Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  No official action was taken against Carden, but he did not wait to find out; two days later the Macedonian weighed anchor and was gone.

  SECRETARY HAMILTON was caught by surprise by the vehemence of the attacks in Congress on the navy’s expansion plans, and after the rejection of the frigate bill in January 1812 he retreated into vacillation, accompanied by bouts of defeatism. In February he suggested to Madison that perhaps it might be better to do as Gallatin wanted and keep the entire small navy in port in the coming war, rather than risk losing it all—possibly in one throw—to the British. The rest of the cabinet appeared inclined to agree.

  William Bainbridge and his fellow captain Charles Stewart were in Washington at the time and caught wind of what Hamilton was saying and at once wrote an impassioned remonstrance to the secretary. Not only would such an order have a “chilling and unhappy effect” on the spirit of the officers of the navy, they wrote, but it would imperil the entire future of the service: the people of the United States would never again “support the expense of a navy which had been thus pronounced useless during a time of national peril.” Frigates and smaller ships of war sallying out singly would be able to “materially injure the commerce of the enemy”; it was at least worth trying.58

  Madison thought his aggressive-minded captains had the better of the argument and, overruling Hamilton and the cabinet, agreed the navy had to be used. Suggesting perhaps a bit facetiously that given how small the American navy was it was not risking much, he told Hamilton, “It is victories we want; if you give us them and lose your ships afterwards, they can be replaced by others.”59

  But there remained the question of how the ships ought to be used, and faced with such a momentous decision, the secretary became almost paralyzed with self-doubt as the nation inched toward war. The demands of his office, his inexperience in naval affairs, the difficulties of living in the half-built capital city, and his rapidly unraveling personal affairs were all taking a toll. For the last year and a half he had been helplessly reading notices in the Charleston newspapers of forced sales of his slaves by his creditors. “Nothing short of ruin can be the consequence to me,” he wrote his son-in-law upon reading of “another sale of 22 of my Negroes”; “I do not now expect that I shall be left a shelter for myself and family, or a Servant to hand them a cup of water.” At one point he thought he might be sent to jail if his creditors demanded security, as he had none to offer; at another point he spoke of resigning his office as soon as he could, “for I am too deeply wounded to remain here with any degree of ease. I shall then … wholly retire from the world.” In the spring of 1812 he lamented, “To me and mine this place is unhealthy, for we have not had a week since November last in which I could say that every one of us has been well.… generally, this city is not favorable to health—and I believe it is to be ascribed to the circumstance that the whole extent of it has been cleared of Trees calculated to afford shade, while not one thousandth part is covered by buildings.”60

  On May 21 he finally roused himself to send a short note to Rodgers and Decatur seeking their advice:

  As a war appears now inevitable, I request you to state to me, a plan of operations, which, in your judgment, will enable our little navy to annoy in the utmost extent, the Trade of Gt Britain while it least exposes it to the immense naval force of that Government. State also, the Ports of the US which you think the safest as assylums for our navy, in time of war.61

  The two captains each replied in early June with their plans to “annoy” the enemy. Over the years many historians, following the lead of the late-nineteenth-century American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, would characterize their views as sharply diverging on fundamental strategy, Rodgers advocating operating the navy in a concentrated force while Decatur wanted ships to disperse in ones or twos. But in fact the two captains agreed much more than they disagreed. Both saw that the only way to overcome Great Britain’s huge numerical advantage at sea was to divide the small American force and send it far and wide to attack British merchant shipping in a manner calculated to be “the most perplexing,” as Rodgers put it, and so keep the British navy chasing in multiple directions after this hydra-headed annoyance.

  Decatur argued that cruising in ones or twos played to American strengths and minimized the small navy’s obvious weaknesses against the British:

  Two Frigates cruising together would not be so easily traced by an enemy as a greater number, their movements would be infinitely more rapid, they would be sufficiently strong in most instances to attack a convoy, & the probability is that they would not meet with a superior cruising force; If however, they should meet with a superior force & cannot avoid it, we should not have to regret the whole of our marine crushed at one blow.

  Rodgers similarly underscored the importance of splitting the American force. While “such dispersion” might seem counterintuitive, he wrote, it was in fact the most effective way to tie up a hugely disproportionate number of British warships. “It would require a comparatively much greater force to protect their own trade … than it would to annihilate ours,” he told Hamilton. The Royal Navy would be so distracted swatting at this swarm of gnats that it would not be able to turn its might against American shipping and the American coast. Rodgers allowed that there might be limited circumstances when very slightly larger squadrons might come together, such as two or three frigates and a sloop of war to maraud against the English coast; but the only time he foresaw all the American frigates operating together in a single powerful force would be to stage a single strike against Britain’s large East India convoys. He added with pugnacious relish that he was looking forward to playing the role of “Buccaneer”—a title, he observed, he had already been honored with by the British “in their lying naval chronicle.”62

  In fact, Rodgers was never the Mahanian proponent of unity of force that Mahan tried to make him out to be. Mahan was writing at a time when American navalists were trying to make the case for a large blue-water fleet, and a central tenet of Mahan’s sea power theory was that a navy was most effective when structured to threaten the enemy’s navy—and the best way to do that was to sail in powerful squadrons or fleets. Dispersion of force was by the same reasoning a fundamentally unsound military strategy. In his analysis of the War of 1812, Mahan insisted that had the American navy followed Rodgers’s views on concentration of force—or rather what Mahan said were Rodgers’s views—Britain would have been forced to keep her warships sailing in company for self-protection and so been unable to spread out along the American coast to prey on American commerce.63

  But Rodgers and Decatur had a keener grasp of the hit-and-run strategy they needed to adopt, and the David-and-Goliath odds that dictated it. The fact was that in a fleet action even the whole American navy operating together would not stand a chance against a concentrated force of the vastly more powerful and vastly more experienced Royal Navy. Decatur pointed out that what mattered above all was to draw the British off, and distant cruising by small detachments was perfectly well suited to attaining that end. The effect, he told Hamilton, “would be to relieve our own coast by withdrawing from it a number of the hostile ships, or compelling the enemy to detach from Europe another force in search of us,” and probably also drawing off the greater part of the British cruisers that were at the moment lying wait in Bermuda, ready to go pounce on American commerce with the start of hostilities.64

  If America did have an advocate for the concentration of its naval force in June 1812 it was Albert Gallatin, but his ideas of naval strategy remained strictly defensive. Gallatin pointed with alarm to the revenues that stood to be lost if American merchant ships returning to port were captured after war was declared. He began urging that the frigates all be sent to sea off New York to protect them. “On the return of our frigates, keep them on our coast, which will best promote our commerce and prevent any but properly defensive engagements with enemy,” Gallatin argued to Madison in a memorandum a few weeks later.65

 
; For nearly two weeks Rodgers’s and Decatur’s letters sat on Secretary Hamilton’s desk unanswered. But everything about the move toward war seemed enveloped in hesitation and uncertainty, if not outright confusion. Even many Republicans in Congress still confidently predicted that talk of war was merely saber rattling. As late as May, Augustus Foster reported that he was at a total loss as to what to make of the contradictory signals coming from various officials in Washington.

  On June 1 Madison finally issued what was at last an unmistakable call for a declaration of war; in a secret message to Congress he reiterated America’s long-standing grievances against Britain and asserted that British actions already constituted a state of war against America. But his timing in many ways could not have been more off. Throughout the spring, acting under new orders to avoid any clashes with the American navy, British warships had been staying well clear of the American coast. Rumors of impending British concessions arrived almost daily. In place of the war fever that had swept the nation in the wake of the Leander and the Chesapeake–Leopard incidents, the march to war, now that it was finally happening, was bloodless and even at times surreal, unimpelled by any immediate air of crisis.66

  For the next two weeks Congress met in secret session to debate a declaration; still Hamilton delayed making a decision on deploying the navy. Finally, he took the temporizing step of ordering Decatur to sail for New York to join Rodgers and await further instructions there. Decatur left Norfolk on June 16, with the frigates United States and Congress and the brig Argus.

  More days passed but still no orders came to put to sea. On June 20, two full days after Congress had passed and Madison had signed the declaration of war, Gallatin complained to Madison about Hamilton’s incomprehensible dithering. The Treasury secretary calculated that a million to a million and a half dollars’ worth of shipping a week would arrive from foreign ports for the next four weeks. Orders sending the combined American squadrons off the coast to protect these ships “ought to have been sent yesterday, & that at all events not one day longer ought to be lost.”67

  On Monday, June 22, after a cabinet meeting hastily called to render a decision on the matter, Hamilton sent an express rider galloping to New York with as confusing a set of orders as probably ever came from the pen of a military commander. Hamilton instructed Rodgers that the two squadrons should focus on protecting returning commerce, as Gallatin wished, but operate independently—Rodgers off the Chesapeake eastward, Decatur southward—not as a single large squadron, as earlier implied by the decision to send Decatur to New York. But the two squadrons could come together whenever the captains thought it “expedient”; on the other hand, when “a different arrangement may promise more success,” they could detach their vessels “either singly, or two in company”; it also “may be well for all vessels occasionally to concentrate—& put into port, for further instructions,” and to that end he would direct his letters to New York, Newport, Boston, “& sometimes Norfolk.”

  “May the God of battles be with you,” the secretary concluded, “& with all our beloved Countrymen.”68

  It was all so contradictory and vague and confusing that perhaps it was just as well Rodgers never received it. On June 20 news of the declaration of war reached New York. The next day Rodgers put to sea with his combined squadrons, the large forty-four-gun frigates President and United States, the smaller thirty-six-gun frigate Congress, the eighteen-gun sloop Hornet, and the sixteen-gun Argus. He had his sights on a large convoy of 110 merchantmen reported to be sailing from Jamaica for Britain. Left behind were the frigates Essex (in New York) and the Constitution (in Washington), both undergoing frantic last-minute repairs that were still expected to take a few more days.

  As he waited through the ensuing days to learn the fate of the force under his care but now beyond his control, Hamilton wrote his son-in-law, “In our Navy Men I have the utmost confidence, that in equal combat they will be superior in the event, but when I reflect on the overwhelming force of our enemy my heart swells almost to bursting, and all the consolation I have is, that in falling they will fall nobly.”69

  American dismantling shot (James, Full and Correct Account)

  CHAPTER 4

  “The Present War, Unexpected, Unnecessary, and Ruinous”

  EVEN A DECLARATION of war could not immediately persuade British officials that America was in earnest. Augustus Foster thought that 80 percent of Americans opposed the war and that the declaration was mostly bluff. Every single Federalist and 20 percent of the Republicans in Congress had voted against it; the 79–49 margin in the House and 19–13 in the Senate would forever remain the closest vote on a formal declaration of war in American history. On June 20 the British minister had gone to Monroe’s office, and the two had “endeavoured to frighten one another for a whole Hour by descanting on the Consequences of War,” Foster informed London.1

  Since the spring of 1812 a powerful movement had been growing in Britain in favor of repeal of the orders in council, but it had almost everything to do with the effect the orders were having on the British economy and almost nothing to do with fear of war with America. The loss of the American trade as a result of the orders had been devastating. Seven thousand firms had failed; the production of textiles in Lancashire was down 40 percent; fifteen thousand paupers were receiving relief in Liverpool. So sharply had public feeling turned that when Spencer Perceval, the British prime minister who had been the chief architect of the orders, was assassinated by a deranged gunman on May 11 in the lobby of Parliament, the news triggered public rejoicing in Britain’s industrial towns. A week later, huge crowds shouted “God bless you!” as Perceval’s murderer was led to the gallows at Newgate. Repeal now seemed all but certain.

  But even Henry Brougham, who led the repeal campaign in Parliament, ridiculed the idea that those seeking to abolish the orders were out to appease America. “Jealousy of America!” he mockingly exclaimed in the House of Commons. “I should as soon think of being jealous of the tradesmen who supply me with necessaries. Jealousy of America!… whose assembled navies could not lay siege to an English sloop of war!”2 There was no sense of urgency as the question of repeal worked its way for the next month and a half through a special parliamentary committee that had been authorized to investigate the state of trade.

  And so, with exquisite mistiming, Parliament found itself voting on June 23, five days after America’s declaration of war, to repeal the orders in council that the United States had so bitterly resented for five long years.

  Almost alone among the voices of the British establishment, the Naval Chronicle had been cautioning its readers for months not to underestimate American determination. “A large portion of the daily press of England has been engaged in promulgating errors with regard to America,” the Chronicle’s editor asserted. “We have been persuaded to believe that our hostile system was useful, and that the American government had not the power, if it had the spirit, to resent provocations.” These political miscalculations, he lamented, had now brought England to “war against the descendants of Englishmen … against the seat of political and religious freedom.” Yet even now the same delusions were still at work: most British newspapers were confidently predicting that no real war would ever materialize, that as soon as word of the repeal of the orders in council reached Washington it would be over before it had ever begun. But, the Chronicle’s editor cautioned, “it is the people, and not merely the government of the United States, who have declared war.” And the American people, he predicted, were not going to stop fighting now that they had begun until a treaty satisfying all their grievances was agreed to.3

  In sweltering Philadelphia, where the shipping merchant and former Republican congressman William Jones had stayed through the summer to tend to his business while his family went to visit friends in the country, Jones noted that some Americans were making the same mistake—believing that forthcoming concessions by the British government would bring about a swift restoration of peace. S
peculators had briefly driven up the prices of goods following the declaration of war. But, he wrote his wife, Eleanor, in early July, prices had been rapidly falling in the past few days on as yet unconfirmed rumors of the revocation of the orders in council. Jones contemptuously dismissed what he called “these coffee house politicians” who “think that the character, Independence and policy of this country hang upon the breath of a British Minister.” The state of war, he told Eleanor, “has totally changed the political relations of the two countrys.” Now that it had begun, the war could only be brought to an end by “an ample and final settlement of all sources of difference.”4

  On July 10 a British schooner arrived in Boston from Halifax under a flag of truce in an even more poignant piece of bad timing. The ship carried John Strachan and Daniel Martin, the two surviving crewmen taken from the Chesapeake five years earlier. The third of the Chesapeake seamen who had been imprisoned in Halifax, William Ware, had died in captivity in the interim.

  At a ceremony the next day aboard the Chesapeake at Charlestown Navy Yard, the two men were formally returned under the settlement Foster had offered, and Madison had wordlessly accepted, the previous November. The commander of the British sloop came aboard, and an American lieutenant read a statement that Bainbridge, the ranking American naval officer in Boston, had prepared: “Sir I am commanded by Commodore Bainbridge to receive those two American Seamen on the very deck from which they were wantonly taken in time of Peace by a vessel of your Nation of Superior Force.” On the quarterdeck Bainbridge then added a few of his own slightly graceless words to the two freed men. “My Lads, I am glad to see you. From this Deck you were taken by British outrage. For your return to it you owe gratitude to the Government of your Country. Your Country now offers you an opportunity to revenge your wrongs, and I cannot doubt but you will be desirous of doing so on board this very Ship.” It apparently did not occur to Bainbridge that men just released from five years’ imprisonment, some of that time spent with a sentence of five hundred lashes hanging over them, might want to see friends or family or old homes again upon returning to freedom and their native land, or for that matter might never want to see a ship or the sea again. But having invited the two men to show their gratitude by immediate reenlistment in the United States navy, he dismissed them from the quarterdeck and his mind, did not even mention them by name in his subsequent report to the secretary of the navy, and invited the British officer to lunch, which he accepted.5