Five days passed, and still no reinforcements arrived, and no regular troops were even ordered to start for Niagara. “I apprehended an attack,” wrote McClure;288 and he retired thirty miles to Buffalo, “with a view of providing for the defence.” On the night of December 18 Colonel Murray, with five hundred and fifty regular rank-and-file, crossed the river from Fort George unperceived; surprised the sentinels on the glacis and at the gates of Fort Niagara; rushed through the main gate; and, with a loss of eight men killed and wounded, captured the fortress with some three hundred and fifty prisoners.

Nothing could be said on the American side in defence or excuse of this disgrace. From Armstrong at the War Department to Captain Leonard who commanded the fort, every one concerned in the transaction deserved whatever punishment the law or army regulations could inflict. The unfortunate people of Niagara and Buffalo were victims to official misconduct. The British, thinking themselves released from ordinary rules of war by the burning of Newark and Queenston, showed unusual ferocity. In the assault on Fort Niagara they killed sixty-seven Americans, all by the bayonet, while they wounded only eleven. Immediately afterward they “let loose”289 their auxiliary Indians on Lewiston and the country around. On the night of December 29, Lieutenant-General Drummond sent a force of fifteen hundred men including Indians290 across the river above the falls, and driving away the militia, burned Black Rock and Buffalo with all their public stores and three small war-schooners.291

These acts of retaliation were justified by Sir George Prevost in a long proclamation292 dated Jan. 12, 1814, which promised that he would not “pursue further a system of warfare so revolting to his own feelings and so little congenial to the British character unless the future measures of the enemy should compel him again to resort to it.” The Americans themselves bore Drummond’s excessive severity with less complaint than usual. They partly suspected that the destruction effected on the Thames, at York and at Newark, by American troops, though unauthorized by orders, had warranted some retaliation; but they felt more strongly that their anger should properly be vented on their own government and themselves, who had allowed a handful of British troops to capture a strong fortress and to ravage thirty miles of frontier, after repeated warning, without losing two hundred men on either side, while thousands of regular troops were idle elsewhere, and the neighborhood ought without an effort to have supplied five thousand militia.

Fort Niagara, which thus fell into British hands, remained, like Mackinaw, in the enemy’s possession until the peace.