Lake Erie

Off the Ohio coastline, American and British naval forces clashed on Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, in an engagement sometimes called the Battle of Put-in-Bay. A squadron of nine United States Navy ships overcame six vessels belonging to the British Royal Navy, capturing all of them in the process. The victory gave the Americans lasting command of the lake through the remainder of the conflict, and that dominance in turn made possible the reclaiming of Detroit, Michigan, along with the subsequent triumph at the Battle of the Thames, which shattered Tecumseh's Indian confederation. Among the naval engagements of the War of 1812, this one ranked as among the largest.

Battle

At dawn on September 10, the American squadron spotted Barclay's ships approaching and weighed anchor from their position at Put-in-Bay, South Bass Island. Winds were faint that morning. Though Barclay held the weather gauge at first, a shift in the breeze let Perry close the distance and press the attack. Both fleets formed lines of battle, positioning their largest ships toward the middle of each formation. Detroit opened fire at 11:45, marking the battle's first shot. Perry intended to bring his two heaviest brigs, the flagship Lawrence and the Niagara, swiftly into carronade range, yet the faint wind left his vessels crawling forward, and for roughly twenty minutes Lawrence absorbed punishment from Detroit's long guns without being able to answer in kind. By 12:45, Lawrence had finally reached carronade distance, though her gunnery fell short of Perry's expectations, apparently because her crews had loaded the carronades with too much shot.

Behind Lawrence, Elliott's Niagara lagged in joining the fight and stayed well beyond effective carronade reach. Some accounts suggest Elliott had been ordered to target his counterpart, Queen Charlotte, and that the sluggish Caledonia blocked his path, but his conduct that day sparked a long-running quarrel with Perry afterward. Aboard Queen Charlotte, the vessel matched against Niagara, both the commander, Robert Finnis, and the First Lieutenant lost their lives. Command then fell to Lieutenant Irvine of the Provincial Marine, who noticed Niagara and the American gunboats sat too far away to strike, and so moved the brig General Hunter forward to close with Lawrence instead.

While the American gunboats trailing the line kept raking the British center from afar with their long guns, Lawrence herself was pounded into a wreck by the two closing British vessels, with four out of every five men aboard killed or wounded. Since both ship surgeons had fallen ill with lake fever, malaria, the wounded were left in the hands of the assistant surgeon, Usher Parsons. Once every gun on Lawrence had gone silent, Perry made the decision to shift his command elsewhere, rowing half a mile through heavy fire toward Niagara as Lawrence lowered her colors behind him. Tradition holds that his personal servant, a Black sailor named Cyrus Tiffany, went along to shield him during that crossing.

Claims later arose that Perry abandoned Lawrence only after she surrendered, but in truth what he lowered was merely his private blue pennant reading "DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP." The guns fell quiet briefly once Lawrence's flag came down. Detroit and Queen Charlotte then collided, both crippled by tangled rigging and stripped of nearly every officer, dead or gravely hurt. Barclay himself lay badly wounded, his first lieutenant had been killed, and command passed to Lieutenant Inglis. Most of the smaller British ships had also lost maneuverability and drifted with the wind. The British expected the American schooners to withdraw under Niagara's lead. Instead, upon boarding Niagara, Perry sent Elliott back to push the schooners into the fight while he himself turned Niagara toward Barclay's battered ships, aided now by a freshening wind.

Cutting through the British line between Detroit and Queen Charlotte, Niagara swung about to unleash raking broadsides from ahead, while Caledonia and the gunboats fired in from behind. Detroit and Queen Charlotte managed to separate but had nothing left to fight with. Both surrendered around 3:00 in the afternoon. Chippeway and Little Belt attempted to escape but were run down and forced to yield as well. Though the victory belonged to Perry aboard Niagara, it was on the deck of Lawrence that he formally accepted Barclay's surrender.

Aftermath

Near West Sister Island, while crews worked quickly to patch up the captured and surviving ships, Perry drafted the dispatch to Harrison that would later become so celebrated, jotting the words in pencil across the back of an old envelope.

He also sent word to Secretary of the Navy William Jones describing the outcome.

Once the fleet's vessels, including the prizes, had been made seaworthy again, Perry transported 2,500 American troops across to Amherstburg, which fell into American hands unopposed on 27 September. At roughly the same time, a force of 1,000 mounted soldiers under Richard Mentor Johnson advanced overland and retook Detroit, again without any fighting. Even before learning how the naval engagement had turned out, Procter and his British troops had already begun readying themselves to withdraw. Tecumseh, who commanded the coalition of Indian tribes fighting alongside the British, urged him to stand firm, but Procter ignored these pleas, pulling out of both Amherstburg and Detroit and starting a retreat along the Thames River on 27 September. With their supplies exhausted, Tecumseh's warriors had little choice but to follow. Harrison pursued and overtook Procter's withdrawing army, defeating it on 5 October at the Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh fell in that fight, along with his most seasoned and trusted subordinate, the Wyandot Chief Roundhead.

The triumph on Lake Erie carried consequences far beyond its immediate scale. From that point until the war's end, the Americans held command of the lake, a factor that contributed heavily to their gains along the Niagara Peninsula in 1814 and eliminated any danger of a British push into Ohio, Pennsylvania, or western New York. Even so, an American attempt in 1814 to reclaim Mackinac Island, Michigan ended in failure with steep losses, and eight smaller American ships and prizes were lost as well. Four had been destroyed after the British seized Black Rock, where the vessels had been docked, in the wake of the Battle of Buffalo late in 1813, while the other four were captured in separate encounters on Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Once the war ended, Perry and Elliott became embroiled in a bitter dispute over each man's role in the fighting, a quarrel that played out largely through public exchanges in the newspapers.

On the British side, Barclay and the officers who survived faced a court-martial. The proceedings concluded that the men had behaved in a most gallant manner and cleared every officer of blame. The panel attributed the loss to the greater numbers on the American side, a shortage of skilled seamen, and the fact that senior officers had fallen as casualties early in the fighting. Barclay himself remained too severely wounded to return to active duty for several years afterward.