Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  The surgeon hired a hack and toured Harvard College and Bunker Hill and thought the two-story frame farmhouses in the countryside handsomely painted and nicely planted with gardens and English walnuts and poplars, and the females of Boston he passed on the streets “rosy and healthy, and their countenances, features, sprightly and animated,” though with “more mind and less grace” than the southern ladies of his native Cecil County, Maryland, on the upper Chesapeake.14 He established himself for a few days at the Exchange Coffee House, which was the wonder of America. Built in 1808 at the fantastic cost of a half million dollars, it was the largest commercial building in the nation, seven stories tall, surmounted by a thirty-foot-wide dome that offered a commanding view of arriving shipping in the harbor. “I slept last night in the room No. 190 something,” Evans remarked in wonderment at the hotel’s size. Its ambitious proprietors had devoted the entire first story to an exchange floor, but the Boston merchants insisted on keeping their customary habit of meeting outside on the sidewalks of State Street from noon to two each day to transact their business, even in winter. The Coffee House also let space to Topliff’s News Room, which was always jammed; it was furnished with all the latest foreign and American papers, and its famous register books recorded the shipping news and other events of interest and served as a sort of local commercial and topical bulletin board.15 Hull handed in a message he asked to be placed on the books:

  Capt. HULL, finding his friends in Boston are correctly informed of his situation when chased by the British squadron off New York, and that they are good enough to give him more credit for having escaped them than he ought to claim, takes this opportunity of requesting them to make a transfer of a great part of their good wishes to Lt. MORRIS, and the other brave Officers, and the Crew under his command, for their very great exertions and prompt attention to orders while the enemy were in chase. Capt. HULL has great pleasure in saying, that notwithstanding the length of the chase, and the officers and crew being deprived of sleep, and allowed but little refreshment during the time, not a murmur was heard to escape them.16

  Surgeon Evans filled a couple of mornings browsing the bookstores, “of which there are a great number in this place. In all of them I found plenty of sermons in pamphlet form, & pieces against ‘Maddison’s ruinous war,’ as they call it.” The sight of several old fortifications around the city dating from the Revolution sent him into a gloomy reverie.

  Will the United States receive any assistance from the eastern states in the prosecution of the present war? Judging from present symptoms, I fear not. Good God! Is it possible that the people of the U.S. enjoying the blessings of freedom under the only republican government on earth, have not virtue enough to support it! Well might Horace say—‘all men are mad.’17

  BOSTON CHEERED Isaac Hull, but there were few cheers for the war. Not without justice, New Englanders saw themselves as bearing almost the entire economic brunt of a war they had opposed. “Time was (and might still be had we had a correct administration) when our ports were thronged with shipping, giving full employ to the merchants, mechanic and laborer—exchanging the products of our country for the commodities of every section of the navigable world,” declared Boston’s Columbian Centinel on the same day it published Captain Hull’s generous praise of his crew from the Exchange Coffee House books, and then continued in verse:

  Yes—time was—but that time hath fled.…

  Sad, on the ground, all ranks and callings bend

  Their alter’d looks—and evil days portend—

  And fold their arms, and watch with anxious stand,

  The tempest blackening o’er their sinking land!18

  The printed sermons that filled Boston’s bookstores were not content with scraps of doggerel to make their point: they shook with all the moral certainty of the New England Puritan church to denounce the war as an abomination, a reckless and wicked adventure, a transgression against the will of God. At Boston’s Second Church, where Increase Mather and Cotton Mather had preached a century before, pastor John Lathrop ascended his pulpit on Thursday, July 23, to deliver a sermon with the title “The Present War Unexpected, Unnecessary, and Ruinous.” War, said Dr. Lathrop, is one of the great evils under which the sinful children of men have been doomed to suffer. “When the chief ruler of a nation signs a declaration of war, he … signs the death warrant of thousands of his fellow creatures. The business of war is the business of destruction.” Yes, there might be times when to retain their liberty a people would be justified in the eyes of God in resorting to war, even a people as unprepared for war as Americans were now, even when fighting an enemy “much stronger, and much better provided.” Yet no such circumstances attended the present case. The very divisions of the country proved that there was no such inescapable urgency to righting the wrongs America had recently endured—endured as a result of actions by both Britain and France, he noted. “Good rulers will not suffer war to be proclaimed until every possible method be attempted to bring an offending nation to make satisfaction; because, when war is commenced, no mortal can tell when or how it will end,” Lathrop warned.

  He added: “Our republick, I fear is corrupted; it is awfully divided, and if no means can be devised to heal the division, we need not the spirit of prophecy to predict its ruin.”19

  Many Republicans had optimistically believed that the coming of war would unite the country, or at least silence opposition, but precisely the reverse had happened in the weeks since the declaration on June 18. The Massachusetts House passed a resolution calling it an act of “inconceivable folly and desperation.”20 Within days of the declaration, the Federalists in Congress came together to issue a widely publicized address reiterating their attack on the Republican war policies. “It cannot be concealed, that to engage in the present war against England is to place ourselves on the side of France, and expose us to the vassalage of States serving under the banners of the French Emperor,” they said. And, they asked again, “How will war upon the land protect commerce on the oceans?”21

  Republican efforts to paint opposition to the war as unpatriotic or even treasonable created an instant backlash that only inflamed opposition all the more. Federalists in the House denounced the tactics employed by the Republican majority to silence dissent—secret sessions, refusal to consider motions offered by the minority, calling the previous question to cut off debate—as an attack on representative government and liberty.22 When Republican newspapers printed none-too-veiled threats of violence against “tories” and “traitors” and warned, “Whoever is not for us, is against us,” the Boston Gazette retorted: “Agreed, if you say so. The States of New-York and New-England are against you … and the opposition to you will increase through every stage of your madness.”23

  More ominously, even respected Republican political leaders began coyly referring to mob violence as the right way to deal with “signs of treason” from the opposition. Robert Wright, a Republican congressman from Maryland and former governor of the state, declared on the floor of the House that the proper remedy for traitors was “hemp and confiscation”—hanging and loss of property. Jefferson wrote to Madison a week after the declaration of war, “the federalists indeed are open mouthed against the declaration. but they are poor devils here, not worthy of notice. a barrel of tar to each state South of the Potomac will keep all in order & that will be freely contributed without troubling government. to the North they will give you more trouble. you may there have to apply the rougher drastics of Gov. Wright.”24

  Sarcastic blasts from the leading Federalist newspaper in the South, Baltimore’s Federal Republican, had long infuriated local Republicans; they referred to it as “His Majesty’s paper.” With the coming of war there was talk around town that unless the paper changed its “obnoxious” tone, some of the local toughs were going to put them out of business. Toughs were one thing Baltimore had in abundance. The youngest and fastest growing of the cities on the East Coast, it had a large Irish and French populatio
n, a shortage of females, a history of political street brawls, and a good many taverns and beer gardens.

  Two days after the declaration of war, the Federal Republican vowed it would employ “every constitutional argument and every legal means” to oppose the war. Two nights after that, a mob of several hundred laborers from Fell’s Point, the notoriously rough end of town, marched to the newspaper’s offices, pulled down the building, and destroyed the printing press and everything else inside.25

  A month later the undaunted editors leased a new building on Charles Street. In preparation for a renewed sarcastic assault on Republican war policies, one of the paper’s engravers had produced an “excellent caricature of a democratic officer, making ‘A Rapid Descent upon Canada,’ mounted on a terrapin.”26

  On July 27 the paper came out with a defiant edition heaping scorn on the “rabble” that had attacked their previous offices. Early that evening a mob of boys began throwing stones at the paper’s new building, and they were soon joined by a crowd of laborers that by morning reached two thousand. At one point in the night the editor of the rival Baltimore Sun had appeared along with a cannon that some men had dragged to the scene and, said one witness, “appeared almost deranged” as he urged the men to fire it. Only the hesitant intervention of a militia officer stopped that.

  Among the defenders of the newspaper’s building was General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a Revolutionary War hero and stalwart Federalist, in town from his native Virginia to arrange for publication of his war memoirs. The mayor and other town officials finally arrived at dawn and urged the Federalists to surrender to protective custody with the promise that they and the newspaper building would be protected. Lee accepted. The mob immediately destroyed the newspaper offices as they left.

  That night the mob returned, stormed the jail, and beat and tortured Lee and the others, dripping hot candle wax in their eyes and stabbing them with penknives to see if they were still alive, leaving most of them for dead in a heap in front of the jail. General James M. Lingan, an elderly veteran of the Revolutionary War, was killed, stabbed in the chest after his pleas for mercy were ignored. Lee never recovered from his injuries; his face was swollen for months afterward, his speech halting the rest of his life, and he died an invalid six years later. Another of the mob’s victims, John Thomson, was stripped, tarred and feathered, and dumped in a cart; one of the mob tried to gouge out his eyes, and another tried to break his legs with an iron bar; another threw some flaming tar and feathers on him, and he was severely burned; then they threatened to hang him if he did not give them the names of everyone in the house who had tried to defend it against the attack.

  The newspaper’s editor survived and, setting up offices in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, published an edition on August 3 and sent it to Baltimore by mail, setting off a third riot when a mob tried to storm the post office to seize the papers. The Baltimore postmaster sent an express rider to Washington with an urgent plea for assistance; President Madison replied that he did not think “any defensive measures were within the Executive sphere.”

  But support poured in from Federalists around the country. To keep the paper going, hundreds of new subscribers signed up from as far away as Boston, $2,000 was raised within a few months, and the Federal Republican continued its thrice-weekly invectives against the folly of Mr. Madison, the incompetence of his generals, and the imbecility of his policies.27

  ONE NEW Englander and Federalist who did support the war was old John Adams, the cantankerous second president of the United States, who had seen his proposals for a strong navy rejected again and again but who saw war with Britain as inevitable and the cause as just. A Federalist who supported the war and a war supporter who supported the navy, he was an odd man out in every sphere. But even Adams despaired of the impossible odds America faced against the Royal Navy. “Our navy is so Lilliputian,” the former president wrote his grandson John Adams Smith a few days before the declaration of war, “… that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.”28

  The Royal Navy was the size of all the rest of the world’s navies combined.29 From the majestic Admiralty building in Whitehall—the nerve center of the Royal Navy where the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty met every day, Sundays and Christmas included, surrounded by maps and charts of all the world’s seas, linked to the dockyards and anchorages by a semaphore telegraph on the roof that relayed reports and orders—a vast bureaucratic network of administration, training, supply, and repair spread out across the globe. Just feeding its seamen cost Britain about $10 million a year, five times what America spent on its navy in total. Victualing yards at Deptford, Plymouth, and Portsmouth employed three thousand men to bake biscuits, brew beer, and put up salt meat to keep the fleet fed; the bakehouse in Portsmouth produced ten thousand pounds of biscuits a day, and at Plymouth’s warehouses three million pounds of them were stacked up in wooden casks.30

  By 1812 the Royal Navy was an institution as well as a fighting force; it had 187 admirals, 777 captains, 586 commanders, 3,100 lieutenants, and all the corruption and inefficiency of a long-established government organization with favors and spoils to dispense.31 Samuel Pepys, who would later be far better remembered for his remarkable private diary of life in Stuart England than for his attempts at reforming the navy, had done what he could; as secretary to the Admiralty Board in the 1670s and 1680s, he had tried to ensure that officers were selected for promotion at least partly on merit, that they knew something about ships and the sea and not merely influential and powerful personages.

  But becoming an officer in the Royal Navy in the first place was almost entirely a matter of having the right connections. Captains of each ship appointed their own retinues of “young gentlemen” as captain’s servants and midshipmen, who then rose through the ranks. Pepys managed to loosen the grip of patronage a bit by giving the Admiralty the power to directly appoint a few midshipmen whom the captains were then forced to take on board, but mainly he sought to exert control with regulations that established professional requirements for promotion to the rank of lieutenant. Under Pepys’s reforms, a candidate for lieutenant had to be at least twenty years of age and have served at least three actual years at sea, at least one of those as a midshipman; pass an oral examination in navigation, seamanship, and command of a warship; present certificates from his previous commander attesting to his sobriety, diligence, and ability; and produce his logbooks as proof he had done the required service and knew how to take navigational observations and keep competent records.

  The reforms were aimed not only at limiting influence and patronage but also at addressing an old problem that the Royal Navy had never quite known how to deal with. As Pepys put it, a gentleman was not a seaman and a seaman was not a gentleman. Almost nobody questioned the idea that an officer had to be a gentleman: only members of the gentlemanly classes possessed the natural courage, leadership, and sense of honor that military command required. The problem was that commanding a ship also required the mastery of manual skills that were equally universally held to be demeaning to a gentleman. Under Pepys’s system, the rank of midshipman was meant to be the key bridge between these two worlds; it was a formal stage of apprenticeship, which ensured that even the most gentlemanly future officers had spent some time getting their hands dirty, learning the ropes, and climbing the tops before actually assuming full command responsibility for a ship of war.32

  But none of this could compete with the old power of influence. While a few “tarpaulin” captains did rise on sheer ability from the lower classes and the lower decks thanks to Pepys’s rules, and while the Admiralty always would look favorably on promotion for an officer who had distinguished himself heroically in battle, family and political patronage remained deeply ingrained in the system.33 There were all kinds of ways around the rules, and by the early 1800s the ways around them were so much the norm that few naval officers gave them a second thought. Admirals on station were allowed to commission
their own candidates as lieutenants or commanders to fill vacancies, and could always stall if subsequently overruled by the Admiralty. A prominent politician or peer might exert his influence directly with the Admiralty on behalf of a relative or protégé. One young man whose father was a minor government official with many useful connections was taken aside at age fourteen by one of his father’s noble friends, who told him, “When there is a general naval promotion, I am always allowed to provide for one friend, to get him made either a lieutenant, a commander or a post captain. Therefore, when your time is up, let me know and you shall be my lieutenant. In short, you are as sure of the commission as if you had it in your pocket.”34

  But most of all there was a constant trade of mutual backscratching among old navy families. To get around the rule of three years’ service for promotion to lieutenant (subsequently increased to six), it was routine for captains to enter a friend’s son or nephew on their ship’s books without his having served at all. A crown piece handed to the Navy Office porter on the way in to the lieutenant’s examination ensured that the age requirement would be ignored as well, which in the early 1800s resulted in many eighteen-, seventeen-, and even sixteen-year-old lieutenants (there was even one thirteen-year-old).

  Three captains were required to conduct the examination for lieutenants, and some took the job seriously enough to prepare lists of questions they intended to ask covering an array of technical knowledge about seamanship, fitting and rigging a ship, and naval warfare. But for favored candidates the fix was always in. “Well, well, a very creditable examination,” one new lieutenant was told by his examiner, a friend of the boy’s two naval uncles. He had not been asked any questions at all, and when one of the other examiners, who had just walked in the door at this point, tried to ask one, the first captain cut him off, humorously threatened to have him arrested for showing up late, and turning to the successful candidate said, “That is not the way to pass, to linger there when you are told you will do!” “So out I bolted like a hunted rat,” the boy recalled.35