Those who tried to buck the old system found it nearly impossible. Admiral Lord Collingwood, who as Horatio Nelson’s second in command at Trafalgar in 1805 commanded one of the two British lines of battle that smashed the French fleet, was asked the following year by a fellow admiral to make a protégé of his a lieutenant. “He is 18 years old and as dull a lad as I ever saw,” Collingwood privately observed. “It is this kind of person that causes all the accidents, the loss of ships, the dreadful expense of them, mutinies, insubordination and everything bad.… If the Country is to depend on the Navy, it must be reformed and weeded, for a great deal of bad stuff has got into it, and hangs like a deadweight where all should be activity.” Collingwood was by then a national hero, made a baron and granted a £2,000-a-year pension by Parliament for the victory at Trafalgar; still he could not turn down an old friend and patron to whom he felt he owed a favor: “My conscience reproved me when I promoted him, which I made two or three attempts to do before I could bring myself to do it. Nothing but it’s being Adml. R’s request could have induced me.”36
Since 1793 the Royal Navy in its encounters with the French had lost 10 ships to the enemy’s 377, which spread a layer of complacency over any deficiencies in its commanders. Nelson made a point of playing to Britain’s heroic image of herself in the tactics he pursued, and the image and results had reinforced one another: there was little finesse and a lot of bloodshed in the way the British took on their opponents at sea. Most battles of the Royal Navy were fought at extremely close range, where there was little choice but to kill or be killed and where seamanship and accurate gunfire mattered far less. The French, having guillotined most of their corps of professional sailors during the Revolution, took a similar view that zeal could substitute for skill and so were largely willing to fight on the same terms. The mayhem reached its zenith in the occasional but absolutely brutal boarding actions, which were hand-to-hand combat on a confined battlefield with no escape. Pistols, cutlasses, long-poled pikes, even fire axes, crowbars, clublike wooden belaying pins, and other tools at hand were used as weapons in what were basically free-for-alls for control of the ship. Casualties in single-ship engagements were known to reach the hundreds, and the bloodiness of such actions was spurred all the more by the Admiralty’s practice of judging the worth of a captain’s action by how many of his own crew were killed or wounded. On more than one occasion, an officer’s claim for promotion for victory in battle was turned down on the grounds that his “butcher’s bill” was not long enough.
The lopsided casualty figures in most of the Royal Navy’s encounters with the French were largely due to the fact that the French sought to disable and capture their enemy’s ships, while the British sought to kill and maim as many of their opponents as they possibly could. French crews were taught to fire as the ship began its up roll, and they tended to shoot high to disable spars, masts, and rigging. British crews fired on the down roll, straight into the hull. While enough shots low to the waterline could eventually sink a ship, that was not the purpose: it was to send cannonballs crashing directly into the gun crews of the ship lying a dozen yards away. In fourteen major engagements between 1794 and 1806, French losses totaled twenty-three thousand killed and wounded versus seven thousand for the British. One in four British casualties was fatal: more than half of the French sailors’ were.37
The enthusiastic British adoption of the carronade added to the destructive effects of the British blood-and-guts approach to naval warfare. Developed by the Carron Company of Scotland in 1776, these were short-barreled, thinly molded guns that weighed about half as much as a long gun of the same caliber and could accordingly fire a much larger round for their weight. Carronades had an effective range of only about four hundred yards, a third that of long guns, but at those short ranges they were appallingly effective: the British called them “smashers,” and placed on the upper deck of a frigate that could normally support only a twelve-pounder or smaller long gun, carronades sent their twenty-four- or thirty-two-pound balls hurtling forth to do horrific execution. The force of a shock wave from a large cannonball passing inches away was said to be able to kill a man, but what multiplied the destructive radius of each six-inch-diameter carronade ball many times over was the avalanche of jagged oak “splinters” unleashed when it crashed into a ship’s planking or frames; “splinters” was a bit of bravura understatement, since they were often several feet long and weighed several pounds, with edges as sharp as a battle lance.
So confident of its success, or perhaps complacent, had the Royal Navy become that gunnery practice came to be officially discouraged as a needless waste of shot and powder: a thirty-eight-gun frigate like the Guerriere was allowed to fire a total of seven practice rounds a month in its first six months at sea and ten a month thereafter. In 1801, when Nelson was shown a proposal for a gun sight to improve the accuracy of fire, he dismissed it, saying, “The best and only mode I have found of hitting the enemy afloat is to get so close that whether the gun is pointed upwards or downwards forward or aft … it must strike its opponent.”38
By 1812 an aura of invincibility suffused the Royal Navy, bedazzling the British public and naval commanders alike. Neither skill in seamanship nor skill in gunnery was necessary—just pluck, dash, courage, and British moral superiority.
IF THERE was one advantage to being as small as the American navy of the first decade of the 1800s, it was that its secretary could become acquainted with the merits of every officer, and possessed the authority to act on that knowledge. The result was that the American navy, as young and inexperienced and untested as it was, quickly attained a level of professionalism that probably surpassed any navy’s in the world.
Robert Smith had in many ways been a lackluster secretary of the navy for the eight years he served in the post under Jefferson. He was a frankly political selection made after Jefferson acknowledged that he was seeking “what cannot be obtained … a prominent officer equal and willing to undertake the necessary duties.” No one with expertise in naval matters was interested in presiding over the Jeffersonian program of retrenchment, and Smith’s major qualifications were a willingness to oblige his colleagues and being the brother of an important Republican senator from Maryland whose support Jefferson needed.39
But Smith had proved a quietly steady force for improving the standards of the officer corps throughout his tenure. His office files were filled with copies of letter after letter to parents, congressmen, senators, even the president himself, steadfastly declining their entreaties to promote officers who Smith felt were not yet qualified. “A lieutenant having the charge of a watch is often entrusted with the entire command of the vessel—hence that absolute necessity of his being an experienced seaman,” Smith wrote one would-be benefactor of a midshipman seeking promotion. “The meritorious midshipmen must rise agreeably to their rank. This is a principle which I shall invariably adhere to,” he told another. When President Jefferson sought the promotion of a midshipman who had served only two years, Smith answered, “He cannot possibly have acquired in this short time that knowledge of seamanship which would justify the placing him in a situation where a public vessel, with the lives of all on board, might depend upon his skill as a seaman.”40
Smith thought it took a minimum of four or five years of actual service at sea for a midshipman to gain the required experience, but he also made clear that he would weigh promotions to lieutenant, and all higher ranks as well, on the basis of merit as well as seniority. He routinely asked captains to submit brief evaluations of their officers at the end of a cruise, and received apparently frank responses:
Lieut. Gordon, an excellent officer
Lieut. Jacobs, a good officer but unaccommodating
Doctr. Taylor, an excellent surgeon
Doctr. Kearney, his mate, worthless and indolent
Mr. Garretson, purser of the first rate
[Midshipmen]
Edward Nicholson, well disposed but dull and inactive
&
nbsp; Hazard, a smart young officer
Travis, middling
Rice, unfit for naval service41
Most naval officers would have been content with a system of promotion strictly by seniority and frequently complained about being passed over, but Smith and his successors were stonily unmoved by these appeals and regularly passed over dozens of officers in the same rank with greater seniority when selecting officers for promotion. Experience, Smith explained to one aggrieved midshipman, was not just a matter of serving time but of embracing the opportunities that had been provided him; his failure to acquire professional knowledge during that time was “unfortunate” but “attributable entirely to himself.”42
“If seniority of date was the absolute rule, the task would be very simple and less irksome to the secretary,” acknowledged one of Smith’s successors a few years later. “But it never has been—it never ought to be—except where merit and knowledge are equal in the candidates.” Promotion on the basis of seniority alone, he said, “I pray may never become the absolute rule; for I should, from thence, date the decline of our infant naval Hercules”:
… genius, valor, talent, and skill would be leveled to the dull equality of the humblest pretensions; and, instead of those brilliant feats which adorn our annals, every commonplace automaton who performed the ordinary acts of duty with sufficient prudence to avoid court martials would rise, by the mere lapse of time and the casualties of mortality, to the highest honors of his profession.43
The constitutional requirement that military and naval commissions be confirmed by the Senate gave the whole promotion process in the American navy an openness and a gravity that served as a check on the kind of winking regulation-bending and favoritism so rampant in the Royal Navy at the time. Since the Quasi War, when some lieutenants had been appointed directly to meet the sudden need for experienced officers, all new officers entering the American navy had begun as midshipmen. Though not subject to Senate approval, even midshipmen were all appointed directly by the secretary; an equivalent policy would be adopted in Britain only in 1815.
There was no formal application process, but there were always many more candidates than openings, and Smith on several occasions showed he was looking for young men of good character, ambition, and zeal, regardless of their social or economic standing. Most were distinctly middle class, sons of master craftsmen or small merchants seeking a career to support themselves. “They are poor; their characters are good; it is from this class of society that we are to expect to find the real defenders of our country,” wrote the mayor of Annapolis in recommending two brothers from his town for midshipmen’s warrants.44 To the extent politics intruded in the selection of midshipmen, it was largely confined to ensuring that all the states were fairly represented in reasonable proportions.
The emphasis on making sure midshipmen mastered seamanship was an incessant theme in the American navy of the early 1800s. Thomas Truxtun, who was captain of the frigate Constellation in the Quasi War, set down his views on the subject in 1794. He was still enough of a product of the American navy’s British heritage—and the aristocratically tinged, antirepublican Federalist political leanings of so many American navy officers—that he felt he needed to warn midshipmen against the moral “contagion” they were liable to fall victim to when associating with common sailors, especially while learning to extend or reduce sails in the tops. But he nonetheless stressed that seeing things from the seaman’s vantage was as vital a lesson as the practical skills of seamanship acquired in the process. “The midshipman who associates with these sailors in the tops till he has acquired a competent skill … will be often entertained with a number of scurrilous jests at the expense of his superiors,” Truxtun said, especially the sailors’ mercilessly deadpan practice of showing up a less than fully competent officer by “punctual obedience” to his incorrect commands. The real lesson from this for the young officer-to-be was that to “prevent him from appearing in the same despicable point of view” he had better become a thoroughgoing seaman himself: nothing less would command true respect from the crew.45
There were plenty of American captains who resorted to brutal floggings to maintain control over their men, meting out sentences of dozens of lashes at a time through the legal fiction of dividing a single infraction into multiple offenses (such as drunkenness, neglect of duty, and insolence) in order to get around the regulation, copied from the Royal Navy, that limited punishment on captain’s authority to a dozen lashes; but there were also more than a few who embraced Truxtun’s much more enlightened view that authority was more effectively maintained by example and an easy air of command than by flaying a man’s bare back into ribbons of flesh. “Consider men in an inferior station as your fellow creatures … always remembering that rigid discipline and good order are very different from tyranny,” Truxtun advised his midshipmen. “Good order can be maintained without much whipping on shipboard; and I can assure you that the worst-disciplined ships I ever saw in our or the British navy was those renowned for severe punishment.”46
An American man-of-war was no less a ranked society than was any navy’s in the world, but the moral distance between officers and men was closer on many scores—a difference that on repeated occasions would prove a hidden strength in the fighting ability of the American navy. Half the men on a typical British warship of the year 1812 had been impressed, and another eighth were the none-too-voluntary “volunteers” who had chosen service in the navy over rotting away in the county jail or worse; in all, probably only a quarter of the crew of a British ship were there in any sense of their own free will. The “quota men” delivered up from the county jails were said to be the worst of them all, demoralizing the rest of the crew with their shirking and thieving, breeding seething resentments over the bounties of as much as £70 apiece they had received, bringing harsh discipline down on the whole ship for their misdeeds. “Them was the chaps as played hell with the fleet!” said one old British tar. “Every grass-combing beggar as chose to bear up for the bounty.… Every finger was fairly a fish-hook: neither chest nor bed nor blanket nor bag escaped their slight-of-hand.”47 The lists of punishments aboard British ships on the American station for two months in the summer of 1812 go on page after page: striking the sergeant of marines, 48 lashes; desertion and running away with the boat, 36 lashes; pissing in the manger and skulking, 24 lashes; theft and mutinous behavior, 36 lashes; contempt, 24 lashes; striking his superior, 36 lashes; drunkenness, 42 lashes; mutinous behavior, 60 lashes; neglect of duty, 36 lashes.48
By contrast the men of an American warship were all genuine volunteers, enlisted freely for a term of two years. An able seaman was paid $12 a month in the American navy versus $8 in the Royal Navy. Charles Morris noted that many American recruits brought with them practical skills in carpentry or blacksmithing or other trades, along with a general air of self-reliance.
Nearly all the captains of the American navy of 1812 were under age forty. All had done something to earn their rank beyond the circumstances of their birth or their family influence. All knew how to handle a ship.
ON THE first day of August 1812, a damp and foggy Saturday morning in Boston, the Constitution awaited only a fair wind to proceed to sea. Isaac Hull had spent the week completing his supplies and growing anxious over the absence of any orders from Washington. Rumors were swirling over the whereabouts of the British squadron: the frigate Maidstone was said to be capturing fishermen off Cape Cod; another report claimed a frigate had been seen off Cape Ann just to the north; yet another placed two frigates in the bay itself, where they would be in a position to seal Boston harbor shut.
Hull had sent to New York for any letters that might have been directed to him there, but neither Rodgers nor Hamilton had apparently left him any instructions. On July 28, Hull wrote Hamilton explaining his haste to get to sea again while there was still a chance, and hoping again that he was not exceeding his authority:
Should I not by the time she is ready get instr
uctions from New York, or find some at this place … I shall proceed to Sea and run to the Eastward, and endeavour to join [Rodgers’s] Squadron, and if I am so unfortunate as not to fall in with them I shall continue cruising where (from information I may collect) I shall be most likely to distress the Enemy. Should I proceed to Sea without your further orders, and it should not meet your approbation, I shall be very unhappy, for I pray you to be assured in doing so I shall act as at this moment I believe you would order me to do so.49
Hull’s letter crossed in the mail with one from Hamilton written the same date. “On the arrival of the Constitution in port, I have ordered Commodore Bainbridge to take command of her,” the secretary instructed. “You will accordingly deliver up to him the command and proceed to this place and assume command of the frigate Constellation.”50 Whether Hull had an inkling of what was in the wind or not—and given Bainbridge’s seniority, his presence in Boston, and his repeated demands for the command of one of the three large frigates, it was unlikely Hull did not—he weighed anchor on Sunday, August 2, taking advantage of the wind that hauled around to the west to run out of the harbor. He wrote a final hasty note to Hamilton, expressing the hope that the ship’s boat that was even at that moment at the post office might come bearing orders; “but to remain here any time longer I am confident that the Ship would be blockaded in by a Superiour force, and probably would not get out for months.”51 To add to his unease, Hull had just learned that his brother was dangerously ill and not expected to live. Hull wrote to his father the night before sailing, urging him to take heart but ending, “Indeed my mind is in such a state I hardly know what I am writing—nor will it be at Ease until I hear from you and god only knows when that will be as I sail in the morning.”52
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