Engagements On Lake Ontario - Results

Results

Because neither side had been prepared to risk everything in a decisive attack on the enemy fleet or naval base, the result of all the construction effort on Lake Ontario was an expensive draw. The great demands for men and materials made by both squadrons adversely affected other parts of the war effort.

The Americans had been based at Sacket's Harbor, and this small town was unable to cope with the great numbers of soldiers, sailors and shipwrights there. There were many deaths from cold, exposure and inadequate rations during the winter months, and from disease during the summer. (Blackwater Creek, on which the town lay, had no fresh water flowing into it, and quickly became a stagnant sewer.) On the British side, the effort required to ship all the ordnance and naval stores up the Saint Lawrence prevented them from deploying sufficiently large numbers of troops in Upper Canada. Prevost once reported paying £1,000 to transport one monstrous cable for the battleship Saint Lawrence to Kingston, and complained that the demands of Yeo's squadron pre-empted the entire transport service up the Saint Lawrence during the later months of 1814.

Both Yeo and Chauncey have been criticised by historians for their unwillingness to act decisively, and for the long and rambling excuses they made in their despatches for their setbacks. Chauncey has received more abuse from American historians than Yeo has from British historians. Roosevelt (and subsequent authors) argued that, since the overall American strategy was offensive, the American forces on Lake Ontario ought to have risked an attack against Kingston, or Chauncey should have sought an all-out action against Yeo's squadron when opportunity offered. Instead, Chauncey (and the Army commanders Dearborn and Wilkinson) repeatedly shied away from any attack on Kingston, while Chauncey failed to pursue Yeo to destruction after the action in York Bay on 28 September 1813. After the British attack on Sackett's Harbor, Chauncey continually hampered operations against targets other than Yeo's ships. He either kept his vessels in port waiting for more ships, or refused to use them to support the Army's attacks elsewhere (on the Niagara peninsula, for example).

By contrast, it has been argued that since the British strategy under Governor General Prevost was defensive for most of the war, Yeo needed only to avoid defeat, and certainly succeeded in this. However, British (and Canadian) historians such as Forester and J. Mackay Hitsman have argued that he did so at such cost that other operations were curtailed or thwarted. For example, Yeo's hoarding of men and supplies, and failure to forward sufficient of these to the British squadron on Lake Erie, contributed to their complete defeat. Similarly, a far smaller effort on Lake Champlain than that required to construct battleships on Lake Ontario would have made British victory on Champlain certain.