o had succeeded Brock, gained control of both
sides of the Niagara and retaliated in kind by laying waste the frontier
villages from Lewiston to Buffalo. The year closed with Amherstburg on
the Detroit the only Canadian post in American hands. On the sea the
capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon salved the pride of England.

The last year of the war was also a year of varying fortunes. In the far
West a small body of Canadians and Indians captured Prairie du Chien, on
the Mississippi, while Michilimackinac, which a force chiefly composed
of French-Canadian voyageurs and Indians had captured in the first
months of war, defied a strong assault. In Upper Canada the Americans
raided the western peninsula from Detroit but made their chief attack
on the Niagara frontier. Though they scored no permanent success, they
fought well and with a fair measure of fortune. The generals with whom
they had been encumbered at the outset of the war, Revolutionary relics
or political favorites, had now nearly all been replaced by abler
men--Scott, Brown, Exert--and their troops were better trained and
better equipped. In July the British forces on the Niagara were
decisively beaten at Chippawa. Three weeks later was fought the
bloodiest battle on Canadian soil, at Lundy's Lane, either side's
victory at the moment but soon followed by the retirement of the
invading force. The British had now outbuilt their opponents on Lake
Ontario; and, though American ships controlled Lake Erie to the end, the
Ontario flotilla aided Drummond, Brock's able successor, in forcing the
withdrawal of Exert forces from the whole peninsula in November. Farther
east a third attempt to capture Montreal had been defeated in the
spring, after Wilkinson with four thousand men had failed to drive five
hundred regulars and militia from the stone walls of Lacolle's Mill.

Until this closing year Britain had been unable, in face of the more
vital danger from Napoleon, to send any but trifling reenforcements to
what she considered a minor theater of the war. Now, with Napoleon in
Elba, she was free to take more vigorous action. Her navy had already
swept the daring little fleet of American frigates and American merchant
marine from the seas. Now it maintained a close blockade of all the
coast and, with troops from Halifax, captured and held the Maine coast
north of the Penobscot. Large forces of Wellington's hardy veterans
crossed the ocean, sixteen thousand to Canada, f