1812: The Navy's War

by George Daughan

  Jefferson further enhanced his electoral appeal during his first term by doing away with the noxious internal taxes imposed by his predecessors. To do so, he drastically reduced the size of the navy, which was the largest item in the budget. He could not do away with the service entirely, however. Tripoli had declared war on the United States in 1801, plunging the nation into an unwelcome conflict with the Barbary pirate state that demanded the use of a limited navy. Still, he kept the service small, which allowed for significant tax reduction.

  The tiny navy that Jefferson deployed against Tripoli was officered by the same men who had trained during the Quasi-War with France. They acquired further indispensable experience fighting the Barbary pirates. Another hero in the tradition of Thomas Truxtun, Captain Edward Preble of Portland, Maine, emerged to motivate and inspire them. He and Truxtun would be the most powerful influences on the exceptional officers who went on to lead the navy during the War of 1812.

  BY THE TIME Jefferson stood for reelection in 1804, internal taxes had been eliminated. And while the country’s defenses had been hollowed out, Jefferson could boast that tax collectors no longer bothered the people. Voters were extremely grateful, reelecting him overwhelmingly to a second term. The Federalist Party, which had opposed both the Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson’s dismantling of the navy, was handed a devastating defeat.

  Jefferson’s luck did not hold in his second term, however. The Napoleonic menace came back with a vengeance. On May 17, 1803, immediately after his Haitian fiasco, Bonaparte terminated the Treaty of Amiens and turned to his next great project: conquering Britain. For him, the key to unlimited world power was crushing the British and their all-powerful navy. By the summer of 1805 he had collected a massive army of 100,000 men and seven hundred barges around Boulogne on the French coast. Once he was across the narrow English Channel, nothing could stop him from occupying London. He waited anxiously for Admiral Villeneuve’s French fleet to appear and protect his advance across the water.

  Napoleon’s army at Boulogne was the greatest menace to Britain since William the Conqueror. To counter it, Pitt, who had been out of office since February 4, 1801, was asked to resume leadership of the cabinet on May 10, 1804. Eight days later, Bonaparte, having destroyed all his rivals, including General Moreau, made himself emperor of France. To fight him, Pitt organized another alliance with Russia, Austria, and Sweden, known as the Third Coalition, and large Austrian and Russian armies were soon on the march, threatening France from the east.

  Napoleon grew increasingly apprehensive, waiting at Boulogne for his ships to arrive, and on August 26—even before he knew that Villeneuve was never coming to the English Channel, having instead put into Cadiz—he left a small force of 30,000 to guard the French coast, wheeled around abruptly, and drove east beyond the Rhine to attack the Third Coalition’s armies.

  Napoleon wanted to fight them individually (en detail), and the Coalition cooperated. He caught a large Austrian army at Ulm on October 20, 1805, and crushed it. Then, on December 2, 1805, he defeated a combined Russian-Austrian army at Austerlitz, knocking Austria out of the war. The following year he dealt with Prussia, whose king, Frederick William, had belatedly joined the Coalition. Napoleon defeated the Prussian armies at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806. The final showdown with the Russians came during the winter of 1807 at Eylau and Friedland; Napoleon won decisively. He then held a famous conference with Czar Alexander at Tilsit on July 7, 1807. The victorious French dictator redrew the map of Europe, supposedly with the czar’s connivance, but no one was deceived: Bonaparte was master of Europe, and Britain stood alone.

  Immediately after Tilsit, Napoleon invaded Portugal and then Spain, despite the objections of his foreign minister, Talleyrand. Never enthusiastic about Bonaparte’s expansion beyond France’s traditional borders, Talleyrand had nonetheless continued to serve him. The invasion of Portugal and Spain in 1807 and 1808 was too much, however, and Talleyrand resigned. Before doing so, he urged the emperor to consolidate his gains, which were already immense. Napoleon ridiculed him. He was intent on ruling not just Portugal and Spain but their vast American empires as well—including all of South and Central America, large portions of the West Indies, and huge parcels of North America.

  To Napoleon’s surprise, Portugal, Spain, and their American colonies refused to knuckle under, precipitating the Peninsula War, which dragged on year after year with no end in sight, tying down 250,000 French troops on the Iberian Peninsula. The British came to the aid of the guerrilla resistance in Spain and Portugal, deploying the army that eventually achieved fame under the Duke of Wellington.

  EVEN AS NAPOLEON was making himself master of continental Europe, Admiral Horatio Nelson demonstrated at the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, that Britain remained dominant on the world’s oceans. Although Nelson died a heroic death during the fighting, he managed to destroy or capture most of Admiral Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet in what would be regarded as the most consequential naval battle of the age. In the months after Trafalgar, the British moved aggressively to thwart Napoleon’s efforts to revive his fleet, first by capturing the entire Danish navy and moving it to England, and then by inducing a beleaguered Portugal to move her fleet to Britain. By the time of Tilsit, Bonaparte was no longer a factor on the high seas.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights

  UNABLE TO DEFEAT Britain at sea or to cross the English Channel with his army, Napoleon turned to economic warfare against the hated British. On November 21, 1806, he issued the Berlin Decree, in which he announced a blockade of the entire British Isles and forbade any British goods from being imported into Europe. The blockade was mere rhetoric; Napoleon had no means of enforcing it. But sealing continental ports was something he could put into effect. He did not implement his decree right away, however, and the British did not respond immediately.

  Back on January 23, 1806, Prime Minister Pitt had died suddenly of exhaustion, shocking the British, who had looked to him for leadership since 1783 and had never felt the need for him quite as much as they did now in the face of the Napoleonic menace. For a brief thirteen-month period in 1806 and 1807, a Whig Ministry of All the Talents replaced Pitt. Lord Grenville, who had negotiated the Jay Treaty, became prime minister, while Charles James Fox took over the Foreign Office. They offered some hope of a reconciliation with the United States. Pitt, growing more reactionary over the years, had become increasingly hard on America. The new government now tried a different approach, hoping by easing relations with the United States to ensure her neutrality. Jefferson dispatched special envoy William Pinkney to joined Ambassador James Monroe in London to negotiate an agreement on trade and impressment. Monroe and Pinkney reached agreement with Grenville and Fox on a new treaty that covered trade but not impressment. Grenville simply could not overcome objections from the Admiralty on this point. He did agree, however, to issue guidelines for naval officers to make certain they impressed only British citizens on American ships, which, under the circumstances, Monroe and Pinkney found satisfactory.

  A rapprochement between London and Washington appeared to be in the making, but Jefferson turned down the deal because of the impressment issue. For months he had been annoyed by the antics of British warships along the American coast—Cambria, Driver, and Leander in particular, which stationed themselves boldly off Sandy Hook, stopping ships and impressing men indiscriminately. The Leander even killed an innocent seaman on April 25, 1806, causing a great furor in New York. Jefferson, in no mood to accept an informal arrangement on impressment, refused to submit the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty to the Senate.

  Unfortunately, Fox died in September 1806, and the Ministry of All the Talents was replaced in March 1807 by another anti-American Tory cabinet, led by the Duke of Portland, a mere figurehead. The dominant members of the ministry were Spencer Perceval and George Canning, reactionaries with a deep contempt for the United States and its republican government. Pitt’s policies toward Americ
a would appear liberal when compared to those of Perceval and Canning.

  IN THE FALL of 1807, roughly a year after issuing the Berlin Decree, Napoleon began enforcing it. Perceval, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, responded with far-reaching Orders in Council designed to control neutral trade with Europe. The most egregious of the Orders was issued on November 11, 1807, requiring all neutral shipping to pass through a British port, obtain a license, and pay a duty before proceeding to any port in Napoleonic Europe, making all neutral goods more expensive than Britain’s own. Any vessel not complying was subject to seizure. Napoleon answered a month later with the Milan Decree, which stipulated that any vessel obtaining a British license or paying duty to Britain was subject to confiscation.

  The economic warfare between Britain and Napoleonic Europe was not quite what it seemed, however. The two enemies continued to trade with each other through an elaborate, cynically conceived system of licenses. Thus, while Britain was attempting to control and profit from neutral trade, she was herself engaged in a brisk business with Europe through the licenses, supplying Napoleon’s needs while denying the United States, the largest neutral carrier, the right to trade independently.

  As the Napoleonic War dragged on, the British ministry grew more reactionary, and its enmity toward America deepened. The animus Jefferson and Madison felt toward Britain naturally grew in equal measure. Again and again, their belief that the British had never reconciled themselves to American independence was confirmed. These British policies, it seemed to Madison, could only be directed at “strangling the maritime power of the United States in its cradle.” The Orders in Council were a bald attempt by Britain to monopolize world trade, “to make the English navigation and markets the medium through which alone the different parts of the world should exchange their superfluities and supply their wants.” Madison was even more incensed by the Royal Navy’s increasingly energetic impressment of American seamen. Surely there was no better demonstration of Britain’s open contempt for the United States.

  The reaction of Federalists to the economic warfare in Europe and to impressment was dramatically different from that of the Republicans. Federalists, believing that Napoleon presented a real danger to the United States, wanted Jefferson to put the country squarely on the side of England in her fight with France. If Britain fell, it would be only a matter of time before the French dictator turned on the United States just as he had before, when he attempted to put a large army into New Orleans. The British, in that sense, were fighting America’s fight. “The most intelligent and respectable men in the country,” Federalist leader Harrison Gray Otis wrote, “. . . tremble for the prosperity and fate of Britain, and consider her justly as the bulwark of the liberties of this country and mankind.”

  Federalists, of course, were not happy about the Orders in Council, nor about impressment, but they were willing to tolerate them as wartime necessities. After all, once Napoleon was defeated, the need for them would disappear. And many Federalists felt that Madison had grossly exaggerated the impressment problem, pointing out that far more British seamen were serving on American merchantmen than Americans serving in the Royal Navy. “The general business of impressing American seamen was . . . not worth mooting about,” Federalist senator John Rutledge Jr. of South Carolina wrote, “where Great Britain has in her service one of our sailors we have twenty of hers on board our merchantmen.” “This whole controversy respecting sailors,” Harrison Gray Otis wrote, “was practically to us not worth mooting, we have always had ten to their one.” Napoleon had been harder on American commerce than Britain had been, Federalists maintained, seizing ships at a faster rate than the Royal Navy.

  IT WAS PRECISELY this reflexive sympathy for Britain on the part of the Federalists, Republicans felt, that had encouraged London’s intransigence over the years. By viewing America through the eyes of Jefferson’s and Madison’s Federalist critics, the British became convinced that a divided country would never stand up to them. To do nothing in the face of the Orders and impressment, Republicans believed, would be to sacrifice the independence and honor of the United States, thereby bringing the entire republican experiment into disrepute, if not failure.

  At only one point during Jefferson’s presidency were the Federalists and Republicans briefly united, and that was after the Chesapeake-Leopard affair. On June 22, 1807, fifteen miles southeast of Virginia’s Cape Henry, the 50-gun British warship Leopard, under Captain Salusbury Pryce Humphreys, hailed the American 36-gun frigate Chesapeake, under Captain James Barron. When Barron hove to, Humphreys sent over a lieutenant with a message demanding that the Chesapeake’s crew be mustered and searched for British deserters. As surprised as he was outraged, Barron denied there were any deserters aboard his ship and refused to muster the crew. The British lieutenant returned to the Leopard empty-handed.

  Humphreys was not about to be put off, however; he was operating under strict orders from Vice Admiral Sir George Berkeley, commander of the North American Station and a rabid anti-American Tory. Within minutes of the lieutenant’s return to the Leopard, even as Barron belatedly prepared the Chesapeake for battle, Humphreys fired three broadsides into her without warning, killing three and wounding eighteen. Barron quickly struck his colors. The British lieutenant then returned and seized four of Barron’s crew, claiming they were deserters. There were probably other British deserters aboard, but the lieutenant failed to identify them. One of the men taken, Jenkin Ratford, was indeed a British deserter, but the other three were Americans. Ratford was given a quick court-martial and then hanged from the yardarm of a warship in Halifax harbor on August 31, 1807. The three Americans were sentenced to receive five hundred lashes, but that was remitted, and they wound up in jail, where one of them died. The other two remained incarcerated until returned to the deck of the Chesapeake in Boston five years later.

  The incident caused a reaction in the United States so furious that Jefferson could have asked for a declaration of war and had the whole country united behind him, including the Federalists. He decided to avoid a war, however, for the same reason Washington had: the country was unprepared and essentially defenseless. The fact that America’s defenseless state was due to Jefferson’s own policies was an irony that would not have been lost on either Hamilton or Adams, but the fact remained that declaring war was out of the question. Instead Jefferson looked for another, more peaceful, way to change British policies.

  NOTHING RANKLED AMERICANS more than the issue of impressment, but it also touched British sensitivities deeply. The Admiralty and the Perceval ministry felt that impressment was essential to the Royal Navy and thus to British security. Calling the practice into question was, in their view, tantamount to asking the country to abandon the main weapon in her life-and-death struggle with Napoleon.

  At the root of the problem, however, was something the Admiralty would never admit—namely, the unnecessarily brutal conditions aboard His Majesty’s warships. So horrendous was the working environment that British tars deserted in droves, creating a manpower shortage in the Royal Navy that the Admiralty could only solve by continually impressing more men. Britain’s leaders—not just the Admiralty—steadfastly refused to recognize the true source of their problem. On the rare occasions in Parliament when any mention was made of the deplorable state of the crews, the Admiralty was quick to deny the obvious. No less a figure than Thomas Cochrane, a storied British sea captain, whom the novelist Patrick O’Brian would use as a model for the character of Jack Aubrey, brought up the taboo subject in the House of Commons. When Cochrane deplored “the decayed and heartless state of the crews,” John W. Croker, first secretary of the Admiralty, challenged him, calling his charges “grossly exaggerated, ... an absolute misrepresentation, . . . [and] a scandalous libel on the Navy.” The House cheered as Croker’s rebuttal progressed. Members simply did not want to hear the truth, not even from such an unimpeachable source as Cochrane.

  Britain’s ruling class preferred the comfort
able illusion that the thousands of deserters were happy tars lured away from their ships by the Americans. They could not bring themselves to think about, much less reform, the bestial conditions aboard their warships. Such indifference was all the more remarkable when one considers that warships functioned far better when working conditions were improved even slightly. No military need required the brutal treatment of sailors; wartime necessity did not mandate that trained men be treated as animals.

  Tradition governed life aboard a British man-of-war, as well as the personalities of the captain and his officers. It was not uncommon for upper-class officers to be contemptuous of their crewmen, nearly all of whom were lower-class and illiterate. Discipline was harsh and often arbitrary on every warship. Being a ruthless disciplinarian never impeded an officer’s advancement. If a pressed man had a brutal, flogging skipper, his life became an intolerable hell. His only recourse was to desert.