The British troops at the foot of Lake Champlain had been heavily reenforced by veterans from the armies that had conquered Napoleon, and Sir George Prevost, who had been ordered to make an invasion of New York by the route taken by Burgoyne in 1777, seized the opportunity when the Americans at Plattsburg were weakened by the absence of Izard and the four thousand men he had taken with him to the Niagara frontier. The object of the movement was, to capture and hold a portion of the State of New York; so that when the pending peace negotiations were brought to a close, it might be stipulated that all territory should remain with the party in whose possession it then was, and this would give the English complete {261}control of the St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain, if not of Lake Ontario also. In accordance with this purpose, Prevost issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of that sparsely settled region, calling upon them to renounce allegiance to the United States, renew their allegiance to Great Britain, and furnish his troops subsistence. Had his forces been victorious, he would have claimed that this had been done, and the English would then probably have been successful in their purpose to "change the boundary of New York." General Alexander Macomb, who had been left in command at Plattsburg on the departure of General Izard, and had been told by that officer that he must expect to be driven out or made a prisoner by the enemy, had made up his mind to falsify the prediction, and exhibited wonderful energy in putting the place into a defensible condition. Saranac River, after running parallel with the shore of Lake Champlain for a short distance, turns sharply to the east and flows into Cumberland or Plattsburg Bay. On the peninsula thus enclosed, which is about half a mile wide, the Americans constructed three redoubts and two block-houses, one of them being at the mouth of the river. The north bank is about thirty feet high; and the south bank, which was the one occupied by the Ameri{262}cans, about fifty. Macomb had fifteen hundred regulars, and two thousand militia.