by Ian W. Toll
No one expected the embargo to continue through the spring sailing season of 1809, but the question of what policy would replace it posed a conundrum. William Crawford of Georgia said that if Congress repealed the embargo, it was honor-bound to declare war; any other policy would be “mere whipping the devil round the stump.” But there was not much enthusiasm for war, either in Congress or among the American people at large. To challenge “the powerful navy of Great Britain on the sea,” said Congressman Alston of North Carolina, would bring “a loss of everything dear to the American character—a loss of our liberty and independence as a free people.”
The nation was rudderless, unsettled, and unhappy, and its leaders eventually chose to procrastinate. At the outset of the Madison administration, the embargo was repealed and trade reinstated with all nations except England and France. When and if either belligerent power should act to withdraw its objectionable orders, the president was authorized to restore full trading rights with that nation, leaving the restrictions in place for the other. Though American merchant ships were technically not permitted to trade with either England or France, however, all knew that this restriction was unenforceable and would be widely disregarded. American merchantmen were essentially free to seek markets where they could find them, eluding capture or harassment as best they could.
During the embargo, none of the frigates except Chesapeake had seen oceangoing service. Early in 1809, a growing pro-navy faction among the Republicans joined with the Federalists to force a change in policy. The House passed a bill to increase naval enlistment from 1,440 to 2,000. In a surprise move, the Senate added an amendment to fit out, man, and deploy “all the frigates and other armed vessels of the United States.” Treasury Secretary Gallatin decried the waste of an estimated $6 million at a time when the treasury had been impoverished by the embargo. To mobilize the navy without regard to national purpose, he said, would sacrifice “the Republican cause itself, and the people of the United States, to a system of favoritism, extravagance, parade, and folly.” After a lengthy debate in the House—in which the pro- and anti-navalist arguments might as well have been lifted word for word from the debates of 1794, 1798, 1804, and so on—the offending provision was sent to a House-Senate committee. The Senate conferees stood firm, maintaining that the frigates were needed in service to “defend the gunboats and their operation,” and to induce seamen to enlist in the navy, since few could be recruited to serve in the gunboats. In the end, the House agreed to a compromise. Four frigates, including President and United States, would be returned to active service.
After eight years as Treasury Secretary, Gallatin aspired to succeed Madison as Secretary of State, and Madison was willing to nominate him to the office. But Gallatin’s enemies in Congress (including William Branch Giles, who wanted the office for himself, and Senator Samuel Smith, brother of Navy Secretary Robert Smith) rounded up enough votes to deny him confirmation, focusing on his foreign birth as a disqualifier. Instead, Robert Smith was nominated and confirmed as the new Secretary of State, and Gallatin remained at Treasury. This ended Smith’s long reign as Secretary of the Navy. In his place Madison nominated Paul Hamilton, a little-known former governor of South Carolina. The navy’s officers initially regarded the change with anxiety, but most soon took a liking to Hamilton. “You may rest assured of one fact,” William Bainbridge told a colleague, after meeting Hamilton, “that we have an excellent secretary and that he is a most zealous friend to the navy.”
Bainbridge took command of the USS President and got her underway from Hampton Roads in September 1809, with orders to patrol the mid-Atlantic coast. After an eight-day passage from the Virginia Capes, in which the President encountered constant headwinds and a three-day gale, she crept into New York Harbor, already in need of a refit. Anchored in the East River, not far from the Brooklyn Navy Yard in which she had been born a decade earlier, the President’s sails and rigging were thoroughly overhauled. Her hull received a new coat of paint and her decks a new layer of cork. She took on water and provisions sufficient for a long voyage. Sailing again on September 25, President patrolled the New England coast, harbored three days at Newport, and then stretched away to the south as far as Charleston. The big frigate, Bainbridge said, was “as fast a sailing Ship as Swims.” The cruise to the south, he told John Rodgers, was a series of “Gales, Shoals, the Shores, rocks, Cape Hatteras…the Gulf Stream.”
Returning to the Virginia Capes and anchoring in Lynnhaven Bay in late October, the frigate was buffeted by “a most furious snow storm accompanied with hail & rain…it blew a perfect storm; we parted one of our best cables about 12 o’clock and expected every moment to go ashore on a very dangerous shoal called the horse shoe.” A sailor was lost overboard as he was climbing the rigging to the foretop—his freezing hands had not been able to grip the ratlines. In the President’s anchorage that night, one merchant brig was wrecked on the beach and another driven out to sea. Several others limped into the bay, dismasted.
The sailing season had emphatically come to a close, but Bainbridge was determined to force his crew into a state of high efficiency and readiness, and he hurried the President back into the offing. “I am growing old and heartily tired of the sea. My constitution is by no means as strong as it was,” the thirty-five-year-old captain wrote David Porter, with whom he had shared the long captivity in Tripoli:
But when I have a ship complete in every respect for action and service, I cannot bear the idea of lying in port…. As a strong proof of my declaration, I gave up double lanteens [lanterns] on the Norfolk station where I commanded, to come to sea at this season of the year, to harden and discipline my crew. I am the only ship that is now cruising or has been this winter. I have as fine a ship and as well officered as I could possibly wish, and if opportunity offers, I trust the result will be such as my countrymen would approve and as you, my dear Friend, would have no cause to blush.
Navigating as far south as the St. Mary’s River, patrolling for illegal slave ships (the slave trade having been outlawed in 1807), the President sighted very few vessels of any sort, and her crew could not see “Sun, Moon, or Stars” for days on end. She chased a 22-gun British sloop of war, the Squirrel, out of American territorial waters. According to Midshipman Henry Gilliam, Bainbridge told the crew that if the President was obliged to go into action, “he would never surrender while life remained…[and vowed] never to strike but to sink alongside.”
In June 1810, William Bainbridge was transferred to shore duty, and John Rodgers assumed command of a squadron that included both President (his flagship) and Constitution, commanded by Isaac Hull. Rodgers planned to take both frigates to Boston, where they would rendezvous with additional vessels and patrol American waters in force. Secretary Hamilton’s orders emphasized that the disgrace of the Chesapeake must never be repeated:
You, like every other patriotic American, have observed and deeply feel the injuries and insults heaped on our Country by the two great belligerents of Europe…. Amongst these stands most conspicuous the inhuman and dastardly attack on our Frigate the Chesapeake—an outrage which prostrated the flag of our Country….
What has been perpetrated may again be attempted. It is therefore our duty to be prepared and determined at every hazard, to vindicate the injured honour of our Navy, and revive the drooping Spirit of the Nation.
After these orders were read aloud to the officers and crews of both frigates, Midshipman Gilliam wrote his uncle to say that “you may expect to hear shortly of a little fighting.”
But the Constitution was too slow to sail in company with the President. She was moving through the water like a barge, and Captain Hull knew why. Seven years had passed since her bottom had been sheathed in Paul Revere’s copper, and she was due for a thorough cleaning. On July 26, in Hampton Roads, Hull arranged to have divers examine the frigate’s bottom. They found enormous colonies of barnacles, mussels, oysters, and seaweed. To underscore the point, Hull arranged to have samples sent to
Washington, where they must have arrived fairly ripe after a week-long journey in high summer. The Constitution, Hull told Secretary Hamilton, had “ten waggon loads of them on her bottom…you can have no doubts as to the cause of her not sailing.”
In August, Hull took the Constitution up the Delaware river into fresh water, hoping that the saltwater shellfish hanging from the hull like “bunches of grapes” would perish and fall off. The mussels let go quickly, but the oysters were more stubborn. Two weeks of vigorous scouring with a custom-designed iron scraper were needed to restore the ship to a respectable condition.
NO ONE HELD OUT MUCH HOPE that the complicated diplomacy played out by Madison in 1809, 1810, and 1811 would secure American rights at sea. Hoping for an armistice in Europe, which would render most of the disputed points moot, many American leaders preferred to wait and watch. “While we can procrastinate the miseries of war,” Congressman Williams of South Carolina said, “I am for procrastinating.” Repeal of the embargo in 1809 had triggered a new boom in shipping and trade, and the nation’s economy underwent a rapid recovery. Although the Non-Intercourse Act, which had replaced the embargo, technically prohibited trade with Britain, France, or France’s allies, the shrewd Yankee merchants had no trouble evading these restrictions. Trade resumed with neutral ports in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and Spanish America. Lord Wellington’s troops in the Iberian Peninsula subsisted largely on American foodstuffs imported into Lisbon under special licenses granted by the British government. In 1809, the nation’s registered tonnage employed in foreign trade leapt to 910,059 tons, a figure larger than any year prior to Jefferson’s embargo. The nation was at peace, and prosperity was returning with pleasing speed. Why rock the boat?
A month after Madison took office, a new British minister, David Erskine, signed a treaty providing for the suspension of both the American and British trade measures. But when the convention arrived in London, Foreign Secretary Canning repudiated it on the grounds that Erskine had exceeded his instructions. Again the prospect of war was debated in Washington, but as Gallatin observed privately, the nation was ill-prepared. “I will only observe that we are not so well prepared for resistance as we were one year ago,” he wrote. “Then almost all our mercantile wealth was safe at home, our resources entire, and our finances sufficient to carry us through the first year of the contest.” A year of embargo had left the treasury “exhausted,” and a mobilization of forces would require heavy borrowing.
Another new British minister, Francis James Jackson, arrived in Washington in the fall of 1809 to succeed the chastened Erskine. His mission would be brief. After an exchange of letters with Secretary of State Robert Smith (Smith’s letters were almost certainly ghost-written by Madison), the American government took exception to some of the language in his correspondence and refused any further contact with him. For a second time that year, a British ambassador was forced to withdraw from Washington.
France’s bullying and plundering of neutral shipping was no less offensive than Britain’s. On Napoleon’s orders, American ships and cargoes were seized on negligible pretenses, or on none at all. When shipowners asked compensation, it was a foregone conclusion that they would be rebuffed, no matter how flagrantly they had been looted. Responding to the Non-Intercourse laws, Napoleon issued the Rambouillet Decree, by which American ships and cargoes in French-controlled ports were seized without warning or explanation. When news of the seizures arrived in Washington in May 1810, Madison remarked to Jefferson that “the late confiscations by Bonaparte comprise robbery, theft, and breach of trust, and exceed in turpitude any of his enormities not wasting human blood.”
The Non-Intercourse Act had attempted to play England and France against each other by offering to restore trade with whichever power acted first to lift its offensive regulations. Now Congress adopted the mirror image of that policy. “Macon’s Bill No. 2” permitted normal trade to resume with both England and France, but allowed the president to reimpose non-intercourse against either of the belligerent powers if and when the other accommodated American demands. Napoleon countered with a shrewd maneuver. In August 1810, the French foreign minister, the duc de Cadore, wrote a carefully worded letter vowing to withdraw the Continental Decrees on the condition that the United States “shall cause their rights to be respected by the English.” Simultaneously, Napoleon issued a new decree imposing exorbitant tariffs on most products carried by American ships, which had the effect of continuing the previous restrictions in another guise. Madison, however, chose to interpret the “Cadore Letter” as satisfying the condition in Nathaniel Macon’s bill, and ordered non-importation reasserted against England in February 1811. The editors of the British Naval Chronicle were surprised by this evidence of American pluck. “In North America, they, who ought daily to offer up thanksgivings for being a safe distance from the din of arms, seem madly ambitious of war, with a certain annihilation of their present enviable advantages!”
The British government, charging that the Cadore Letter had been a ruse and that Madison’s policy favored France, refused any concessions. Anglo-American relations deteriorated. The American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was withdrawn, leaving only a lowly chargé d’affaires in London. The Royal Navy continued to maintain a powerful presence off the North American coast; impressments and violations of American territorial rights continued unabated. That summer, a new British ambassador, John Foster, arrived in Washington with a rigid set of instructions, leaving no doubt that British restrictions on neutral trade would remain in place. Positions hardened, resentments accumulated, and war seemed increasingly likely.
IN APRIL 1811, JOHN RODGERS took the USS President up the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, where she would harbor for a few weeks while the thirty-nine-year-old captain visited his family in Havre de Grace, Maryland. While in Havre de Grace, Rodgers received word that an English frigate, HMS Guerrière, had interdicted American shipping off New York and had impressed several American seamen into her crew. Rodgers raced back to Annapolis and ordered the President readied for sea. Sailing from the Capes of Virginia on May 14, she set a course for New York.
Two days later, shortly after noon, the lookout reported a sail in the east. The stranger hoisted unrecognizable signals; receiving no answer, she wore and ran south. The President made all sail in chase. The pursuit continued throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. In the failing light, Rodgers scrutinized the fleeing stranger through his telescope. He could see that she had hoisted her colors but could not make them out, and “although her appearance indicated she was a Frigate, I was unable to determine her actual force.” As darkness fell, the two vessels were separated by just a mile and a half. Continuing the chase as best he could, Rodgers took care to maintain the weather gauge (the position to windward). At 8:15 p.m., President came to within about 100 yards of the stranger. Rodgers lifted his speaking trumpet and bellowed: “What ship is that?”
What followed was the familiar nocturnal game of nerves, in which each commander demanded to know the name of the unknown ship before giving the name of his own. When Preble had played it, as the Constitution entered Gibraltar Straits on a dark night in August 1803, it had nearly climaxed in an exchange of broadsides with the HMS Maidstone.
When Rodgers’s hail came back, echoed verbatim, in plain English—“What ship is that?”—very little doubt remained that the stranger was a British man-of-war. “Having asked the first question,” Rodgers later said, “and of course considering myself entitled by the common rules of politeness to the first answer, after a pause of fifteen or twenty seconds, I reiterated my first enquiry of ‘What Ship is that?’”
Before Rodgers could lower his speaking trumpet, a gun was fired. All at once, both vessels opened a furious barrage of cannon and musket fire. The President was struck in the mainmast and foremast, and several of her shrouds and stays were cut to ribbons. In the intermittent light of the muzzle flashes, however, Rodgers could see that the other ship h
ad a lower profile and a lighter broadside than the President. She was no frigate. Under the President’s heavy cannonading, the smaller vessel’s main topsail yard came down, her colors were either hauled down or shot away, and most of her battery was silenced. Fifteen minutes after the first gun, Rodgers ordered his crew to cease fire.
With the wind freshening, the two commanders again tried to communicate, but neither could understand the other. The President wore, ran under the stranger’s lee, and hove to at a safe distance to repair the modest damage she had sustained in her rigging. One of the crew, a boy, was slightly wounded.
At daybreak on May 17, the Americans finally had a good look at their opponent. She was a British 20-gun corvette, the Lille Belt, commonly called the Little Belt. The President, some distance to windward, ran down to the smaller vessel. As the United States and Britain were not at war, Rodgers offered to render whatever assistance the President could provide. The English captain, Arthur Bingham, sent word back that he “had on board all the necessary requisites to repair the damages, sufficiently to enable him to return to Halifax.”
The Little Belt had suffered badly, with her hull pierced in several places between wind and water, her sails and rigging “cut to pieces,” and her starboard pump destroyed. Nine of her men were killed and twenty-three wounded, several of them mortally. Captain Bingham’s spirited refusal of assistance almost resulted in the loss of his ship. When a gale came up two days later, the sea worked into the Little Belt through a dozen different holes in her hull, and she nearly foundered.
In his official letter to the Navy Office, dispatched from New York, Rodgers reported categorically that the Little Belt had fired the first shot, but he also expressed regret at having fired upon “a vessel of her inferiour force,” and lamented the loss of life among her crew. Any man with a “humane & generous heart,” he said, would feel the same way. He asked that a court of inquiry examine his conduct. Secretary Hamilton’s response, May 28, took the opposite tone. He was frankly triumphant. Ignoring the request for an inquiry, he ordered Rodgers to hurry the President back to sea, urging him to be prepared for “a trial much more serious than that to which you have been invited; for I am certain that the chastisement which you have very properly inflicted will cause you to be marked for British vengeance.”