1812: The Navy's War

by George Daughan

  On May 1, 1810, in order to revive the revenue stream flowing to the cashstarved Treasury, Congress replaced the Non-Intercourse Act with Macon’s Bill #2, which restored trade with the entire world, including Britain and France. Moreover, the bill stipulated that if either Britain or France ceased interfering with neutral trade, the United States would stop trading with the other nation. This provision moved Napoleon to notify the United States that he was removing his Berlin and Milan decrees, although, in truth, he had no intention of doing so. Madison, choosing to believe him, asked Britain to rescind the Orders in Council, or be faced with the prospect of having trade with America cut off. London was quick to point out that Napoleon had not actually done what he said and so refused.

  On February 11, 1811, Madison, having given Perceval three months’ warning, imposed nonimportation against Great Britain, and as 1811 progressed, relations between the two governments further deteriorated. The Royal Navy appeared again off New York, stopping and seizing American ships, and aggressively impressing American seamen. Particularly noxious were the frigates Guerriere and Melampus.

  On May 1 the Guerriere stopped the brig Spitfire and impressed an innocent Maine man serving as apprentice to the master. New York City was in an uproar over the incident, and the secretary of the navy ordered Captain John Rodgers, then at Annapolis, to rush to New York in the President and “vindicate the injured honor of our navy and revive the drooping spirits of the nation.” On May 16, 1811, while he was on his way to New York, Rodgers spotted a British warship forty-five miles northeast of Cape Henry. Thinking she might be the Guerriere, he went after her. The stranger fled, but Rodgers caught up with her at eightthirty that evening, when visibility was poor. Confusion ensued as both ships started shooting before they knew who the other was.

  The stranger turned out to be the 20-gun British sloop of war Little Belt, a two-decked, formerly Danish warship. She was much smaller than the President, and Rodgers forced her to strike her colors in a few minutes. After the brief fight, the captain of the badly banged-up Little Belt, Arthur Bingham, refused all help from Rodgers and struggled back to Halifax, while Rodgers sailed the President to New York, where he received a hero’s welcome. Such was the state of British-American relations that the president was quick to publicly congratulate Rodgers.

  AS 1811 PROGRESSED, Madison, in utter frustration, was coming to the conclusion that war with Britain was unavoidable. He would not give up on trying to get the British to change their policies, but it looked increasingly unlikely they would do so. During the summer he conferred at length with Jefferson and Secretary of State James Monroe at Monticello and decided that only an actual declaration of war would move Perceval to the negotiating table. “We have been so long dealing in small ways of embargoes, non-intercourse, and non-importation, with menaces of war, &c.,” explained Monroe, “that the British Government has not believed us. We must actually get to war before the intention to make it will be credited either here or abroad.” In a similar vein, the president wrote that, “Perceval [and his colleagues] . . . prefer war with us to a repeal of their Orders in Council. We have nothing left therefore, but to make ready for it.”

  On November 4, 1811, Madison urged Congress to strengthen the nation’s defenses, which for the last eleven years under Republican rule had been allowed to deteriorate. He asked Congress to authorize an additional 10,000 men for the regular army, which would have brought it up to 20,000. Congress responded on January 11, 1812, by increasing bounties for an enlistment of five years from $12 to $16, plus three months pay and 160 acres of land, and it approved an increase in the regular army of 25,000—in other words, 15,000 more troops than the 10,000 Madison asked for. The legislation thus authorized a regular force of up to 35,000.

  Republican malcontents like Senator William Giles of Virginia, eager to chastise the president for being too soft on Britain and too lax about keeping up the nation’s defenses, promoted the larger number. Giles, paradoxically, had been a strong supporter and, indeed, an intimate of President Jefferson, and he had worked hard for the election of Madison, but his antipathy toward Treasury Secretary Gallatin estranged him from the president, and he became a bitter opponent.

  Madison felt that he would have great difficulty bringing the existing regular army up to full strength and then raising 10,000 more men. Enlisting 25,000 seemed impossible. Nonetheless, his supporters in the House approved the higher number, 94 to 34. Speaker Henry Clay declared that a larger army was indispensable to America’s “commerce, character, [and] a nation’s best treasure, honor!”

  Considering its size and prosperity, the United States could have easily supported a regular force of 100,000, but Madison never wanted a large standing army, nor would Republicans in Congress have approved one, since they considered it a threat to the Constitution. Like Jefferson and most other Republicans, Madison intended to rely on state militias—citizen soldiers who could be organized, equipped, and trained ahead of time and then called upon when needed. Militiamen would serve only for brief periods before returning to their civilian pursuits, making it impossible for an American Caesar or Napoleon to misuse them.

  In April, with war increasingly likely, Congress authorized the president to call up to 100,000 state militiamen for six months of federal service. The militiamen were an unknown quantity, however. It was not at all certain they could fight or would be willing to march beyond the country’s borders. Thirty days later, Congress authorized Madison to call up 50,000 volunteers in addition to the militiamen and the regulars. Volunteers were neither militiamen nor regulars but something in between. They were men who served for brief periods of a few months and then went home. Regular army personnel signed on for five years. No one was confident that volunteers in sufficient numbers would respond to the president’s call. Indeed, it was unlikely they would. By June recruitment had produced no more than 5,000 additional men for the regular army, bringing it near 12,000, out of the authorized total of 35,000. The War Department was so disorganized it could not even give Congress exact figures on their present manpower.

  The legislation also authorized the appointment of two major generals and five brigadier generals. The president, if he saw fit, could make one major general senior to the others and thus the leader of the army. Back on January 27, Madison had appointed the former secretary of war under Jefferson, sixty-two-year-old Henry Dearborn, as the senior major general, and he was given command of the entire northern army based outside Albany, New York. Dearborn’s advanced age did not seem to bother the president. A distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary War and a physician, Dearborn had been in the thick of the fighting from Bunker Hill to Valley Forge and Yorktown, rising to colonel and later, at the close of the war, serving on Washington’s staff as deputy quartermaster general. No one had seen more combat than Henry Dearborn, and no one was better acquainted with the suffering of the patriot army. After the war he had become a successful congressman and then, for eight years, Jefferson’s secretary of war. During that time he had formed a close personal relationship with Secretary of State Madison.

  For his second major general, Madison appointed sixty-two-year-old Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina, to whom he gave command of the southern army. Pinckney had had a long, distinguished career as a soldier during the Revolution, as a diplomat afterward, and as a politician, but his capacity to lead an army at this stage in his life was limited. Congressman Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, reflecting the views of many Southerners, observed that he “was not more at a loss to account for any proceeding than the nomination of Pinckney to be major-general.” Macon assumed Pinckney’s appointment was the work of Navy Secretary Paul Hamilton, who, he said, “is about as fit for his place as the Indian Prophet would be for Emperor of Europe.”

  Macon’s slur against Paul Hamilton was a gross exaggeration. It’s true that Hamilton had been appointed in 1809 strictly for political reasons; he was a landsman, after all, with no obvious qualifications to lead the Na
vy Department. Madison appointed him first and foremost to achieve geographical balance in his cabinet. Still, Secretary Hamilton had fought with distinction in the Revolutionary War in South Carolina under guerilla leaders like Francis Marion, and in 1804, after many years as a successful planter and local politician, he became governor of South Carolina. A strong patriot, Hamilton did his best to strengthen the navy with little help from the chief executive or the Republican Congress. Unfortunately, having little understanding of naval strategy, he was unable to give sound advice to the president on how to use the country’s limited naval resources. His appointment can only be seen as one more indication of the little regard Madison had for the navy.

  ON NOVEMBER 4, 1811, Madison requested Congress to increase the navy. It was not that the president had suddenly become enamored of the fleet; rather, he wanted to send a message to London. On January 17 Langdon Cheves, chairman of the House Naval Committee, asked his colleagues to approve building twelve 74-gun ships-of-the-line and twenty frigates. That touched off an acrimonious debate that ended on January 27, with the House voting 62–59 to defeat a drastically reduced bill to add ten frigates to the navy. Instead of expanding the navy, Congress appropriated $600,000 to acquire timber over a three-year period. The message was the exact opposite of the one Madison wanted to send. Perceval could only view the bill’s defeat as another sign that the United States lacked the will to fight.

  The arguments against expanding the navy had been heard inside and outside of Congress for many years, and they had not changed. A larger navy, its opponents said, would endanger liberty, plunge the country into unnecessary wars, and become an enormous burden on taxpayers. Congressman Adam Seybert of Philadelphia, the well-known scientist, warned that an expanded navy would not return to its small state after the war but would become a permanent force at great expense and “a powerful engine in the hands of an ambitious Executive.” Attempting to make the United States into a naval power, Seybert predicted, would likely destroy the Constitution. “We cannot contend with Great Britain on the ocean,” he said, “but we can undermine our form of government by trying to do so.”

  The lack of Republican support did not prevent the navy from being ready when Congress declared war, however. Its leaders were veterans of two conflicts—the Quasi-War with France, from 1798 to 1800, and the war with Tripoli, from 1801 to 1805. They were eager to test their mettle against the British. Although the warships they commanded were old and few in number, these men were anxious to prove they were the finest afloat. Composed entirely of volunteers, their crews included no shortage of experienced fighters. And all of them received far better treatment than their British counterparts, making their ships—other things being equal—more potent. In spite of the young navy’s excellence and fighting spirit, however, its small size would remain an enormous handicap.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Madison’s Strategy

  AS THE UNITED STATES approached war in the winter and spring of 1812, President Madison had a clear strategy for winning: while Napoleon was launching his widely anticipated invasion of Russia in the summer of 1812, the United States would invade lightly defended Canada. Bonaparte’s success in Russia and America’s in Canada, Madison expected, would bring Perceval to the negotiating table. The president’s strategy did not include a major role for the navy. He assumed, as he always had, that in the early stages of the war the Royal Navy would make quick work of the tiny American fleet. Instead of relying on the navy, Madison intended to unleash hundreds of privateers and bring pressure on British commerce, as privateers had done so successfully during the War of Independence. They would be America’s navy.

  Madison’s confidence in Napoleon was widely shared in the United States and in Europe, particularly Britain. Long before the president urged Congress to declare war on June 1, it was common knowledge that the French dictator intended to invade Russia in 1812 as soon as the weather permitted. “If war should not commence soon,” wrote John Quincy Adams, the American ambassador in St. Petersburg, on October 11, 1811, “there is . . . nobody who thinks it possible it should be postponed longer than until next summer.” Napoleon was at the apogee of his power. The stupendous French forces gathering along the Russian frontier during the winter and spring of 1812 could not be hidden, and they looked invincible. By June 1812 his Grand Army had grown to an astonishing 600,000 plus, the largest in history. Czar Alexander could summon less than half that number, and perhaps only a third. The belief that Russia would be on her knees in a matter of weeks was all but universal.

  War between Napoleon and Alexander had appeared certain since at least December 31, 1810. On that date the czar issued a ukase (decree) that opened trade with Britain while imposing high tariffs on the French, thus breaking Napoleon’s continental trading system and ending Russia’s alliance with France. Knowing full well how violent Napoleon’s reaction would be, Alexander prepared for war. Few observers expected him to be able to withstand Bonaparte, but Alexander was determined to resist to the last. In the winter of 1811–12, General Mikhail Kutuzov defeated Russia’s old nemesis the Turks, ending for the moment their interminable conflict, which had flared up again in 1811. Kutuzov’s force could then combine with other elements of the Russian army and concentrate on the French and their allies. In April 1812 the czar further improved his position by making an alliance with Sweden, eliminating the possibility of Bernadotte’s army attacking St. Petersburg while Napoleon was invading Russia’s heartland.

  In May, even as Bonaparte’s hordes were gathering along the Russian border, he demonstrated to the world his dominion over Europe by throwing a lavish ball for himself in Dresden, the capital of Saxony. The proud princes and monarchs of Europe, including those of Prussia and Austria, were required to attend and pay homage to their new master at his grand soiree. When the reluctant guests were assembled in the lavish ballroom of the King of Saxony, the crowd suddenly grew silent, and then a loud voice announced, “the emperor!” After a pause, Napoleon, dressed in his green uniform, made a dramatic, solitary entrance. His message was clear enough; he was not just the Emperor of France. He was The Emperor—certainly of Europe, but after that, who knew? In June 1812 it was hard to imagine what country, or what coalition, could curb his unlimited ambition. Once he subdued Russia and pacified Spain, Britain would stand alone. Could she survive the tidal wave that was sure to follow? It seemed unlikely.

  The emperor had convinced nearly everyone that he was unbeatable, and Madison, it would seem, believed he was—at least for the moment. To be sure, Napoleon had 250,000 troops stuck in Spain for four years, unable to defeat the guerrillas and their British allies. Of course, it was Joseph Bonaparte leading the French army there, not his brother. It was widely assumed that once Napoleon turned his full attention to the Iberian Peninsula, he would prevail. Eventually the French dictator would overreach, Madison thought, and that would be the end of him. But for now he was supreme and a useful lever against the British.

  In the wake of the grand May ball, Napoleon traveled to the front and took personal command of the Grand Army, his confidence—like that of his generals— absolute. Ignoring the yearning of all Europeans, including his own people, for an end to the mass killing that had been going on for twenty years, he was determined to bring Russia to heel. Once he had done so, his dominance of the European mainland would be complete. Britain would then be in danger of seeing the French dictator, in the not too distant future, strutting in London.

  It appeared likely that after subduing Russia, Bonaparte would force the small British army out of Spain and Portugal, while simultaneously building a fleet large enough to challenge the Royal Navy in preparation for an invasion of the British mainland. Of course, there were other possibilities. After throwing Wellington out of the Iberian Peninsula, the emperor might eject Britain from Gibraltar, sweep across North Africa into Egypt, and from there push east with the compliance of his new Russian ally and conquer India, which he had long dreamed of doing. Soone
r or later, though, he would invade Britain; there could be no doubt about it. Madison was sure that, faced with this reality, the intractable Perceval would at last seek a rapprochement with the United States.

  To bring added pressure on the prime minister, Madison planned to invade Canada in the summer of 1812. Once in possession of even part of Canada, he would have a powerful bargaining tool, particularly when a French victory in Russia would threaten British security as never before. In addition, American privateers would be attacking British commerce and disrupting the supply line moving troops, equipment, money, and food to Wellington’s army in Portugal and Spain. The president even hoped that faced with the prospect of having to fight both France and the United States, the stubborn prime minister might come to terms without the need for actual combat.