Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The accusation placed a further strain on relations between the town and the American squadron, and served as a harsh reminder of how sharply the War of 1812 had divided the nation. Federalists everywhere detested the war, but Connecticut Federalists were especially adamant in their loathing for Madison and the Virginia Republican dynasty he represented. In a town called New London, on a river called the Thames, in a region called New England, many felt sympathy for the British in their long struggle to defeat Napoleon, and some believed (or professed to believe) that Madison had entered into a secret alliance with the French. There were even those who entertained the idea, at least in private, that if losing the war promised to drive the Republicans from power, then losing the war might not be a bad result.

  Trapped by a superior enemy force, Decatur offered Hardy a prearranged meeting between ships of comparable force. The challenge was a violation of his orders. After the loss of the Chesapeake, Secretary Jones had forbidden American commanders from “giving or receiving a Challenge, to, or from, an Enemy’s Vessel.” But since his squadron was unlikely to get to sea by any other means, Decatur, on January 17, 1814, wrote to Hardy under a flag of truce. He offered a two-on-two engagement between the United States and Macedonian and two of the frigates in the British squadron, Endymion (Captain Hope) and Statira (Captain Stackpoole). In Decatur’s judgment, the Macedonian was an equal match for the Statira, and the United States for the Endymion (which also carried a main battery of 24-pounders). Decatur’s note closed with the thought that “we beg you will assure Captains Hope and Stackpoole, that no personal feeling towards them, induces me to make this communication. They are solicitous to add to the renown of their country: we honor their motives.”

  Hardy replied the following day, agreeing to a duel between Statira and Macedonian, “as they are sister-ships, carrying the same number of guns, and weight of metal.” But he would not countenance a meeting between the two larger frigates, “as it is my opinion, the Endymion is not equal to the United States.” Hardy justified his view with a long technical discussion of the force of the two ships, pointing out that the Endymion was slightly smaller and less powerfully armed than her proposed adversary, and concluded: “The captains of H.B.M. frigates under my orders, as well as myself, cannot too highly appreciate the gallant spirit that has led to the communication from you, sir.”

  Decatur would not allow the Macedonian to sail alone. He suspected the Statira’s complement would be reinforced from the rest of the British squadron, and if he reinforced the Macedonian in similar fashion he would leave the United States undermanned and unable to put to sea. He added that “the guarantee against recapture, in case the Macedonian should prove successful, is very far from satisfactory.” There the exchange ended. No one called anyone else a coward—Hardy expressed his hope for an “amicable adjustment of the differences between the two nations,” and Decatur reciprocated the sentiment. But the American commodore could not resist scoring one last rhetorical point. Captain Stackpoole, in a separate response to the challenge, had expressed his opinion that England was “engaged in a just and unprovoked war.” Decatur might have replied that Stackpoole, having recently refused to allow a proven American to leave his crew, could hardly pretend not to know what had provoked the war. Instead, he took up the mantle of the professional: “Whether the war we are engaged in be just and unprovoked on the part of Great Britain, as Captain Stackpoole has been pleased to suggest, is considered by us as a question exclusively with the civilians; and I am perfectly ready to admit both my incompetence and unwillingness to confront Captain Stackpoole in its discussion.”

  WITH UNITED STATES and her consorts bottled up at New London, Constellation at Norfolk, Constitution at Boston, and President at Newport, the navy’s offensive commerce-raiding strategy was, at least for the moment, effectively thwarted. By concentrating his blockading forces off ports known to be harboring the American frigates, however, Admiral Warren left gaping holes in other parts of the British cordon. Again and again, the pattern reasserted itself, as the British fixation on the U.S. Navy’s frigates allowed other American vessels to get safely to sea. In the drive to capture or destroy the Constellation, the British neglected the southern and Gulf coasts, which became a haven for American privateers stalking the Caribbean sea-lanes. “We are here, three sail of the line, viz. Marlborough, Victorious, & Dragon,” wrote Captain Robert Barrie, who had been left in command at Lynnhaven Bay, “literally doing nothing but blocking up a Yankee Frigate and almost twenty gunboats.” When Decatur’s squadron sailed from New York into Long Island Sound, the blockading warships withdrew to Montauk to cut him off, and allowed an untold number of merchantmen and privateers to break out via Sandy Hook. Broke’s decision to send the Shannon’s consorts away from Massachusetts Bay succeeded in bringing Lawrence and the Chesapeake out to fight (and lose) a ship duel, but it also allowed a small armada of Yankee vessels to escape Boston during a two-week window, at the height of the sailing season, when the port was left totally unwatched.

  To the growing frustration of British merchants, American privateers were sallying out of port by the hundreds. “Jonathan’s privateers have roved with impunity and success to all corners of the earth,” a correspondent to the Naval Chronicle complained. An editorial in the same paper appeared under the headline: “Success of American Trade War Unprecedented.” By the fall of 1813, the British were losing as many as forty-five merchant vessels per month. Privateers swarmed in the Bay of Fundy, in the West Indies, off the coast of Portugal, in the North Sea, and in the western approaches to the English Channel. They stalked the big East India convoys and pounced on the stragglers. With the French welcoming American vessels into the Channel ports, they staged daring raids into the heart of Britain’s home waters. The True Blooded Yankee descended on a remote Irish island and occupied it for six days, then crossed the Irish Sea and terrorized a remote Scottish harbor, burned half a dozen merchantmen, and vanished back to sea before the Royal Navy could respond. The Lion captured some twenty merchantmen in November alone, and made off with the fantastic sum of $400,000 in specie taken from a vessel bound to Lisbon for the support of Wellington’s troops.

  Wellington complained directly to Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty: “Surely the British navy cannot be so hard run as not to be able to keep up the communication with Lisbon for this army!” Later: “If they only take the ship with our shoes, we must halt for six weeks.” And then: “I am certain that it will not be denied, that since Great Britain has been a naval power, a British army has never been left in such a situation.” When Melville referred to political constraints on the government, Wellington responded in a tone that must have made the First Lord wince:

  What I have written has been founded upon my own sense of a want of naval assistance on this coast…and I assure you that I neither know nor care what has passed, or may pass, in Parliament or in the newspapers on the subject.

  I complain of an actual want of naval assistance and cooperation with the army. I know nothing about the cause of the evil, I state the fact, which nobody will deny; and leave it to government to apply a remedy or not as they think proper.

  In London, a peace faction was beginning to make itself heard. The Naval Chronicle purported to speak for the Royal Navy, but its editors had never liked the American war, regarding it as a costly diversion of military forces from the European theater. Beginning in the summer of 1813, the editors pressed the point in nearly every issue: “Peace Needed With America,” “America—The Need for Peace is Apparent,” “Peace With America Must Be Negotiated.” The Chronicle grasped England’s dilemma. To wage the war more ruthlessly, as many in the press and public were demanding, would only weaken America’s pro-British domestic opposition and cause the American people to “rally round the executive.” The editors likened the situation to that of 1778. A long, bitter, open-ended war could gain nothing for England—it could only create “an inextinguishable spirit of hatred and revenge…Let
us rather secure the respect of America, by our justice and moderation—and accept of her proffered amity, whenever we can do it on terms compatible with our honour and our safety.”

  In Parliament, members of the opposition calmly proved that the cost of the war was not justified by its purported objective. The war was costing Britain about £10 million a year. The entire enlisted payroll of the Royal Navy was only £3 million. Why not double or even triple the pay of every seaman in the navy? It would be cheaper than fighting for the right to impress men from foreign ships, while probably eliminating the need to do so. Lord Erskine pressed an even more fundamental point. Where was this endless Anglo-American feud going? How was it all supposed to end? “It has been said that this war, if the Americans persist in their claims, must be eternal,” he said. “If so, our prospects are disheartening. America is a growing country, increasing every day in numbers, in strength, in resources of every kind. In a lengthened contest all the advantages are on her side, and against this country.”

  When Tsar Alexander of Russia had first offered to serve as a diplomatic mediator, in the fall of 1812, the British government had rejected the proposal. The American peace commissioners—Gallatin, Bayard, and John Quincy Adams—had rendezvoused at St. Petersburg before learning of the refusal. After six idle months in the Russian capital, word came that the British foreign secretary, Robert Castlereagh, prompted by Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, had proposed direct negotiations with the American government. Madison accepted the offer without hesitation. The American team was reinforced by two additional commissioners, one of whom was Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives and leader of the congressional “War Hawk” faction (he resigned his seat to accept the diplomatic assignment). Peace talks were originally to take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, but were subsequently moved to the charming little canal town of Ghent in Belgium.

  Initially, the American negotiators remained under strict instructions not to offer concessions on the issue of impressment. But the progress of the war, both in Europe and America, gradually undermined the American negotiating position. Cockburn’s punitive expeditions in the Chesapeake had demonstrated the vulnerability of the long American coastline. Every attempted American invasion of Canada had been turned back. The cost of the war to the United States was enormous and growing. American privateers were enjoying success, but the American merchant marine had been all but annihilated. British cruisers had sent hundreds of prizes into Bermuda and Halifax, and between 1812 and 1814, both imports and exports fell by more than 80 percent. The blockade had interrupted the all-important coastal trade: a gallon of wine cost $25 in New York, more than ten times its peacetime cost, and Rhode Island suffered dangerous shortages of imported grain and corn. The treasury was exhausted; customs revenues had diminished to an imperceptible trickle; there was a danger of default on upcoming federal interest payments, which would lead to bank failures across the country, and it was difficult to imagine how American merchants could be persuaded to accommodate any new government borrowing. Throughout New England, trading with the enemy had become so widespread and systematic that Madison turned to the old Republican remedy of an embargo, but the further injury to trade threatened to activate an open revolt, perhaps even a dissolution of the Union.

  In Europe, events were ominous. Napoleon’s October 1813 defeat at Leipzig allowed the allied armies to mass on the Rhine, apparently preparing to drive into the heart of France. In April 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne and was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba. Ex-President Adams grasped the American dilemma. The Corsican Freebooter had never been an American ally, and his overthrow deserved to be celebrated throughout the civilized world. But who, in his absence, would keep England in check? “Though France has been humbled, Britain is not,” he wrote Jefferson. “Though Bona is banished, a greater Tyrant and wider Usurper still domineers. John Bull is quite as unfeeling, as unprincipled, more powerful, [and] has shed more blood, then Bona…. How shall the Tyrant of Tyrantsbe brought low? Aye! there’s the rub.”

  With England free to turn the full weight of its military power against the United States, Madison made the painful decision to drop his one sine qua non, the point on which two years of war had been fought. The capitulation came on June 27, 1814, in a secret letter to the American negotiating team. “On mature consideration,” Secretary of State Monroe wrote, “it has been decided that…you may omit any stipulation on the subject of impressment, if found indispensably necessary to terminate [the war]. You will of course not recur to this expedient until all your efforts to adjust the controversy in a more satisfactory manner have failed.” From this day forward, Madison’s sole remaining objective was to end the war without sacrifice of American independence, territory, or national honor.

  ADMIRAL WARREN’S REPORTS to London remained pessimistic throughout 1813. The Admiralty had demanded that he accomplish several things at once: maintain a rigorous blockade of the entire American coast; provide convoys to the West India merchant fleets, patrol the sea-lanes for privateers; and capture or destroy the remaining American frigates, so that a portion of his forces could be redeployed. The Lords had little sympathy for the admiral’s repeated pleas for reinforcements, informing him that the force at his disposal “exceeds very much what on a mere comparison with the means of the Enemy would appear necessary.”

  On November 12, 1813, Halifax was struck by a devastating hurricane. Though it lasted only an hour and a half, the storm drove more than fifty ships onto the beach, including Warren’s flagship, the 74-gun San Domingo. A large portion of the British North American fleet was “materially crippled by this event.” The combination of hurricane damage and winter weather significantly weakened the blockade, and when President and Constitution escaped safely back to sea in the last month of the year, Warren grumbled, “the good Fortune of these Rascally privateer Frigates makes me almost Despair of ever seeing them.” Writing the Admiralty from his winter headquarters at Bermuda two days before the New Year, Warren expressed concern about the growth of the privateering threat. “The rapidity with which the Americans build and fit out their Ships is scarcely credible, and I am very apprehensive of the mischief their Cruizers will do to our Trade.” Not only did he need reinforcements, he told the Lords, but he needed to be reinforced with faster ships, because “all the American Men of War, Privateers and even Traders, are particularly good Sailing Vessels.”

  Warren had every right to complain. He had been made the victim of unrealistic expectations. The Admiralty had consistently underestimated the challenge of blockading the long American coast, the audacity and skill of the American privateers, and the armament and efficiency of the American frigates. The Lords had sent Warren to North America with instructions to arrange a truce, and then faulted him for not inflicting enough punishment on the enemy. Whether he deserved it or not, however, Warren was finished. The Admiralty sent orders by fast-sailing packet to Bermuda, informing him that his eighteen-month command was terminated. His replacement would be Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, a fifty-six-year-old veteran officer who had served with distinction in the Mediterranean, the Leeward Islands, and the English Channel.* Admiral Cockburn was retained as Cochrane’s second-in-command, and the North American station was heavily reinforced with ships released from blockade duty in Europe.

  Even as the first direct peace talks were beginning in Europe, the British gathered their strength to strike the kind of mortal blow that would hasten the end of the war. During the summer of 1814, relentless, punitive, amphibious raids in the South would be combined with invasion from the North. The planned offensive was a concession, at least in part, to domestic political pressures—a large segment of the British public continued to demand that America be bludgeoned into submission, and a vocal minority was agitating to restore hegemony over the former colonies. The papers were full of exhortations to “let havock, with all its horrors and devastations, be carried into her interior. Bombard her towns—abolish her
works—burn her shipping.” The editors of the furiously pro-war Times never failed to find the words to express their feelings on the subject. May 24: “They are struck to the heart with terror for their impending punishment; and oh may no false liberality, no mistaken lenity, no weak and cowardly policy, interpose to save them from the blow! Strike! Chastise the savages, for such they are!” The Naval Chronicle’s campaign for a truce was rebutted by anonymous letters to the editor. “I am of opinion that a peace with America would at this time be hurtful to us,” wrote “C.H.” in July; “how often would our disasters be thrown in our teeth, and the loss of our ships be a subject for their triumph?…[T]hey have shown to other nations that the British navy is not invincible—these nations will not inquire the difference of force, but believe the Americans, and we cannot deny it, that THEIR FRIGATES have CAPTURED OURS.”

  But the British were frustrated by all the old, familiar problems of the American Revolutionary War. How to strike a decisive blow against a sprawling, pastoral republic with no vital center? Cities could be occupied, or even destroyed, but resistance forces could retire to the backcountry, as Washington and the Continental Army had done in 1776–81. When the cabinet consulted General Wellington on the question, he gave them little encouragement: “In such countries as America, very extensive, thinly peopled, and producing but little food in proportion to their extent, military operations are impracticable without river or land transport.” Regarding the planned offensive: “I do not know where you could carry on such an operation which would be so injurious to the Americans as to force them to sue for peace.”