Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  On the other hand, Naval Occurrences is a bitterly sarcastic and deeply malevolent work. Nearly every page is sprinkled with gratuitous insults aimed at American officers and seamen, with the occasional ad hominem whack at the entire American people or the American “character” (“It may suit the Americans to invent any falsehood, no matter how barefaced, to foist a valiant character on themselves”). James wrote with the high passion of a man possessed by his hatred for England’s recent enemy, and he never managed to achieve the detachment and composure required of a great historian. Nor was he an especially trustworthy arbiter when evidence was contradictory or lacking. As an attorney, James assumed the familiar role of a courtroom advocate presenting a case on behalf of a client. In every instance in which the particulars of the British and American accounts disagree, he accepts those of the former at face value. He often makes sweeping assertions without even attempting to support his facts, and when he errs, as he often does, his errors always manage to work in favor of the British officers and ships. In failing to achieve his potential as a great historian, James failed even to be a good one.

  For six and a half decades, James’s book stood unrefuted. It fell to Theodore Roosevelt, as a twenty-two-year-old law student, to produce an effective response. Roosevelt began researching the subject as an undergraduate at Harvard College in 1879, somehow finding time for the work despite carrying a heavy schedule of classes, sports, social engagements, and extracurricular activities. He wrote the early chapters of the book that would eventually be published as The Naval War of 1812 (for which he received no academic credit at Harvard) while simultaneously churning out his senior thesis. Graduating with high honors in 1880, Roosevelt moved back into his mother’s house on West Fifty-Seventh Street in New York, married Alice Hathaway Lee, and enrolled at Columbia Law School. In the afternoons, after his law classes, he often did research for his naval history at the Astor Library on Lafayette Place. In the evenings, at home, he would work on the book for an hour or so before dinner.

  A friend, Owen Wister, recalled that Roosevelt “finished his naval history of 1812 mostly standing on one leg at the bookcases in his New York house, the other leg crossed behind, toe touching the floor, heedless of dinner engagements and the flight of time.” Wister continued:

  A slide drew out from the bookcase. On this he had open the leading authorities on navigation, of which he knew nothing. He knew that when a ship’s course was one way, with the wind another, the ship had to sail at angles, and this was called tacking or beating. By exhaustive study and drawing of models, he pertinaciously got it all right, whatever of it came into the naval engagements he was writing about.

  His wife used to look in at his oblivious back, and exclaim in a plaintive drawl: “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teedy’s drawing little ships!”

  Then there would be a scurry, and he would cut himself shaving, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding, and they would have to surround him and take measures to save his collar from getting stained.

  Roosevelt was no seaman, and did not easily master the details of ship-handling and maneuvering, or the finer points of early nineteenth-century naval armament and relative force. It was an enormous task, particularly since much of the original historical documentation remained in its raw form, not yet transcribed and published as it is today. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I’m afraid it is too big a task for me,” he told his sister. “I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities.” But he managed to push through to the end, and The Naval War of 1812 was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1882. Reviews were favorable, and for many years the book was required reading for midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

  Much of The Naval War is fairly dry and technical, structured largely as a point-by-point rebuttal of James’s book (Roosevelt actually used the relevant chapters from James’s Naval History of Great Britain, an abridged version of Naval Occurrences). Roosevelt does not dismiss James’s main thesis out of hand; indeed, he concedes the truth of many of the Englishman’s claims, and praises his book as “an invaluable work, written with fullness and care,” while in the same breath condemning it as “a piece of special pleading by a bitter and not over-scrupulous partisan.” There are outcroppings of humor in Roosevelt’s prose, as when he quotes James as noting a “similarity” of language between Americans and Britons, calling the remark “an interesting philological discovery that but few will attempt to controvert.” After quoting James’s long-winded justification of the British practice of impressing seamen from American ships, Roosevelt dismisses it as a “euphemistic way of saying that whenever a British commander short of men came across an American vessel he impressed all of her crew that he wanted, whether they were citizens of the United States or not.”

  Occasionally, Roosevelt seizes upon one of James’s unsupported assertions and shows how, if carried to logical extremes, it would lead to a perverse conclusion. For example, when James estimates that of the crews of the American ships, “one third in number and one half in point of effectiveness” were in fact British seamen, Roosevelt challenges the truth of the claim, but for the sake of argument applies the rule to the Constitution-Java action (in which the crews numbered 450 and 400, respectively):

  That is, of the 450 men the Constitution had when she fought the Java, 150 were British, and the remaining 300 could have been as effectively replaced by 150 more British. So a very little logic works out a result that James certainly did not intend to arrive at; namely, that 300 British led by American officers could beat, with ease and comparative impunity, 400 British led by their own officers.

  To the same point, in discussing the Constitution-Guerrière action, Roosevelt quotes court-martial testimony in which the British captain had claimed his ship was “very much weakened by permitting the Americans on board to quit their quarters.” Roosevelt adds:

  Coupling this with the assertion made by James…that the Constitution was largely manned by Englishmen, we reach the somewhat remarkable conclusion that the British ship was defeated because the Americans on board would not fight against their country, and that the American was victorious because the British on board would.

  Roosevelt’s book exposed enough of James’s distortions and fabrications to leave no doubt that the latter was, in spite of his talents, guilty of “every known form of willful misstatement, from the suppression of the truth and the suggestion of the false to the lie direct.” But Roosevelt’s purpose was not only to refute James, but to show that James’s American contemporaries were equally culpable. When the American ships were better manned and more heavily armed than their adversaries, Roosevelt states the case clearly, and admits that many of the American naval victories of the War of 1812 were “magnified absurdly by most of our writers at the time.” There was no reason not to “tell the truth” about the relative force of British and American ships in the War of 1812, said Roosevelt, for the American victories would not have been possible if not for the courage and skill of both officers and crew:

  And it must always be remembered that a victory, honorably won, if even over a weaker foe, does reflect credit on the nation by whom it is gained. It was creditable to us as a nation that our ships were better made and better armed than the British frigates…. Some of my countrymen will consider this but scant approbation, to which the answer must be that a history is not a panegyric.

  Of course, what was most interesting about The Naval War of 1812 was not the book itself but the identity of its author, and the lessons he would draw from naval history in the course of his remarkable career as an American statesman and a devoted imperialist. During the next several years of Roosevelt’s whirlwind of a life, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, rising to the rank of minority leader at age twenty-five; suffered the tragedy of having his wife and mother die (of different illnesses) on the same day; took up cattle ranching in the remote Dakota Territory on the western frontier;
and published his second book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885). Roosevelt was invited to speak at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in June 1887. To an audience of naval officers and professors, Roosevelt delivered a speech laced with stunningly bellicose rhetoric. He was beginning to develop the high-voltage speaking style that would make him such an iconic figure in American public life: his high raspy voice sometimes breaking into falsetto, his arm-waving, his fist-shaking, his practice of smacking his right fist into his left palm, and his way of leaning far over the rostrum as if trying to get his face closer to the audience.

  We ask for a great navy, partly because we think that the possession of such a navy is the surest guaranty of peace, and partly because we feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and its tears like water, rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown…. No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.

  At the Naval War College, Roosevelt was introduced to Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval officer turned historian who would shortly publish The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, destined to become one of the most influential naval works ever written. When it was published two years later, Roosevelt wrote the captain: “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book, and that I found it interesting is shown by the fact that having taken it up I have gone straight through and finished it…. It is a very good book—admirable; and I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.” Roosevelt wrote an admiring review in the Atlantic Monthly, reserving special praise for Mahan’s conclusion that the War of 1812 had shown that the United States needed a fleet of capital ships, or battleships, of the heaviest class. Captain Mahan would join an inner circle of Roosevelt’s advisers, allies, and fellow imperialists that would include John Hay, Elihu Root, and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

  After stints as a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission and New York City Board of Police Commissioners, Roosevelt was appointed, in 1897, Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the administration of William McKinley. Roosevelt agitated in favor of a naval buildup, the cutting of a canal across the Central American isthmus, the annexation of Hawaii, and intervention in Cuba on the side of anti-Spanish revolutionaries. He openly hoped for a war with one of the European imperial powers, “by preference Germany—but I am not particular, and I’d take even Spain if nothing better offered.” After the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Roosevelt cabled Admiral George Dewey, commander of the Asiatic Squadron at Hong Kong, and ordered him to prepare to attack the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. When McKinley was slow to ask for a declaration of war, Roosevelt privately remarked that the president had “the backbone of a chocolate éclair.” Six days after the American declaration of war against Spain on April 25, 1898, Dewey’s fleet surprised and destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay, and the Philippines came under American control.

  A week later, Roosevelt quit the Navy Department. He obtained an army commission, led the “Rough Riders” regiment in a famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, returned to the United States as a war hero, and was elected governor of New York State in 1898. In 1900, he was elected vice president in the second McKinley administration. When McKinley was shot and killed by an assassin in Buffalo, New York, the following year, Roosevelt, at age forty-two, suddenly found himself the twenty-sixth president of the United States.

  Using the “bully pulpit” of the presidency (a term he coined), President Roosevelt campaigned for a major naval building program. He delivered his famous “Big Stick” speech in Chicago in April 1903. “There is a homely old adage which runs, Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far,” he told the audience. “If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.” The next morning, the Chicago Tribune ran a headline: SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK, SAYS ROOSEVELT. In the following days, people who came out to see the president carried baseball bats and makeshift clubs, brandishing them above their heads.

  During his first term, Roosevelt convinced Congress to build ten first-class battleships, four armored cruisers, and seventeen smaller vessels. Naval spending rose nearly 40 percent, surpassing $100 million for the first time. It was the largest peacetime naval expansion in American history. By 1906, the United States had more battleships afloat than any other naval power except Great Britain.

  Early in his career, Roosevelt had believed that the United States might find itself in a third war with England. After the peaceful settlement of an Alaska-Yukon boundary dispute in 1903, he wrote: “There is no danger to us from England now in any way. I think there never will be.” Roosevelt regarded Germany, with its territorial ambitions in South America, as America’s most dangerous rival; and he believed Japan, recent victor of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, posed a longer-term threat in the Pacific. Roosevelt told Cecil Spring-Rice, an English friend who would later serve as British ambassador to Washington: “In a dozen years the English, Americans and Germans, who now dread one another as rivals in the trade of the Pacific, will have each to dread the Japanese more than they do any other nation.”

  In 1906, Roosevelt traveled to Panama aboard the USS Louisiana to inspect the progress of construction of the Panama Canal—a project he regarded as essential to enable the United States to maintain a credible naval presence in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It was the first time a sitting president had traveled outside the United States. (The canal would be completed and opened in 1914.) In 1907, Roosevelt proposed that the main battle fleet of the U.S. Navy—sixteen first-class battleships known as the “Great White Fleet,” so named because they were painted white—should sail on a “goodwill” circumnavigation of the world, both in order to advertise American naval power and to drill the officers and men in a technically demanding exercise. No fleet of capital ships had ever made such a voyage. When Congress balked at the expense, Roosevelt ordered the ships to sail for the Pacific using existing resources, and then dared Congress not to appropriate funds for the fleet’s return. Roosevelt later remarked, “There was no further difficulty about the money.”

  Roosevelt saw the White Fleet off from Hampton Roads in December 1907. The column of ships stretched for seven miles across the sea. Watching from the presidential yacht, the Mayflower, Roosevelt asked: “Did you ever see such a fleet? Isn’t it magnificent? Oughtn’t we all feel proud?” The fleet traversed 43,000 miles, making twenty port calls on six continents over a period of fourteen months, and returned to Hampton Roads in February 1909, just days before Roosevelt was due to retire from office. Again the president watched from the deck of the Mayflower. As each ship passed, she fired a 21-gun salute in honor of the commander in chief. Roosevelt was, as he often said, “deee-lighted.”

  Almost a century had passed since the Anglo-American war of 1812–15. Theodore Roosevelt, whose career had begun with an exhaustive study of the naval operations of that war, had almost single-handedly persuaded his countrymen to recognize and adopt, as he had put it to the midshipmen of the Naval Academy a few years earlier, “the lessons which should be learned by the study of the War of 1812.”

  CHRONOLOGY OF LATER EVENTS: 1815–2005

  1815

  Stephen Decatur leads a naval expedition to the Mediterranean and obtains highly favorable treaties with the Barbary powers.

  1816

  USS Constitution laid up in ordinary (mothballed) at the Charlestown Navy Yard.

  1817

  Former USS President, now HMS President, has seen only two years’ active service in the Royal Navy after her capture off New York in January 1815. Cumulative damages sustained in her grounding at Sandy Hook, her battle with Endymion, and a gale during the return passage from Bermuda to England have rendered her unfit for repair. In
1817 she is broken up at Portsmouth, England.

  1818

  An act of the U.S. Congress, passed in April, empowers the president to deploy naval vessels to suppress the illegal slave trade.

  1819–20

  USS Constellation serves as flagship to Commodore Charles Morris (formerly first lieutenant of the Constitution under Isaac Hull) on the Brazil station, patrolling against illegal slavers.

  Stephen Decatur, having won more prize money than any other commander in the U.S. Navy, is now a wealthy man. He and his wife, Susan, live in a mansion designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, on the northwest corner of President’s Square (present-day Lafayette Park), a stone’s throw from the White House.

  James Barron, who commanded the Chesapeake when she was attacked by the Leopard in 1807 and was suspended from the navy, returns to the United States after an absence of six years, seeking reinstatement. Decatur opposes the reinstatement, and is openly critical of Barron in conversations with other naval officers and government officials in Washington. Barron, from Norfolk, writes Decatur on June 12, 1819: “Sir: I have been informed, in Norfolk, that you have said you could insult me with impunity, or words to that effect. If you have said so, you will no doubt disavow it, and I shall expect to hear from you.” Decatur replies June 17: “Whatever I may have thought, or said, in the very frequent and free conversation I have had respecting you and your conduct, I feel a thorough conviction that I never could have been guilty of so much egoism as to say that ‘I could insult you’ (or any other man) ‘with impunity.’ I am, sir, your obedient servant, Stephen Decatur.”