Plattsburgh: The Naval Battle That Saved the North
Near Burlington, New York
Plattsburgh sits at the northern end of Lake Champlain, and in September of eighteen fourteen that geography made it the pivot of the entire War of eighteen twelve. A British army of about eleven thousand men, many of them veterans of the wars against Napoleon, marched south to capture the town and sever New England from the republic. Everything depended on Lake Champlain.
American Commodore Thomas Macdonough anchored his fleet in Plattsburgh Bay and, in a single brutal morning of fighting on September eleventh, destroyed the British squadron. Without naval control of the lake, the British invasion collapsed. The victory ended fighting in the North and strengthened the American hand in the peace talks that closed the war.
The town founder, Zephaniah Platt, had laid it out in seventeen eighty-five as a commercial outpost. It became instead one of the most strategically decisive spots in American history.
