Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Chesapeake Bay Flotilla was a motley collection of barges and gunboats that the United States assembled under the command of Joshua Barney, an 1812 privateer captain, to stall British attacks in the Chesapeake Bay which came to be known as the "Chesapeake campaign" during the War of 1812.
Since 1813 the Royal Navy had carried out a campaign in Chesapeake Bay, raiding the shorelines of Virginia and Maryland. The raids targeted public buildings and supplies in a hope of diverting American troops from the Canada front and persuading US civilians to advocate for peace at a time when British forces were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars .
The Chesapeake campaign was a strategic offensive of the Royal Navy designed to destroy American naval resources, vessels, forts, dockyards and arsenals; and impose a full naval blockade of the Atlantic Coast in order to seize ships and powder magazines from Charleston to New York. [1] The Chesapeake campaign battles: [NB 1] Rappahannock (3 ...
As part of the British expedition to the Chesapeake Bay in the middle of 1814, a naval force under Commodore James Alexander Gordon was ordered to sail up the Potomac River and attack Fort Washington. The raid was supposed to be a demonstration, to distract American troops from the main British attack on Washington under General Robert Ross.
[2]: 29 Cockburn therefore sent Commander John Lawrence at the head of a flotilla of sixteen [2]: 29 or nineteen [3] boats to row across the shoals, beginning at midnight on 3 May. [1] Despite or because of intelligence warning of an impending attack, most of the militia that had been in Havre de Grace had departed before the raid.
That year in 1814, during the Chesapeake campaign, they proceeded up the Chesapeake Bay, as there were no forts guarding the mouth of the bay at the time (this led to the building of Fort Monroe beginning in the 1820s, to close the bay to enemy vessels), routing Admiral Barney's flotilla of gunboats, carrying out the Raid on Alexandria, landing ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
His men had been confined aboard their transports for nearly three months, and he lacked cavalry, artillery, and transport. Ross was also wary of the U.S. Chesapeake Bay Flotilla (three gunboats and ten gun-armed barges) [16] lurking in the Patuxent River. [17] His first objective had to be the capture or destruction of the U.S. flotilla.