On December 10, 1813, two New Yorkers raged at each other in the entryway of Joseph McCarthy’s store on Queen Street in the Upper Canada village of Newark, known today as Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
Soldiers held back a crowd as the ranking officer in charge of the American troops occupying nearby Fort George, Brigadier-General George McClure (1771-1851) cursed a Buffalo physician and militia captain, the forty-four-year-old Dr. Cyrenius Chapin (1769-1838). Both were part of the New York State militia assigned by the United States regular army to occupy Canada’s Fort George.
With British troops fighting Napoleon in Europe, the fighting between American and British forces in what became known as the War of 1812 had been going well for the Americans in 1813.
But when British and European troops defeated Napoleon at Leipzig, President James Madison decided it was urgent for the United States to control the St. Lawrence River and capture Montreal and Quebec before Britain reassigned troops to Canada.
Just a few weeks before the Queen Street confrontation, McClure had assumed command of the occupied Fort George as American army regulars were reassigned to the Saint Lawrence campaign.
Niagara-on-the-Lake Burns
General McClure was a part-time farmer and land speculator from Bath, NY (in Steuben County), whose skills leaned towards self-promotion. With frigid winter winds approaching, most of McClure’s militia were nearing the end of their terms of service and eager to return to their families.
In a letter to Secretary of War John Armstrong, cosigned by Dr. Chapin and Buffalo congressman Peter Porter, McClure insisted reinforcements were needed if Fort George was to be held.
Instead, he received orders to destroy Fort George and vacate the Canadian shore. In McClure’s mind, this required destroying the neighboring town of Newark to prevent its residents from offering refuge to British troops that would soon reoccupy the area.
On December 10, 1813, McClure ordered a contingent of his militia to knock on doors, give one hour’s notice, then torch all eighty Newark homes.
Dr. Chapin and his wife Sylvia had lived on the Canadian shore when they first arrived on the Niagara frontier in 1803. Even after building their home, office, and drugstore in Buffalo, his medical practice included many patients from Canada.
The apprentice-trained Chapin possessed a commanding, paternalistic temperament backed by a stubborn willingness to tackle any affliction his patients suffered. He slept little and had a reputation for denouncing people he did not admire with direct statements that often led to conflict.
He could not abide by McClure’s orders, which would send women, children and elderly into a Niagara frontier winter. Though in the militia – Chapin’s rank was only that of captain – he was used to being listened to and thought little about challenging a superior officer.
His anger was punctuated with expletives describing McClure as callous and spiteful. It was enough, he said, to destroy the barracks and buildings at Fort George. Burning Newark would accomplish nothing short of satisfying a sadistic wish to visit undeserved misery on non-combatants. In return, McClure accused Chapin of being an unpatriotic partisan who typified uncivilized backwoods sodbusters.
Holding rank’s upper hand, McClure charged Chapin with mutiny, ordered him arrested for treason, and had him escorted to the stockade at gunpoint. McClure’s report on the incident reads, “there is not a greater rascal [who] exists than Chapin, and he is supported by a pack of Tories and enemies to our government.”
Being an ardent Federalist and British hater, nothing could have insulted Chapin more than being called a Tory. Within hours, several of Chapin’s supporters confronted the stockade guards and freed him without resistance.
This was not the first quarrel between Dr. Chapin and McClure. A few days earlier, to prove that the British were lurking in the woods around Fort George, Chapin had defied orders and marched his militia into the Canadian countryside.
As he suspected, his outfit was soon attacked by a British militia. Hemmed down, Chapin sent a messenger to Fort George asking for help. McClure refused to send anyone to support Chapin, telling his officers that he hoped Chapin would be captured, or worse.
The day after McClure destroyed Newark, Chapin resigned his militia appointment.
His resignation read, “The ill-fated town of Newark was burned, under his [McClure’s] orders, the night of the 10th of December, 1813. Here was exhibited a scene of distress which language would be inadequate to describe. Women and children were turned out of doors in a cold and stormy night; the cries of infants, the decrepitude of age, and the debility of sickness, had no impression upon this monster in human shape; they were consigned to that house whose canopy was the heavens, and whose walls were as boundless as the wide world.”
The Buffalo Gazette sided with Chapin and excoriated McClure for the burning of Newark, sparking widespread condemnation of McClure’s command. Other newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Gazette, called McClure’s order a “wanton and abominable act.”
McClure Deserts Buffalo
Once he burned Newark and abandoned Fort George, McClure abandoned Buffalo. He withdrew his entire battalion, likely a mix of regular and militia troops numbering between 200 and 300 soldiers, to Batavia, NY (in Genesee County), thirty miles east of Buffalo.
Buffalonians protested McClure’s desertion, but his response was that the citizens of Buffalo should arrest “that damned rascal Chapin.” Upon reaching Batavia, McClure surrendered his command to Major General Amos Hall, and Buffalo’s defense was left to a few volunteers who pledged their allegiance to Dr. Chapin.
As a militia leader, Dr. Chapin’s record was mixed. He had commanded a rowboat with six men in one of Winfield Scott’s early naval operations against Fort Erie, Canada.
In May 1813, when 4,500 troops under the command of United States Major General Henry Dearborn (1751-1829) captured Fort George and the village of Newark, the Buffalo Gazette reported, “Dr. C. Chapin, was in the vanguard.”
Chapin’s Buffalo militia, numbering about forty, was described as “showing up where they were least expected, always ready, and effective in their unique style of hit and run warfare.”
But, a major challenge for both armies was feeding the troops, prompting Chapin to lead his Buffalo militia, renowned as the “Forty Thieves,” on reconnaissance missions across the Canadian peninsula raiding food stores from official Canadian buildings and British loyalists.
In June 1813, Chapin’s actions accumulated enemies, and many British loyalists began viewing Chapin as a brigand. Chapin devised a raid on a British regiment at Beaver Dams, but, unsure of Chapin’s ability to command a large force, the American generals assigned a career officer to lead the attack.
Despite Chapin’s warning, that officer carelessly marched his American troops into an ambush and the “Forty Thieves” became British prisoners.
While being transported to a prison camp, Chapin distracted the British guards by telling bawdy stories. On cue, he signaled his men to overcome their guards and by morning they had returned to Fort George; the British guards now American captives.
Retribution
Upon McClure’s abandonment of Fort George, British/Canadian troops promptly returned to the area, but found themselves saddled with an urgent need to feed themselves and Newark’s refugees.
On December 18, 1813, British/Canadian forces crossed the Niagara River and seized army supplies stored at Fort Niagara. The only resistance came from a few Native American Tuscarora men who attempted to rescue a family from the assault. Before returning to Canada, the British burned the Tuscarora village and the village of Lewiston.
Days later, American General Hall learned British troops were staging for a full-fledged invasion. However, McClure’s departure had left the American troops in disarray and also desperate for food and supplies.
So, stuck in Batavia, General Hall sent a messenger to order Dr. Chapin to conduct hit-and-run raids on British positions in Canada to delay, or at least confuse the British.
Near midnight on December 29, 1813, nineteen days after the burning of Newark, British soldiers, fortified by Algonquin and Mohawk mercenaries, made a second landing near Fort Niagara under the command of British General Phineas Riall. Once again, Fort Niagara was poorly guarded by two colonels and a few men who quickly abandoned the fort.
A courier was sent to alert Dr. Chapin who raced a ragtag cavalry unit towards Fort Niagara where one soldier said, “The irascible doctor furiously damned the two colonels and their men for not having driven away the British, and delivered General Hall’s order that they should immediately make an attack.”
But the British had already begun their march south along the Niagara River to Black Rock and Buffalo. They were burning everything in their path and being reinforced by more British/Canadian, Algonquin and Mohawk troops crossing the Niagara River along the way. Using guerrilla tactics, Dr. Chapin’s small cavalry harassed the advancing British troops.
Motivated by the fervency to save their own families, every pause in battle meant a few men ran off for home. When they encountered fresh British reinforcements landing just north of Buffalo at Scajaquada Creek, Chapin’s remaining unit was showered by a crushing volley of musketry that in the darkness seemed to arise from everywhere. Chapin’s last few men broke ranks and rushed back to Buffalo to gather their families.
By the time British troops approached Buffalo’s northern edge, Riall’s forces included fifty Canadian militiamen, four-hundred indigenous mercenaries, and one-thousand British regulars.
They had burned six villages and every home encountered along the way, paying little heed to Chapin’s assaults or those of other impromptu defenders. Most of the way, the British regulars marched in formation along the portage route that paralleled the Niagara River, leaving their indigenous mercenaries to clear their advance with war screams and destruction.
Chapin also rushed into Buffalo where he ordered his wife and daughters to flee. Knowing most escaping families would be on roads that would quickly churn into impassable mud, Chapin instructed his family and one remaining apprentice to walk to a farm they owned in Hamburg, thirteen miles away. They were to take the footpath through the Seneca village at Buffalo Creek.
Chapin then hurried back to the front line, recruiting five men and boys along the way. At the northern edge of the village, the impromptu unit erected a barrier across the portage road to block the advancing Redcoats. They then mounted a nine-pound cannon on the barrier. As the Redcoat formation approached, the first cannonball blew a hole in the front line. The second shot misfired.
Chapin tied a handkerchief to his sword, mounted a horse, and shouted, “Every man for himself and the devil for us all.” One member of Chapin’s tiny squad, twelve-year-old James Aigin, said the doctor rode towards the advancing British army, alone, after ordering his little squad to race through the village shouting a final message to abandon Buffalo.
The doctor offered British General Riall the total surrender of Buffalo and all public property in exchange for protection of private property and an agreement that women and children would not be harmed. He offered himself as a prisoner.
Chapin later wrote, “A large body of British troops were now within thirty rods of us, and the Indians had nearly surrounded the town. [Some] were in full pursuit of the distressed inhabitants, who had no means of making a rapid retreat, or [offer] the least resistance. In this situation, I conceived it my duty to resort to some stratagem to save the people from inevitable destruction.”
It is unlikely that Riall could have stopped the conflagration even if Dr. Chapin had the authority to bargain. The British paid Native American tribes, not individuals, making plunder the only reward mercenaries had for risking their lives.
One Buffalonian, Job Hoysington, took a position on the corner of Main and Utica Streets as his wife and their two small children fled. It would be spring’s thaw before Job’s heroism was affirmed. His gunpowder and pellet pouch were empty, and his musket lay by his side. Job saved his family, but a bullet piercing his brain sealed his ultimate defeat.
In the early hours of December 30, 1813, British troops followed their mercenaries into Buffalo village proper. Every home was entered, then torched. One woman, Mrs. Lovejoy, is said to have stood in defiant confrontation as troops broke into her house. They stabbed her and threw her body into the street. Within the hour, the house was torched.
One-hundred-four homes, 43 barns, and 18 stores were destroyed as were four schooners trapped in Black Rock harbor ice. One eyewitness reported that by 3 pm on New Year’s Eve, the British began loading their boats to return across the Niagara River to Canada. They carried with them the belongings of every citizen from Youngstown to Buffalo.
New Year’s Day 1814 dawned clear and cold as a few citizens returned to a ghastly scene. Most of the bodies were stripped, tomahawked and scalped. Only the walls of two stone buildings, the Seneca Street blacksmith shop and the jail on Washington Street, broke Buffalo’s landscape.
The British invasion depopulated a tract of 160 square miles of Western New York that paralleled the east banks of the Niagara River, including the villages of Buffalo, Black Rock, Niagara Falls, Lewiston and Youngstown. Previously abandoned wilderness cabins, barns and sheds sheltered desperate families as mothers gave refuge to orphans roaming the countryside.
General Riall sent the notorious Dr. Cyrenius Chapin under heavy guard to the British prisoner of war camp in Montreal, where he was held for nine months.
Meanwhile, the American army proved unable to wrest control of the St. Lawrence River from the British. In July 1814, American troops attempted to retake Fort George in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. The Americans failed, but the battle proved to be the bloodiest ever fought in the province of Ontario.
Back in England, the parliament grew tired of continuous wars and the taxes needed to fund them, forcing King George III to seek a treaty and end the war. On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1814, the Treaty of Ghent officially ended hostilities, though the war’s last battle, the Battle of New Orleans, was fought two weeks into January, 1815.
Dr. Chapin spent a lifetime blaming McClure’s burning of Newark for the British burning of Buffalo, though burning cities was common in wars in the nineteenth-century. The Americans had already burned York (today’s Toronto), and the British would later burn Washington, D.C.
About his last stand, Chapin later wrote, “Although I failed in saving the town, still I succeeded in securing the retreat of many inhabitants who would have otherwise fallen victims to savage vengeance.”
Read more about the War of 1812.
Dr. Thomas C. Rosenthal is Emeritus Professor of Family Medicine in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. He has authored two medical history books about Upstate New York; Bloodletting and Germs: A Doctor in Nineteenth Century Rural New York (2020) and Cyrenius Chapin: Buffalo’s First Physician and War of 1812 Hero (2025).
Illustrations, from above: Edward Walsh’s “A View of Fort George, Navy Hall and New Niagara, taken from the United States Fort of Old Niagara April 20th 1804” (courtesy William Clements Library, University of Michigan); New correct map of the seat of war in Lower Canada (1814); Portrait of Dr. Cyrenius Chapin based on descriptions of Chapin and the facial characteristics of his descendants (created for a Buffalo newspaper in 1927); George McClure (artist unknown); Major General Phineas Riall (unknown artist); Chapin’s Defense of Buffalo by Raymond Massy (courtesy of Buffalo History Museum); and a contemporary drawing of citizens fleeing Buffalo on December 30, 1812 by LeGrand St. John (Buffalo History Museum).
