Before the turn of the 21st century, September 11 was a day to celebrate, not commemorate. It was the date of a major American victory that helped secure, once and for all, our country’s independence from Great Britain.
The War of 1812, which resolved issues left over from the Revolutionary War, was no easy victory. The British won major battles and even burned the White House before losing momentum and finally the war.
Things might have turned out better for the British if not for the prodigious work accomplished at a naval shipyard on the banks of Otter Creek. The shipyard, which built the vessels that helped repel a British invasion, proved to be a vitally important site in the struggle with Great Britain.
The war is little thought of today, but it determined the fate of nations. Hostile actions by both countries triggered the conflict. The British were seizing American sailors from merchant vessels and forcing them to serve in the Royal Navy and were also forcefully restricting America’s foreign trade in order to block supplies from reaching the French, with whom they were at war.
Meanwhile, the United States’ territorial ambitions were also ratcheting up tensions. Americans were expanding into the Northwest Territories (today’s upper Midwest), where they faced stiff opposition from a confederacy of Native American tribes; and they also had designs on Canada. America declared war on Britain in June 1812.
As it had during the Revolution, Lake Champlain played a vital role in military strategy. American commanders knew the British would probably invade the United States from Canada and use the lake to do so.
Twenty-eight-year-old Lt. Thomas Macdonough was given a piddling force with which to stop the British Empire. Under his command were six sloops and two 40-ton row galleys. The small fleet was further diminished in July 1813, when two of those sloops ventured too far up the Richelieu River at the north end of the lake and were seized by the British, who repaired the damage inflicted during their capture and began using them against the Americans.
Subtracting two sloops from the American side of the equation and adding them to the British was a major blow, essentially handing Britain control of the lake.
The U.S. Navy authorized Macdonough to spend the money needed to bolster his Lake Champlain fleet. When winter came in 1813, he moved his ships about 6 miles up Otter Creek from its delta on Lake Champlain, where they would be safer from naval attack. There, below the falls in Vergennes, Macdonough took over and expanded an existing commercial shipyard.
The location was ideal: It was near forests that could provide plenty of lumber, and furnaces and forges that produced iron. The Navy hired shipbuilder Noah Brown of New York City to run the yard. The work accomplished in just a few months by Brown and the more than 100 shipwrights he brought with him is staggering.
In a mere 40 days, for example, they built a 143-foot-long, 26-gun frigate, the Saratoga, to serve as Macdonough’s flagship.
To give Brown and his men a head start on a second vessel, Macdonough purchased the completed hull of a merchant steamboat under construction at the yard. Macdonough decided to convert it to a sailing vessel, rather than power it with steam. It was the safer course; steam power was notoriously unreliable and had never been used in battle.
Macdonough had Brown use the steamer’s hull as part of a 120-foot sailing schooner, which was armed with 17 guns and christened the Ticonderoga.
The shipwrights also built six 70-ton row galleys, each measuring about 75 feet in length. These they equipped with two large cannons apiece. The galleys were named Viper, Nettle, Allen, Borer, Burrow and Centipede (the latter presumably for its appearance once outfitted with oars).
Their work completed, Brown and the shipwrights returned to New York.
The British learned from spies the position of Macdonough’s shipyard. Alarmed by the extent of the Americans’ shipbuilding efforts, they sent a small fleet in May 1814 to land a detachment of more than 150 soldiers. British vessels intended to blockade the river, to prevent Macdonough’s fleet from departing, while the soldiers would hike to the falls and burn the U.S. fleet.
But Macdonough anticipated such a threat and had had an earthen fort, named Fort Cassin, constructed at the mouth of Otter Creek. For an hour and a half, the fort traded cannon shots with the British ships. American militiamen positioned themselves on the shore to ward off any attempted troop landing. The British commander canceled the attack and withdrew his forces north.
Unwilling to be outgunned, the British set to work on a large warship at their shipyard at Ile Aux Noix on the Richelieu. The ship, the Confiance, was designed to carry 37 guns and remains the largest warship ever in service on Lake Champlain.
Learning of this new threat, Macdonough pleaded with the Navy for permission to build another large warship in response. Navy Secretary William Jones rejected the request, saying the Navy couldn’t afford the cost. But President Madison intervened.
This time, the Navy hired Adam Brown, Noah’s brother, who brought about 200 shipwrights with him. In just 19 days, they built the Eagle, a 120-foot, 20-gun brig, and launched it on Aug. 11, two weeks before the Confiance was launched.
The Browns and their bands of shipwrights were invaluable to the American cause, as was proven on Sept. 11, 1814. The British, who were invading south along the New York side of Lake Champlain, had numerous troops in the Plattsburgh area. The British commander, however, wanted to wait for the Royal Navy to defeat Macdonough’s fleet before storming Plattsburgh. (Plattsburgh with an H, because that’s the most common way the Battle of Plattsburgh is described.)
When the American and British navies met in Plattsburgh Bay (also known as Cumberland Bay), the British had a slight advantage in terms of the number of ships and guns aboard them, but the work done at the Otter Creek shipyard made it a fair fight.
The British shipwrights had had to rush their work to prepare for this battle. In fact, work was still underway aboard the Confiance when it was launched. According to one account, the battleship stopped at Cumberland Head, in Plattsburgh Bay, to drop off the last of the carpenters before the battle.
During the battle, the navies’ massive broadsides could be heard as far away as Highgate, on the Vermont-Canadian border. Macdonough’s superior tactics won the day. He anchored his ships in a way that allowed him to swing his vessels quickly to fire a second broadside at the British line.
The tactic worked to devastating effect. In a battle lasting barely two hours, Macdonough’s fleet captured the entire British fleet except its swift gunboats, which managed to flee.
The American victory proved a turning point in the war. Having lost its naval support, the British army saw that its supply lines were threatened and retreated to Canada. The war in North America officially ended on Dec. 24, 1814, with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.
Naval historian and future British prime minister Winston Churchill later called the Battle of Plattsburgh, sometimes called the Battle of Lake Champlain, “the most decisive engagement of the war.” If not for the work of the shipwrights in Vergennes, the outcome of that pivotal engagement might have been decidedly different.
