Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  That evening the bodies of Lieutenant Bush and one of the Guerriere’s men who had died from his wounds were committed to the deep.

  Sailing points and maneuvering in the wind (Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship; System of Naval Tactics; courtesy Charles E. Brodine Jr.)

  Stephen Decatur’s daring raid of February 16, 1804, on Tripoli harbor to burn the captured American frigate Philadelphia made the twenty-five-year-old lieutenant a national hero and helped salvage the honor of the embattled young navy. (Painting by Edward Moran, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  For three days at the outbreak of the war the Constitution eluded a pursuing British squadron off the coast of New Jersey; at a crucial moment when the winds died the ship was towed forward on anchor lines carried ahead by the ship’s boats. (Painting by F. Muller, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  Isaac Hull, the Constitution’s first wartime captain, a kind but thoroughgoing seaman who commanded the almost worshipful loyalty of his crew. (Painting by Samuel L. Waldo after a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  “The birth of a world power” was how Charles Francis Adams Jr. described the moment the Constitution claimed the first American naval victory of the war: the defeat of the British frigate Guerriere on August 19, 1812. (Painting by Michel Felice Corne, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  William Bainbridge had three times struck the flag of the United States in prewar commands and was possessed with jealousy, resentment, and self-pity; he also fought one of the most tactically brilliant engagements of the war, defeating the British frigate Java on December 29, 1812. (Painting by John Wesley Jarvis, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  The Shannon leads the ill-fated American frigate Chesapeake into Halifax harbor, June 6, 1813. (Naval History & Heritage Command)

  A weapon more of intimidation than military effectiveness, the British Congreve rocket caused only a single known fatality during the war—but it would be immortalized in Francis Scott Key’s verse describing “the rockets’ red glare.” (Congreve, Details of Rocket System; courtesy National Maritime Museum, U.K.)

  British admiral George Cockburn, probably the most hated man in America for the raids he carried out along the Chesapeake Bay in 1813 and 1814, was depicted in his portrait standing against a backdrop of the White House in flames. (Painting by John James Halls, National Maritime Museum, U.K.)

  The secretary of the British Admiralty was the conservative politician John Wilson Croker, who raised the withering of opponents and subordinates to an art form. (Painting by William Owen, National Portrait Gallery, London)

  A man ahead of his time: Croker’s American counterpart, Secretary of the Navy William Jones, keenly grasped the importance of keeping a much more powerful enemy constantly off balance. (Painting by Gilbert Stuart, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  Stephen Decatur was the quintessential American naval hero, whose “sense of honor too disdainful of life” brought him wartime fame and later tragedy. (Painting by John Wesley Jarvis, Naval History & Heritage Command)

  CHAPTER 5

  Love of Fame Is a Noble Passion

  THIS TIME a whole procession made its way up the harbor, Constitution in the lead, the Guerriere’s flag flying beneath the Stars and Stripes from her peak, then the frigates President, United States, and Congress, then Argus and Hornet taking up the rear. Word had spread through Boston from the moment of the Constitution’s arrival in the outer harbor the day before, anchoring at the lighthouse in the early hours of Sunday, August 30, 1812. Now, as the ship passed Long Wharf, chorus upon chorus of huzzahs echoed from a huge crowd gathered there, repeated by each of the merchant ships in the harbor.

  Earlier in the morning, having anchored in Nantasket Roads overnight to await a favorable wind to carry her into the narrows, the ship had been sent tearing to quarters when her lookout spotted five unidentified armed vessels nearing Boston light. At 6:30 a.m, roused from his first peaceful night’s sleep in weeks, Hull gave the order to cut the two anchor cables and make all sail to try to get under the protection of the harbor forts before their last chance of escape was cut off. Hull had already decided to “sell our lives as dear as possible” in what he expected to be a last stand against the entire British squadron when he made out the American flag on the leadmost of the approaching men-of-war and recognized the outlines of Constitution’s half sister the President.

  All day, boats surrounded the frigate at her anchorage at the navy yard, cheering the victorious crew; Bainbridge went aboard, as did Decatur from the United States and James Lawrence, now a master commandant and captain of the Hornet.

  Rodgers’s squadron had returned with little to show for its ten-week cruise but an outbreak of scurvy that had left scores of his men dangerously sick. On June 23, two days out of New York, they had chased a lone British frigate, the Belvidera, off Sandy Hook, but Rodgers had bungled the engagement from the start. Rather than bring the outnumbered and outmatched enemy to close action as quickly as possible, Rodgers had repeatedly yawed to bring the President’s broadside to bear, hoping to cripple her with a long-range shot. Some of the President’s shots struck home, but each time he turned his ship, the chase got farther ahead. Ill luck added to miscalculation: ten minutes after the President began firing, one of her bow guns burst, killing and wounding sixteen men including Rodgers, whose leg was broken, and setting off the powder box with an explosion that destroyed both the main and forecastle decks around the gun. The Belvidera dumped fourteen tons of drinking water and threw her boats, anchors, and spare spars overboard to lighten ship and two and a half hours from the start of the action had run out of gunshot; in another few hours she had disappeared into the vast stretches of the Atlantic.

  Back on the trail of the Jamaica convoy, Rodgers had sailed for three weeks across the Atlantic until he was within a day and a half of the English Channel before abandoning the futile chase. Twice the Americans had come within a whisker of their prize: on July 1 they had sailed into a floating sea of coconut shells and orange peels, and on July 9 they had taken a British merchant brig whose crew told Rodgers they had seen eighty-five sail the night before. Rodgers disconsolately wrote Secretary Hamilton on his arrival at Boston that his had been a “barren” cruise; they had taken only six British merchant ships and had also recaptured the Betsey, William Orne’s schooner that had been snapped up by the Guerriere and ordered to Halifax just before her battle with the Constitution. (The Betsey was recaptured yet again five days later, by the British frigate Acasta; two other of Rodgers’s prizes were also recaptured before they could make their way to an American port.) The “only consolation” Rodgers said he could take was “derived from knowing that our being at Sea obliged the Enemy to concentrate a considerable portion of his most active force and thereby prevented his capturing an incalculable amount of American property that would otherwise have fallen a sacrifice.” But even that was mostly wishful thinking; knowing that Rodgers had taken nearly the entire American navy on a wild goose chase far to the east had allowed Captain Broke to separate the ships of his squadron in the meanwhile, returning to the American coast with all but the sixty-four-gun Africa, which he left with the Jamaica convoy, and proceeding in Rodgers’s absence to send in a stream of prizes to Halifax.1

  The next morning, September 1, Hull stepped ashore at 11:00 a.m. to more cheers and a seventeen-gun salute from an artillery company, returned by the Constitution’s guns. The captain “had barely room to plant his feet on the stone” as he clambered onto the pier from the boat that had rowed him ashore, said Moses Smith, so dense were the throngs; Smith estimated that thousands were there. From adjacent buildings women waved handkerchiefs and threw flowers. A letter awaiting Hull at the Exchange Coffee House carried the news of his brother’s death two weeks earlier.2

  On Saturday night, the fifth, a huge dinner was held at Faneuil Hall for the Constitution’s officers, five hundred guests, and all of Boston’s leading citizens, with mag
nificent wreaths of flowers adorning the walls and a model of the Constitution in the gallery above with colors flying as they were during the battle. John Adams was unable to attend, pleading his age and the inclement weather, but he sent a couple of barbed toasts to be read on his behalf, each punctuated by an artillery salute from the street:

  May every Commodore in our American Navy soon be made an Admiral, and every Captain a Commodore; with ships and squadrons, worthy of their commanders and worthy of the wealth, power, and dignity of their country!

  Talbot, Truxton, Decatur, Little and Preble—Had their country given them the means, they would have been Blakes, Drakes and Nelsons!3

  For weeks Federalist Boston celebrated in spite of itself. The manager of Boston’s Federal Street Theater hastened into production a new addition to the bill:

  A new naval Overture composed by Mr. Hewett

  To which will be added, the first time,

  A New Patriotic Effusion, called the

  CONSTITUTION AND GUERRIERE; or

  A Tribute to the Brave!

  written to commemorate the late brilliant Naval

  Victory.

  Amos Evans went to the theater to see it on opening night; “a very foolish, ridiculous thing,” he said in his diary, remarking too that the actors of the serious works on the program needed to study Hamlet’s advice to the players, so awfully had they “butchered” and “murdered” their parts with overacting.4 But the manager knew his business: the house was packed. The dramatization of the naval battle ended with a song, “Huzza for the Constitution,” with the chorus, “With our true noble Captain we fought on the main … And we hope that with him, we’ll soon conquer again.”5

  A raft of other odes to Hull and the Constitution appeared on broadsides around town.

  They met with a Warrior, by name and by nature,

  That had challeng’d the whole Yankee fleet,

  Our sailors, they stood, every man at his station.

  The Briton disdain’d to retreat.

  In a broadside or two, not a mast was left standing,

  The deck it was cover’d with slain;

  So Hull gave the Guerriere a good reprimanding

  For disturbing the rights of the main.6

  And, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:

  Come, come my lads, the glasses raise;

  Let’s drink to gallant Hull, Sir,

  For well, our Constitution, he

  Sustain’d against John Bull, Sir.

  Where’s now the Guerrere? Deep she sinks

  Beneath old Neptune’s Acres; Hull,

  Hull’s the lad, will make them glad

  To bear away with Dacres.

  Our good Live Oak ’gainst British Oak

  On Ocean shall maintain, Sir,

  With Yankee balls and Hearts of Oak

  Its claims to Ocean, vain, Sir.7

  A few of the more skillful editorial writers for the Federalist papers twisted themselves into logical knots trying to explain the contradiction of celebrating victory in a war they opposed. Boston’s Repertory newspaper opined that the pleasure to be derived from Hull’s success came chiefly from the proof it offered “that in this disastrous war which will terminate most certainly in our ruin on the ocean, we shall have the consolation of shewing that it is neither through want of naval skill, or courage, or good conduct in our officers or men, that we shall not succeed, but to the imbecility, or treachery, or lukewarmness of our administration.” The editor added that the town’s Republican newspaper, the Chronicle, which “has uniformly been the zealous opponent of a naval establishment,… to be consistent ought to lament Hull’s victory.”8

  But those barbs cut two ways; part of the glee that Boston took in the first triumph at sea was undeniably due to news arriving at the very same instant of the first disaster on land. William Hull—Isaac Hull’s uncle, no less, a Revolutionary war officer who was leading the western prong of what was to be a three-pronged attack on Montreal, Niagara, and the Detroit frontier—had already become the butt of a relentless series of facetious barbs for his disorganized and hesitant start. In the same issue that lauded the Constitution’s victory, the Repertory ran an item under the headline PROGRESS OF THE WAR that was par for the treatment he had been receiving from the war’s critics: “The news from Gen Hull’s army is that he has taken 836 Merino SHEEP, which will probably be detained till a cartel is arranged for exchange of prisoners.”9

  Two days later, on September 3, news arrived in Boston that General Hull and his entire army had been taken prisoner on August 16. Evans noted that at the dinner at Faneuil Hall one of the guests had said he couldn’t resist observing that “we had a Hull Up and a Hull Down,” but the news at the Exchange Coffee House a few days later added details that stilled the humor, even as they fed Federalist schadenfreude. General Hull had apparently surrendered Fort Detroit without any resistance at all, panicked by rumors that a vast band of Indians was preparing to descend on the fort and massacre all the women and children. The rumors were actually a hoax planted by the British army commander, Isaac Brock: he had written a letter addressed to a fellow British general at a nearby post asking that no more Indians be sent to reinforce his position because he already had five thousand and was running short of provisions. Brock arranged for the letter to fall into American hands, then sent Hull a surrender demand stating, “It is far from my inclination to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops, will be beyond controul the moment the contest commences.” And so without consulting any of his officers Hull had waved a white flag, surrendering his twenty-five hundred men without firing a shot.10

  Evans noted in his diary that two of the Guerriere’s officers, free to move about town on parole while waiting to be exchanged as prisoners of war, had come by to see him and reported that they were delighted with the attention paid to them by the citizens of Boston, and had been overwhelmed with invitations to dine.11

  “WITH OUR true noble Captain we fought on the main … And we hope that with him, we’ll soon conquer again”: on the stage of the Federal Street Theater the chorus of officers, sailors, and marines of the Constitution had marched up State Street in the final scene, colors flying, after singing that refrain; but it was not to be. The same day Isaac Hull set foot ashore and received the news of his brother’s death, he had closed himself in his room at the Exchange Coffee House and written to Secretary Hamilton asking to be relieved of his command:

  Having had the misfortune to lose a brother since my departure from this place, on whom depended my father’s family, and with whom all my private concerns have been left ever since I joined the Navy, makes it absolutely necessary that I should take a short time to make provision for my younger brothers, and to see my father placed in a comfortable situation. I have therefore to request that you will be pleased to order a commander to the Constitution to take my place.12

  His family obligations were real enough, but so too was his manifest desire for some tranquillity; Hull never had the killer instinct or the boastful drive of a Decatur or Bainbridge or Rodgers. “It is so dreadful to see my men wounded and suffering,” Hull confessed to a friend, and Moses Smith recalled that his captain “even looked more truly noble, bending over the hammock of a wounded tar, than when invading and conquering the enemy.” Beyond offering praise for the bravery of his crew, Hull never once afterward spoke or wrote—even privately to friends—of his part in the taking of the Guerriere. He even sent Hamilton a second, much shorter account of the action a few days after his first report, fearing the first would sound too vain; he told Hamilton, “As it’s my opinion that the less that is said about a brilliant act the better, I have therefore given you a short sketch which I should prefer having published.”

  Bainbridge, who had missed by a day or two getting the command of the Constitution when she was in port a month earlier, wrote Hamilton hard on the heels of Hull’s letter, offering
what he saw as the perfect solution: he would take the Constitution, but without giving up his claim to the Boston Navy Yard whenever he wanted it back. “Captain Hull could be appointed to the command of this Navy Yard, during my absence from it,” Bainbridge proposed. Agreeing to the switch and no doubt feeling he had enough troubles without worrying about hypothetical future assignments, Hamilton replied on September 9, ordering the change of commands and not addressing Bainbridge’s “during my absence” proviso.13

  At four in the afternoon of September 15 Commodore William Bainbridge went aboard the Constitution, hoisted his broad red pennant, and found himself with a mutiny on his hands before he could even open his mouth.