On September 1 Prevost invaded New York State by Lake Champlain. He advanced against Plattsburg, which he bombarded on the 11th, but his flotilla was defeated by an American flotilla during the bombardment, and he felt himself compelled to retreat into Canada. At the end of the year Sir Edward Pakenham took command of a force operating against New Orleans, but on January 8, 1815, he was defeated and killed by the American forces under the future president, Andrew Jackson. No expedition was ever worse planned than this; the veterans of the Peninsula were mowed down by a withering fire, and, losing confidence in their leaders, forfeited their reputation for invincible courage in attack. The fighting, however, was desperate while it lasted, and was compared by one engaged in it with the storm of Badajoz, and the deadly charges at Waterloo. It was but a small compensation for these failures that the British were able to annex a strip of territory belonging to the State of Maine. On the sea no general engagement took place, nor was there any naval duel so famous as that between the _Shannon_ and the _Chesapeake_ in the previous year. The Americans lost two of their best frigates, but, with crews largely composed of British sailors, captured several British ships of war. [Pageheading: _THE TREATY OF GHENT._] As early as January, 1814, advances had been made towards negotiations for peace, but they were not actually begun till August 6. In the course of a few days a serious difficulty arose, as the British commissioners demanded the delimitation of an Indian territory which should be exempt from territorial acquisitions on the part of either power, and also claimed the military occupation of the lakes for their own government. The Americans thereupon suspended the negotiations, and Castlereagh expressed grave discontent with the conduct of the British negotiators in pressing these points. Late in the year negotiations were resumed, when the British abandoned these claims. The far more comprehensive questions about the rights of neutrals, which had occasioned the war, had ceased to be of practical importance now that peace was restored in Europe. They were therefore, by tacit consent, suffered to drop, and a treaty signed at Ghent on December 24, 1814, ended a war of which the Canadians alone had reason to be proud.