truggle to assert
commercial rights or national prestige.

The course and fortunes of the war call for only the briefest notice.
In the first year the American plans for invading Upper Canada came to
grief through the surrender of Hull at Detroit to Isaac Brock and the
defeat at Queenston Heights of the American army under Van Rensselaer.
The campaign ended with not a foot of Canadian soil in the invaders'
hands, and with Michigan lost, but Brock, Canada's brilliant leader, had
fallen at Queenston, and at sea the British had tasted unwonted defeat.
In single actions one American frigate after another proved too much for
its British opponent. It was a rude shock to the Mistress of the Seas.

The second year's campaign was more checkered. In the West the Americans
gained the command of the Great Lakes by rapid building and good
sailing, and with it followed the command of all the western peninsula
of Upper Canada. The British General Procter was disastrously defeated
at Moraviantown, and his ally, the Shawanoe chief Tecumseh, one of
the half dozen great men of his race, was killed. York, later known
as Toronto, the capital of the province, was captured, and its public
buildings were burned and looted. But in the East fortune was kinder
to the Canadians. The American plan of invasion called for an attack on
Montreal from two directions; General Wilkinson was to sail and march
down the St. Lawrence from Sackett's Harbor with some eight thousand
men, while General Hampton, with four thousand, was to take the historic
route by Lake Champlain. Half-way down the St. Lawrence Wilkinson came
to grief. Eighteen hundred men whom he landed to drive off a force of
a thousand hampering his rear were decisively defeated at Chrystler's
Farm. Wilkinson pushed on for a few days, but when word came that
Hampton had also met disaster he withdrew into winter quarters. Hampton
had found Colonel de Salaberry, with less than sixteen hundred troops,
nearly all French Canadians, making a stand on the banks of the
Chateauguay, thirty-five miles south of Montreal. He divided his
force in order to take the Canadians in front and rear, only to be
outmaneuvered and outfought in one of the most brilliant actions of
the war and forced to retire. In the closing months of the year the
Americans, compelled to withdraw from Fort George on the Niagara, burned
the adjoining town of Newark and turned its women and children into the
December snow. Drummond, wh