In a fair national trial of the military faculties, courage, activity, and fortitude, discipline, gunnery, and tactics, for the first time the palm was awarded by Englishmen to Americans over Englishmen.  Without fortuitous advantage the Americans proved too much for the redoubtable English, though superior in number, therefore universally arrogating to themselves even with inferior numbers, a mastery but faintly questioned by most Americana; no accident to depreciate the triumph of the younger over the older nation; no more fortune than what favors the bravest.

Physical and even corporeal national characteristics, did not escape comparison in this normal contest.  The American rather more active and more demonstrative than his ancestors, many of the officers of imposing figure, Scott and McNeil particularly, towering with gigantic stature above the rest, stood opposed in striking contrast to the short, thick, brawny, burly Briton, hard to overcome....  The Marquis of Tweedale, with his sturdy, short person, and stubborn courage, represented the British....  Even the names betokened at once consanguinity and hostility.  Scott, McNeill, and McRee, in arms against Gordon, Hay, and Maconochie.  And the harsh Scotch nomenclature, compared with the more euphonious savage Canada, Chippewa, Niagara, which latter modern English prosody has corrupted from the measure of Goldsmith’s Traveller:—­

  “Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around,
  And Niagara stuns with thundering sound.”

...  Mankind impressed by numbers and bloodshed, regard the second more extensive battle near the falls of Niagara, on the 25th of the same month, between the same parties with British reinforcements, known as the battle of Bridgewater, as more important than its precursor....  The victory of Chippewa was the resurrection or birth of American arms, after their prostration by so long disuse, and when at length taken up again, by such continual and deplorable failures, that the martial and moral influence of the first decided victory opened and characterized an epoch in the annals and intercourse of the two kindred and rival nations, whose language is to be spoken, as their institutions are rapidly spreading, throughout most of mankind.  Fought between only some three or four thousand men in both armies, at a place remote from either of their countries, the battle of Chippewa may not bear vulgar comparison with the great military engagements of modern Europe.

...  The charm of British military invincibility was as effectually broken, by a single brigade, as that of naval supremacy was by a single frigate, as much as if a large army or fleet had been the agent.

* * * * *

=_Henry M. Brackenridge,[38] 1786-._= (Manual, p. 505.)

From “Recollections of the West.”

=_120._= OLD ST. GENEVIEVE, IN MISSOURI.