The Burning, December 1813
Near Buffalo, New York
On the morning of December thirtieth, eighteen thirteen, more than a thousand British soldiers and their Indigenous allies crossed the Niagara River in two columns, moving quietly through the winter dark. They came in retaliation.
Three weeks earlier, American militia commander Brigadier General George McClure had ordered the Canadian village of Newark, across the river in present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake, to be burned to the ground. He gave the residents a few hours' notice on a night of bitter cold, then put the torch to roughly one hundred fifty buildings. The act was unauthorized, cruel, and politically disastrous for the United States cause.
Major General Phineas Riall commanded the British column that landed near what is now the foot of Amherst Street. The American militia that was supposed to defend the village scattered almost immediately. What followed was not a battle. It was a systematic destruction.
British soldiers moved through Buffalo and the neighboring village of Black Rock, setting fire to buildings one after another. By mid-afternoon of December thirtieth, nearly the entire town was ash. Of the structures standing in Buffalo that morning, only a handful, about four, survived. The British crossed back to Canada that afternoon, taking with them roughly seventy American prisoners and leaving more than forty Americans dead. The destruction extended from Buffalo northward along the frontier for miles, with three hundred thirty-three buildings burned in total.
Buffalo had to be rebuilt almost from nothing. It was rebuilt quickly. Within two years the village was functioning again, and by the time the canal arrived twelve years later it was a city in waiting. What the burning did, in a way, was prove that the settlement here was too strategically important to abandon. The lakeshore was worth rebuilding for.
No British soldier who participated was ever tried or sanctioned for the destruction. General McClure, who gave the order that triggered the retaliation, was widely blamed by the American press and effectively ended his military career.
