Battle of Chippawa, 1814: "Those are regulars, by God!"

From across the plain they looked like militia. Their jackets were gray, not the blue of the regular army, and Major General Phineas Riall expected militia to scatter after a few volleys. He marched his three regiments over the Chippawa River to brush them aside. Then the gray line came on through the cannon fire without losing its order, and the British commander realized his mistake too late. In the American telling he exclaimed, “Those are regulars, by God!”²

Background: the third summer of war

The War of 1812 was entering its third summer. In 1814 the main American effort was the Niagara frontier: Major General Jacob Brown's Left Division was to cross the Niagara River, sweep north along the peninsula, meet the navy's Lake Ontario squadron and then strike at targets such as Burlington Bay, York or Kingston as circumstances allowed.³

On 3 July the division crossed the Niagara into Upper Canada and took Fort Erie within hours. The next day Brown sent Scott's brigade north along the river road. A British force of infantry, cavalry and artillery under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Pearson, ordered to keep contact and delay the advance, did its job so well that it was dusk before Scott reached the Chippawa River, the British line of defense. The bridge had been partly destroyed. Scott pulled back to camp behind Street's Creek, to the south, and Brown came up with the rest of the division that night.⁴

Armies and commanders

What set Brown's division apart was its training. Through the spring Brown and Scott drilled their still-raw regulars hard in camps of instruction in northern New York, and by the time they crossed the Niagara they knew their drill, though not yet battle. Uniforms were short, and many of Scott's men went to war in the gray cloth normally issued to militia, a detail that would matter on 5 July.⁵

The size of the American force depends on whom you count. HistoryOfWar.org puts Brown's whole division at about 4,000 men: 2,400 regular infantry in the brigades of Scott and Eleazar Ripley, 300 artillerymen, 600 Pennsylvania volunteers and 600 Native American warriors. The Lilly Library at Indiana University gives about 3,500 men crossing the river. On the field at Chippawa itself, The Canadian Encyclopedia counts roughly 2,000 on each side.⁶

Riall commanded the British forces on the Niagara, and the speed of the invasion caught him out. The commander at Fort Erie sent riders to warn him before surrendering, but for several days Riall seems to have believed that only a small American force had crossed, or that much of it was tied down besieging the fort. Against Brown he could gather about 2,000 regulars, Canadian militia and First Nations warriors. Parks Canada lists 1,400 regulars, 70 cavalry and 300 Indigenous allies; HistoryOfWar.org gives 1,500 regulars and 300 militia and warriors. His three regular regiments were the 1st Foot (the Royal Scots), the 8th (the King's) and the 100th.⁷

The battle in phases

Riall's mistake

Between the two camps lay a broad plain, bordered by woods on the west and the Niagara on the east. During 5 July Riall had the American camp scouted and concluded, wrongly, that it was held by militia; his scouts had seen the gray coats. Convinced he could beat about 2,000 Americans with the force he had, he repaired the bridge and prepared to march onto the plain. Brown, for his part, expected the British to be reinforced and wanted to strike first.⁸

Fighting in the woods

Brown moved first. He sent about 500 Pennsylvania militia and Native warriors into the woods on the west side of the plain to clear out the British skirmishers there. They pushed north until they ran into Pearson's light infantry and Canadian militia, and then into Riall's main force crossing the river, and were driven back toward their camp.⁹

Line against line

Brown ordered Scott forward. His brigade crossed Street's Creek and formed on the open ground just as Riall's line came into position, late in the afternoon. Riall's plan was simple: advance in line, fire a volley and charge, and wait for the Americans to break.¹⁰

They did not break. Riall watched the gray-clad troops keep their order under artillery fire and realized, as The Canadian Encyclopedia puts it, that he faced well-trained regulars; the famous exclamation is attributed to him by the American Battlefield Trust as an allegation rather than a record. Worse, as his line advanced and widened, it masked the fire of his own guns, while the American guns kept firing.¹¹

Turning point

The battle came down to discipline and musketry at close range. The two lines loaded and fired into each other for somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes: about 30 by The Canadian Encyclopedia's estimate, 25 by the American Battlefield Trust's, 20 by HistoryOfWar.org's. It was the Americans who held. The British line wavered, and Riall ordered a withdrawal. His men left in good order, crossed back over the Chippawa and dropped the bridge behind them.¹²

Aftermath

The casualty figures were heavy for an afternoon's work. Riall reported 148 killed, 321 wounded and 46 missing, figures given by both The Canadian Encyclopedia and HistoryOfWar.org. For the Americans The Canadian Encyclopedia gives 58 killed, 241 wounded and 19 missing, and HistoryOfWar.org around 60 dead and 300 to 350 casualties in all, most of them in Scott's brigade. Parks Canada sums it up as about 200 men killed and more than 500 wounded.¹³

Strategically the victory settled little. The armies stayed in place for two days before the British fell back toward Fort George. The naval support on Lake Ontario on which Brown's plan depended never appeared. Three weeks later, on 25 July, the two armies met again at Lundy's Lane, near Niagara Falls, in a long and fierce fight that ended in a draw with both Brown and Scott wounded. The Americans then fell back to Fort Erie, where the British besieged them. Parks Canada counts four months of heavy fighting in all, with major actions at Lundy's Lane, Fort Erie and Cook's Mills, before the invaders were forced back across the river to the United States.¹⁴

Legacy and memory

The historian John R. Grodzinski calls Chippawa a momentous event, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University describes it as the first time the United States had beaten British forces in an equal contest on open ground. In open country, against British regulars of equal strength, a brigade of trained American regulars had stood its ground and won. Britannica notes that Chippawa and Lundy's Lane made Winfield Scott a national hero; he was a major general by the war's end. For Brown, in Dennis Showalter's verdict, the hard fighting of 1814 made him the ideal model of a citizen soldier.¹⁵ › Winfield Scott

Canada remembers the battle too, from the other side. The battlefield was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, in 1921 according to Parks Canada's register and in 1920 according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, and a stone cairn and plaque of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada mark it. The Canadian Encyclopedia's entry on the site sums up its meaning: fought between equally matched opponents, the battle proved that American infantry could be as good as British infantry.¹⁶

Visiting the battlefield today

The battlefield lies about 1.6 kilometers south of the village of Chippawa, now part of Niagara Falls, Ontario, on the west side of the Niagara River Parkway. It is preserved as Chippawa Battlefield Park, about 300 acres (121 hectares) owned by the Niagara Parks Commission, with a self-guided trail. There are no visible remains of the battle, but the landscape keeps its wooded northern section and open fields, and the cairn stands beside the Niagara River Recreation Trail on the east side of the park.¹⁷ › 5 July in military history