The Niagara Campaign of 1814: The Battle of Lundy's Lane “The poor fellows...could not have anticipated such a dreadful slaughter as they have since awfully witnessed" US Representative Samuel Sherwood on Lundy’s aftermath Further Reading The Battle of Lundy's Lane Background to the Battle of Lundy's Lane The Americans at Lundy's Lane The British at Lundy's Lane Two Accounts From The Battle Surgeon William Dunlop Tends to the Wounded William Dunlop Remembers a Tragic Scene Books Where Right and Glory Lead! The Battle of Lundy's Lane, 1814 Donald E Graves

The Aftermath of Lundy's Lane Back at Chippawa, only hours after the battle, Eleazar Ripley was chewed out by Jacob Brown for abandoning the guns that had been captured. Brown seemed to have forgotten that he ordered Ripley, who was committed to maintaining the position, to withdraw. Ripley's entirely valid explanation, that the men were simply too exhausted to physically pull the heavy guns all the way to Chippawa (no living horses could be found) fell on deaf ears. Ripley was ordered to march out in the morning, retake the battlefield, and collect the guns. When he led the battalion of 1200 men out at daybreak, Ripley found that a superior British force had moved forward a mile and was in battle formation. Ripley and his fellow officers decided it would be crazy to fight them. Unable to determine the size of the American force, Gordon Drummond would not initiate an attack. Drummond would later claim that the battle at Lundy's Lane was great victory over a larger enemy force. This was clearly not the case, but he could justify this only in that he was left on the battlefield, which meant, by gentlemanly rules of war, that he had the task of cleaning up. All morning, the British regulars and militia separated the dead from the dying. The reason they worked so quickly was that, in the July heat, the threat of disease was very real. Conditions were already bad enough without risking an epidemic. A mass grave was dug for the British dead in order to provide the semblance of a Christian burial; the American corpses were burned on a huge pyre. At Chippawa, the U.S. Army made fires of their own. They burned Riall's former fortifications north of the river as well as the Chippawa bridge, and then moved slowly southwards toward Fort Erie. There were so many wounded that Ripley had to order provisions and rations dumped in the river so the carts could be used to transport the injured. The situation was just the kind that Eleazar Ripley had feared all along; had no gains had been made on the peninsula, and the force they had begun with only three weeks prior, had been reduced by more than a third. The British eventually followed the Americans to Fort Erie and found them entrenched. The US Army had reinforced the fort and had regained its defiant spirit. Gordon Drummond's battalions would try for the better part of seven weeks to dislodge the Americans from Fort Erie without success. Both sides would mount attacks and lose more men in the process. Finally Drummond pulled back and the Americans, facing dwindling troops and provisions, took the opportunity to retreat to Black Rock. Though the weary Niagara inhabitants had no way of knowing it, this was the end of the war on their much-abused lands.