Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  Traveling in northern Europe in midwinter was a harrowing ordeal, but Bainbridge decided to return at once. With the northern harbors frozen, his only route lay overland across Finland to Sweden, where he hoped to get passage on a ship for England. Roads and facilities for travelers were equally nonexistent; in Sweden his coach overturned and fell down a thirty-foot embankment, killing the coachman and one horse, but Bainbridge emerged miraculously unhurt.

  He arrived in Boston on February 9, 1812, and at once wrote Secretary Hamilton that the desire to serve his country alone had compelled him to take “a very fatiguing journey of 1200 miles on the Continent of Europe, and a dangerous passage of 53 days from Gothenburg.” Hamilton appointed him to the command of the Boston Navy Yard to allow him some time with his family before assuming a sea command.45

  The frigate Constitution was swiftly making her way back from Europe at the same time. She had been sent on a diplomatic mission to take to Paris the new American minister, Joel Barlow, deliver to the Netherlands debt payments of $220,000 in specie, and on her return drop the current American chargé d’affaires in France, Jonathan Russell, in England, where he was to take up the same post at the consulate in London.

  In command of the Constitution was Isaac Hull, whose novel approach to being the captain of a ship of war was to take unfeigned delight in his job. He was the son of a Connecticut merchant captain and like many American naval officers had begun his career that way. He was short and pudgy where Decatur was tall and slim, kind and trusting where Bainbridge was rough and suspicious. When Gilbert Stuart was going to paint his portrait, he remarked to another artist who had earlier painted Hull, “You have Hull’s likeness. He always looks as if he was looking at the sun and half shutting his eyes.”46

  The captain from Connecticut made a point of avoiding personal confrontations and never fought a duel; he disliked corporal punishment and rarely ordered men flogged; he wrote Bainbridge humorous letters about his tribulations over love as a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor and how much he wished he had money. Once, when away from the ship at Christmas, he returned to discover that some men had been flogged, and promptly wrote out an order addressed to all the officers of the ship: “It is my positive orders that they do not punish any seaman, marine, or any other person on board in my absence, and that the punishment for missing muster, or any other trifling offense, shall not exceed three lashes with a small rope over the shirt.”47

  There was no mistaking his bravery, though, or his seamanship. In the Quasi War he had led a daring cutting-out expedition that boarded and seized a French privateer in the Caribbean; in the Tripolitan war, as Captain Campbell’s lieutenant on the frigate Adams, he had saved the ship from breaking up on rocks with his quick thinking and cool disregard of his captain’s panicked indecision. Campbell was not known as much of a seaman, and when the ship missed stays while tacking in Algeciras harbor and began drifting rapidly aback toward the rocks of Cabrita Point, Campbell was momentarily struck speechless. Hull, who had run on deck wearing only his nightshirt and carrying a pair of striped pantaloons, grabbed the speaking trumpet out of Campbell’s hands, issued a quick series of orders to wear the ship, and seeing the furious astonishment on Campbell’s face, turned to the captain and said, “Keep yourself cool, Sir, and the ship will be got off.” And then he calmly pulled on his pantaloons. The crew kept a straight face, but a new catchphrase was soon being heard throughout the ship: “Keep yourself cool!”48

  Like Bainbridge, he had once almost resigned his commission in anger at being passed over for promotion, and it was not until 1807 that he was made a captain, not until May 1810 that he received command of one of the navy’s plum frigates. He had had the command of the President for scarcely a month when Rodgers, pulling seniority, ordered him to switch with him in the Constitution, which Rodgers thought a sluggish sailer.

  But nothing now could dampen Hull’s enthusiasm. Years later, David Porter would look back on his own long naval career and sourly remark, “During the whole thirty one years that I have been in the naval service, I do not recollect having passed one day, I will not say of happiness, but of pleasure.”49 Hull seemed to take pleasure in everything about his new command. “I have now one of the best ships in our Navy,” he wrote his half sister from Boston, “and a crew of 430 men, which you will think a large family, it’s true; but being a good housekeeper I manage them with tolerable ease.… Mary, I have not a word of news to tell you. Indeed, I am so much rapt up in my ship if half Boston was to burn down I should not know it unless I got a singe.” Even when the ship sailed terribly on his first cruise, amply confirming Rodgers’s disdainful assessment, Hull remained exultant in his letters home. Divers inspected the ship’s bottom and discovered “ten waggon loads” of mussels and oysters clinging to her copper sheathing: she had not had her bottom cleaned since Preble had had her careened in Boston in 1803. Hull was confident he could solve the problem by taking the ship up the Delaware River, where the fresh water would kill the clinging shellfish, or by scraping the bottom with an iron drag; then she would sail as well as she ever did, he told Mary, which “would give me great pleasure as she has always been a favourite of mine.”50

  There was also no mistaking that Captain Hull’s officers and crew fully returned his devotion to them and to his ship. Charles Morris jumped at the chance to move with Hull to the Constitution as first lieutenant even though Rodgers asked him to stay with the President. “Rodgers is passionate, and we should soon disagree,” Morris wrote his family. But “Captain Hull … gives his first lieutenant every opportunity of displaying taste or talent that they can desire.” When three of the Constitution’s crew drowned in an accident, Hull learned that one of the men was the sole support for his widowed mother and called the crew together to suggest they take up a subscription for her; he told them that they must not put down more than they could afford, but if every man contributed even a small amount, say twenty-five cents apiece, it would come to a tidy sum. When the subscription was complete Hull was astonished to find it totaled $1,000—an average of $3 a man, or one to two weeks of a seaman’s pay.51

  On August 5, 1811, the Constitution rode at anchor in Hampton Roads preparing to sail for France, and there was no doubt in any American captain’s mind now of the proper drill when passing a British warship: The ship was cleared for action, fully prepared as if heading into battle in earnest, her crew at quarters and guns run out, powder horns filled, slow matches smoking in tubs, the decks cleared from fore to aft, even the walls of the captain’s spacious quarters at the stern of the gun deck knocked out by the carpenters and the furniture struck down to the hold below so that guns which occupied the captain’s dining cabin could be freely worked. The marines manned the tops, muskets and cartridges at the ready, fire hoses rigged to the pumps, chains slung to the largest yards to hold them in place if their rigging was shot away. The surgeons were in the cockpit on the orlop deck down below the waterline, their knives and saws and other grisly instruments laid out. So prepared, the Constitution sailed out of Hampton Roads past the British frigates Atalanta and Tartarus. The ships exchanged polite greetings; the band on the Atalanta even serenaded the American ship with “Hail Columbia.”

  Minister Barlow’s widowed sister-in-law, Clara Baldwin, was traveling with the diplomat to Paris; Hull wrote his half sister Mary, “I find I am to take out a buxom widow. Take care: at sea is a dangerous place to be with ladies.” The ship made nine, ten, eleven knots; day after day the crew exercised at the great guns, or at small arms and boarding, or at trimming the sails for battle maneuvers. Mrs. Baldwin’s two pet mockingbirds and a raccoon and caged squirrels kept the wardroom entertained; David Bailie Warden, another member of the minister’s retinue, who was going to take up the post of consul in Paris, each day took notes about the Gulf Stream, recording the color and temperature of the water. On the night of August 28 he noted a phosphorescent sea around the ship, and the next day they were surrounded by dolphins.

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p; Just after noon on September 1 the lookout from the masthead sighted Lizard Point, the southernmost tip of England. For several days they beat up the Channel against contrary winds to Cherbourg, and on the afternoon of the fifth the ship was again cleared for action and at battle stations as they ran through the British squadron blockading Cherbourg, two ships of the line and two frigates. Again all was polite and correct.52

  At Cherbourg, Hull had to wait two weeks for Russell to appear. He exchanged dinners with the French admiral, toured forts and the shipyard and the naval hospital, and went to Paris and played tourist, escorting the “buxom widow” to galleries, buying items friends had asked him to purchase, and speculating $3,000 of his own money on Parisian goods that were in demand at home owing to the British blockade—satins, laces, gloves, ribbons, watches, razors.

  On the voyage to England they now beat down the Channel fighting contrary winds. Approaching Portsmouth on the night of October 9, they were followed by the British brig of war Redpole. Suddenly at 2:30 a.m. the British ship ran down on them and fired two shots, one striking the quarter and one amidships. “What sloop is that?” Hull furiously hailed, and once identifications had been exchanged, he ordered the British ship to send a boat aboard.

  “How dare you fire on us?” Hull shouted at the officer as he came aboard.

  “O!—we beg pardon. We mistook you for French.”

  “French! French! You’ve been in sight all night and yet can’t tell who we are? I’ve a good mind to sink you on the spot.”53

  At anchor at St. Helen’s Roads, another incident occurred to increase tensions. On the night of November 12 a British officer came aboard to report that a deserter from the Constitution had swum across to the British ship Havannah. Captain Hull was gone to London, accompanying Russell, and so Lieutenant Morris received the officer, thanked him for the information, and said a formal demand for the man’s return would be made the next day. The next day, perhaps predictably, Morris was given a runaround reminiscent of the treatment the Halifax’s captain had been given in Norfolk four years earlier. Finally, Morris called on the port admiral, who refused to discuss the matter without first receiving an answer to the question of “whether we would surrender British deserters who reached our ship,” Morris said.

  The admiral got his answer four days later. Morris was wakened the night of November 16 by the sound of the sentries firing their muskets and the cries of a man in the water near the ship. When the man was pulled out and brought on deck, he identified himself as a deserter from the Havannah. “On being asked his country,” Morris said, the deserter answered “in the richest Irish brogue, ‘An American!’ This was sufficient.” A boat was immediately sent across bearing with excruciating politeness a reciprocation of the message the British had sent about Constitution’s deserter.

  The humor of the situation was lost on the British, who the next day moved two frigates close to the American ship, making it almost impossible for her to get under way without running afoul of one of the anchored vessels. Morris nonetheless brought the Constitution to a new anchorage outside the British ships, slipping down with the tide and barely avoiding getting foul of the blocking ships. On November 20, cleared for action even before weighing anchor, the Constitution put to sea without further challenge.54

  Back in Cherbourg again, this time to pick up dispatches for Washington from Barlow, Hull was for the first time beginning to feel vexed. The brushes with the British had given him only satisfaction: “I have again had my troubles in England but luckily got off with flying colors,” he noted on his arrival in Cherbourg. “It was whispered about on shore that they intended taking [the deserter] out at sea, but they made no attempt of that sort. If they had, we were ready for them.” But the wait for Barlow’s dispatches dragged on for seven weeks, and every American in France who had something he wanted to send safely home was besieging Hull with requests for passage. Russell and Warden sent box after box of goods, “sufficient to load a ship of sixty tons,” Hull fumed. “I find I am about to make many enemies by endeavoring to serve my friends.” He flatly refused Russell’s request to transport a flock of merino sheep, a gift to the United States from the empress of France, and further angered Russell by sending back to him dozens of boxes of stuff that kept arriving. Running a ship of war and facing down a hostile enemy were fine, but even Hull’s normally relentless optimism was being beaten down by these troubles from friends. “I have everything to trouble me: detained far beyond my calculation; fifty men on the sick list; constant bad weather; a cold and unpleasant passage to make, &c. &c. &c. &c. If I get home safe you need not calculate on seeing me soon on a voyage of this sort,” he wrote home. It was a sign of his uncharacteristic mood that on December 19 he ordered two men flogged for sneaking rum aboard.

  Not until January 9, 1812, did the ship weigh anchor at last; once again the crew was ready for action as they bore down on the British blockading squadron, but the swift forty-day voyage was uneventful, despite tempestuous weather, and the Constitution anchored at Lynnhaven Bay at 11:00 p.m. on February 19. She had been away six months.55

  Standing in the roads when she arrived was the British frigate Macedonian, Captain John Surman Carden. The British warship had come in nine days earlier and was permitted into American waters upon her informing the collector of the port that she was carrying diplomatic dispatches.

  CARDEN HAD last been to America thirty years before. His family belonged to the minor Anglo-Irish gentry that conspicuously filled the ranks of the British army and navy of the era. During the American Revolution, while still a very young boy, he had been commissioned an ensign in a loyalist regiment raised in South Carolina by his father, a British army major. Three months after Carden’s arrival in America in 1781 his father and uncle were killed at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse; another uncle was wounded in the same battle, and Carden had been allowed to accompany him on “a long & tedious Journey” by litter and cart to Norfolk and then on a transport home to Ireland. Carden’s mother died ten days after he returned, overcome with the news he and his uncle had carried with them. Yet Carden’s view of America was not black and white despite this melancholy history; in his memoirs years later he referred to the “blind Injustice” by which the war against American independence had been commenced on Britain’s part.56

  Whatever apprehensions Carden entertained about setting foot on American soil again, though, were maliciously inflamed by the local pilot who brought the Macedonian in. He gravely assured Carden that he and his officers could not possibly pass through the country to Washington safely; they would be insulted every step of the way, and most likely injured or killed. But the British consul in Norfolk laughed off Carden’s fears, assuring him in any event that there was no need to send an officer to Washington to carry his dispatches since the United States mails were completely trustworthy. Meanwhile, Stephen Decatur put on a fine show of chivalrously welcoming his visitor, and Carden was soon a regular guest at Decatur’s dinner table. On one occasion the two captains had a friendly debate over the relative merits of the twenty-four-pound long guns on Decatur’s frigate United States versus the eighteen-pounders that the Macedonian and other British frigates carried. Carden maintained that the Royal Navy’s superior experience proved the smaller guns more than made up for their shorter range by the efficiency and speed with which their crews could handle and fire them.

  But Carden’s visit to Norfolk would not end on so pleasant or convivial a note. A few days after sending his dispatches to Augustus Foster in Washington, Carden told his dinner companions of his outrage at what had happened: Foster had just written back to say that the dispatches had been opened in public and their contents made known. Decatur and Littleton Waller Tazewell, a local lawyer and a close friend of Decatur’s, were among the company, and the Americans said they were much concerned by this reflection “upon the integrity of our public officers, if not upon the government itself,” and promised to look into the matter. Tazewell asked the Norf
olk postmaster to write his counterpart in Washington to inquire what had happened. On February 26 a reply came back that put an entirely different light on the story.

  In fact, no one had tampered with Carden’s package; rather, when the parcel arrived in Washington along with a $39 charge for postage, Foster himself had gone to the post office and told the postmaster that he thought the large packet must contain just newspapers, which carried a much lower postage rate. The postmaster offered to let him open the package and see if that was the case. When Foster did, he and the postmaster found themselves staring at a huge sheaf of bills of exchange, hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth.

  When the Washington postmaster’s explanation arrived in Norfolk, Tazewell called on Carden that same day to give him the news, whereupon Carden abruptly blurted out, “Then the cat is out of the bag at last,” adding after a short pause, “I shall lose £1,800 sterling by the blunder.”

  Tazewell found this mystifying, to say the least, but after several questions Carden revealed the whole thing. The “sealed dispatches” he was carrying had indeed consisted of nothing but £600,000 in government bills of exchange, which Foster was to have sold to U.S. banks for specie, and which the Macedonian was then to have carried to Lisbon. The £1,800 Carden ingenuously referred to was the customary “freight money” the captain of a man-of-war received as a fee for transporting specie. It was a huge windfall he had lost, about a decade’s regular pay for a frigate captain.

  It was also a distinctly unfriendly business, not to mention a violation of the diplomatic privilege that permitted British warships to continue entering American ports to carry dispatches. Tazewell wrote to Secretary of State Monroe the next day relating the whole incident, and adding that it appeared the British government had been carrying on this kind of business for some time: manipulating the American currency markets with rumors designed to drive up the exchange rate of the pound against the dollar and then quickly distributing British government bills to agents who would exchange them for gold at banks across the country at the temporarily higher rate. In part, the British were trying to offset a huge drain of specie from Lisbon to the United States that had resulted from keeping Wellington’s army on the Iberian Peninsula fed; a flotilla of American grain ships was plying the trade under British licenses, and with nothing worth purchasing in Lisbon to carry back to America, the ship captains insisted on payment in cash. Yet coming just at a moment when Congress had approved Gallatin’s plan to borrow $11 million to finance anticipated war expenses, this undercover British scheme to drain American capital markets of $3 million of cash in a single blow was clearly an act of economic warfare as well.57