by John McCain
AT SOME POINT IN 1812 Charles Black was interned at Dartmoor. He was an ordinary seaman on a captured American merchant ship when he was pressed into service on a British warship. When the war began, he refused to continue serving the Royal Navy, was made to forfeit the nine hundred dollars he was owed as his share of captured prizes, and was sent in chains to Dartmoor, along with other impressed sailors who refused to fight against their country.
There are no detailed accounts of his experiences there, but it is safe to assume they were as miserable as everyone else’s. The overcrowding would have been worse than the cramped quarters aboard ship. The discipline was probably harsher and the food more likely to poison him. He might have slept on a cold, stone floor. He might have been whipped severely for some small infraction. He surely would have yearned for relief from bitter winter winds. He might not have risked death in combat, but had he challenged his captors he could count on being flogged or shot, and he likely had to brawl from time to time to discourage thieves or defend his person and honor from assault. He would have run a greater risk of death by illness than he faced at sea once the remedy for scurvy had been discovered. King Dick might have been a more benevolent dictator than some ship’s captains he had known, but Black could very well have resented being the subject of an absolute monarch who made his own rules and likely enforced them capriciously. And he would surely have been discouraged by the discovery that men like those he had lived with on long sea voyages, whose respect and even friendship he had enjoyed, now considered him an inferior human being.
Accounts of how Black managed to get out of Dartmoor also lack details. All that is known is that he was released at some point during the war, possibly as part of a prisoner exchange, but was brought back to Dartmoor before he left England. He was released again, and this time he managed to make his way back to America, where he promptly enlisted in the navy. The historian David Fitz-Enz, in his account of the Battle of Plattsburgh, New York, described Black as having “a particular hatred of two things: one was digging holes and the other was the English who first impressed him and then imprisoned him in the hell hole of Dartmoor.”
Americans were still stuck in that hellhole well after the Treaty of Ghent was ratified in February 1815. On April 6, 1815, Dartmoor’s guards fired indiscriminately at prisoners they believed were about to riot, killing seven and wounding many more. Blacks were among the last Americans to leave. Some historians believe they preferred to remain in prison to await passage on ships bound for northern ports rather than board those sailing to southern slave ports. King Dick got on board a ship bound for Boston, where he would exchange the robes of monarchy for the smiles and glad-handing of a popular leader of the city’s African American community.
While Charles Black spent his first discouraging weeks in Dartmoor, African Americans on privateers and navy ships helped win more victories on the high seas and Great Lakes, which shocked the British. During the same period British soldiers and their Indian allies won a succession of victories on land, which discouraged Americans. Sailors preferred serving on privateers because of the prospect of shared profits from captured prizes. Privateers filled their rolls quickly, which put a strain on the manpower available for service on navy ships, particularly those that sailed the remote Great Lakes, where there was little chance of booty and no lively port cities in the frontier wilderness in which to spend it.
Much of the war was fought near the U.S.-Canadian border. The British had stationed fleets in the lakes to transport men and matériel to their armies in the north. Americans had to catch up quickly, so hastily built frigates were launched, requisitioned merchant vessels were converted to warships, and higher pay was offered to induce sailors to crew them. By the second year of the war, U.S. Navy squadrons were patrolling inland lakes with large numbers of African American sailors.
The most famous American naval battle in the War of 1812 is Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory over a British squadron of six ships in the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. After British broadsides had disabled her guns and killed or wounded four-fifths of her crew, Perry was forced to abandon his battered flagship, the USS Lawrence. He and his battle flag were rowed a half mile under gunfire to another ship, the Niagara. An immense oil painting of the scene looms over a landing on the U.S. Senate’s east staircase. Ships are clustered together in a haze of smoke, fire belching from their gun ports. Dead men and flotsam drift in the roiling water. Perry is standing heroically in the bow of a rowboat, pointing toward the Niagara, while a young midshipman, believed to be his brother, tugs at the fool’s coat to get him to sit down. Six oarsmen row furiously through the maelstrom; only one of them is black. His is the only expression that suggests an emotion other than steely determination: he looks terrified.
The Battle of Lake Erie was a fiercely fought, narrowly won contest, and certainly a victory that earned its fame, giving Americans control of Lake Erie and bringing relief to Major General William Henry Harrison’s struggling army in Ohio. It lasted nearly four hours. Perry’s guns had a shorter range than those of the British, so he had to maneuver in light winds to get close to the enemy while the enemy’s longer range guns pounded his flagship. Furious broadsides were exchanged, and sailors hanging in the rigging fired muskets at targets close enough to hear their cries. Dead and wounded littered the decks.
When the Lawrence was destroyed the British expected Perry to surrender. But he had the Niagara sailed straight to the center of the action, firing both larboard and starboard guns, and in less than half an hour the British had struck their colors and surrendered. After the battle Perry sent his famous dispatch to Harrison: “Dear Genl: We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”
As important as Perry’s daring and skill was on that day, just as important were the bravery and sacrifices of his sailors and marines, many of whom were African Americans. Unlike their representation in the painting, if they were terrified—and who wouldn’t have been?—they were not incapacitated by fear. They fought fiercely, resourcefully, and determinedly, earning the respect and gratitude of their commander, who had once doubted their fitness to serve.
Commodore Isaac Chauncey, who commanded the American fleet on Lake Ontario, was Perry’s commanding officer. Perry had been desperately short of men to crew the flotilla he was assembling in Lake Erie. He had little more than a hundred men and needed as many as seven hundred. He begged Chauncey for reinforcements, but Chauncey, who, as commander of all Great Lakes naval operations, had serious manpower issues of his own, was unresponsive. Perry went over his head and wrote directly to the secretary of the navy, infuriating Chauncey, who nevertheless felt compelled then to come to Perry’s aid. He sent Perry 150 men. They were African American, and many of them had served on the Constitution.
When Perry saw them, he immediately wrote to Chauncey to complain:
Sir, I have this moment received . . . the enclosed letter from General Harrison. If I had officers and men . . . I could fight the enemy, and proceed up the lake; but having no one to command the “Niagara,” and only one commissioned lieutenant and two acting lieutenants, whatever my wishes may be, going out is out of the question. The men who came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set,—blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them after they were selected. I am, however, pleased to see any thing in the shape of a man.
Perry’s tactless complaint, added to what Chauncey considered his earlier insubordination, was received with considerable indignation. We can feel the heat of Chauncey’s anger in his written response:
Sir, . . . I regret that you are not pleased with the men sent you by Mssrs Champlin and Forest; for, to my knowledge, a part of them are not surpassed by any seamen we have in the fleet: and I have yet to learn that the color of the skin, or the cut and trimmings of the coat, can effect a man’s qualifications or usefulness. I have nearly fifty blacks on this ship, and many of them are among my best men; and those people you call soldiers have been to sea from two to
seventeen years; and I presume you will find them as good and useful as any men on board of your vessel.
Chauncey’s prediction was proved accurate. After the battle Perry wrote the secretary of the navy and Chauncey, praising the “bravery and good conduct of his negroes.”
WHEN PERRY LEFT THE Lawrence, he took with him his personal pennant, which bore the famous dying words, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” of the man for whom his flagship was named, Perry’s close friend, Captain James Lawrence. A lawyer by training, Lawrence joined the infant U.S. Navy in 1798, received a lieutenant’s commission in 1802, and commanded several ships before and during the War of 1812. He first won renown as commander of the sloop of war USS Hornet. The Hornet had been cruising the Atlantic during the first four months of the war and had already distinguished herself by capturing a British privateer, blockading a British sloop off the coast of Brazil, and capturing a British packet ship, the Resolution, that was carrying a small fortune in gold and silver.
On February 24, 1813, while chasing another privateer into the mouth of a river off the coast of Guyana, the Hornet spotted a British man-of-war, the Espiegle, riding at anchor in the mouth of the Demerara River. As she was bearing down on the Espiegle, the Hornet was suddenly approached from the sea by the twenty-gun British sloop Peacock, commanded by William Peake. Lawrence brought the Hornet about, gaining the upwind advantage, beat to quarters, and cleared for action, leaving the Espiegle unmolested. At about 5:30 the two fast-closing sloops passed each other on opposite tacks within pistol range. Both fired broadsides, but the Hornet had more guns and better gunners, and while some of her crew were killed or wounded in the exchange, she inflicted far worse damage on the Peacock. Both ships made to come about, but the Hornet was faster. Lawrence brought her up to the Peacock’s defenseless stern, and his gunners destroyed the man-of-war in minutes. Commander Peake was killed, and his second-in-command ordered her colors struck.
Lawrence sent a crew to board the Peacock, but she couldn’t be saved and quickly sank to the bottom. The survivors were brought on board the Hornet. Carrying too many men and too few provisions, she left the coast of South America and made for Martha’s Vineyard, where she could replenish her stores unmolested by British warships. Though they were desperately low on water, and the crew had been on reduced rations for a while, captain and crew treated their British prisoners generously, as the Peacock’s surviving officers publicly acknowledged when they reached the States.
In his after-action report to Secretary of the Navy William Jones, Lawrence praised “the cool and determined conduct of my officers and crew . . . and their almost unexampled exertions afterward entitle them to my warmest acknowledgements.” Many of his men—half of them, according to one account—were African Americans, including many of the gunners whose skill had proved superior to the Peacock’s gunners.
ALTHOUGH THE NAVAL WAR hadn’t gone well for the British, with Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814, they could send additional regiments to North America and begin in earnest their plan to force America’s capitulation. In August of that year, while British soldiers were marching on Washington and Baltimore, Lieutenant General Sir George Prevost left Montreal and invaded New York with an army of eleven thousand seasoned British troops, many of them veterans of the Peninsular War. His object was control of Lake Champlain, from where he could eventually advance down the Hudson River Valley to New York City. He would have to take the lake from a small force of fifteen hundred American regulars and two thousand mostly untrained militia under the command of Brigadier General Alexander Macomb at Plattsburgh on the lake’s Cumberland Bay.
The resulting Battle of Plattsburgh—or Battle of Lake Champlain, depending on which service’s perspective you share, the army’s or navy’s—proved to be hugely consequential. But its importance has always been overshadowed by the hard-won American victory at Baltimore, when Francis Scott Key hailed the oversized American flag waving over Fort McHenry at dawn on September 14. The battle on the shores of Lake Champlain ended the war in the north and, arguably, the entire conflict. British intransigence had stalled the peace negotiations at Ghent; London insisted on terms that would have created an Indian buffer state between Canada and the United States and banned the U.S. Navy from the Great Lakes. After the smoke cleared at Plattsburgh and word of the outcome reached London, Britain was prepared to accept a treaty that recognized the antebellum status quo. Negotiations proceeded swiftly, and the Treaty of Ghent was signed in December. In the words of Winston Churchill, the Battle of Plattsburgh was “the most decisive engagement of the war.”
In the lead-up to the engagement, General Macomb sent a force of fewer than five hundred soldiers to harass and slow the British. Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough, in command of U.S. naval forces on the lake, hastily finished assembling his fleet of fourteen ships, which included the recently constructed twenty-six-gun Saratoga, the fourteen-gun Ticonderoga, and the just completed twenty-gun brig USS Eagle. He faced a British squadron of sixteen ships commanded by Commodore George Downie, which boasted the newly built thirty-six-gun frigate HMS Confiance. Though Downie had more and better guns, Macdonough had the better battle plan.
General Prevost’s army arrived at Plattsburgh on September 6 opposite the Saranac River from the American defenders, who occupied a ridge just south of the little town. Friction in the British ranks had weakened Prevost’s command; soldiers who had served under the Duke of Wellington grumbled about Prevost’s timidity and indecisiveness, despite enjoying a huge numerical advantage. He spent the first few days at Plattsburgh exchanging artillery fire with the Americans and launching minor attacks that were easily repulsed. When the British found a place to ford the Saranac three miles above the town, Prevost committed to a full assault on the American left flank. The attack was scheduled for September 10, to coincide with the arrival of Commodore Downie’s squadron. It would begin with a diversionary attack on the American center to keep the defenders occupied, while the main British force forded the Saranac and bore down on their left and Downie destroyed Macdonough’s squadron.
Macdonough’s ships, anchored in Cumberland Bay, were responsible for protecting Macomb’s right flank. Macdonough knew he was facing a formidable foe. None of his ships could match the firepower of a British frigate, and the British guns were longer range than his. He needed to erase Downie’s advantage by enticing him to fight at close range. Cumberland Bay was only three miles wide, and with its hidden shoals and sandbars it could be treacherous to maneuver. It was ideal for a close fight. Macdonough decided to fight his ships at anchor, with his four biggest ships in a line north to south, their spring lines attached to their anchor cables so they could be turned from side to side, and the gunboats interspersed between them.
In the weeks before the battle Macdonough’s biggest challenge had been finding sailors and marines for his fleet. He had to plead for soldiers from Major General George Izard, who commanded America’s northern army. Izard sent him two hundred fifty men whom Macdonough quickly trained as marines and sailors. He still needed oarsmen for his gunboats and asked Macomb for some of his. But the badly outnumbered Macomb had no men to spare and agreed only to empty his stockade and have the prisoners man the oars. A few members of Macomb’s regimental band volunteered to fight on the lake, as did an African American seaman, just arrived from Boston and recently an inmate in Dartmoor prison.
We don’t know which ship Charles Black fought on that day. We know he fought bravely, and he fought alongside other brave men, black and white. They fought for the country each called home and for each other. Some knew their business, and some had never fought at sea before. They withstood the fire together. They killed together. They were wounded together. They died together. And they deserve equal credit for the victory that turned the tide of the war.
Around eight o’clock on the morning of September 11, a day later than Prevost planned, Macdonough saw Downie’s flagship, the big frigate Confiance, her sails full, round Cumb
erland Head, two miles northeast of where his little fleet was anchored. Minutes later the other British ships appeared. The noise they made as they readied their guns for battle alerted Prevost and his officers that the Royal Navy had arrived and the battle was at hand. Prevost issued orders to begin executing his battle plan.
Prevost heard Downie’s ships fire their first salvo and then gave the order to fire his six artillery batteries all at once at the American lines. A brigade marched in formation to the bridges over the Saranac as if readying a frontal assault and began firing their muskets at the Americans. The main body of Prevost’s army marched north to the ford, while the noise from naval cannon and field artillery and the drifting gun smoke masked their movements.
Downie’s plan was to cross Macdonough’s line out of range of their guns. But as they sailed downwind toward the anchored American fleet, with the Confiance leading the way, the wind fell off. The British ships, their sails luffing in the dying, shifting breeze, slowly drifted into harm’s way and had to drop anchor a few hundred yards in front of the American line. The Confiance approached Macdonough’s flagship, the Saratoga. On Macdonough’s order the Saratoga fired first. A single cannonball hit the bow of the Confiance, and all at once American guns opened fire. British guns, loaded with double shot, replied. A British sloop, HMS Chubb, was quickly disabled. Her main boom destroyed and anchor cable severed, she drifted helplessly along the battle line, her decks crowded with dead and dying. Another British sloop ran aground on a sandbar. But HMS Linnet crossed in front of the Eagle and fired a full broadside at her before dropping anchor.
Macdonough held his fire while he let the Confiance drift closer to him. Before he could order another salvo, Downie dropped anchor and gave the Saratoga a tremendous battering with his starboard guns, killing or wounding nearly a fifth of her crew. Body parts, rigging, and all manner of debris were strewn across her deck. Macdonough was struck by falling timber and knocked briefly unconscious.