Plattsburgh: The Battle That Ended the War of 1812
Near Burlington, New York
Plattsburgh, on the western shore of Lake Champlain, was founded in seventeen eighty-four by Zephaniah Platt, who brought a company of Long Island settlers north to claim land in the Adirondack foothills. Thirty years later it became the site of one of the most consequential naval battles in American history. In September of eighteen fourteen, a British army of roughly eleven thousand soldiers marched from Canada toward Plattsburgh while a naval squadron sailed south on the lake.
On September eleventh, American Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough met the British fleet and won a decisive victory. The British army, its lake support gone, turned around and retreated to Canada. Historians credit the Battle of Plattsburgh with ending negotiations at Ghent: the British, no longer able to threaten New York by the Hudson River corridor, signed the peace treaty that December.
