Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  The English public’s enthusiasm for the war was declining. When it was announced that another year’s campaign would require a prolongation of the detested wartime property tax, the news, according to the Morning Chronicle, was greeted with “a sense of horror and indignation.” Losses at sea were growing. On September 9, a caucus of Liverpool merchants announced that the city had lost a combined total of eight hundred vessels to the Americans since the beginning of the war. At the end of September, Lloyd’s of London reported that 108 British merchantmen had been snapped up in that month alone. Maritime insurance rates for vessels sailing from Liverpool to Halifax were 30 percent; between Liverpool and Ireland, 13 percent—the latter represented a 300 percent increase over the rate charged when all of Europe had been at war. Captain Thomas Boyle of the Baltimore privateer Chasseur—an allusion to the troops responsible for the rape of Hampton the previous year—sailed into a British port and issued a tongue-in-cheek notice of blockade, extended to “all the ports, harbours, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands and sea coast of the united kingdom of G. Britain and Ireland.” The opposition Whigs launched a parliamentary investigation of the Admiralty’s failure to deal with the American privateers. Headlines in the Naval Chronicle told the story of that influential newspaper’s continuing skepticism: “The War with America Britain Cannot Win” “On the Remarkable Success of the Young American Navy” “America—The Need for Peace is Apparent” “Desertion to the Enemy a Growing Problem” “The Poverty of British Naval Leadership” “Why is America So Powerful at Sea?”

  President Madison allowed the correspondence from Ghent to be published in the American newspapers. In doing so, he advertised to the world that the United States had already dropped its condition on impressment, and that the British negotiators were demanding territorial concessions as the price of peace. As a result, Lord Liverpool’s government was obliged to answer the charge, both at home and abroad, that Britain was waging a Bonaparte-style war of conquest on the North American continent. The major issues of postwar Europe were being sorted out at the grand, multilateral Congress of Vienna, and British leaders were keen to preserve England’s prestige and moral authority. The British team at Ghent had been maneuvered into an untenable position, from which their only option was retreat. Liverpool was aggravated: “Our Commissioners have certainly taken a very erroneous view of our policy.” Aggressive territorial demands, he said, were unwise because they failed to take account of “the inconvenience of the continuance of the war.”

  To avert the collapse of the talks, the British envoys gave up their demand for an Indian state, which they had earlier presented as non-negotiable, and consented instead to a vague (and therefore unenforceable) provision returning the Indians to their 1811 status. For the ensuing month, negotiations hinged on the issue of whether the war should be concluded on the basis of uti possidetis—that is, each side to keep the territory it held at the cessation of hostilities. Under this arrangement, the British would retain control of occupied territory in northern Maine, which would open a secure corridor between Québec and Nova Scotia, and fortresses on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence taken in the course of the war. But on October 24, with their position immeasurably strengthened by the news of Baltimore and Plattsburgh, the Americans rejected uti possidetis and declared that they would negotiate only on the basis of status quo ante bellum—that is, “status before the war,” or a restoration of all occupied territories.

  At first, the British cabinet assumed that the American delegation’s intransigence must bring a rupture in the negotiations. Lord Liverpool wrote Castlereagh, who was representing Great Britain at the Congress of Vienna, to warn that the American war “will probably now be of some duration.” The cost of another season of campaigning was projected at £10 million. “We must expect, therefore, to hear it said that the property tax is continued for the purpose of securing a better frontier for Canada.”

  On November 3, the British government asked Lord Wellington, then serving as ambassador in Paris, to take command of the army in Canada. Wellington did not refuse the assignment outright, but he reiterated the objections he had voiced since the beginning of the War of 1812—that it was a wasteful diversion, that England would encounter all the same problems of 1775–81, and that no invasion from Canada could succeed without naval supremacy on the Great Lakes, a prediction borne out in the fiasco at Plattsburgh. But he reserved his most devastating remarks for the progress of the talks at Ghent. “In regard to your present negotiations,” he told Castlereagh on November 9,

  I confess that I think you have no right, from the state of the war, to demand any concession of territory from America…. You have not been able to carry it into the enemy’s territory, notwithstanding your military success and now undoubted military superiority, and have not even cleared your own territory on the point of attack. You cannot on any principle of equality in negotiation claim a cessation of territory excepting in exchange for other advantages which you have in your power…. Then if this reasoning be true, why stipulate for the uti possidetis? You can get no territory; indeed, the state of your military operations, however creditable, does not entitle you to demand any.

  The Iron Duke’s blunt assessment proved decisive. The British envoys were instructed to offer another humiliating concession. Uti possidetis was dropped, and peace offered on the basis of status quo ante bellum.

  The final obstacle was an internal rift among the American delegates. John Quincy Adams was adamant that the coastal fishing rights negotiated by his father in the 1783 Treaty of Paris must be reasserted in the new treaty. (The senior Adams had lobbied both Madison and his own son not to surrender them.) The British considered the fishing rights as annulled by the war, but seemed willing to restore them in exchange for navigation rights on the Mississippi River. But Henry Clay, representing the western interest, was adamantly opposed to the latter. When it seemed as if the American consensus might founder on this issue, Albert Gallatin acted as a mediator, and at length persuaded Adams and Clay to shelve both issues. The treaty would include no mention of either, with the understanding that they would be settled in future negotiations. John Quincy Adams generously credited Gallatin with “the largest and most important share to the conclusion of the peace,” and added, “It would have been an irreparable loss if our country had been deprived of the benefit of his talents in this negotiation.”

  The Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve, 1814, was essentially nothing more than an agreement to stop fighting. It did not address any of the issues that had prompted the American declaration of war. Pending ratification by the U.S. Senate, however, the war was over.

  RAPID COMMUNICATION between Europe and America did not become possible until 1858, when the first greeting was transmitted from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan by a transatlantic telegraph cable. In 1815, news traveled as it always had in the past—in a ragged, gradually widening circle over land and sea. Outside that circle, the Anglo-American war continued to rage, and in the more distant theaters the fighting would go on for months.

  In April 1814, after almost a year of cooling his heels in New London, where the United States and her consorts remained closely blockaded, Stephen Decatur had accepted command of the President, then lying at New York. The United States and the Macedonian were taken about five miles up the Thames and dismantled. Decatur, his officers, and much of the crew of the United States traveled overland through Connecticut to New York Harbor and took possession of the President. His orders were to sail to the far side of the world to prey on the enemy’s East India commerce. Months of refitting followed, while the Americans waited for the kind of nasty weather that would blow the British squadron off their station at Sandy Hook.

  The opportunity did not come until January 14, 1815—three weeks after the treaty had been signed in Ghent—when an icy blast out of the northwest forced the blockaders to run about fifty miles out to sea. President had anchored in a shallow bay northeas
t of Staten Island. About eight o’clock at night, in pitch-blackness, with a driving snowstorm and freezing winds, the crew shipped the capstan bars and heaved the anchor out of the mud. It was the worst possible time to navigate a heavily laden, deep-draft frigate out of New York, but it was also the only chance of evading the British cordon. President ran down the Narrows on the wings of the gale, taking care to steer clear of the shoals off Great Kills and Vandeventer’s Point on Staten Island, and skirting Middle Bank to the east, then put her helm down and aimed for the five-fathom channel over “the bar,” a submerged barrier dividing the bay from the open sea. The channel was supposedly marked by anchored boats, but they were difficult to see in the storm, and the frightened pilot was reduced to guesswork. He guessed wrong and drove the President hard aground.

  For almost two hours, the big frigate thumped helplessly on the bar. She suffered severe injuries. Her keel was mangled and hogged, with part of the copper and the false keel torn off; her masts were unseated; and several of her rudder braces were broken. If it had been possible to return to New York for repairs, Decatur would have done so, but there was no hope of making progress into the teeth of the gale. There was nothing to do but try to force the President over the bar, little by little, shoved along by the combined force of wind and waves, and eventually out to sea. The hands were called to heel the ship from side to side by running in unison from larboard to starboard and back again. She made progress, bit by bit, but the repeated violent shocks of the hull striking the ground exacerbated the damages she had already suffered.

  Finally, at about 10:00 p.m., President was free. Decatur shaped a course along the southern coast of Long Island, sailing large before the gale. At about three in the morning, off Fire Island, he adjusted course slightly to the southward. At first light, with the gale diminishing, the lookout at the masthead caught sight of four ships dead to east, the nearest only two miles away. They could only be the British squadron, and they were—the razeed battleship Majestic, the familiar heavy frigate Endymion, and the 38-gun frigates Pomone and Tenedos. Commodore John Hayes had guessed which course Decatur would take from Sandy Hook, and his guess had been perfect. The President had sailed right into his arms.

  Decatur hauled up and ran north toward Montauk under a press of sail, but the damage to President’s hull had taken a few knots of speed out of her, and she was making enough water to require men to work her pumps constantly. By midday, the wind fell to a breeze, and then nearly a calm. The Endymion was the fastest ship in the British squadron, and she was gaining perceptibly. Decatur ordered the President lightened, and everything not essential to battle went over the side: boats, cables, extra spars, casks of provisions. The fresh water was started from the hold, the anchors cut away, and buckets of water hauled aloft to wet the sails, “but notwithstanding all that,” wrote Midshipman George Hollins, “they steadily gained on us.”

  At twilight, Endymion got within cannon-shot range and opened fire with her bow chasers. At 5:30 p.m., she was able to being her forwardmost 24-pounder long guns to bear on President’s starboard quarter. Decatur was running out of alternatives. He could steer off the wind and fight, but that would only allow the other enemy ships to come up and join the action. He could continue fleeing, but in that case Endymion could continue to peck away at President’s vulnerable quarter. Decatur called the crew back to the mizzenmast and announced his intention to put his helm down, run the enemy aboard, and take her by boarding. If the attempt was successful, the Americans would scuttle the damaged President and take the captured Endymion into New York.

  It was a bold notion, but impossible to carry out in the light and baffling breezes. Captain Hope skillfully kept his ship away, and the two big frigates ran to the south, trading broadsides. The President suffered heavy casualties. First Lieutenant F. H. Babbitt’s right leg was shot off as he stood on the quarterdeck; he bled to death two hours later, after dictating a letter to his sweetheart. Lieutenant Archibald Hamilton, son of former Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton, was struck by a round of grape shot, and as he fell to the deck, mortally wounded, he shouted to the men of his division, “Carry on! Carry on!” Stephen Decatur was hit in the chest by a splinter and knocked to the deck. He was temporarily stunned, but soon returned to his feet. A few minutes later he was hit by another splinter, this time in his forehead. Blood streamed down his face, but he remained on his feet, insisting the wound was not serious. Altogether, the President suffered twenty-five killed and sixty wounded, and among the dead were five lieutenants.

  Hoping to disable his antagonist, Decatur had the gun crews load the President’s guns with dismantling shot—chain and bar shot designed to hack away the enemy’s rigging. The Endymion did not lose a spar, but her rigging and sails were badly cut up. President hauled her wind, turned her stern to the Endymion, and attempted to run from the other ships, fast approaching, but this maneuver allowed Endymion to fire two raking broadsides into the American frigate’s unprotected stern, to great effect. Midshipman Hollins walked back to the quarterdeck and became transfixed by the sight of a dead sailor, illuminated in the glow of the binnacle light. The body had been “cut in two by a shot.” Decatur approached from behind, placed his hand on Hollins’s shoulder, and asked: “Young gentleman, have you nothing else to do than to be looking at such things as that? Go and attend to your duty.”

  As the night wore on, Pomone and Tenedos continued in hot pursuit, and at about ten o’clock Pomone closed to within cannon-shot range. She fired a broadside, perhaps two, and Decatur gave the fateful order to haul down the light at the mizzen peak, which substituted for the President’s ensign in the darkness. When hailed by the Pomone, Decatur called out: “I surrender to the squadron.”

  For three years the British had wanted to take one of the American 44-gun frigates in single combat, and some of the early newspaper reports flatly asserted that the President had been beaten and captured by the Endymion alone. Decatur always maintained that he had surrendered to the entire British squadron, rather than to any one ship. Later, there would be some controversy over how many broadsides the Pomone fired at the President prior to her surrender, and to what effect, and whether the Tenedos was also within range. Decatur’s own reports are contradictory. It is known that he told his wife, Susan, that he had decided in advance that if the British pursuers came within range of the President a second time, he would surrender in order to avoid spilling more American blood in an impossible fight. Decatur was exonerated in his subsequent court-martial, but the surrender of the President struck many as oddly tame for an officer with his ferocious reputation. It is likely that physical exhaustion played a role in the outcome: the President’s officers and crew had been on their feet, exposed to the raw winter weather, for thirty consecutive hours.

  The President was navigated into Bermuda, and subsequently taken into the Royal Navy as the HMS President. Decatur, his officers, and his crew were soon paroled and allowed to return to the United States, where they learned of the peace upon arriving in mid-March 1815.

  THE LAST MAJOR BRITISH AMPHIBIOUS operation of the war was directed against the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. The army that had occupied Washington and been repulsed at Baltimore sailed from the Chesapeake to Jamaica. With additional reinforcements from Europe and the West Indies, their numbers exceeded ten thousand men. As General Robert Ross had been killed at Baltimore, command of the army was transferred to General Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law to the Duke of Wellington. The officers and troops of this formidable invasion force included several thousand veterans of the Peninsular Campaign, including some of the most elite companies in the British Army.

  Pakenham’s objective was New Orleans, a polyglot city of 25,000 inhabitants located on the north bank of the Mississippi River, about 100 miles from the Gulf. Apart from the rich plunder the city offered, its conquest and occupation would enable the British to interdict navigation of the Mississippi, and thus force the American delegation at Ghent to assume a more submis
sive attitude.

  Sailing from Jamaica in late November, in a fleet commanded by Admiral Cochrane, the invaders landed at Cat Island on December 13, attacked through Lake Borgne, captured or destroyed a small American gunboat squadron, and landed on the mainland east of New Orleans. An advance party marched through bayous and cypress swamps to a plantation on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, about eight miles downriver of New Orleans. One by one, the British regiments were brought up into position, their numbers eventually approaching six thousand. With the recent experience of Bladensburg in mind, the British commanding officers assumed that a frontal attack on the American lines would quickly rout the defenders.

  The American forces were commanded by Major General Andrew Jackson, a native of South Carolina who had commanded the entire Gulf Coast region since May 1814. Having arrived in New Orleans only a month earlier, Jackson had found the city critically unprepared for the British invasion, and his engineers worked at a furious pace to throw up earthworks and redoubts. At first the defenders were badly outnumbered, but they were gradually reinforced as militiamen streamed into the city from the surrounding region. A small force of U.S. Army regulars were joined by crack riflemen from Kentucky and Tennessee, free black regiments raised over the objections of local politicians, a handful of Choctaw Indian scouts, and a gang of pirates under the leadership of Jean Lafitte. Lafitte’s pirates were wanted men, but they were motivated to join Jackson’s army by a combination of patriotism, hatred of the British, and the hope of a future pardon. The New Orleans French naturally took up arms against their hereditary enemies; “Yankee Doodle” and the “Marseillaise” were the tunes most often heard on the streets of the city.