British storm Fort Erie in the dark; a bastion explodes and the attack collapses
By August 1814, American troops under Jacob Brown held Fort Erie on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, and Lieutenant General Gordon Drummond wanted them gone. British forces reached the fort on August 4 and settled in to besiege it. On the night of August 15-16, Drummond sent three columns forward in a coordinated assault. American gunners held their ground in the rain. An explosion in the fort's northeast bastion killed about 250 attackers and ended the attempt; British losses came to 57 killed, 309 wounded, and 537 missing.
Fort Erie was the last serious British attempt to push American forces off Canadian soil, and its failure closed out major British offensive operations on the Niagara frontier. The defense, built on earthworks Brown and Gaines had ordered strengthened rather than superior numbers, stood out as one of the few clear American successes in a war otherwise marked by burned capitals and stalemate.
QWhat did Gordon Drummond give away to a battlefield surgeon after the assault?
Drummond handed over his own sword, a presentation piece he had received as a gift from Lloyd's of London, to Surgeon William "Tiger" Dunlop of the 89th Regiment. Dunlop had spent nearly three days without stopping treating the wounded from the failed assault, working through a casualty list that ran past 800 British killed, wounded, captured, and missing. Drummond had just watched roughly a third of his division fall in a single night, much of it in the seconds the northeast bastion took to go up. No account explains exactly what Drummond said when he passed the blade over, only that he did it in the aftermath among the wounded and dying under Dunlop's care.
QWhat happened to Sergeant Richard Smith after he lost his arm at Fort Erie?
Smith, a sergeant in the 104th Foot, took five separate wounds during the assault before surgeons amputated his right arm. His commanding officers recommended him for a commission on the strength of his conduct under fire, an honor that would have lifted him from the enlisted ranks into the officer corps. The commission never came through, and no surviving record explains why the recommendation stalled. The recommendation went forward but never resulted in a commission, and no record explains where it stalled.
QWhat happened to the American schooners Ohio and Somers in the days before the assault?
On August 12, 1814, three nights before Drummond's columns went forward, British naval forces seized the American schooners Ohio and Somers on the Niagara River. British commanders read the capture as a sign that American resolve at Fort Erie was cracking. The garrison's actual strength and fighting condition were badly underestimated as a result. Three days later, Fischer's, Scott's, and Drummond's columns walked into defenses manned by roughly 2,200 Americans who had spent weeks digging in rather than the shaken force British intelligence expected to find.
