Fighting Sail on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay: The War of 1812 and Its Aftermath (review)

The War of 1812 began with great expectations for the United States, as many Americans anticipated they would quickly overrun Canada and finally destroy British control over and influence in North America. Instead, on 17 July 1812, less than a month after the declaration of war, British Captain Charles Roberts and a contingent of regulars, Canadian volunteers, and Indians forced the U.S. surrender of Michilimackinac Island—the location where the waters of Lakes Huron and Michigan converge. A month later General Isaac Brock captured William Hull's twenty-five hundred American troops and Detroit. These bloodless victories, which gave the British control over the upper Great Lakes, proved conclusively that the war would be a protracted struggle.

In nine chapters, an introduction, and appendixes, Barry Gough—Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University—adds to our understanding of the War of 1812 by chronicling the little-known campaigns for Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. The war that Fighting Sail describes is not the dramatic ship-to-ship engagements or the epic battles for control of Lakes Champlain or Erie, although Oliver H. Perry's September 1813 victory at Put-in-Bay is included and does serve as a backdrop for subsequent events on the northern lakes. Instead, Gough describes how the British used small vessels and small-scale naval operations to secure and maintain control over the upper lakes.

Throughout the war British commanders in North America understood the primacy of commanding the inland seas. After the loss of Erie—a setback that eliminated the lake as an avenue of communication, retreat, or western supply—the British had to intensify their struggle for Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Gough rightly uses the general ebb and flow of the war to describe how events played out in the struggle for the northern lakes; British 1814 operations in the Chesapeake Bay and the along Atlantic seaboard, for example, coincided with the July capture of Fort Shelby at Prairie du Chien (present-day Wisconsin) and with the September seizure of the schooners Tigress and Scorpion on Lake Huron. News of the December 1814 peace treaty, which reached the lakes by late February 1815, ultimately concluded the contest for the Great Lakes, ending the imperial struggle for North America.

Fighting Sail joins other recent books—including Robert Malcomson's Lords of the Lake and David Curtis Skaggs and Gerald T. Altoff's A Signal Victory—to give us a much-needed account of the War of 1812 on the northern waters. In doing so, it also emphasizes the importance and extent of sea power on the interior Great Lakes, and how the struggle ultimately shaped the boundaries of the U.S. and Canada, as well as the future for those who lived along the border.