In 1814, following the French surrender, "Menelaus" was assigned to the North American Station and sent to Bermuda, which had been identified in 1783, on the independence of the United States, as potentially Britain's most important North American naval base (safer than Halifax against both naval and overland attack, and in a position, 640 miles off North Carolina, to dominate the Atlantic Seaboard) where the Royal Navy had been operating since 1795 from St. George's Town (with the Admiralty House nearby at "Mount Wyndham", in Hamilton Parish), at the East End, while the Royal Naval Dockyard was under construction at the West End. With the outbreak of the American War of 1812, the blockade of the American Atlantic coast (from which New England, where support for the war was low and upon which Britain relied for grain, was at first spared) was orchestrated from Bermuda throughout the war. In August 1814, a force of 2,500 soldiers under General Robert Ross freed from the Peninsular War arrived in Bermuda aboard , three frigates, three sloops and ten other vessels, intended to be used for diversionary raids along the coasts of Maryland and Virginia. In response to Sir George Prévost's request for an attack in retaliation for the "wanton destruction of private property along the north shores of Lake Erie" by American forces under Colonel John Campbell in May 1814, the most notable being the Raid on Port Dover) to draw United States forces away from the Canadian border., they were instead used, along with the naval and military units already on the station, to strike at Washington, D.C. in the Chesapeake Campaign, resulting in British victory at the Battle of Bladensburg, the Burning of Washington, and the Raid on Alexandria, and a failed attempt on Baltimore.