efforts of three commanders, Robert Heriot Barclay, Robert Finnis, and Daniel Pring, all reassigned from the naval station at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Both men understood that once the Wolfe entered service, Yeo's fleet would hold a narrow advantage over Chauncey's, yet they also knew the Americans were constructing their own vessel, the 28-gun General Pike, at Sackett's Harbor, a ship that would once again tip naval superiority back toward the American side.

On May 25th, lookouts spotted Chauncey's squadron near Fort George. Brigadier General John Vincent, commanding British forces there, immediately dispatched a vessel carrying word of this sighting to Kingston. Two days afterward, heavy casualties forced Vincent to abandon his post during the Battle of Fort George. Upon receiving news that Chauncey's ships were positioned off Fort George, both Yeo and Prevost recognized that the American fleet, together with Dearborn's army, would likely remain tied down there for some time. This circumstance offered a chance to strike Sacket's Harbor itself, dealing a crippling blow to the shipyard there and securing lasting British command of the lake.

Battle

Kingston mustered whatever regulars it could spare for the venture: the grenadier company of the 100th, a pair of companies from the 8th (The King's), four from the 104th, a single company of Glengarry Light Infantry, two of the Canadian Voltigeurs, and a Royal Artillery detachment hauling a pair of 6-pounders. These men boarded Yeo's ships in haste. With no general on hand to take charge, Prevost assumed personal command of the expedition, though once the men were ashore he passed authority over to his Adjutant General, Colonel Edward Baynes.

The force departed late on 27 May and reached the waters near Sacket's Harbor early the following morning. Light winds hampered Yeo's ability to bring his vessels close to shore, and he had little knowledge of the harbor's depths or local terrain. Just before noon on 28 May, boats began ferrying troops toward land, but strange sails appeared on the horizon. Fearing this might be Chauncey's squadron, the British called off the landing and pulled their men back to the ships. The mysterious sails turned out to be twelve bateaux ferrying men of the 9th and 21st U.S. Infantry Regiments from Oswego toward Sackets Harbor. Three large canoes filled with Native American warriors, along with a gunboat carrying Glengarry troops, were dispatched to intercept them.

The interception happened off Stoney Point in Henderson Bay. When British fire opened up, the largely inexperienced American recruits beached their bateaux and scattered into the woods, only to be chased down by the pursuing Natives. Roughly thirty minutes of fighting left 35 Americans dead before the remaining troops made it back to their boats and hoisted a white flag. Their commanding officer went out to Yeo's ships and surrendered what remained of his force, 115 men in total. Just seven Americans managed to slip away and make it back to Sacket's Harbor.

This pause bought the defenders valuable time to shore up their position. About 400 regulars now held Sacket's Harbor, most of them scattered in small garrisons at Fort Volunteer and Fort Tompkins near the harbor mouth, along with assorted reinforcements and wounded soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Electus Backus of the 1st Light Dragoons held seniority among the regular officers. Another 250 men came from the New York militia as volunteers, and 500 more militia were summoned on short notice from nearby districts. Following instructions left by Henry Dearborn before his departure for York, command of the entire garrison fell to Brigadier General Jacob Brown of the New York militia.

Beyond Fort Volunteer and Fort Tompkins, the Americans had raised several sturdy blockhouses south of the settlement and begun, though not finished, a defensive line of earthworks and abatis (obstacles built from cut trees and branches) encircling both town and shipyard. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Macomb had designed and staked out these fortifications the year before.

While most of the American naval force remained at Fort George under Chauncey, two armed schooners, the Fair American and the Pert, sat anchored in Blackwater Creek near Sacket's Harbor. Command of naval forces there fell to Lieutenant Woolcott Chauncey, the Commodore's younger brother.

Prevost renewed his assault the following morning of 29 May. British troops came ashore on Horse Island, south of the settlement, braving fire from two militia 6-pounder field pieces and a naval 32-pounder shooting from Fort Tompkins at considerable range. Musket volleys from the Albany Volunteers stationed on the island added to their troubles. Despite losing several men while still in their boats, the British managed to establish a foothold, forcing the Volunteers to retreat. Once fully assembled, the landing force pushed across the flooded causeway connecting the island to the mainland. Though exposed and vulnerable during this crossing, they found the American militia had already broken and fled, leaving their guns behind. Brigadier General Brown managed to reassemble roughly 100 of these scattered men.

Turning left, the British aimed to seize the town and dockyard by approaching from inland, but American regulars supported by field guns yielded ground grudgingly. Retreating behind their blockhouses and prepared positions, they beat back every British assault on their fortifications.

Yeo had accompanied the troops ashore, leaving none of his larger warships positioned close enough to lend support to the attack. The small gunboats capable of appro

Later events

After General Pike hit the water, Yeo tried once more to sink her while she sat at Sackett's Harbor, still being outfitted and awaiting replacement supplies for what had been ruined on 29 May. His plan called for a surprise strike launched from boats just before sunrise on 1 July, but daylight came before his men reached their target, forcing them to pull back to the north shore of Blackwater Creek. As the day wore on, several seamen and marines slipped away from the expedition, and Yeo abandoned the scheme altogether, worried, rightly as it turned out, that the deserters would tip off the Americans.

What followed was a months long deadlock across Lake Ontario and its shores, broken only when General Pike battered Yeo's flagship Wolfe during a clash off York on 28 September. This defeat sent Yeo retreating into Burlington Bay, and he gave up any claim to command of the lake for the rest of that year.

Analysis

When measured against the successful American assaults on York and Fort George, the setback the British suffered at Sacket's Harbor looks all the more striking, especially given that the defenders there actually held a slimmer advantage in numbers. What likely tipped the balance was the haste behind the assault itself, thrown together without adequate groundwork, coordination, or drilling beforehand. The force sent in was little more than a patchwork of separate detachments that had never trained as a single unit. American regulars faced a similar problem, yet their position behind established fortifications made the lack of cohesion far less costly.

Prevost's record offered a curious parallel. He had overseen an opposed landing before, at Martinique in 1809, but even then he had not personally directed the fighting, instead handing that responsibility to another officer, in that case Brigadier General Daniel Hoghton. This same pattern of stepping back from direct command would mark his conduct in engagements that followed. At Sackett's Harbor, he again passed authority downward, this time to Colonel Baynes, a man whose career had given him few real chances to lead troops under fire.

Yeo, meanwhile, carried a name for boldness earned through his own experience heading landing parties, yet he remained unfamiliar with commanding on the lake and with the peculiarities of that theater. His response on the 28th of May was to hold the bulk of his warships back in deeper water rather than commit them. The next day, when he moved ashore to stay near the action, the larger British ships seem to have been left waiting without direction, and only Beresford made any real attempt to step in and change the course of events.