Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The Constitution made sail before the wind and hove to a short distance to the east of her adversary. Her crew went to work repairing braces, halyards, and running rigging that had been cut to pieces by the Guerrière’s guns, and swaying up new yards to replace those that had been shot away. Then she returned and assumed a raking position on the Guerrière’s quarter.

  The British ship had been hulled about thirty times on her larboard side. Five sheets of her copper sheathing had been torn from the bottom. Several of her guns had come loose from their breechings and were traveling around the deck, threatening to crush any man caught in their path. None of her remaining guns would bear on the Constitution. Nearly a third of her crew was killed or wounded. In the words of one of the English officers, the loss of the masts had left the Guerrière “in the trough of the sea, rolling her main deck guns under water. Our opponent, by this time, had refitted and wore round to rake us; and all attempts to get the ship before the wind, or to bring any of our guns to bear, [proved] in vain.”

  After a hurried conference with his remaining officers, Captain Dacres decided the Guerrière had had enough. At 6:30 p.m. on August 19, he ordered the British white ensign removed from the stump of the Guerrière’s mizzenmast, and a gun fired to leeward in token of surrender. Captain Hull ordered a gun fired in acknowledgment. A boat was lowered from the Constitution, and Third Lieutenant George C. Read and a crew went across to take possession of the surrendered frigate. Coming under Guerrière’s stern, Read called out: “Commodore Hull’s compliments, and wishes to know if you have struck your flag?” According to Benjamin Hodges, Dacres’s dry response was: “Well, I don’t know. Our mizzenmast is gone; our mainmast is gone; and, upon the whole, you may say we have struck our flag.”

  About twenty minutes later, Read’s boat brought Dacres across to the Constitution. Stepping onto the quarterdeck, Dacres offered his sword in token of surrender. Hull, playing his part in the chivalrous ritual, refused to accept it. Dacres complimented Hull on the performance of the Constitution, remarking that the American crew had fought “like tigers.”

  Dismasted, rolling heavily, and strewn with dead and wounded men, the British frigate presented an awful scene. Dr. Evans would only say that “immense mischief and destruction [was] done by our grape & canister shot,” but Midshipman Henry Gilliam’s description was more graphic: “pieces of skulls, brains, legs, arms & blood Lay in every direction and the groans of the wounded were enough almost to make me curse the war.” The Guerrière was in danger of sinking, and it was decided that the prisoners and wounded men should be transferred to the Constitution as quickly as possible. It was a dark night, with high seas and strong winds. It would be a difficult operation. All serviceable boats were lowered into the sea and a towing hawser was passed between the two ships. Working together, the two crews helped sixty wounded men into the boats and hauled them across a heaving sea to the Constitution, which maneuvered “to keep in the best position to receive the boats.”

  Dr. Evans of the Constitution and Dr. Irwin of the Guerrière worked together to save the wounded, making no distinction between Americans and British (though there were many more of the latter). The doctors worked through the night, taking no sleep. Dr. Evans amputated two arms and two legs. First Lieutenant Charles Morris’s chances were considered doubtful. (He survived, though he did not regain consciousness for several days.) A British seaman’s entire lower jaw had been shot off; despite the doctors’ best efforts to stem the bleeding, he soon died. An American sailor, Dick Dunn, cursed the surgeons as a “hard set of butchers” while they were actually sawing through his leg. In the days after the battle, according to Moses Smith, Captain Hull was often seen visiting the sick bay, bending over the hammocks of the wounded men, “tendering the consolations needed in such an hour, and showing his humanity to the best advantage.” The bodies of Lieutenant Bush and a British seaman were buried at sea in a joint ceremony. Including those who died of their wounds, American casualties totaled seven killed and seven wounded. The Guerrière had lost twenty-three killed and fifty-six wounded.

  At 7:30 a.m. on August 20, Lieutenant Read hailed from the Guerrière to report that there was five feet of water in the hold, and the water was rising faster than the prize crew could pump it out. After a failed attempt to take the British ship under tow, Hull bowed to the inevitable: Guerrière would soon be on her way to the bottom of the Atlantic. There was no hope of bringing the prize back into port. The Americans set charges on a slow match in the Guerrière’s storerooms and returned to the Constitution. Read and the last few members of his crew came aboard the American ship at 3:00 p.m. The Constitution hauled her sheets and sailed east to a safe distance, about three miles away.

  All aboard turned to watch the “incomparably grand and magnificent” sight of the British frigate’s last moments. Captain Dacres watched silently from the Constitution’s taffrail. “It was like waiting for the uncapping of a volcano, or the bursting up of a crater,” wrote Moses Smith.

  Scarcely a word was spoken on board the Constitution, so breathless was the interest felt in the scene…. The first intimation we had that the fire was at work was the discharge of the guns. One after another, as the flame advanced, they came booming toward us. Roar followed roar, flash followed flash, until the whole mass was enveloped in clouds of smoke. We could see but little of the direct progress of the work, and therefore we looked more earnestly for the explosion, not knowing how soon it might occur. Presently there was a dead silence; then followed a vibratory, shuddering motion, and streams of light, like streaks of lightning running along the sides; and the grand crash came! The quarter deck, which was immediately over the magazine, lifted in a mass, broke into fragments, and flew in every direction. The hull, parted in the center by the shock, and loaded with such masses of iron and spars, reeled, staggered, plunged forward a few feet, and sank out of sight.

  The Constitution set sail to the westward. During the nine-day passage to Boston, the crew continued to drill frequently at the cannon and small arms. The lookout caught sight of Boston Light at 6:00 p.m. on August 29.

  As the frigate beat up the bay, a flotilla of small vessels approached. To the first that came within hailing distance, seamen standing at the frigate’s rail shouted: “The Constitution has captured the Guerrière!” The men in the boat removed their hats, thumped them on the side, “and rising, gave cheers upon cheers. They hailed other boats; and thus the air was rent with cheers; and the victory passed along till it reached the shore, and then spread like wildfire, over the city and country.” As the great frigate entered the ship channel in Boston’s outer Roads, boats filled with well-wishers came down the narrows to greet her. In the inner harbor, the roar of artillery mingled with the sound of the church bells swinging in their belfries, and as the news passed from mouth to mouth throughout the city and surrounding towns, the self-appointed messengers commanded their neighbors never to forget what had happened in latitude 41° 42' North and longitude 55° 48' West, on August 19 in the year 1812. Wherever the amazing news was told, the bells rang and the guns roared; before long they would be ringing and roaring all across America.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Vice-Admiral Herbert Sawyer, commander in chief of British naval forces at Halifax, received the shocking news from Captain Dacres in a letter from Boston dated September 7: “Sir, I am sorry to inform you of the Capture of His Majesty’s late Ship Guerrière by the American Frigate Constitution, after a severe action on the 19th of August in Latitude 40.20 N and Longitude 55.00 West.”

  Sawyer had been slow to react to the American declaration of war. This was due in great part to the limitations of early nineteenth-century communications. After learning of the Belvidera’s dustup with the President in late June, he had dispatched a sloop of war, the Colibri, to sail to New York under a flag of truce and request an explanation. Even after confirming that war had been declared, Sawyer had continued to order captured American merchant vessels released, pend
ing instructions from London. Sawyer was a junior admiral, and he was conscious of his duty to prevent “incidents” at sea from escalating into wider conflicts without the sanction of the British government. There was hope that hostilities would be called off when the American government learned that the offending British Orders in Council had been repealed in early June.

  British public opinion was divided over the prospect of an American war. Many of the leading newspapers continued to take a belligerent tone, and the fortunes to be won in capturing American commerce were a powerful enticement to the officers and seamen of the Royal Navy, as well as to the myriad other British interests that held a stake in the prize system. When news of the American declaration of war reached London, the British government commanded that “H.M.’s ships of war and privateers do detain and bring into port all ships and vessels belonging to citizens of the United States of America.” American vessels found in British ports were peremptorily seized, American goods were confiscated, and debts owed American merchants were annulled. But there were also many British citizens, including Whig politicians and newspapers, who argued that England could ill afford to take on new enemies. The struggle against Napoleon was at a critical phase. The same week Madison had signed the American declaration of war, the French emperor had crossed the Niemen River into Russia with the largest army assembled in modern times—some 400,000 troops, all told. There was every reason to expect the campaign to succeed, if only because Napoleon had never failed. If Russia was conquered, there would be no other viable threat to France in the east, and Napoleon would be free to turn his full attention to defeating the British armies under Lord Wellington on the Iberian Peninsula, and perhaps to renewing his old dream of invading England.

  Wellington’s forces in Portugal and Spain were gathering their strength to drive the French beyond the Pyrenees. It was the largest and most important land campaign England had ever mounted against Napoleon, and its success was essential to the overall course of the war. British forces were supplied principally by sea, through the port of Lisbon, by some two thousand ships per year. Any interruption of that supply line posed a serious threat to the British war effort. Moreover, Wellington’s troops relied heavily on imported American grain and corn. As recently as April, Admiral Sir David Milne, writing from Lisbon, had told a colleague that “if it was not for the supplies from America, the army here could not be maintained.” War with America threatened to cut off this trade, while at the same time unleashing American privateers on the sea routes between England and Portugal.

  On August 6, Admiral Sawyer was superseded by the appointment of Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren as “commander in chief of H.M.’s squadron on the Halifax and West India stations, and down the whole Coast of America.” The order merged all of the operations of the Royal Navy in the Western Hemisphere, from the northernmost navigable waters of the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico and the Spanish Main, under one command. Sailing from Portsmouth in the 80-gun San Domingo on August 14, Sir John suffered a wet, nasty crossing. The flagship was beleaguered by fierce, unseasonable gales, and one of her consorts, the sloop of war Magnet, went down with the loss of all hands. When San Domingo reached Halifax on September 27, Warren learned of the capture of the Guerrière.

  Warren, fifty-nine years old, had nearly forty years of service in the Royal Navy. He also brought wide-ranging political and diplomatic experience to the job, having served for several years in Parliament and as ambassador extraordinary to Russia in 1802. His appointment was a measure of how seriously Whitehall took the threat of an American war. The admiral’s instructions empowered him to offer an armistice to President Madison. He was to refer to the June repeal of the Orders in Council, but had no authority to offer concessions on the question of impressments. As his first official act, Admiral Warren wrote directly to the American president, offering an immediate cessation of hostilities, with reparations or indemnities to be determined by a bilateral commission. Though Warren’s instructions also granted authority to “attack, sink, burn or otherwise destroy” enemy warships, privateers, and merchantmen, the full weight of British naval power would not fall on the American seaboard until the last hope of a peaceful reconciliation had been extinguished.

  JUST AS THE VICTORIOUS CONSTITUTION entered the outer Roads of Boston, the sails of Commodore Rodgers’s squadron—President, United States, and Congress, in company with the smaller vessels Hornet and Argus—had appeared in the offing.

  After his brush with the Belvidera ten weeks earlier, Rodgers had put his powerful squadron on a course to intercept the England-bound Jamaica convoy. Near the Newfoundland Bank, President and her consorts had picked up a trail of floating coconut shells and orange peels. Cracking on to the eastward, they had reached the western approaches to the English Channel on August 6. Not wanting to sail into the hands of the Royal Navy’s Channel Fleet, Rodgers had given up the pursuit. The squadron stretched away to the south for Madeira and the Azores, then doubled back to the westward, passing south of Cape Sable, and finally to Boston. By that time, “that wretched disease the scurvey, having made its appearance on board of the vessels,” many of the hands were losing teeth and hair, and a few had died. That seamen should be made to suffer the effects of a vitamin-deprived diet on a cruise of less than three months, in an era when it was widely known that the disease could be prevented by shipping an adequate store of vegetables and citrus fruits, was indefensible. It was also foolhardy, because it forced Rodgers to return home earlier than he would have liked.

  With bitter remorse, Rodgers reported to Secretary Hamilton that the squadron had “only made seven Captures & one recapture.” The value of the prizes taken did not equal the cost of keeping five warships at sea for ten weeks. Rodgers blamed heavy fog, which was often so thick that the ships of the squadron could not see one another even when separated by just a few hundred yards.

  As shrewd observers understood, however, Commodore Rodgers’s cruise had achieved important strategic objectives. It had diverted British naval forces away from the American coast at a time when hundreds of American merchantmen were homeward-bound. “We have been so completely occupied looking for Commodore Rodgers’s squadron,” said one British officer, “that we have taken very few prizes.” The safe return of so many ships and cargoes was a boon to the American economy, and injected badly needed revenues into the treasury. The British failure to impose an early blockade also allowed a swarm of American privateers to sail unmolested into the Atlantic. In July, a Halifax newspaper reported that enemy privateers were “swarming round our coast and in the Bay of Fundy,” and advised that it was “imprudent for any vessel to sail from this port unless under convoy.” Lloyds of London reported a spike in the insurance rates paid by shipowners and merchants. On September 5, the Niles’ Register published a list of 136 British prizes sent into American ports by privateers, and that list was probably less than half the actual number. “Prizes are pouring into almost every convenient port; and many privateers are still fitting out…a hundred sail are at sea.”

  With Commodore Rodgers’s arrival virtually in the wake of the Constitution, the entire U.S. Navy was again safe in port. With the exception of Constellation, still undergoing repairs at the Washington Navy Yard, all of the original six frigates were now moored in Boston Harbor, not far from the Charlestown wharves. The triumphant Constitution was often surrounded by a flotilla of boats filled with well-wishers. Liquor in bladders was smuggled to the enlisted men. On September 5, five hundred citizens of Boston fêted the ship’s officers at a victory banquet in Faneuil Hall. A model of the Constitution was placed in the gallery, “with her masts fished and the Colors as they flew during the action.” A wreath of flowers was arranged on the wall behind Isaac Hull’s seat, and a band played patriotic songs as the dinner was served. The guests drank seventeen toasts, and each was answered in succession by the roar of artillery, positioned just outside the doors and manned by local militia companies. A hastily written play depicting th
e Constitution-Guerrière action was performed at the theater. Dr. Evans saw it and pronounced it “a very foolish, ridiculous thing.”

  When Hull’s report arrived in Washington on September 9, Secretary Hamilton, who was not generally effusive in giving praise, wrote the captain: “In this action, we know not which most to applaud, Your gallantry or Your skill. You, Your officers & Crew are entitled to & will receive the applause & the gratitude of Your gratefull country.” Congress voted to award a gold medal to Hull and silver medals to the lieutenants and midshipmen.

  The timing of Hull’s sensational victory was critical, not only for the nation but for the Hull family. Three days before the capture of the Guerrière, an American army commanded by Brigadier General William Hull, Isaac Hull’s uncle, had surrendered without a fight to an inferior British and Indian force at Fort Detroit. In the Ohio Valley, where the security of American settlements was immediately placed in jeopardy, General Hull’s name was cursed, “and if he was to attempt to pass this way,” said John Graham, a resident of the valley, “he would be hunted and shot like a mad dog.” Richard Rush dismissed the general as a “gasconading booby” and Dolley Madison asked a correspondent: “Do you not tremble with resentment at this treacherous act?” The surrender was reported in the Boston newspapers on September 2, two days after the return of the Constitution. In maritime Boston, a popular quip circulated: “We have a Hull-up and a Hull-down.”

  Before the war, many Americans had assumed Canada would be conquered without much difficulty (“a mere matter of marching,” Jefferson had predicted), while anticipating little success in the war at sea. The humiliation at Detroit and the sensational capture of the Guerrière reversed these expectations. Those who had argued for keeping the U.S. Navy safe in port fell abruptly silent. Madison and his advisers quickly settled on a new deployment strategy. The fleet would be divided into three squadrons, to be commanded by the three senior most captains on active duty: John Rodgers, Stephen Decatur, and William Bainbridge. The 44-gun frigates President, Constitution, and United States would serve as flagships. Each would be accompanied by one of the smaller frigates and a brig. Each commodore was at liberty to choose his own cruising ground, based on his judgment of how best “to afford protection to our trade & to annoy the enemy.”