Chesapeake campaign was a Early Republic and War of 1812 engagement fought in Virginia, 1812.
Between 23 April 1813 and 14 September 1814, British naval forces conducted a series of operations across the waters and shorelines of the Delaware and Chesapeake bays. This effort, part of the broader War of 1812, has come to be known by two names: the Chesapeake campaign and, alternatively, the Chesapeake Bay campaign.
Between 23 April 1813 and 14 September 1814, British naval forces conducted a series of operations across the waters and shorelines of the Delaware and Chesapeake bays. This effort, part of the broader War of 1812, has come to be known by two names: the Chesapeake campaign and, alternatively, the Chesapeake Bay campaign.
The Royal Navy's push into Chesapeake waters aimed at wiping out American naval resources, vessels, forts, dockyards and arsenals, while clamping a full blockade on the Atlantic Coast to seize ships and powder magazines all the way from Charleston to New York.
On 3 April 1813, British forces pushed up the Rappahannock River, which flows into the bay forty miles north of Hampton, Virginia, capturing or destroying fourteen American ships along the way.
At Havre de Grace on 3 May 1813, Rear Admiral George Cockburn led a flotilla of small boats against the town. Maryland militia tried to stop the landing, so Royal Marines set fire to and plundered homes, torched a warehouse, and took or slaughtered livestock. Their destruction extended to the Principio Foundry, where several guns and the manufacturing works themselves were wrecked.
On 22 June 1813, fighting broke out at Craney Island, positioned where the Elizabeth River meets the sea. There a British landing force could not overcome a far smaller American defense, and this failure kept Norfolk safe from British hands.
Having failed to take Craney Island, the British turned to Hampton, Virginia, occupying the town over 25 and 26 June 1813. In that single day of control, they seized guns, ammunition, wagons, horses, livestock, and other food supplies. French soldiers fighting alongside British troops allegedly joined in looting, vandalism, rape, and killing. The British suffered 5 dead, 33 wounded, and 10 missing.
Between 11 and 16 July 1813, British ships carried out a successful operation at Ocracoke Inlet, the passage through North Carolina's Outer Banks connecting to Pamlico Sound that American merchant vessels relied on despite the blockade. Several American ships fell into British hands, and stores and livestock were taken from the settlements of Ocracoke and Portsmouth.
A British raiding party struck up the Connecticut River on 7 and 8 April 1814, destroying the privateer fleet moored at Pettipaug, known today as Essex. Captain Richard Coote commanded 136 sailors and marines aboard six boats, setting fire to 25 American vessels and seizing two more, at a cost of only two men lost. This strike crippled American privateering efforts.
On 30 May 1814, British forces launched a successful assault from the sea against an American gun battery positioned on a bluff above Pongoteague Creek, defended by Virginia militia in the strip of Virginia running south of Maryland between the bay and the ocean.
Near where the Patuxent River meets the bay, American and British vessels faced off inconclusively on 1 June 1814. Ships under Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn maneuvered against an American flotilla, and both sides traded fire at a distance, but the Americans withdrew before any vessel took damage.
From 9 through 12 August 1814, the British warships Ramillies, Pactolus, Dispatch, and Terror, under Sir Thomas Hardy, shelled the town of Stonington, Connecticut. For three days the townspeople answered with steady return fire, inflicting numerous casualties on the British while suffering few losses themselves.
Captain James Gordon led a squadron up the Potomac from 17 August to 6 September 1814, meant to draw attention away from the simultaneous push up the Patuxent that would end in Washington's burning. Gordon's force drove American defenders from Fort Washington, Maryland, took the wealthy port of Alexandria, Virginia without resistance, and made off with a wealth of captured goods and vessels.
The fighting at Bladensburg, stretching from 17 to 29 August 1814, marked the country's poorest military showing of the entire war, as fifteen hundred British troops scattered an American force nearly seven thousand strong and left the capital exposed. Between four and five thousand British troops, drawn from Cockburn's fleet, then took possession of the capital itself, a move widely seen as payback for the American burning and plundering of York the year before. The Capitol, the Library of Congress, the White House, and the buildings that housed the Treasury and War Departments all went up in flames, though the sole private home destroyed was one from which shots
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