Cannonballs over Lewes — the bombardment, and what it cost

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

The blockade, and a demand for cattle

In March 1813 British warships entered Delaware Bay to enforce the blockade of the American coast. On 4 April a squadron under Commodore John P. Beresford, in HMS Poictiers, anchored off Cape Henlopen and stood in toward Lewes.

Beresford was after provisions. When his shore parties were turned away by the arriving Delaware militia, he wrote to “the first magistrate at Lewistown” requesting twenty live bullocks with a proportionate quantity of vegetables and hay for the squadron, to be “immediately paid for at the Philadelphia prices” — and added that if the request were refused he should be under the necessity of destroying the town.

The letter reached the Governor of Delaware, who had come down from Dover as the confrontation developed. He replied that supplying a blockading squadron would break the laws of the United States, and declined.

Twenty-two hours of it

The bombardment ran from 6 April into 7 April, twenty-two hours in all. The British used solid shot and Congreve rockets — the incendiary rocket artillery of the period, the same weapon that supplied the “rockets’ red glare” at Baltimore the following year.

It was almost entirely ineffective. Chimneys were knocked about, houses and businesses took damage from naval fire, and one house kept a cannonball in its foundation permanently, which is why we still have the Cannonball House. The town was not taken and never looked like being taken. American gunners ashore returned fire and set one British gunboat alight.

Beresford broke off on 7 April and withdrew to resume the blockade. The engagement is reckoned an American victory.

The casualty return

The American record of losses for the entire twenty-two hours is one pig, wounded, with a broken leg, and one chicken, killed. The British recorded no casualties at all.

It is a genuinely comic figure and it is also a serious one. A squadron of the most powerful navy in the world spent a day and a night firing on a defended town and could not force it. Coastal bombardment without troops ashore was, over and over in this war, an expensive way to break windows.

The town’s own defences were thin — a revolution-era battery west of the settlement and a fort hastily built out of pine logs in the centre — and the militia holding them were largely local men, including bay and river pilots. They did not need to win. They only needed to not sell the cattle.

Why Lewes still talks about it

Two hundred years on, the bombardment is the event Lewes commemorates most visibly: the cannonball in the wall, the 1812 Memorial Park, the guns in the museum yard. For a small town, a defensive victory with no dead is close to a perfect founding story — dramatic, unambiguous and harmless.

It is worth holding the scale in mind. This was a raid over provisions during a blockade, not a campaign, and Lewes was one of many coastal places the Royal Navy leaned on that year. What makes it memorable is not the military significance but the refusal, and the poultry.

From the original page at this address

“Cannonballs and Congreve rockets shattered the calm of coast and countryside on April 6 and 7, 1813, during America’s ‘second war for independence.’ The War of 1812 washed ashore at little Lewistown on Delaware Bay when for a dramatic 22-hour period there was an exchange of cannonballs.”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Cannonballs Over Lewes”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.