Author’s Note: Courage rarely announces itself. It forms through risk, resistance, and consequence long before history chooses names to remember. The Courage They Didn’t Teach moves decade by decade from the mid-1700s onward, setting aside hero worship to focus on moments when retreat looked safer but resolve demanded sacrifice. Please note that, since these people weren't readily celebrated, historical information may be light at times.
Each entry follows one life that faced danger, opposition, or erasure and stood firm without promise of reward. Some endured violence in the open. Others absorbed pressure in silence. Together, these stories show courage as a skill shaped by striving and refined long before applause, if applause comes at all.
A sailor who expects a gale doesn't wait for the sky to darken before checking the anchor line; he doubles the rope, tests each knot, and thinks through the strain before the first wave hits.
On Lake Champlain in 1814, Thomas Macdonough did something close to that — except the gale carried British guns, infantry, and the threat of a northern invasion route cutting deep into American territory.
Thomas Macdonough: 1783-1825
Macdonough entered the Navy as a midshipman in 1800 and learned his trade in hard waters, serving during the conflict with Tripoli, and joined the dangerous mission that destroyed the captured frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli Harbor. From the USS Constitution Museum:
Thomas McDonough, the son of an American Revolutionary War veteran, was born in Delaware on December 31, 1783. Orphaned at age 12, he worked as a store clerk for several years before getting a midshipman’s warrant in 1800.
For reasons unknown, his surname became “Macdonough.” He made one cruise during the Quasi-War with France aboard the 24-gun corvette Ganges. He then served in both the Second and Third Mediterranean Squadrons during the Barbary War, and distinguished himself as a volunteer in the crew that destroyed the captured frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli Harbor.
Promoted to lieutenant in 1807, he was ordered to the sloop-of-war Wasp and, in 1810, commanded the gunboats on the Connecticut shore. Later that year, he received permission to make a merchant voyage, after which he returned to command gunboats in New England.
By October 1812, he had command of American naval forces on Lake Champlain, where shipbuilding, training, supply shortages, and weather all became part of the same fight.
In September 1814, Britain saw Lake Champlain as a road into New York. Lt. Gen. George Prevost had a large invasion force moving south from Canada, while the Royal Navy needed control of the lake to support the army.
Macdonough understood the basic truth: Lose the lake, and the land force at Plattsburgh could be rolled up from the water. Hold the lake, and Prevost's army would have to fight without its shield. From War on the Rocks:
The Battle of Plattsburgh and the Battle of Lake Champlain on September 11, 1814 salvaged two years of dismal military losses for the United States, staving off the threat of losing the War of 1812.
By late summer 1814, American forces had little to show for their earlier efforts and stood on the brink of having to make major concessions to the British for peace. The U.S. Treasury was empty, fueling a financial crisis that worsened sectional tensions and pushed some Federalist leaders in New England to consider secession from the union.
The Royal Navy controlled the seas, strangling the American coastline with a blockade. Meanwhile, with Napoleon’s exile to Elba in April 1814, Britain’s military resources — once focused on continental Europe — seemed bound to crush the Americans. The month prior, British forces had conducted a successful diversionary feint in the mid-Atlantic, invading and burning Washington, D.C., destroying the Navy Yard, and preparing to besiege Baltimore in the hopes of drawing American forces away from the Canadian front.
Militarily, politically, economically, and socially, the war effort looked grim for the United States. Yet for the second time in the country’s short history, joint combat on Lake Champlain stopped a British invasion along the Great Warpath from Canada and turned the course of the war.
Macdonough didn't have the luxury of open-water engagement; he anchored his 14-vessel squadron inside Plattsburgh Bay, where wind, water, and geography could work against the stronger British approach. He prepared spring lines and anchors so his ships could rotate in place and bring fresh guns to bear after one side had been battered into silence.
Such work lacked glamour; nobody writes songs about rope, cable, and angle. Yet those details decided whether American cannon would keep speaking after British fire tore into the hulls.
On Sept. 11, 1814, the British squadron came in with 16 vessels. Macdonough's flagship, Saratoga, took brutal punishment from HMS Confiance. Cannon fire knocked him down more than once, yet he kept directing the fight. From Naval History and Heritage Command.
Prevost planned a joint land and lake attack. He advanced a British force of 10,350 along Lake Champlain’s south shore and on September 6 occupied Plattsburg, west of the Saranac River. Across the river, American defensive positions guarded the bridges. The American flotilla commanded by Captain Thomas Macdonough anchored off shore on the lake. The ships of the flotilla were USS Saratoga, Eagle, Ticonderoga, and Preble, plus ten gunboats. Prevost’s assault was to be coordinated with an attack on Macdonough by Captain George Downie’s naval squadron. It consisted of HMS Confidence, Linnet, Chubb, and Finch, plus twelve gunboats.
Downie arrived on September 11. He ordered his four ships abreast and sailed directly at the American line, firing his long-range guns. Macdonough’s guns were shorter range but heavier. The wind died, disrupting Downie’s formation. When the starboard batteries of USS Saratoga and USS Eagle were damaged, Macdonough used anchors to swing the ships so that their port guns could fire broadsides. Downie was crushed and killed by cannon and HMS Confidence, badly damaged, soon surrendered. USS Ticonderoga and USS Preble forced HMS Finch to beach, but USS Preble was heavily damaged. USS Chubb and USS Linnet did little and both struck their colors after being hit by several broadsides. Prevost watched the naval disaster and revoked his already on-going attack. The next day he withdrew his army back to Canada.
The result for the US was approximatley 100 dead, 120 wounded; for the British it was some 380 killed or wounded, more than 300 captured or deserted. The US victory at Plattsburgh influenced the terms of the December peace, drawn at the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812.
The result reached beyond one lake. Prevost withdrew to Canada after losing naval support, and Britain lost the leverage it needed to demand northern territory during the peace talks at Ghent.
Macdonough received the thanks of Congress, promotion to captain, and a gold medal, but his larger achievement deserves clearer memory. He helped prevent Britain from turning a bad American war into a national wound that might have healed very differently. From the U.S. Naval Institute:
When Macdonough was going to die, he relinquished command of the Mediterranean squadron and took passage homeward in a merchant ship; but it was not granted to his longing soul to pass away in his native land. He died at sea a few days before reaching it.
This was in 1825, and it was not until 1909 that a full biography of him was written by a descendant. Even Fenimore Cooper, who had the highest opinion of his abilities as an officer - higher than that of most of the officers whose lives he wrote, except Preble - did not, for some unknown reason, include Macdonough in his two volumes of naval biography.
Theodore Roosevelt probably expresses the judgment of most naval students when he says that "down to the time of the Civil War Macdonough is the greatest figure in our naval history."
But it is outside of his professional life as well as within it, that it is a tonic to an American to examine the character of Macdonough. His sincerity, his purity, his modesty, his courage, show him a man almost without a flaw.
Tuberculosis had badly weakened him, and he gave up command at Gibraltar in October 1825 and died aboard the merchant brig Edwin on Nov. 10, 1825, while sailing home.
The gale passed, and other names gathered more sunlight. Still, the hidden line held. Macdonough's courage lived in preparation before danger, composure during punishment, and duty after applause faded.
Next up in the series: Mary Pickersgill
Mary Pickersgill, the Baltimore flagmaker who stitched the enormous Fort McHenry garrison flag in 1813. Major George Armistead wanted a flag so large the British could see it from far away, and Pickersgill delivered one that measured 30 feet by 42 feet. Before the song became an anthem and before the flag became a national relic, a widow and craftswoman helped create the image that survived smoke, bombardment, and fear.
Other columns in this series
- Franklin Before the Break
- The Woman Who Printed the Names
- The Man Who Refused to Stay Quiet
- Measured by the Stars
- Courage Measured in Seconds
- Margaret Corbin’s Stand Under Fire
- Hidden in Plain Sight—Deborah Sampson
- The Man Who Listened
- A 16-Year-Old Against an Army
- The Shot That Steadied a Revolution
- Mum Bett and the Law
- Phillis Wheatley and the Cost of Freedom
- Ona Judge Chose Freedom Over Comfort
- Richard Allen, A Faith That Wouldn’t Sit in the Balcony
- John Fitch: Steam Before the Spotlight
- The Night Dolley Madison Refused to Run
- Tecumseh, the Shawnee Who Refused to Think Small
- Prudence Crandall’s Classroom Rebellion
- Maria Stewart Refused the Silence
- David Walker Lit the Fuse Slaveholders Feared
